The last time I was in Paris, I had about three hours to kill one morning before I caught a train to Normandy. I asked a friend of mine, an American ex-pat living in Paris, what he’d recommend I do for that time. I only had until 11am or so – not enough to embroil myself in a museum, really. His suggestion? The Buttes Chaumont Park.
I’d never heard of it. I was honestly a bit skeptical, but as a Canadian who works outdoors for a living out in nature the crowds of Paris had been getting to me a bit, so I thought I’d give this park a try. It was an excellent decision, because after about a fifteen minute ride on the metro and a ten minutes’ walk, I encountered this dramatic landscape in the middle of Paris:
I spent a delightful few hours discovering view after dramatic view. There were crags and canyons, bridges four or five stories tall, statues of nature spirits, brightly coloured holly, waterfalls, and a beautiful view of the famous Sacré Coeur in Montmartre in the distance. However, for all its “natural” grandeur, this park is an entirely man-made landscape.
There was a helpful small but unstaffed museum that told me the history of this place. (This history- and nature-loving nerd always appreciates interpretive panels!)
It was once an old gypsum quarry outside of town. In fact, the park gets its name because the gypsum underneath apparently made the earth unsuitable for farming: “chaumont” = “mont chauve”, or bald hill, devoid of plants. At the height of the gypsum mining, the quarry’s galleries were 45 metres high. For many years, the place was used as a dumping ground for garbage and dead horses.
By the 1860s, the city of Paris was changing. Hausmann was famously widening boulevards, but Emperor Napoleon III was also ordering the creation of new inner city parks. The Buttes Chaumont Park was created at this time from the remains of the old quarry. They retained 6 of the dramatic cliffs as the base of the park, then constructed a faux-Roman temple at the top of one of them and a tall bridge to take visitors there. The park was opened on April 1st, 1867, at the time of the Paris Universal Exhibition.
Studio portrait, taken in July 1882, of the surviving Six Nations warriors who fought with the British in the War of 1812. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada (official Flickr page), MIKAN 3630023.
We like to think of the past in convenient little time packets: the Victorian Era and the 1920s were completely distinct eras, right? Just look at how fashion changed dramatically during that time! Likewise, between 1812 and 1882, technology advanced, photography was invented, the interior of North America was mapped in detail, railroads were stretching far and wide… and yet one can still be startled by photographs like the one above of men who fought during the War of 1812.
I believe that we in the twenty-first century have a tendency to over-emphasize the uniqueness and discreteness of each era and forget that, well, people often live for a long time. Decades, even! There were many people still alive well into the twentieth century who were born in the nineteenth. Dr. Mary Walker, for instance, was a openly female doctor who served during the American Civil War and lived until 1919 to promote rational dress reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, elderly people who had been enslaved until 1865 could still be interviewed in the United States about their childhood experiences of bondage. In 1949, the world had seen the invention of the automobile, the airplane, and the atomic bomb… and people who were born under the conditions of American chattel slavery still lived. Sometimes I like to examine photographs from the 1960s and imagine what the world would have been like in the youths of some of the elderly people pictured. That older woman with the unfashionable hairstyle in a photograph from the 1980s may have been born during the Edwardian era and grew up in the 1920s.
“An Old Timer Passed Away.” The St. Albert Star/Étoile de St. Albert, December 31, 1912 (English), Page 1, Item Ar00102. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.
In the Canadian West, around the turn of the twentieth century, settler communities began to look back at their past in a celebratory manner. Frequent figures in parades and newspapers were those that they called “Old-Timers,” who were often seen as living relics of the past: remnants of the “pioneer times” not too far off. In many newspapers there were not only obituaries but actual columns written by Old Timers reminiscing about the often romanticized past when they were young. They spoke of a time before railroads and radios, often in a truly evocative way. These Old Timers were portrayed as storytellers, always sharing just one more shenanigan-filled tale of early life in the West. Those of the new generation who had come to live in these new cities were fascinated by the way these men embodied living elements of the past. They were the long term memory of the new settlements.
My favourite example of a newspaper article about Old Timers appeared in the Crag & Canyon, Banff’s newspaper, on December 15th, 1900 (page 4). It described a Banquet in honour of the retirement of the elderly Constable Jarvis of the North West Mounted Police. After describing the festivities and the notable attendees, the final paragraph of the article read:
A unique feature of the evening was the substitution of Cree for English, which since nearly all present were old timers, proved a happy inovation [sic], and helped to recall to many present, reminiscences of their former abodes.
These men had long lived and worked in the West during a time when Cree was a far more useful and more widely spoken lingua franca than English, and it was pleasantly surprising to read that Cree was still spoken with such zeal by older white men of Scottish origin – who, the article concludes, “dispersed in the ‘wee sma” hours, after singing Auld Lang Sine and the national anthem.” After that last generation was gone – those who had moved West from Scotland or Eastern Canada during the height of the fur trade during the early- to mid-nineteenth century – Cree would never be so widely spoken by Euro-Canadians.
Old Timers straddled time periods – and the line between the lived reality of the recent past and the romanticized retellings of historical events that came with distance (temporal, physical, and emotional). Even then, generic pioneer narratives – the trope of the brave (European, male) immigrant leaving a land of poverty and striking out for a new and better life in the West where farmland was plentiful – was taking over. Even today, few remember or know that for a time, newcomers to the West found Cree more useful than English. As “Old Timers” passed on, so did the popular knowledge of their life experiences.
“An Old-Timer of Alberta with Indians.” PC017863. Image courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.“An old timer of Alberta with Indians.” Cropped image on the reverse of PC017863. Circa 1905-1920s(?).
Audio recording of an interview with Fountain Hughes (former slave, born 1848) in 1949.
The Revolutionary Eyes of George Fishley: A very rare daguerreotype reveals the last of Portsmouth’s “Cocked Hats” (photograph of an American Revolutionary War Veteran taken in 1850.
Our Future, Our Past: The Alberta Heritage Digitization Project(where one can find scanned historical copies of local newspapers such as the Banff Crag & Canyon, searchable by date).
The internet is a fascinating place. Many imagine historians to look rather like that historian who gets slain after the fourth wall breaks in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, more at home in the dusty archive wearing a tweed shirt than cruising around online. But honestly, there are amazing resources in the depths of the internet that are making it easier and easier for historians to save on travel costs – and wear and tear on delicate documents. Here are a few that I feel you should know. All on this list can be accessed for free, which makes them ideal for those who don’t yet (or no longer) have access to subscription-based online databases through university tuition fees. This list is by no means exhaustive, but may contain a few of the slightly less well-known free archives and collections available online.
Peel’s Prairie Provinces via the University of Alberta library and archive. A huge collection of digitized Western Canadiana. If it was published in or about Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or Alberta prior to, say, the 1950s, they probably have a copy in their full text keyword searchable database. I’ve talked about a few of their documents before – see this post on a Western Canadian Dictionary and Phrase-Book from 1912 – but the element of their collection that I have made the most use of is their postcards. Some, like the postcards of bison/cow hybrids, have been digitized: over 15,000 historical postcard entries. However, as of last year they doubled their collection, though most have not yet been described or made available online. Nevertheless, they are a hugely rich resource that is only just started to be tapped by researchers (including me for my MA research project). Peel’s Prairie Provinces also has a large collection of digitized photographs apart from their postcards and a huge set of Western Canadian newspapers – even those that only ran for a few years, or were from small towns or in unusual languages. Once again, they are entirely keyword searchable!
Group of children in costume showing the allies of the British during the First World War. PC002348, courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.
Archive.org: A repository for a huge number of digitized primary documents. One of my favourites is the Medical and Surgical History of the War of Rebellion, a medical history of the American Civil War published in the decades that followed – in gruesome detail!
Athabasca University Pressoffers all of their books for free download in PDF format. May I recommend Sarah Carter’s The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation-Building in Western Canada to 1915, Jack W. Brink’s Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains, Ted McCoy’s Hard Time: Reforming the Penitentiary in Nineteenth-Century Canada,and Joan Sangster’s edited anthology Through Feminist Eyes: Essays on Canadian Women’s History?
Please post further online archive recommendations below!
Postcards were not always mass produced. In the early twentieth century, one could print Kodaked images onto postcard stock and create one’s own unique postcard to mail off to friends and relations. The University of Alberta Archive’s Peel’s Prairie Provinces has just recently doubled its collection of early Western Canadian postcards to nearly 30,000 examples, some entirely unique. I had the opportunity last summer to examine some of the ones that weren’t yet digitized. Among the picture postcards of Banff’s main street, parades at the Calgary Stampede, European pioneers in Saskatoon, and everything in between, I ran across a series of privately produced postcard images that I find incredibly intriguing. They are a set of photographic postcards that have been cut from a photo album – the backs are blank, glued to pieces of black paper from the album sheets. The same people appear in multiple images, but aside from a few telling details and a few names which may or may not be jokes or pop culture references I cannot understand over a century later, these images are now relatively anonymous. This photoset may not even be complete. I confess I was scanning them alongside about 300 other images over the course of a single day and I only noticed that they were from the same grouping later on when I began looking at them more deeply for my major research essay. I also only examined a few boxes of cards which had been separated out by the archivist for having explicitly Aboriginal subjects, so it is possible that there are other postcards from these photographers in the Peel’s Prairie Provinces Collection, yet to be digitized. I was initially hoping to incorporate them into my major research project, but they have far more in common with anonymous photo album pages than they do postcards, as fascinating as they are. Ah, well, a project for another time!
I have placed these images in an order that made sense to me, placing them either in what amounts to a sequence, or beside images that share the same photographic subjects for ease of comparison. Do not ascribe meaning to the order as it was imposed by me. I now invite you to consider these photographs for yourself. I have included a few preliminary observations, but I welcome any further commentary from my readers. Maybe we’ll find the proverbial smoking gun that identifies these people. Please click the images to enlarge them and see my annotations. (Note: The strings of numbers beginning in “PC” (“post card”) are their Peel’s Prairie Provinces call numbers, so you may cite them or look them up when they finally become digitized.)
PC030189 – “Accepting Friendship” The man on the right appears in multiple photographs, as does the man on the left, identified as “Calf Robes” in another image. Notice the ax on the ground between them – perhaps a reference to the expression “burying the hatchet”?
PC030240 – “The blow almost killed Father” A family man, eh? This implies that the author of the messages on these images – possibly the photographer – is that man’s daughter or son, or that the image was sent to the children of the “Father” and so the author of the note is writing from the children’s perspective, their potential audience. This image may also be playing to “Indian” stereotypes – fighting with tomahawks. It’s interesting that the “Sarcee”(?) man on the left (Calf Robes?) is a full participant in these photographic vignettes. He also appears to be wearing dancing/ceremonial regalia – the war bonnet, the beaded jacket and moccasins and the bells(?) on his belt are not everyday wear.
PC030238 – “A original Hair Cut” A faux depiction of scalping. The posing of this scene may be influenced by popular images of missionary martyrs… or “Father” is just praying prior to his “death”.
PC030247 – “Calf Robes resisting capture” Because this is from the 1920s at the latest, I’m going to assume that that’s a real gun. Calf Robes does seem to be holding his own, though. Is “Calf Robes” his real name? Or is he playing a character just as much as the other men in the scene are? These first four photographs all seem to have been taken on the same day with the same backdrop (tent, light snow on the ground).
PC030250 – “Good bye sweet day” The tables have turned. That doesn’t seem to be “Calf Robes” holding the gun, though. He appears in multiple following images. The man cheering in the background with the ribbed bone bead work on his shirt is also a recurring figure.
PC030242 – “Gone but not forgotten” Apparently the man didn’t escape. The man holding the rifle in this shot is not the same man holding the gun in the previous “Good bye sweet day” image, but the cheering man.
PC030237. This man appears in multiple images, as does his beaded robe/blanket.
PC030195 – “Tis only the “Brave” that deserve the fair.” I suspect that this caption is a quotation from some poem or song (I think “None but the brave deserve the fair” is an expression), and that they are creating a pun. The writer put “Brave” in quotation marks, drawing attention to the play on words: brave as in courageous but also “brave” as in “native warrior.”
PC030191 – “Spencer & Kipp” Once again, are “Spencer and Kipp their real names? Or is this another reference I don’t understand? These two figures appear in several other images, as does that distinctively beaded robe.
PC030246 These are the two men from previous images – whom I have called “Father” and “the Scot”, wearing the feather headdresses and the robes of the Aboriginal participants. They may also be striking stoic portrait poses from paintings of “Indians.”
PC030251 – “Black + White or A scot in Indian garb.” This image may have been taken immediately after the previous one, and definitely on the same occasion. (Whose leg is that on the left? Possibly “Father’s”.) It is possible that these two images were taken with two separate cameras, considering the quality of some of the images (some more grey in tone, like this one, and others lighter and more sepia) and the fact that several other photographs show “Father” holding a brownie camera, meaning that there were two cameras present.
PC030276 These two ladies wear what look to me like very Edwardian outfits, particularly the very large hats which were only popular for about a decade until 1914 or so. As a side note, I would like to point out the fact that all three people in this portrait are wearing feathers on their heads. The man in the middle is definitely wearing ceremonial/dancing regalia: bells are not worn on a daily basis.
PC030194 – “Mrs. Mayfield’s Baby” Note the two ladies from the previous image having their photograph taken in the background, likely taken on the same occasion because they are wearing the same outfits. This photograph also confirms that there were two cameras at play. This photo series may only be the results of one of those Kodak Brownies, though. Note that cameras were not held to the eye – you looked through the viewfinder from up above and hold the camera at waist height.
PC030241. This image really set the tone for me as I looked at the rest of the photographs in the series. These two men are having fun, being ridiculous and out of place.
PC030244. This wagon also appears in the previous photograph. That man with the ribbed bone shirt also appears in earlier photographs (“Good bye sweet day” and “Gone but not forgotten.”) I also have to ask myself what they are doing there – and where “there” is. Are they tourists just out on the town, wanting to be photographed with some “real Indians”? The posture of the man with the pipe (“Father”) makes me uneasy, especially with the other man standing behind the child and turning his attention to the baby, holding his or her hand for support.
PC030190 – “Mr & Mrs Muski” I am unsure if “Muski” is an Edwardian pop culture reference, or the woman’s name. If the latter, the “joke” is likely to be found in identifying the man as her husband. Note that the man on the right holds a Kodak Brownie camera under his left arm.
PC030199 – “Susie” The fact that this woman is named leads me to believe that these “tourists” knew some of the people in these photographs, but I could be mistaken. This photograph also made me quite excited because she is standing next to a window with a newspaper prominently displayed. I hoped to use it to date the image. It says: – “LANDSLIDE , Saturday February 25th, 9am.” I haven’t been able to find which newspaper this is; unfortunately, the name of the paper is not in frame. I was hoping that the landslide it refers to was the infamous Frank Slide, but that happened in April, not February. However, there were only four years between 1895 and 1920 in which February 25th fell on a Saturday, so this particular photograph could have been taken in 1899,1905, 1911, or 1922, though judging by what the white women were wearing in other photos in this series I’d say that the middle two dates were most likely. As a side note, I also find the shadow of the photographer in this image slightly eerie. Who/what is Susie looking at?
PC030200 – “Susie’s blind husband” Again, these photographs were taken on at least two separate occasions: Susie is pictured again here, but in a completely different outfit, though possibly wearing the same beaded belt. I am intrigued by the fact that Susie appears to be standing arm in arm with the white man in the centre. I believe that the caption is correct and the man on the left is blind, judging by the way his gaze does not meet the camera. If he is blind, it is entirely possible that he would have been a distinctive enough individual to record. How many blind men lived on the prairies circa 1910? Susie also appears to be wearing dress moccasins (heavily beaded, unlike in the prior image of her taken in town) and what may be (judging by the texture) a beaded shirt. She holds her plaid blanket in one hand instead of using it as a shawl as she did in the prior image. Perhaps this photograph was taken when she was dressed for a special occasion.
PC030248 – “The toiler?” That question mark is very telling and may be playing into stereotypes of “Indians” as inherently lazy, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. Some of these photographs were evidently taken in a small town, perhaps the one visible in the background of several other shots (with the grain elevator). Maybe this photograph was even taken later in the day from the first “Susie” photograph, judging by the location and the length of the shadows.
PC030193 – “Age 93 Bull Head’s Squaw Chief of the Sarcees” Many postcards depict exceptional individuals, particularly the elderly. I do find it disturbing that we cannot see her face, even though the lighting in the image would otherwise indicate that we could.
So, in summary: these photographs were taken on at least two occasions, as evidenced by the same figures appearing at least twice in different outfits and the presence/lack of snow on the ground. These photographs were likely taken South of Calgary, as one of the figures is identified as “Sarcee” (Tsuu T’ina); that is, of course, if the writer identified the band correctly. The photographs likely date from circa 1899-1922, but are more likely from 1905 or 1912, when gigantic Merry Widow hats were popular. There were two photographers present, but these photographs may have only come from one of their cameras. I am unsure of the relationship between the people in the photographs. Why do “Calf Robes” and the others play along in staging scenes of violence? Is “Susie” truly on a first name basis with the photographer and the man she stands arm-in-arm with? Are these white folks tourists, locals visiting Tsuu T’ina friends, or the family of an Indian agent with political power over these people? Furthermore, if these photographs were all taken by the same person, there may be a (sixth?) person in the party who is never pictured because they are always behind the camera and not in front of it.
Throughout my childhood, growing up in Canada, my family would often go on summer camping trips. We always used tents, not trailers (also known as RVs or Caravans), as I think that my dad always considered having a vehicle with a kitchen and a washroom inside it cheating. We also loved going for walks in the woods any day, and I have fond memories of my father pointing out animal tracks, animal scat, and various plants. He would quiz my siblings and I on the identification of various flora and fauna. (I still remember feeling ashamed at hesitating and not being able to immediately identify a poplar tree in junior high.) We grew up watching nature shows, and reading through big illustrated books of North American animals. We were always aware of wild animals and their habits. They behaved nothing like the animals with big eyes and squeaky voices we saw in cartoons on TV.
Whenever we’d go to the Rockies, we were always told about bear safety: by my father, in books, in cheaply printed pamphlets, and by park rangers and guides. I actually can’t recall a time where I ever thought that feeding a bear was a good idea. I grew up with the idea that wild animals should always be assumed to be just that: wild. They didn’t need human food. I have clear memories of struggling with the special bear-proof garbage bins in Jasper (littering is also something I have always thought of as a cardinal sin) and while we never hoisted bags of food up trees, I can’t recall the first time someone told me about the practice. I think that I picked up bear safety advice through osmosis.
That’s why, when I’m perusing images on Peel’s Prairie Provinces or other collections of old photographs of the Rockies, I’m shocked by photographs like the ones below. Fully half if not more of the early postcards with “bears” as a keyword on Peel’s Prairie Provinces portray some evidence of human influence or interference. What is pictured runs so counter to what I was always taught was good practice. I was also amazed at the sheer number of these historical images, and their variety. I suppose having a chance to interact with bears was a huge attraction in the park in the early twentieth century, as I’m sure some consider it now. People come to “commune with nature” or what have you. However, so many of these pictures, while shenanigan-filled and fascinating, leave me with unanswered questions. Crazy things are happening in front of the camera, to be sure, but the pictures only tell a small fragment of the story. Here are some of the most intriguing images of bears misbehaving that I ran across:
Postcard 11779: Black bear. Banff: Photographed and Copyrighted by Byron Harmon, Banff, Canada, [before 1942]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.Is this the photographer’s car? Did they lure the bear into the car with food to get this photograph? Did it get in their accidentally and did the photographer just take advantage of a great photo opportunity? Or did someone have to let it in? The passenger side door appears to be open…
Postcard 8070: Bear – Jasper Park Lodge. Jasper: Photographed and Copyrighted by G. Morris Taylor, Jasper National Park, Canada, ca. 1940. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.
Real life “Teddy Bear Picnics” are never as full of charm and magic as the song. Dangerous! This “nuisance” ground is pictured in many postcards. Was trash laid out explicitly for the purpose of attracting bears to be photographed by tourists? Or was it to attempt to prevent the bears from strolling through the town site and only became popular with photographers after the fact?
Postcard 8197: “Hello You”. Jasper National Park: Photographed and Copyrighted by J.A. Weiss, Jasper National Park, Canada, [1945]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.Innocence is no excuse. I’m having flashbacks to my first summer job at a cabin place out by Hinton, AB – I had to babysit the manager’s kids a few times in between housekeeping and bussing tables at the restaurant, and the cherubic three year old approached a full grown moose in much the same manner, though she didn’t get nearly as close. Please don’t encourage your kids to do this, no matter how “cool” you think the resulting photograph would be.
Postcard 9354: Cinnamon bear. Banff: Photographed and Copyrighted by Byron Harmon, Banff, Canada, [before 1942]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.
Whose cup is that? Is this bear somebody’s pet? Is it the bear‘s cup?? Is there anything in it? Beer, perhaps? (I have read at least one historical account of a saloon owner with a pet bear giving it enough beer to get it drunk. Apparently drunk bears were entertaining.)
Postcard 9352: Cinamon bear. Banff: Photographed and Copyrighted by Byron Harmon, Banff, Canada, [before 1942]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces. Possibly in the Banff zoo? Whose hand is that, and what is it holding that the bear finds so fascinating?
Postcard 9355: A day’s hunt, three grizzlies. Banff: Photographed and Copyrighted by Byron Harmon, Banff, Canada, [ca. 1910]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.Yes, Harmon, I respect you as a photographer and everything, and I understand it was a different time and all and you kind of had to be there, but… I’m not proud of you for being proud of this. Now I have to go and watch cheerful clips from Brother Bear and their anthropomorphized animals to make myself feel better.
Postcard 8196: Room service Jasper Park Lodge. Jasper: Photographed and Copyrighted by Tom. H. Johnston, Jasper, Alberta, [ca. 1941]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.Again, what is this man holding? Is it the tourist getting room service, or the bear?
Now please, and I can’t stress this enough: these are historical photographs. Yes, they are amusing (uh, in general? Not all of them?), but they should be amusing because of their incongruity and ridiculousness. These are wild animals behaving in ways that they shouldn’t be because of human intervention. Please do not feed the bears. Or any wild animals, for that matter. Not even – especially not even – if it makes a good photograph.
Further Resources
National Post article – “Banff motorcyclist pursued by ‘massive’ grey wolf” – this is the kind of thing that could have happened because of too much interaction between human beings and wild animals.
Post Script: I deliberately excluded most of the hunting photographs from this list, because this post is too lighthearted for such things. But believe you me, they definitely exist.
Consider this photograph, taken when I was on holiday in Jasper National Park three years ago with my family.
Spirit Island, Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park, 2010. Photograph by Lauren Markewicz
I’m quite proud of it. It’s a beautiful view, if I do say so myself. The way the trees and the mountains frame the island, the richness of the colours of the water and the plant life, the starkness of the lighting because of the storm clouds, the stillness of the water… Only I could have taken this photograph, right? It’s a big lake. There has to be thousands of possible shots for tourists to take, right?
Postcard 7957. The Camera Products Co (Publisher) . The narrows, Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park, Alberta. Vancouver: Published by The Camera Products Co., 1731 Dunbar Street, Vancouver, B.C, [ca. 1940]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.Nope. I’d wager that many people who have visited Maligne Lake have taken a photograph almost precisely like this one, at least in terms of composition. Do a quick Google Image Search, keywords “Maligne Lake.” Fully half, if not more, of the photographs are narrow variations on the theme of this small island. And this isn’t anything new.
Maybe the photographs are in black and white, or are coloured by hand. Perhaps the resolution changes with the settings and/or quality of the camera, or there is more or less snow or greenery depending on the season. Maybe the trees on the island have grown, or there is a different log floating in the foreground. There are slight changes in angle based on the photographer’s height, or perhaps it is framed slightly differently according to the photographer’s eye for the scene. Nevertheless, in composition and choice of subject there is a striking consistency in shots taken at Maligne Lake. If you further refine your Google image search to “Maligne Lake Spirit Island”, the similarities in composition are even more narrow.
Postcard 8271. Weiss J.A (Photographer) . Maligne Lake, Jasper Park. Jasper National Park: Photographed and Copyrighted by J.A. Weiss, Jasper National Park, Canada, [after 1930]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces (click image for link).Why is this the case? Is this the photograph that Jasper’s tourism industry “wants” you to take?
Historian David E. Nye, in “Visualizing Eternity: Photographic Constructions of the Grand Canyon”, speaks to the initial difficultly Americans had in attracting tourists to the Grand Canyon. Put simply, it was too big. Ironic, I suppose, because that’s its biggest draw, today. When you imagine the Grand Canyon, you picture “bigness” in your head. But unless it’s the new “Skywalk”, do you “picture” any particular aspect of the Grand Canyon? Since the nineteenth century – well, since the popular rise of tourism period – tourism and photography have been intrinsically linked. It’s a cliché; tourists are inseparable from their cameras. They seek out the most photogenic things for the express purpose of capturing their image. The search for the perfect shot becomes bound up in the touristic experience. So much of touristic sites are viewed through the camera lens. What sites become havens for tourists are often determined by how pleasingly they can be photographed.
But what of the things that can’t be photographed? You can’t fit the entirety of the Grand Canyon into one frame, or even a panoramic shot. Nye argues that that is one of the reasons why the Grand Canyon was so slow to become popular: because it was difficult to photograph. The best shots that showed the most depth could only be taken from the bottom of the canyon, where very few tourists visited. Some early photographers tried to treat the canyon as sort of the reverse of the more familiar mountain landscapes, with little success. What do you train your photographic gaze upon, when the subject of your gaze is so gigantic? The photograph needs a focus, particularly something that is unique to the region, if your goal is to attract tourists there and not elsewhere. In the case of other national parks, it could be a geyser or a waterfall… or an island. I think that that’s what’s happening in these photographs of Maligne Lake. The mountain landscape is gorgeous, but a bit too big to comfortably fit into one frame. Or, if you do take a photograph of the mountains, there’s nothing strikingly unique about it. Spirit Island functions as a wonderful focus, and a symbol for this lake in particular. The landscape surrounding it, by contrast, isn’t atypical of the many other dozens of lakes in the region. Spirit Island and the eye-pleasing composition found there is an identifiable image and symbol of the region. Hence, its appearance on hundreds of postcards and in innumerable tourist scrapbooks.
Postcard 8272. Gowen Sutton Co. Ltd (Publisher) . Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park. Vancouver: Published by the Gowen Sutton Co. Ltd., Vancouver, B.C, [after 1921]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.Spirit Island on Maligne Lake resides in Jasper National Park, which is protected by the Canadian government as a preserve of the natural bounty of the Canadian nation. (Fewer people know of the First Nations who were removed from the “park” upon its creation in the early 20th century, to make sure that the land remained untouched and unused… unless you were a tourist.) Today, to get to Spirit Island, you must go by boat – you must buy a ticket, or theoretically rent a canoe, but it’s a long, long paddle over about 15 km of gorgeous landscape if you do. (Few seem to photograph the passage in between the dock and the island. Or, at the very least, they aren’t considered as striking as the ones of Spirit Island.) You are deposited on this island for about 20 minutes to take in “the view”. You would be a foolish tourist indeed to forget to bring your camera out to photograph this place. Why Spirit Island? Why not the mountains around it? Why not use Spirit Island as a platform to get out into the lake? Why not take photographs from the boat? Tourists have the option of moving about the dock or going through the trees… but many don’t seem to do so. Apparently, it has been determined over the years by consensus that this is one of the best views – the best of angles – to capture the spirit of Jasper. It fits neatly into your camera’s frame. It is uniquely identifiable as a place. Hence, its overwhelming representation on postcards of the region.
But it doesn’t have to be photographed in this way. Observe:
Where could this photograph have possibly been taken?! I recognize nothing! Photograph by Lauren Markewicz.
In case you haven’t guessed, this photograph was also taken at Spirit Island – it’s visible in the right of the frame. I had moved about five or ten metres to the left to take this shot. I believe it to also be a fine photograph. The mountains and the island dip down towards the centre of the frame, and the land also meets the water at precisely the middle of the shot. We can see the reflections of the mountains and the sky in the water. I like it, but it’s not a “postcard-worthy” shot. This photograph isn’t nearly as iconic as, well, the photograph of Spirit Island that’s on all of the postcards where the island appears front and centre.
Oh, and as an ultimate sign of betrayal and false advertising: Spirit Island? It isn’t even an island most of the time, except when there’s spring melt-off. It’s a peninsula. I suppose “Spirit Peninsula” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Except in this case. Here, it’s an island. Postcard 8273 Taylor G. Morris (Photographer) . The Narrows, Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park. Jasper: Photographed and Copyrighted by G. Morris Taylor, Jasper National Park, Canada, [ca. 1940]. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.Post-Script: If you have never been to this region of the Canadian Rockies, you were probably pronouncing the word “Maligne” in your head like the word “malign”, and are probably wondering why such a beautiful area is referred to by a word with such negative connotations (“evil or malignant in disposition, nature, intent or influence”). It is in fact pronounced more like the original French, “Ma Ligne” (I guess on a map it kind of looks like a straight line?). To clarify, for the monolingual anglophones among us, it is pronounced more like like “mah-lean”, as in “lean meat.”
One more postcard for the road – this time, with bonus tipi and canoe. Postcard 8276. Photogelatine Engraving Co (Publisher) . Maligne Lake. – Jasper National Park.. Ottawa: Photogelatine Engraving Co. Limited, Ottawa, c1942. Courtesy of Peel’s Prairie Provinces.
Further Reading (and Viewing):
Nye, David E. “Visualizing Eternity: Photographic Constructions of the Grand Canyon.” In Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination. Edited by Joan M. Schwartz. London: I.B. Tauris: 2003.
![Harmon Byron (Photographer) . Black bear. Banff: Photographed and Copyrighted by Byron Harmon, Banff, Canada, [before 1942]. Courtesy of Peel's Prairie Provinces.](https://historyboots.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/pc011779.jpg)
![Weiss J.A (Photographer) . "Hello You". Jasper National Park: Photographed and Copyrighted by J.A. Weiss, Jasper National Park, Canada, [1945]. Courtesy of Peel's Prairie Provinces.](https://historyboots.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/pc008197.jpg)
![Harmon Byron (Photographer) . Cinnamon bear.. Banff: Photographed and Copyrighted by Byron Harmon, Banff, Canada, [before 1942].](https://historyboots.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/pc009353.jpg)
![Harmon Byron (Photographer) . Cinamon bear.. Banff: Photographed and Copyrighted by Byron Harmon, Banff, Canada, [before 1942].](https://historyboots.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/pc009352.jpg)
![Postcard 9355. Harmon Byron (Photographer) . A day's hunt, three grizzlies. Banff: Photographed and Copyrighted by Byron Harmon, Banff, Canada, [ca. 1910]. (Courtesy of Peel's Prairie Provinces.)](https://historyboots.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/pc009355.jpg)
![Postcard 8196 Johnston Tom H. (Photographer) . Room service Jasper Park Lodge. Jasper: Photographed and Copyrighted by Tom. H. Johnston, Jasper, Alberta, [ca. 1941]. Courtesy of Peel's Prairie Provinces.](https://historyboots.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/pc008196.jpg)
History Research Shenanigans 