History
[edit]
First Nations[edit]
The territory encompassed by what is now Jasper National Park has been inhabited since time immemorial by Nakoda, Cree, Secwépemc, and Dane-zaa peoples. Plainview projectile points have been found at the head of Jasper Lake, dating back to between 8000 and 7000 BCE. In the centuries between then and the establishment of the park, First Nations land use has fluctuated according to climatic variations over the long term, and according to cyclical patterns of ungulate population numbers, particularly elk, moose, mule deer, and occasionally caribou. Starting in the 1790s, Haudenosaunee and Nipissing hunters and trappers moved in large numbers to the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, around the headwaters of the Athabasca and Smoky Rivers in particular, most of them employed by the North West Company. By the early 19th century, there were hundreds of Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe people living in the region.
Fur trade[edit]
Searching for a new route to the Columbia River, David Thompson's brigade reached the upper Athabasca in December 1810, led by a Haudenosaunee guide named Thomas. After some weeks hunting and making preparations for the trip over Athabasca Pass, the group left William Henry with their supply cache, building a hut and shed. Henry's House is presumed to have been just north of present-day Old Fort Point across the Athabasca River from the town of Jasper. Thompson's brigade crossed Athabasca Pass in January 1811 and returned in May 1812 after which the old fort was abandoned.
In 1813, François Decoigne built a new supply depot for the North West Company on Brûlé Lake. Jasper National Park's name originates from Jasper Haws, a Maryland-born fur trader who in 1817 took command of the post, which subsequently became known as Jasper's House. The route over Athabasca Pass was too labourious for freighting large volumes of fur. Called the York Factory Express, it linked Hudson Bay with the Pacific and was primarily used to move correspondence and people over the continental divide.
In the early 1820s, the British government forcibly merged the Hudson's Bay Company with the North West Company and the new governor George Simpson visited the area to inspect posts and decide on operational changes. Simpson instructed Chief Trader J. F. Larocque to build a post on Cranberry or Moose Lake, in Yellowhead Pass in 1824. Larocque instead built 8 huts at the present-day location of the town of Jasper. The next year, Simpson visited Larocque's House and promptly ordered it closed.
Especially from 1826 through 1829, Yellowhead Pass was also used to get critical goods—leather in particular—to the New Caledonia posts. Jasper House's role was to facilitate trips over these passes, by providing horses (or snowshoes) and other supplies to westbound brigades. Around 1829, during the management of Michel Klyne, Jasper House was relocated further up the Athabasca River, just north of Jasper Lake. Until the mid 1840s, the post also periodically traded for furs with Haudenosaunee and Métis groups who stayed nearby regularly, and Secwépemc from west of Yellowhead Pass. These residents of the upper Athabasca, Snake Indian, and Smoky Rivers supplied significant numbers of beaver, marten, and lynx furs. The Company would later estimate that in 1836, there was a local Indigenous population of approximately 200.
At the end of this period of activity, in 1846, Jasper House hosted several notable travelers. In April, the priest Pierre-Jean De Smet arrived, accompanied by Louis Kwarakwante's extended family, numbering 36. Kwarakwante, also called Calahoo and Sun Traveller, had resided with his family in the area since 1801, and had married and traded with neighbouring Haudenosaunee, Cree, and Dane-zaa. De Smet remained performing rites and hunting with Kwarakwante's and the postmaster Colin Fraser's family before continuing up the Athabasca on April 25 and crossing the pass by showshoe on May 6. Roche De Smet, the mountain immediately west of Jasper House, was named in his honour.
Shortly before reaching the pass, De Smet met Lieutenants Henry James Warre and Mervin Vavasour who had been spying for the British in the Oregon Country and were returning east with a Hudson's Bay Company brigade and 15 Indigenous porters. Now over the pass, Warre and company traded their snowshoes for horses and continued down to Jasper House. Warre sketched the Whirlpool River Valley and Jasper House; the latter showing the post's log buildings and many tipis of Indigenous families.
Paul Kane's sketch of Jasper House in November 1846.
That November, artist Paul Kane arrived, sketching the Athabasca and Whirlpool valleys from vantage points including Brûlé Lake, Jasper House, and Old Fort Point. These illustrations show easily recognizable features such as Roche Miette (which he called "Meayets Rock"), Pyramid Mountain ("the Cascades"), and Pyramid Bench. Compared to the modern landscape condition, there is far less vegetation in Kane's sketches, emphasizing the effects of nearly a century of fire suppression after the government began managing the area in 1907. Prior to Kane's visit, there had been fires in the Athabasca Valley in 1795, 1808, 1830, and 1840. Kane's notes describe Jasper House itself as, "three miserable log huts".
Beginning 1847, the post was inactive until the company reopened it in 1858 with Henry John Moberly as chief factor. Moberly traded with, and was guided by, Louis Kwarakwante. Moberly had two sons with Kwarakwante's daughter Suzanne (b. 1824 at Jasper House): Ewan in 1859 and John in 1861. Moberly resigned from the Company in June 1861 and in October traveled with Suzanne to Lac St. Anne to be married. They split shortly after, with Moberly heading east and Suzanne returning to the Jasper area to raise her children.
The Hudson's Bay Company continued sending employees to Jasper House twice per year to collect a steady supply of furs from the local Indigenous population until finally closing the post for good in 1874. Indigenous peoples in the area continued to supply furs, but they were collected at less remote posts such as Edmonton, Lac La Biche and Lesser Slave Lake. In 1910, the remains of Jasper House was destroyed. It was designated a national historic site in 1924.
Jasper Park established[edit]
Year
Area
Notes
1907
12,950 square kilometres (5,000 sq mi)
Park created.
1911
2,590 square kilometres (1,000 sq mi)
Reduced to a strip on either side of the railroad.
1914
11,396 square kilometres (4,400 sq mi)
Restored to nearly its original size.
1927
13,934 square kilometres (5,380 sq mi)
Parts of Rocky Mountain (Banff) National Park temporarily assigned to Jasper.
1929
11,709 square kilometres (4,521 sq mi)
The north boundary changed to the heights of land rather than a straight line.
1930
10,878 square kilometres (4,200 sq mi)
The National Parks Act prohibited resource extraction; coal-bearing areas on the east divested to the province of Alberta.
Jasper Forest Park was established by a federal order in council on September 14, 1907. The approximately 12,950 square kilometres (5,000 sq mi) were carved out of the Rocky Mountain Forest Reserve, and covered an area bounded on the west by the continental divide, on the south by the divide between the Athabasca and North Saskatchewan watersheds, on the north by a straight line at 53°35′ north, and on the east by "the base of the foothills". The boundary was somewhat clarified by another order in council in 1909, but because the area was unsurveyed, the southeastern portion remained vague for years.
The park's establishment was spurred by plans for the construction of additional Canadian transcontinental railways built through Edmonton, the Canadian Northern Railway and Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which were to cross the Rocky Mountains at Yellowhead Pass. Jasper Park was intended to be developed into an alpine resort similar to Banff National Park, at the time known as Rocky Mountains Park, with a train station, tourist hotels, and a service town. Jasper Park was intended to occupy the same position to the railways that Banff National Park already had to the Canadian Pacific Railway. Collectively, the mountain parks were intended as a sort of wilderness playground for middle-class workers, an antidote to the malaise of modern life.
However, the vision of wilderness on which Jasper Park's development plan depended was at odds with the presence of long-established Métis homesteads within the park, many of whom were descended from the white and Haudenosaunee fur traders and trappers employed by the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company in the 19th century. In 1909, six Métis families living in Jasper Park were declared squatters, paid compensation for improvements made to the land, including buildings, ditches, and fences, and ordered to leave the park. The American Lewis Swift had also settled in the area in the 1890s to farm, raise livestock, and trade. Expecting to be able to sell his land at a premium to the railroad, and later the government, he refused to leave. Swift was made Jasper's first game warden and was granted title for his homestead in 1911.
With the passing of The Dominion Forest Reserves and Parks Act, 1911, Jasper Forest Park came under the administration of the newly established Dominion Parks Branch of the Department of the Interior under Parks Commissioner James Harkin, at which time the name was changed to simply Jasper Park. Minister of the Interior Frank Oliver expanded the overall size of the Forest Reserve but dramatically reduced the parks within. Jasper was reduced to a strip 16 kilometres (10 mi) north and south of the railway, which had reached the park that year. Now just 2,600 km2 (1,000 sq mi), the tourist destination was shorn of many of its biggest attractions, such as Maligne Lake, Mount Edith Cavell, and the Columbia Icefields. Due to the protests of the railways and Jasper's commercial guides, this reduction was rescinded in 1914. The boundaries would change repeatedly until being finally established by the National Parks Act in 1930.
Under Harkin, Canada's national parks were to fulfill a dual mandate of wilderness protection and economic development—primarily as tourist destinations. In particular, the Parks Branch expressly forbade hunting in Jasper and the other mountain parks, deprecating First Nations' centuries-long history of subsistence hunting in the region as indiscriminate slaughter of the local game wildlife. Despite the prohibition on hunting, the park and its tourist facilities became a base of operations for wealthy Canadian and American sport hunters for hunting trips further into the Rockies, beyond the prohibitions in place in the mountain parks and the Rocky Mountains Forest Reserve.
The Jasper Park Information Centre, originally constructed in 1914 as an administration building and as the park superintendent's residence
Early tourism and sport[edit]
CNR advertisement, 1929
When Mary Schäffer Warren visited Maligne Lake—known by the Nakoda as Chaba Imne—in 1908, she did so by following a map given to her by Samson Beaver, a Nakoda guide and hunter.
In 1911, the Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP) laid track through the park and over Yellowhead Pass. That same year, the GTP founded the town of Fitzhugh around the company's railway station; the town was renamed Jasper in 1913. The GTP's route across the pass was followed in 1913 by the Canadian Northern (CNoR). Both having fallen into financial difficulty, the two railways were nationalized—the CNoR in 1919 and the GTP in 1923—and eventually merged into the Canadian National Railway (CNR) by an order in council. The railway was later followed by a road built between Edmonton and Jasper. The section between the town of Jasper and the eastern gate of the park was completed in 1928; however, it took another three years for the province of Alberta to complete the remaining stretch of the road from Edmonton.
By the time the GTP's railway track cleared Yellowhead Pass in 1911, there were already eight hotels established in Jasper, but they were rudimentary, and did not meet the expectations of the well-heeled clientele to which the GTP advertised. Jasper Park Lodge, the focal point of the GTP's Jasper advertising campaign, did not open until 1922, three years after the company's bankruptcy and only a year before the railway was merged into the nationally owned CNR. Like the GTP before it, Canadian National featured both Jasper Park and the lodge prominently in its advertising literature.
From its founding, the town of Jasper, and later the Jasper Park Lodge, served as a hub for a variety of outdoor sporting activities. Outfitters sprang up in the park to rent out equipment and guide sightseers, skiers, and alpinists. The Alpine Club of Canada, formed in 1906 and sponsored through the 1920s in part by the CNR, held seven of its annual alpine camps in Jasper between 1926 and 1950. And while hunting was forbidden within park grounds, the park's facilities served as a base of operations for outfitters and guides who led wealthy hunters on hunting trips into the forest reserves outside Jasper's boundaries.
Internment camps[edit]
In 1916, following the precedent set at Rocky Mountains Park, the Government of Canada opened an internment camp for individuals deemed enemy aliens, primarily immigrants from the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Ukrainians, who made up the largest affected population, and the Ottoman Empire. The interned men were primarily employed in the construction of a road from the town of Jasper, along the Maligne River first to Medicine Lake, and later on to Maligne Lake.
In 1931, in response to the Great Depression, the government of Prime Minister R. B. Bennett enacted the Unemployment and Farm Relief Act, which allocated funds for public works projects in the national parks. Labourers, many of them laid-off Canadian National Railway workers, were employed on road and bridge projects within the park, for which they were paid 25 to 30 cents per hour, working eight hours a day up to six days per week. In October, 1931, under the auspices of the relief project, construction started on a road between Jasper and Banff, which ultimately formed the basis for the Icefields Parkway.
Internment camps were established again during World War II, when three hundred Japanese Canadians were forcibly sent to three road camps in Jasper. Additionally, 160 conscientious objectors, many of them Mennonites from the Prairie provinces, were interned at Jasper and put to work upgrading the Maligne Lake and Medicine Lake roads, as well as building a road from Geikie to the British Columbia border.
Conservation and recent history[edit]
In 1930, Jasper Forest Park officially became Jasper National Park with the passing of the National Parks Act. Section 4 of the act further underlined the park's wilderness preservation function, with Canada's National Parks "dedicated to the people of Canada for their benefit, education and enjoyment" and "maintained and made use of so as to leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations". Ironically, given its mandate to preserve natural spaces, the act also redefined Jasper Park's boundaries, removing 518 square kilometres (200 sq mi) of land from the park—including Brûlé Lake and Rock Lake—opening the excised area to coal mining and hydroelectric development.
In 1984, Jasper and the six other Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks – Banff, Kootenay, Yoho, Hamber, Mount Robson, and Mount Assiniboine – were collectively declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site for their, "rugged mountain peaks, ice fields, and glaciers, alpine meadows, lakes, waterfalls, extensive karst cave systems, thermal springs and deeply incised canyons".
Since 1999, the arrival of the mountain pine beetle has impacted the park with 93,000 hectares of the park's forest infested with the beetle by 2017. In 2016, Parks Canada released the Mountain Pine Beetle Management Plan which includes prescribed burns and removal of infected trees to reduce the fire risk and to prevent the beetles from spreading into provincial land.
In 2011, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada designated Jasper National Park as a dark-sky preserve due to its minimal light pollution and ideal conditions for dark sky viewing.
In 2024, a wildfire destroyed a significant part of the town of Jasper and its surrounding area.
