New Book Explores the Trailblazers Who Opened the Canadian Rockies to Tourism

For anyone who has spent a summer afternoon walking a well-marked trail in the Canadian Rockies, it can be easy to forget how different the landscape once was.

The trails are mapped. Bridges cross rivers. Backcountry camps have been established. There are signs, lodges and well-worn routes leading into places that attract hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.

But more than a century ago, getting into those same mountains could mean travelling for days through terrain that had not been mapped or established for tourism.

A new book by longtime Banff historian EJ (Ted) Hart asks readers to look back at that transformation through the people who helped make it possible.

Trailblazers: Legendary Guides and Outfitters of the Canadian Rockies, published by Banff-based Summerthought Publishing in May, profiles six of the men and families who helped open the mountain parks to a growing tourism industry: Tom Wilson, the Brewster family, Curly Phillips, Jimmy Simpson, Bert Riggall and Andy Russell.

Opening the Rockies to tourism

“These guys were the pioneers of Banff,” said Hart. “They were the first ones to really start up the tourism business, because the tourism business depended on the railroad, but the railroad depended on them to get the tourists.”

The Canadian Pacific Railway had brought wealthy visitors to the mountain parks beginning in the late 19th century, but getting beyond the railway and hotel required guides, horses and people who knew how to move through the landscape.

Hart describes these visitors as “tourist explorers.” Some were mountaineers arriving from eastern North America, Britain and Europe to summit peaks that had never been climbed. Others were scientists or wealthy travellers looking for long horseback journeys into unfamiliar country.

Without roads leading them to trailheads, and sometimes without trails, these tourist explorers required much of their local guides. “They had to find a route there. They had to find people who could take care of them and get them across flooding rivers and through burnt timber and keep them alive so that they could do their mountaineering,” Hart said.

The work was often seasonal. When tourists disappeared during the winter, guides and outfitters turned to trapping and prospecting to make a living.

Stories from the early days of guiding

Trailblazers uses personal stories and anecdotes from the early mountain guides to illustrate the realities of life in the Rockies before established trails, infrastructure, and tourism.

One of Hart’s favourite examples is Jimmy Simpson, an outfitter and guide who operated in Banff in the early 20th century and later built the lodge now known as Num-Ti-Jah Lodge at Bow Lake.

Simpson maintained a trapline north of Bow Lake toward the Columbia Icefield, travelling long distances on snowshoes. His speed earned him the Stoney name Nashan-esen, which Hart translates as “wolverine go quick.”He was also a prolific storyteller, and highly influential in his time. 

“The stories of his exploits out in the winter cold and wilds really formed a whole pantheon,” said Hart. 

One story illustrates the combination of skill, isolation and occasional bad judgment that characterized the era.

While travelling alone along his trapline in winter, Simpson stopped beneath a spruce tree to cook breakfast. Snow fell from the branches, soaking him, his food, and his fire. Believing the smoke from the fire had caused the snow above to melt, Simpson moved to another location and started a second fire, only to be doused with more snow. This time he attributed it to a presence of a whiskey jack bird, which he subsequently scared off. 

When something fell in his frying pan a third time without any obvious cause, Simpson became suspicious. Eventually, he determined that the source had actually been a vial of strychnine (a powerful poison he used in his trapping operations) which had come loose in his shirt pocket. 

“He threw the bacon out, he stood up, put on his snowshoes, and said, ‘James, you're gonna kill yourself if you don't get moving again,’” said Hart. “So that’s typical of the kind of stories you’re going to get in the book.”

Seeing today’s trails through a different lens

Ted Hart has spent more than five decades documenting the history of Banff and the Canadian Rockies, including a 32-year period at what became the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, where he served as director until 2008.

His first book, Diamond Hitch, was published in 1975 and examined the early outfitters and guides of Banff and Jasper. Hart said Trailblazers grew out of a desire to revisit that work, but in a shorter format focused on the central figures and expanded to include Waterton.

Trailblazers’ six subjects played a significant role in making the west accessible to visitors, shaping the early tourism industry by helping connect the early railway towns and hotels to the outdoors. 

For people who already know the Rockies, that history can be read against the landscape itself.

Hart hopes that someone who finishes the book and heads out into the mountains  will recognize some of the places described in its pages, and consider what it took to make those places accessible in the first place.

“If they have read the book, they'll read about many of the places that they're going to go,” he said. “I think it'll give people sort of cause for thought about how much change there has been in the mountains in that way,”

That might mean thinking about how early travellers camped, hunted or fished for their meals, how difficult the journeys were and how different the trails and facilities would have looked.

“It was really a night and day difference between what the outfitters and guides do today and what they did then,” Hart said. “But essentially, in many ways, they're doing the same thing,” he said. “They are taking people to wild places in the Rockies, showing them the sites, telling them the stories, and making sure they get back in one piece.”