In just over 100 years Calgary has expanded from a lonely police post to a burgeoning metropolis with a population of over one half million. This study provides historical perspective through which the changing forces and processes of growth can be clarified and examined.
Police Post and Cattle Town: The Early Years to 1900
Calgary's beginning, like its subsequent development, was influenced by political decisions formulated in distant Ottawa. By the summer of 1874, the federal government was ready to establish a physical presence on the recently acquired western plains. In June the North West Mounted Police were sent to put down the whisky trade in the Blackfoot country adjacent to the American boundary. Quickly successful in bringing stability to the southern region about Fort Macleod, the police moved to consolidate their hold further north. In the late summer of 1875, the men of F Troop under the command of Inspector E.A. Brisebois arrived at the junction of the Bow and Swift (later Elbow) Rivers. They were to supervise the construction of a new fort that the I.G. Baker Company of Fort Benton, Montana had agreed to build for $2,476. Following the precedent set by other officers in the force, the Inspector named the new post after himself: Fort Brisebois.
Through the fall and winter, relations between the commanding officer and his men deteriorated and F troop mutinied. Brisebois soon "resigned" from the force and the Commissioner, Colonel J.F. Macleod, suggested "Calgary" as the fort's new name. Macleod's successor, A.G. Irvine, forwarded the suggestion to Ottawa with the elaboration that Calgary was Scottish for "clear running water." The name, with its faulty derivation, was accepted. Rather than meaning "clear running water", as tradition has it, Calgary probably derives from the Gaelic word Cala-ghearridh meaning "bay pasture" or "bay farm."
The presence of the police garrison constituted a small local market and, within a few weeks, the dominant trading company on the southern plains, the I.G. Baker Company, constructed a company store. Shortly after, the Hudson's Bay Company established its first Calgary store on the east side of the Elbow River across from the fort. Nearby were a few farm families and in the late 1870s, a number of small ranchers located along the Bow River west of the fort and in the foothills to the southwest.
Through these first years Calgary did not advance beyond being a minor, local trade centre. Western trade mainly followed the traditional route from Fort Garry-Winnipeg to Fort Edmonton, then south to Calgary. For the north-south trade Calgary's position was a bit stronger. Along this route, Fort Calgary was an important stop on the Old North Trail that linked Fort Benton on the Missouri with Fort Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan. But even here the focus of the trade was on the larger and longer established community of Edmonton, while to the south, Fort Macleod, with its larger police contingent was becoming the centre of a rapidly expanding stock raising industry.
The decision of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company to take a more southerly route across the prairies and to follow the Bow River Valley into the Rockies in order to enter British Columbia through the Kicking Horse Pass abruptly altered Calgary's marginal place in the territorial trade network. This decision placed Calgary on the main line of east-west commerce Eastern capitalists, led by Senator M.H. Cochrane, anticipated the railway's impact and began to organize and stock huge cattle ranches. This meant that the character of the ranching enterprise shifted from a number of small, indigenous producers with production geared to local demands, to large scale operators whose plan was to tap the national market as well as the vast overseas trade. Calgary soon replaced Fort Macleod as the financial, administrative and social centre of the ranch country.
The burst of commercial development associated with the arrival of the railway was, therefore, closely connected with the expansion of the stock-raising industry. Beyond the provision of basic goods and services that ranged all the way from harness, saddle and leather goods suppliers to banks and brokerage houses, the foundation of a major beef-processing industry was laid. Moreover, the successful development of the cattle industry meant that by the late 1880s ranchers were doing sufficiently well to become the most important local source of investment capital. As owners of the stockyards, slaughterhouse, tannery, pork packing plant, cold storage plant and brewery, local stockmen were the dominant force in the creation of the community's manufacturing base. They also financed many of the large, sandstone, commercial blocks in the business section of the town and owned the waterworks, electric light, telephone and street railway companies. Thus, by providing both an attractive market for urban services and a substantial source of risk capital, the ranchers performed a critical dual function in Calgary's initial development.
The Canadian Pacific Railway track reached Calgary in August 1883, but it was not until May 25th, 1886, that construction work was completed through mountainous British Columbia and the first transcontinental train steamed into Calgary. In the interval, rival commercial interests manoeuvred to control the direction of town expansion in order to obtain the best price for their property holdings. The early machinations of the real estate promoters are best illustrated by the railway station site controversy.
In 1881 most of the little community was clustered on either side of the Elbow River on the southwest quarter of section 14. Before the arrival of the railway, speculators began acquiring property in section 14 in anticipation of the location of the station as close as possible to the existing fort and village. The railway company, however, was not inclined to share the lucrative townsite development market with small-time speculators and simply built its station about a mile and a half from the existing village on section 15, one of the odd-numbered sections acquired from the Canadian government as part of the railway's land grant. Townsite lots across from the station were soon on sale. The ensuing contest for commercial dominance between west Calgary (the station area) and east Calgary (the old town) influenced the pattern of land use and left a lasting imprint on Calgary's development. The downtown, commercial service core and the wholesale area developed close to the station, while the well-organized, east Calgary developers were able to exercise sufficient political and economic influence to ensure that the city's industrial development would occur mainly in their area. The location in east Calgary of the stockyards in 1886-87, the junction of the Calgary and Edmonton railway with the Canadian Pacific Railway's main line in 1890, and the Calgary Malting and Brewery Company in 1892, were probably critical in determining this trend.
Railway branch-line construction through the 1890s bound more distant outlying areas to the main line at Calgary and greatly expanded the city's economic hinterland which assured continued, if modest, growth. When Calgary was incorporated as a town in November 1884, hardly 500 people inhabited the ramshackle dwellings along the Elbow. By 1890 the population had increased to about 3,800 and the prospects for continued growth seemed bright. A substantial lumber industry relying on the forest wealth of the upper Bow River had grown up in response to city and district demands. The market also had been sufficient for the development of brickworks and a number of sandstone quarries. But in the early 1890s the pace of development began to slow in face of the growing world depression.
By the time the expansion began again at the end of the decade, the city's decidedly Victorian character, pattern of subsequent physical development, as well as economic structure and function, were defined and set in place. Over the next four decades the city changed greatly in size, but not much in substance or function. Town and business leaders were generally staunch Methodists or Presbyterians, anxious through their clubs, churches and fraternal societies to ensure that their "sandstone city" reflect the civilized standards of the day. As befitted the frontier model, Calgary was an aggressive, energetic community, but at the same time it was hardly innovative, egalitarian or radical in its thinking; much more, it was a conservative and imitative society. From the outset, the wide open frontier image of Hollywood's stereotyped western cowtown never really applied to Calgary. Being mainly of Canadian and British origin, and often from the North West Mounted Police and old military families, the ranchers of the Canadian foothills tended to identify with the social values of the British landed gentry. These values they shared with most of Calgary's leading citizens, many of whom were fellow members of the Ranchmen's Club. The blending of the ranch and city business elites during the founding period left a remarkably durable imprint that has helped to give the city a distinctive character.
Confident in the future of their region, Calgarians largely rejected the concept of a single western community. The old capital of the foothill cattle kingdom was never inclined to bend to Winnipeg's guidance and from its earliest days Calgary's expansive, metropolitan ambitions had continually chafed with those of its northern rival, Edmonton.
Agricultural Metropolis: 1900 to 1948
As the century turned and the world's economy began to move forward again after prolonged depression, the Canadian West suddenly became the destination of hundreds of thousands of homesteaders. Calgary's location astride a key transportation link assured the city's metropolitan ambitions. Increasingly, the city became the major farm service centre for the southwestern prairie and, by 1904, Calgary was launched on its first real boom.
For thousands of prairie homesteaders Calgary was the end of their rail journey. Livestock, implements and supplies were unloaded from the train or purchased from Calgary merchants before settlers commenced the final stage of their trek to a new life on a prairie farm. Central Canadian and Winnipeg based firms were quick to establish or expand their Calgary facilities in order to supply the hundreds of small-town merchants who were setting up businesses in new prairie towns. As its hinterland population expanded, so did Calgary's role as financial, commercial, educational, administrative, and professional service centre for the region.
Expanding demands for services of all kinds meant jobs and this is reflected in population growth. Between 1891 and 1901, Calgary grew by less than 1,000 people. From a population of about 4,400 in 1901, the city grew to nearly 44,000 by 1911 a tenfold increase. This tremendous growth partly tempered the disappointment of Calgarians when, in 1905, Edmonton rather than Calgary was named capital of the new province of Alberta. Nonetheless, a latent sense of injustice made Calgarians even more wary of their northern rival and fuelled the competition that has always characterized relations between the two Alberta cities.
The initial pattern of expansion was determined largely by Calgary's physical setting. Inadequately-bridged rivers and the steep inclines to the benchlands above the river valley thwarted horse-drawn vehicles and kept the population clustered about the business section. In 1909, as motor vehicles were beginning to appear in some number, the city's first electric street cars went into service. Land developers were among the first to realize that the new modes of transportation made feasible the extension of residential areas and they were perhaps the main force behind the organization of a municipally-owned street railway system. The location of proposed bridges and street car lines therefore became of special concern. The common practice was to lobby the city to develop certain routes in order to enhance property values. The expansive boom mentality is nowhere more evident than in the 1910 decision of the city fathers to engage Thomas Mawson, a well-known English town planner, to draw up a city plan for one million people.
The spatial expansion made feasible by the automobile and the street railway had important social consequences. With extended city boundaries came division and segregation. Workers tended to remain close to the railway yards and industry in the eastern, and particularly the southeastern, part of the city. In contrast to the more homogeneous community of the frontier period, those with means were inclined to relocate in the preferred and usually more removed districts such as Mount Royal to the southwest.
The changing face of the city was also a function of technological change. The early years of the century saw electricity come into general use, automobiles become common on Calgary streets, heating converted from coal to natural gas, the telephone developed beyond a novelty, and motion pictures attract eager audiences. Such innovations affected not only the physical dimension and appearance of the city, but the patterns of work and leisure as well.
In 1913 the real estate bubble burst and planned suburban developments distant from the river valley were not realized. Within a year, however, Calgarians were involved in an even more frenzied speculative fever. At Turner Valley about thirty miles southwest of the city, on May 14, 1914, the Calgary Petroleum Products Company struck oil. Gilt-edged share certificates of the several hundred companies that were organized within weeks of the announcement, sold by the thousands. The mood of the time perhaps was captured best in the words of Calgary's well-known journalist and newspaper editor Bob Edwards.
Oil ! Oil ! Oil !
Let'er gush !
Wow !
This is the life.
The carnival atmosphere was short-lived; drilling technology was not well-advanced, few appreciated the difficulties involved in oil-field development, and enthusiasm soon waned.
The oil industry, however, added an important new dimension to the city's economic base that increasingly differentiated Calgary from its sister cities on the prairies and elsewhere in Canada. Over the following decade, several hundred exploratory wells were drilled in the Calgary area and, in 1921, the newly built Imperial Oil refinery in Calgary was connected by pipeline to the Turner Valley oil field. In recognition that petroleum had become an important factor in Alberta's economy, the provincial government decided to play a more direct regulatory role. The Alberta Oil and Gas Conservation Board was established in 1938 with headquarters in Calgary, thereby strengthening the city's role as administrative and financial centre of western Canada's petroleum industry.
The outbreak of World War I just a few months after the Turner Valley discovery at first diverted attention from the region's depressed economy. Although Calgarians responded eagerly to what most conceived to be an imperial duty, their inveterate optimism was definitely stayed by the war. Following the war, wheat and beef prices dropped and returning soldiers swelled the numbers of unemployed.
To understand the social and political turmoil in Calgary during the inter-war period it is useful to take a closer look at the work force that had grown with the city's expanded role as an agricultural service centre. In 1921 the Calgary work force numbered about 25,000 individuals (eighty percent were male). In keeping with the city's primary function, about seventy percent of the employed were in the service, trade and finance sector. In these sectors too, were the vast majority of employed women engaged usually as domestic, sales and clerical help. Thirty percent of the labour force was involved in the transportation and manufacturing sectors. Included were the newer skilled trade components that reflected changes in the city's economic profile over the previous decade. They also added a vital new dimension to the city's social and political climate.
The majority of the skilled industrial workers were employed in the CPR's vast Ogden repair and maintenance shops which opened in 1912. The tradesmen who came to work in the shops brought not only their industrial skills, but also their craft unions and the bond of national and international unionism. This meant that through the generally depressed economic conditions of the inter-war period, the railway shops were able to provide strong spokesmen for the defence of workers' interests, as well as leadership and guidance for unemployed and other labour groups.
Labour unrest in Calgary complemented the broader based agrarian unrest that characterized the prairie West during the period. Believing themselves to be the victims of an unjust economic system that favoured the manufacturing interests of central Canada at their direct expense, western farmers faced depressed markets and high fixed costs. Calgary emerged as a focal point and generator of ideas regarding pressing agrarian problems. In this context the city's maturing metropolitan role can be seen in the prominent careers of William Irvine, Henry Wise Wood, William Aberhart and Richard Bedford Bennett.
Through these resident political activists were articulated the concerns and aspirations of the region, of the West generally and to some extent of the nation at large. As editor of the Alberta Non Partisan, William Irvine emerged in the immediate post-war period as one of the most influential voices for social, economic and political reform. As a prominent spokesman for the left, Irvine worked to bring farm and labour groups together and in the process helped another Calgarian, Henry Wise Wood, further develop his unique political theory of group government. Wood proposed to replace party politicians with political representation by delegates of democratically organized, occupational groups who would deal with public business on the basis of merit and conscience, unfettered by party control. Wood was the inspirational leader of the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) and a key figure in the 1921 farmers' revolt against the old-line federal parties.
Bringing a different message to Calgarians was another persuasive speaker, William Aberhart. A high school principal since 1915, Aberhart organized Bible classes and, as a radio evangelist, by the late 1920s drew tens of thousands of responsive listeners throughout the province to join his congregation. Already used to close linkages between religion and politics, many Albertans found it easy to follow Aberhart's conversion and adopt Social Credit theory as the answer to economic depression and religious fulfilment. In August,1935, Albertans abandoned the UFA to give William Aberhart's Social Creditors an overwhelming mandate to govern the province.
Not all Calgarians, however, were convinced that the nation's economic and political order needed to be turned upside down. Many, particularly those longer established in the city, subscribed to the quite different and very traditional views of one of the nation's outstanding lawyers, Richard Bedford Bennett. Active in territorial and provincial politics from 1898 until 1911 when he was elected to the House of Commons, Bennett commenced to make his imprint at the national level, becoming leader of the Conservative Party in 1927 and Prime Minister of Canada in 1930.
Through such spokesmen Calgary left its mark on the character and course of reform agitation through the inter-war period. In large part, this resulted from a strong sense of regional identity and long frustrated commercial ambitions. After World War I these factors fused with a ripening and more broadly-based feeling of western alienation to produce a direct challenge to the eastern concept of Canadian nationhood. Once set, it has been on this course as the champion of "western" interests that Calgary has focused its political energies.
Oil Capital: 1947 to the Present
World War II stimulated Calgary's growth and, as the conflict terminated, there were signs of a basic modification to the city's agricultural service centre function. That a new era in the city's development had commenced was confirmed in the emblazoned Albertan headline (14 February, 1947): LEDUC WELL ROARS IN WITH OIL. Drilling which followed Imperial Oil's Leduc discovery was remarkably successful and the whole structure of Alberta's post-war economy began to alter.
The Leduc success could hardly have come at a more opportune time. Declining Turner Valley production could not satisfy increased prairie consumption but, with Leduc, Alberta suddenly became an oil surplus region again. Although Leduc was 13 miles southwest of Edmonton and Calgary was 180 miles to the south, the location in the more southerly city of existing refineries and the headquarters for most of the oil companies gave Calgary an initial advantage that assured its continued preeminence as administrative and financial centre of the Canadian petroleum industry.
With this and subsequent discoveries, supported by the buoyant state of the post-war Canadian economy, Calgary commenced a period of sustained growth that has lasted uninterrupted to the present. Perhaps the most striking measure of this growth is population increase. The 1941 population of about 112,000 had increased to 156,000 in 1951, to 290,000 in 1961 and 403,000 in 1971. The significance of this growth is better understood when placed in a regional perspective. Between 1961 and 1971 the population of the Calgary metropolitan area increased by 113,000 or twenty-eight percent. Over this same decade Winnipeg, the long dominant city of the Canadian prairie, grew by about 64,000 or a modest twelve percent. This reflects the shift of economic and political power from the eastern to the western edge of the plains.
To understand the character of post-war Calgary it is, of course, necessary to look beyond mere numbers of people added through the oil-generated, population boom. The city acquired an estimated fifty percent of its population increase from the rural areas of Alberta and Saskatchewan. This reflects the rural-urban drift and the extent to which the oil industry has been a critical factor in the further urbanization of the province. Despite the vast population increase, basic employment in manufacturing remains low, with only twelve to fifteen percent of the labour force engaged in manufacturing, compared to three times this percentage in a city like Hamilton or double this in Vancouver. Similarly, the percentage of those engaged in the wholesale trade has shifted even more towards white-collar, specialist and managerial occupations associated with the petroleum industry. The relative place of the petroleum industry is underlined by the fact that 10,225 Calgarians were directly employed in 1971 by the crude petroleum and natural gas industry, compared to 2,050 Edmontonians and only 60 Winnipeggers. In Calgary, therefore, the factories are few; it is much more a "brief-case" than a "lunch-box" city.
With the concentration of highly-skilled, managerial and professional people (the ratio of managerial to unskilled labour in Calgary is approximately three to one), average incomes have long been higher than in any other prairie city. Moreover, the character of employment opportunities has contributed importantly to the homogeneous tone of the city. Because the incoming population has been drawn heavily from the surrounding region and since employers were not recruiting a factory labour force, the foreign-born, non-english-speaking population has remained relatively small. Unlike other major cities of the prairie West, and like the rest of southern Alberta, more than half of Calgary's population is of British stock. In 1961 a little over one half of Calgary's population was Alberta-born, while the Canadian born total was over 75 percent. Such homogeneity of population is not typical of a sustained boom economy and this unusual combination is an important factor underlying the social and political stability and generally conservative outlook that has characterized the city during the post-war period.
In a visual or spatial sense, the impact of the oil industry is just as dramatic as the demographic change. Towering, multi-storied oil company offices occupy the downtown core. Stretching away from the downtown workplace are miles of residential suburbia supported at intervals with shopping centres and tied to the city's core by traffic-clogged, multi-lane expressways. As the largest Canadian city in area, Calgary's far-flung city boundaries have much to do with the fact that income levels have permitted the great majority of families to purchase the preferred, detached single family dwelling. While the old industrial areas in the northeast and southeast sectors have been filled in mainly by numerous service-oriented enterprises related to the petroleum industry, Calgary still functions as a key regional service centre for the surrounding agricultural hinterland. The meat-processing industry, for example, still ranks as the third largest in the country.
Another dimension of Calgary's petroleum-dominated development is the role in the Alberta and Calgary economies of foreign, multi-national corporations. Calgary, more than any other major city, has come to stand as the centre of an industry that is almost completely dominated by foreign interests. In 1973, foreign corporations controlled 99.5 percent of the assets, accounted for 98.9 percent of the sales and accumulated 98.8 percent of the profits in the petroleum and coal products sector of the Canadian economy. Perhaps the acquisition in 1921 of the Calgary Petroleum Products Company, the discoverer of oil at Turner Valley in 1914, by Royalite Oil (an Imperial Oil subsidiary) can be considered to mark the beginning of this movement. The need for steady and plentiful risk capital and the general aloofness of eastern Canadian investors towards western Canadian oil ventures accelerated the process of foreign acquisition of capital-starved Canadian enterprises. As the petroleum industry in western Canada became ever more an extension of American enterprise, the old north-south axis that bound Calgary to the United States in pre-CPR days was restored.
The close ties with the United States and the buoyant character of the oil-fuelled Alberta economy have influenced Calgary's evolving social and political character. The strong north-south linkages forged by the heavy movement of oil company capital and personnel back and forth across the border have helped to reinforce "Uncle Sam's" cultural embrace. While the precise consequences of this experience of working with and for Americans in an almost totally American-dominated industry is impossible to measure, it is clear that the former British character of the city has greatly diminished.
In rebuilding north-south ties the oil industry has also helped to shape the political views of many Calgarians in a way that has reinforced traditional western objections to the eastern favoured National Policy. With its interests tied so closely to petroleum, Calgary's world view is predominantly continental. To this extent, the interests of the new oil-based economy have lent support to those post-war political energies that have focused on opposition to Ottawa. This attitude, moreover, has been consistent with a political tradition that goes far back to the territorial period and is manifest in the region's preference for the Conservative Party.
The petroleum industry has also functioned as an agent of political stability at the local level. The almost continuous expansionary economy generated by the oil boom has made for a broadly-based rising standard of living and the political dissent and debate characteristic of the 1920s and 1930s have given way to a remarkable political and social calm. At the provincial level, Calgary's political energies have been mainly absorbed in the city's continuing rivalry with the provincial capital, Edmonton. Almost evenly matched, Edmonton's advantage as provincial capital has been checked by Calgary's place as administrative and financial centre of the petroleum industry.
An additional factor that accounts for the smooth integration of the oil industry into the city's social and political fabric is its "western" character. Though oil has changed the physical face of Calgary, it is doubtful that one could identify another enterprise that could be as supportive of the city's old identity. In both Canada and the United States the most significant oil finds came first in the heart of the ranch country and as the industry developed in this region elements of the existing social-cultural milieu in the cattle country were absorbed by the new economic order. The transition from cattle-baron to oil-baron, cowboy to oil-rigger was easy; the predominant attitudes or ethic did not have to change. The continued close social connection with the old life style the connection between oil, cattle and things equestrian is immediately apparent to anyone who has travelled west of Calgary and observed the palatial "hobby ranches" that dot the westward-facing slopes of the Rocky Mountain foothills. The connection once forged now has been set for two generations.
In summary one can say there are two critical events that stand out in the first one hundred years of Calgary's growth and development. The arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1883 gave Calgary an advantageous position along the nation's main artery of east-west commerce and assured the city's place as an important regional service centre. The discovery of oil prior to World War I and the subsequent development of this resource permitted Calgary to grow beyond this stage to become a city of national economic and financial stature. As the search for petroleum has expanded in Canada and elsewhere the substantial Canadian participation in these activities has been mainly directed from Calgary. In addition to direct exploration and development elsewhere, and standing as evidence of the city's more sophisticated economic function, Calgary-based firms are especially active in the marketing of oil field experience and expertise in developing frontier areas. In this highly specialized field Calgary's hinterland has expanded to global dimensions.
