Waterton Lakes: The Business of Parks and Preservation in the North American Borderlands

Abstract

While the Canadian Pacific instigated the establishment of Banff, Waterton Lakes National Park never had a connection to the Canadian main line. Instead, the Great Northern, the northernmost US transcontinental railroad, stepped in to develop Waterton Lakes and Glacier along the Alberta/Montana borderlands. With the completion of the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton Townsite, the railroad integrated the two spaces five years before the parks were formally designated, in 1932, as the world’s first peace park. While big businesses, like the railroads, participated in the creation and development of parks, decidedly smaller businesses from shops, groceries, restaurants, and hoteliers operating both inside and adjacent to protected spaces also influenced and benefitted from them as well. Waterton Lakes and Glacier, as parks on the periphery of two nations, were profoundly shaped by ideas and actors that migrated across borders just as freely as the flora and fauna these spaces sought to protect.