Wildlife Promotions, Western Canadian Boosterism, and the Conservation Movement, 1890–1914

Abstract

Between 1890 and World War One, western Canadians advertised their region as the last wildlife stronghold in North America. Few studies have assessed how and why westerners sought to win distinction as custodians of the last wild animals but, as this essay will demonstrate, urban promoters made numerous civic statements in their displays of wildlife that have been overlooked by historians more interested in the genesis of Canadian tourist industries. (1) Westerners used wildlife symbolically to advertise abundance, to make statements about western urbanism, and even to build up local and provincial identities. (2) More than this, they used wildlife symbolism for these purposes at a key moment in the history of changing environmental attitudes, a time when many Americans and eastern Canadians were initiating conservation and preservation policies. (3) Prompted by the near extermination of such animals as the North American buffalo and the growing fear that civilization was crowding out wilderness areas, George Bird Grinnel, William T. Hornaday, C. J. Buffalo Jones, and others launched campaigns to limit hunting activities and preserve game in parks and breding areas, or domesticate it in an effort to prevent depletion. (4) While news of their activities circulated in Canada's western provinces, local conditions significantly changed the imported conservation message. Motivated by a spirit of boosterism and the realities of a hinterland economy, western residents drew on the rising conservation ethic as a means to promote their region. By analyzing the ways in which booster promotion influenced conservationist ideas, this essay follows Robert G. McCandless's example of displaying larger social concerns by unearthing local attitudes to wildlife. (5) Further, this essay should place a caveat upon Altmeyer's proposition that Canadian attitudes towards nature reflected those developing south of the border by the century's end. (6) Westerners created images of inherent abundance in the natural resources they drew from; they tirelessly flaunted images of a wildlife Eden that contradicted many of the environmental concerns growing elsewhere. This essay begins with wildlife displays created by immigration and tourist departments of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and the federal government as well as those engineered by provincial and municipal promoters. To sell the West, members of game offices, conservation associations, auto clubs, and boards of trade all used images of wildlife in their promotions. Not surprisingly, they supported the building of local natural history museums, which in the West became great booster shrines. The second section looks closely at booster networks attempting to make the West appear as the last wildlife stronghold on the continent. Concluding comments point out that the idea of a northern refuge and the imaginative use of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis allowed westerners to assert abundant wildlife as proof that their region enjoyed special natural abundance; confidence in this proposition might well have influenced the subsequent development of the Canadian conservation movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Wildlife Displays No image was so pervasive in western promotional literature as natural abundance: brochures and posters offered images of a plenitude of resources. Nature's abundance was identified in western soils, in vast forests found along western reaches of the prairies, and in British Columbia's mountain streams. In particular, literature produced after 1890 stressed the theme of natural abundance, that God had provided greatly in the West and a supernatural provision was offered to anyone who came, settlers or visitors: all could sup, all could be satisfied. Even after the 1885 North West Rebellion, itself caused in part by the unsettling food question prompted by the disappearance of the buffalo, a Canadian Senate inquiry launched by the untiring booster, John Schultz, attempted to set the record straight. …