Читать книгу Let It Snow. Keeping Canada's Winter Sports Alive онлайн

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By the early twentieth century, a further transition was occurring. The private automobile and alternating-current electricity made suburbanization possible as well as the gradual redistribution of industrial production from its downtown locations. All this did, however, was make the city bigger. Its rural counterparts, and their associated memories, grew weaker. There would be no going back to a supposedly “simpler” age.

Meanwhile, in the countryside by the 1880s, improvements in agricultural mechanization and competition from the wheat fields of the West resulted in an almost fifty-year period of rural depopulation, as many in eastern Canada flocked west to take advantage of the virgin farmlands of the prairies.

Fred Grant was one of those, but for him this was a new territory of winter pleasures to explore:

In December 1898, I had the pleasure of being a member of a bunch of hockey players in Golden, B.C., who journeyed to Banff, Alberta, to meet the team of that place in a game on the Bow River, and among the entertainers were four former Barrieites — Mr. and Mrs. “Bob” Campbell, the former the principal of the public school there, a player on the Banff team, now a resident of Calgary and a member of the Alberta Legislature, and a very pronounced opponent of the party led by his fellow townsman Premier Stewart; Tom Wilson, the owner of a large outfitting business for tourist and mountaineering parties, frequently a guide to Dominion Government Geological parties, and probably the best-informed man in Canada on the famous Lake Louise and Yoho Valley Districts; and Billy Alexander, then and now in the jewellery business.