The Canadian Rockies tend to appear in our imagination as a crisp postcard: serrated ridgelines rising over turquoise water, glaciers pouring from icefields, and a ribbon of highway threading the valleys. What doesn’t fit that postcard is how culturally crowded these mountains have always been—trade corridors mapped and managed by Indigenous nations; migrant rail and mining camps; forced-labour road crews; expropriated townsites drowned under reservoirs; high-country guides who were themselves guided; and scientific and military experiments that left quiet, material traces. The hidden history of the Rockies is not a single story so much as a palimpsest of routes, removals, renamings, and returns.
Long before the first surveyor lined up a transit on a distant col, Indigenous families moved through these ranges along paths worn over thousands of years. Archaeological sites near present-day Banff—around Vermilion Lakes and Lake Minnewanka—show continuous use stretching back more than ten millennia. In those early seasons the valleys were not “untouched wilderness” but living landscapes managed with fire, harvested for roots and berries, and crossed to reach obsidian, chert, and other toolstone. The eastern slopes were within the roaming grounds of the plains bison, and knowledge of where, when, and how to move—across a pass before the first storms, to a south-facing bench with winter forage, to a hot spring for ceremony—was the kind of capital that families carried as securely as any pack.
Among the nations whose histories are braided into the Rockies are the Stoney Nakoda (Iyarhe Nakoda), the Ktunaxa, Secwepemc, Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy), Kainai, Piikani, Tsuut’ina, and Cree and Métis communities tied to the fur trade. Their names and narratives are still embedded across these mountains, even when cartography later overlaid new labels. The Stoney Nakoda, for instance, knew the emerald basin we now call Lake Louise as Ho-run-num-nay, “Lake of the Little Fishes”; a Stoney hunter led the guide and packer Tom Wilson to it in the 1880s, shortly before a railway timetable transmuted it into a European princess. The massif above Canmore long carried a slur as “Chinaman’s Peak,” after a Chinese cook named Ha Ling proved his detractors wrong with a one-day ascent and flag-planting in 1896; only in 1998 did Alberta officially rename the summit Ha Ling Peak, returning the man’s own name to his mountain.
The fur trade formalized existing mountain mobility, and the famous passes of the Rockies each come with a footnote. In 1809, Joseph Howse of the Hudson’s Bay Company reached the Columbia through what is now Howse Pass, though Blackfoot resistance to incursions across their hunting territories soon made this route perilous for Euro-Canadian traders. When David Thompson crossed Athabasca Pass in January 1811—guided by an Iroquois companion—the North West Company pivoted to this snow-bound but strategically safer line over the Great Divide, transforming the Athabasca and Columbia river systems into a continental conveyor for furs and trade goods. The Kicking Horse Pass entered Euro-Canadian lore after a horse famously sent the geologist James Hector flying in 1858, but long before its hazards challenged surveyors and locomotives, Indigenous families treated it as another of many routine corridors that stitched together the Columbia headwaters and the Bow.
Yellowhead Pass carries an even older name within a newer one. “Tête Jaune”—Yellowhead—was the nickname of Pierre Bostonais, an Iroquois-Métis guide with fair hair who moved parties between the Athabasca and Fraser watersheds in the 1820s. When the Grand Trunk Pacific and Canadian Northern railways raced west a century later, they absorbed the pass and the name, leaving only fragmentary traces of the earlier Iroquois and Métis presence in the homesteads and burial grounds that eventually gave way to park plans and rail yards.
The same layering of uses and erasures played out when Canada invented the national park as an institution. The hot springs at Banff—known to Indigenous nations for generations—were rebranded in the mid-1880s as the crown jewels of a new “Rocky Mountains Park,” a health resort and tourist magnet tightly coupled to the corporate ambitions of the Canadian Pacific Railway. What looked from Ottawa like enlightened conservation often felt on the ground like exclusion. By the 1890s and early 1900s, park managers banned Indigenous hunting, gathering, and burning, arresting people for activities that had sustained both families and landscapes. The Stoney Nakoda were pushed to the margins of Banff, their presence invited back each summer only in the staged, lucrative pageantry of “Banff Indian Days,” where beadwork and regalia could be admired safely by paying guests. In Jasper Forest Park (the precursor to Jasper National Park), Métis and Iroquois-descended families who had built cabins, managed hay meadows, and worked with the posts at Jasper House and Henry House were evicted between 1909 and 1911. The story these families told—of being the first stewards and then the first removed—has taken a century to find its audience in park museums and policy.
Even within the parks, industrial ambitions persisted, though they are now mostly mute. In Banff’s Bow Valley, the ghost town of Bankhead tells of a company-built coal community that operated from 1903 to 1922 on the slopes of Cascade Mountain, demolishing and hauling away most of the town’s buildings after labour disputes and a mine closure. Across the ridge at Lake Minnewanka—a reservoir whose very name distills that colonial habit of taking Indigenous words while ignoring Indigenous governance—drowned pilings and stone foundations bear witness to another erasure. In 1941, Calgary Power raised the lake once more behind a new dam to meet wartime electricity demand, submerging the resort community of Minnewanka Landing and permanently altering a valley filled with archaeological sites. Divers still visit the underwater hotel steps. In a different, colder register, the floor of Patricia Lake near Jasper hides the decaying remains of a secret wartime experiment: a pykrete barge, a prototype for “Project Habakkuk,” a proposed Allied aircraft carrier made of ice reinforced with wood pulp that would, in theory, resist bombs and torpedoes. For a few months in 1943, the Rockies served as a lab bench for an idea so strange that it has the ring of a tall tale—until you see the rotting timbers in the silty green.
The Rockies were also a crucible for the kind of national story that papers over the labour that made it possible. When the Canadian Pacific Railway hurled itself over the Kicking Horse Pass in the 1880s, it left a section so steep and treacherous that trainmen dubbed it the Big Hill. For decades, crews wrestled with grades of 4.5 percent that sent brakemen scrambling on icy roofs to twist handwheels and stave off catastrophe. The Swiss-chalet romance sold in CPR posters relied as well on Chinese labourers hired for less pay and more risk than their white counterparts; many of those men died unnamed and uncounted in camps, rockcuts, and snow slides. In 1909, the Spiral Tunnels cut into the limestone above Field finally eased the grade, transforming the spectacular danger of the Big Hill into a spectacle of a different sort: a serpentine feat of engineering that still pulls spectators to the parkway pullouts. Meanwhile, to the north, the rails of the Grand Trunk Pacific anchored Jasper as a divisional town, even as the nascent park’s wardens and superintendents cleared out those whose hayfields and traplines—awkwardly—lay in the path of a new idea of nature.
Some of the Rockies’ hidden histories play out through names and their afterlives. The Burgess Shale, high on a ridge above Field, entered science as a treasure chest of Cambrian fossils after the Smithsonian’s Charles Doolittle Walcott began excavating there in 1909. For decades, crates of exquisite soft-bodied creatures—trilobites’ bizarre cousins and arthropods as alien as any in fiction—flowed south to Washington, D.C. The site is now both a UNESCO World Heritage treasure and a reminder that scientific prestige often travelled in one direction, away from the mountains where knowledge was found. In the opposite direction, local and Indigenous names, long sidelined, have begun to surface. While some proposals—such as Stoney Nakoda elders’ request to rename Banff’s Tunnel Mountain in honour of the Sacred Buffalo Guardian—have sparked debate without yet changing maps, the wider trend is unmistakable: to separate remembrance from reflex, returning stories to the geography that holds them.
Other names, sometimes borne by the land itself, tell of displacement and control. During the First World War, the Dominion government interned thousands of immigrants classified as “enemy aliens,” many of them Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans. In the Rockies, camps sprang up in scenic places with strategic needs—Castle Mountain in Banff National Park, Morrissey in the Elk Valley, and a site near Jasper—where incarcerated men built roads, bridges, and park amenities under guard. A generation later, during the Second World War, Japanese Canadians were uprooted from coastal communities and shipped inland; road camps along the Yellowhead corridor and elsewhere used their labour to push through and improve mountain highways. These episodes remain harder to find on interpretive signs than lakes named for governors general, but they braid state power into the timber, gravel, and asphalt of mountain travel.
Tourism, too, has its hidden scaffolding. The idea of the Rockies as “Canada’s Alps” was partly a branding strategy, and the Canadian Pacific imported Swiss guides to Banff and Lake Louise at the turn of the twentieth century both to market and to manage the dangers of true alpinism. For decades, figures like Edward Feuz and Christian Haesler led first ascents and mentored local climbers; their presence is visible today in guidebooks, museum archives, and in a mountaineering culture that was at once international and rooted. But the story is not only European. The mountain adventures of Mary Schäffer—a Philadelphian botanist and photographer who roamed the Jasper backcountry in the first decade of the 1900s—hinged on a hand-drawn map by Samson Beaver, a Stoney Nakoda man who, as a boy, had travelled to the grand lake his people knew as Chaba Imne. Schäffer’s tale is often told as one of feminine pluck in a masculine realm; it is also, just beneath the surface, a story of Indigenous cartography making a spectacular “discovery” possible.
Look closely at the Rockies’ valleys and you’ll find other human traces almost erased by time or intent. Pictographs in sheltered canyons, the ochre images sun-faded and lichen-framed, speak to ancient visits to specific, resonant places. High on passes, archaeologists continue to find chipped stone and other artifacts where wind scours snow thin and ungulates have long used the same saddles to cross between drainages. Fire-scarred stumps in subalpine forests reveal both lightning strikes and cultural burns that opened meadows and kept berry shrubs productive; only in the last generation have park managers begun to reintroduce controlled burns, acknowledging that the postcard’s deep greens were often a colonial artifact of suppression. The demographic oscillations of elk and wolves around Banff in the twentieth century—boom-bust cycles amplified by predator culls, townsite hand-feeding, highways, and finally wildlife overpasses—read like a case study in how an idealized wilderness had to be actively maintained, with all the unintended consequences that followed.
Even the newer infrastructures that underwrite life in and around the Rockies—pipelines, dams, and mountain highways—carry backstories that surface only when something goes wrong or an old-timer starts talking. The Trans Mountain pipeline, pushed through Jasper National Park in the early 1950s, is one such presence, now the focus of debates far removed from the construction camps that carved and backfilled the right-of-way. Kootenay National Park exists at all because a road had to be built: British Columbia agreed to transfer a swath of land to federal control in 1916 in exchange for Ottawa constructing the Banff–Windermere Highway through the Sinclair Canyon to Radium Hot Springs, a resort whose very name bottled early twentieth-century enthusiasm for “curative” waters. In the northern Rockies, a forgotten saga of regional ambition played out in the 1930s, when volunteers and local governments cut the beginnings of a highway over Monkman Pass to link Grande Prairie to Prince George. They dynamited ledges through canyon walls and named the Monkman Cascades, but the depression, war, and a federally preferred Yellowhead route strangled the dream. The old grades and rotting bridges still exist in the bush, a parallel world to Highway 16’s steady sweep.
To talk about hidden histories in the Rockies is also to speak honestly about who gets counted and who belongs. The Michel First Nation, whose reserve lay near present-day Hinton on the eastern flanks of the Rockies, was enfranchised—its legal Indian status extinguished—under the Indian Act in 1958, the only First Nation in Alberta subjected to mass enfranchisement. For decades, descendants fought to regain recognition and rights; only recently have courts and governments begun to unwind this bureaucratic erasure. Meanwhile, within the parks, co-management agreements, Indigenous guardians programs, and cultural monitoring are starting to stitch lived knowledge back into land stewardship, from caribou maternal penning projects in Jasper to the reintroduction of wild bison to Banff’s remote Panther Valley in 2017. These are not simply ecological moves but historical ones, acknowledging that the mountain story was never just peaks and postcards.
Some of the Rockies’ secrets are literally underfoot. If you walk the interpretive loops at Bankhead, the gravel pathways line up not with trees but with old streets; the foundations you see once held company houses, a hotel, and a Chinese laundry that serviced a coal town inside a national park. If you peer into the pale green water of Lake Minnewanka from a boat on a calm day, you might glimpse fenceposts tilting into the depths, the outlines of a road. And in a museum case in Banff or Canmore, you might come upon a Stoney Nakoda beaded panel that looks like a landscape in miniature—mountains crested in white, a river flowing blue between them—and realize that the Rockies have been looked at and lived in far longer than any camera has captured them, and interpreted through aesthetics and ethics that suited a lived relationship rather than a week-long tour.
There are, of course, many more layers. On the south end of the range, near the Crowsnest Pass, the Frank Slide in 1903 buried a part of the coal town of Frank beneath millions of tonnes of limestone when Turtle Mountain shed a flank; it is the disaster you can see. Less obvious are the currents of rum-running and labour radicalism that flowed through those same camps in the early 1900s, or the churches and mutual-aid societies that knitted together immigrant communities from Italy, Eastern Europe, and East Asia. On the north end, Jasper’s skyline includes Mount Robson across the provincial line—first climbed in 1913 by a party led by the Austrian guide Conrad Kain—and a whole literature of mountaineering memoir that is, in fact, a record of livelihoods: outfitters and cooks, packers and photographers, many of them Stoney Nakoda and Métis, whose names survive in ledgers rather than in granite.
If there’s a thread that ties these histories together, it’s that the image of the Rockies as remote, empty, “beyond history” is precisely what obscures their histories. Mountains resist some kinds of change—the limestone uplifts and folded shales that make them spectacular will outlast us—but they don’t resist people. They shape us and we shape them. The carved portals of the Spiral Tunnels and the rounded silhouettes of long-occupied campsites both belong here. So do the stories of a Stoney elder’s map leading a botanist to the shore of a hidden lake; of a Chinese cook’s flag snapping above a ridge; of Ukrainian internees felling trees for a scenic drive; of bison returning to a valley their hoofprints once patterned. The Rockies are full of such accounts—quiet, sometimes submerged, sometimes dragged to the surface like a fossil from shale. Listening for them, you begin to hear a range less like an unpeopled wall than like a library: dense, layered, and, for those willing to look past the cover, very much alive.
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