The Bow: Living with a River

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and co-editor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

The Bow is a book of essays that documents a Glenbow Museum exhibition
on the same theme. The essays begin with the river’s origin above Bow
Lake, and trace its course past Banff, the Gateway, the Foothills, and
downstream beyond Calgary. These sites are explored from multiple
perspectives—history, geology, ecology, and industry—to show the
influence of the Bow River on the people and activities that depend on
it and on the artists who have painted its varied aspects. The first
essay surveys the imagery depicting the Bow River Valley from the late
19th century to the present, by both amateur and professional artists.
The last essay is a collection of “reflections” on the river, both
visual and verbal.

Fed by meltwater from a glacier in the Rockies, the Bow River was
nurturing the semi-arid lands of southern Alberta and sustaining the
Native peoples, the bison, and other wildlife of the foothills long
before settlement. When the North West Mounted Police chose the
confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers as the site for Fort Calgary in
the 1870s, and the CPR chose the Bow Corridor as the route for the
transcontinental railway, the importance of the river was affirmed and
settlement was assured. In the early years, mining near Canmore, logging
in Kananaskis, and then hydroelectric power were all more or less
dependent on the river. But homesteaders, cattle ranchers, and evolving
industry affected the landscape, and today ecological concerns are
gaining prominence.

Examining such topics in separate essays results in a narrative that is
less cohesive than the exhibition whose format it echoes. But the many
well-chosen illustrations (all reproductions in colour) tell their own
story via archival photographs, paintings, watercolours, prints,
drawings, and sketches, by mostly little-known local artists. Many
belonged to the Alberta Society of Artists, in its heyday a vital
organization that encouraged traditional plein-air landscape painting by
members who obliged by recording their impressions of the Bow’s
riparian vistas, both rural and urban. Having access to those delightful
images is alone worth the price of the book.