The Rockies of Canada: A Revised and Enlarged Edition of «Camping in the Canadian Rockies».

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

This reprint of the 1909 edition was first published as Camping in the Canadian Rockies in 1896. In the interim, over the course of several expeditions into the regions west, south, and north of Banff, Walter Wilcox refined a guide to camping into an introduction for the few who had the leisure and means to finance a trip, and a vicarious experience for the many limited to armchair travel. The book sold widely and well. It represented a source of information independent from that issued by the Canadian Pacific Railway. As presented by Wilcox, an American, one could be persuaded to think of the Canadian Rockies as part of the last, best west, conveniently furnished with a string of bases made accessible by rail, but bordered by a hinterland virtually untrammeled by the gentleman explorer, mountaineer, camper, and sportsman.

Its beauty and advantages were extraordinary. Of the mountain ranges of the world, only the Alps could challenge them for access and manageable heights. Whereas the former offered a storied history, the Canadian Rockies offered unparalleled vistas, variety, and a sense of unlimited wilderness. The first four chapters introduce the novice to the characteristics, rewards, challenges, and dangers of mountain travel, as Wilcox had experienced them in the immediate vicinity of Banff and Lake Louise. Five and six ratchet up the balance sheet of risk and reward, as he and his companions take up the challenge of Mount Assiniboine. Subsequent chapters describe their adventures in river valleys such as the Vermillion, lakes such as O’Hara, and the nitty-gritty of camping, mountaineering, hunting, and fishing. He concludes with a chapter on the Stony Indians.

Wilcox wrote what we now describe as “adventure travel.” Indeed, it contains more than a little of what might now be described as “extreme adventure travel”: often in their ignorance he and his companions put their lives at risk. However, practice and time spent with a Swiss mountain guide made him an informed authority. The Rockies of Canada is a polished, well-written example of the adventure genre, and a recommended source for historians and others with an interest in the place and the period.