Bend In The Bow Stories

First Nations people of the Blackfoot Confederacy have inhabited the Bow River Basin on the land now mapped as Calgary for more than 10,000 years. Major traditional divisions include the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai. The Blackfoot people traversed their traditional territory that once stretched between Alberta’s North Saskatchewan River, Saskatchewan’s Great Sand Hills, Montana’s Yellowstone River and the Continental Divide. They lived within extended familial social groups under non-hierarchical, consensus-based leadership structures. In the Inglewood area, it is surmised the Blackfoot seasonally hunted bison and other game. While they did not extensively fish for food, the Blackfoot did use the tree-lined river banks for encampments because they were a source of game, water and firewood. Evidence of a pre-historic fire has been found in the north end of the bird sanctuary, along the Bow River’s meandering shoreline. These remains could indicate a winter encampment inhabited while they hunted the surrounding wildlands and prairies, or it could be there was only one fire made while they ate a meal along the river.

Colonel James Walker was one of the founders of The City of Calgary. As a businessman and civic leader, Walker was an active proponent of City improvement, education, and outdoor recreation. He was involved in many endeavors, serving as a mounted police officer, rancher, lumberman and school board chairman; and founding the Calgary Agricultural Society. From 1882 to 1903, Walker operated a sawmill on the open river plain of his homestead property at the site he named Inglewood. He dammed an inner channel of the Bow River to form a lagoon that sits above the river’s high water level, where he stored logs in floating booms. The mill was one of Calgary’s first manufacturing industries, supplying the nascent city with building materials to grow its economy. Walker’s Italianate red brick residence, built in 1910, is one of the few remaining agricultural homesteads in the inner city. On these grounds, Walker experimented with agricultural crops and techniques. In 1975, Walker was named Calgary’s Citizen of the Century. In 1977, the Colonel Walker Residence and Homestead Lands were declared a Provincial Historic Resource.

From the 1930s to 1950s, Chinese families operated active market gardens on the Walker homestead grounds. Colonel Walker informally agreed to lease the land for gardening and his daughter-in-law administered the rentals. Three Chinese families lived on the property in small buildings without electricity or plumbing. They hand-dug a 20’ well and also pumped water from the lagoon to irrigate their crops. In the 1940s, the British-American Oil Company (that operated a refinery on the adjacent tract of land) dug the families a new 60’ well. Greenhouses scattered on the property supported a seasonal agricultural lifestyle. According to family descendents, in January, children wielding pick axes broke frozen sod and carried it into the warm greenhouses to be mulched. The mulch was then used to fill wood veneer boxes that were planted and grown in the greenhouses. Fields were sowed in the spring and bedding plants were sold in May. Their major harvest was in September and the children went to school in October. In the winter, root cellars held vegetables that were sold at Calgary-area markets.

In 1929 the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary became one of the first federally designated migratory bird sanctuaries in Canada, following ratification of the Migratory Bird Convention Act by the U.S. and Canada in 1917. The Sanctuary was founded by Colonel Walker’s son, Selby, on 59 acres of the Bow River channel and islands east of the Walker homestead. Selby’s friend, naturalist George Pickering, lived in a cabin on the south end of the property and managed the sanctuary. Pickering developed paths and gardens, started a fish hatchery in the lagoon, bred and tended birds (in the area at the south end of the site still designated for wildlife research), brought in exotic birds for show, and ran a bird feeding program (with bread crumbs) for the public. Pickering estimated in 1950 some 6,000 birds stopped at the sanctuary during spring and fall migrations. Volunteers and staff have recorded observations of some 270 bird species, 21 mammal species, and 347 plant species at Inglewood Bird Sanctuary.

Peak flows of the Bow River typically occur in June, when snow pack and glacial melt in the mountains is highest. In June 2013, unusually heavy rainfall triggered catastrophic floods along the Bow, prompting states of emergency and evacuations. At the peak of the flooding, the Bow River was flowing through Calgary at an estimated rate of 1,458 cubic metres per second, five times its normal rate for this time of the year. At the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary water inundated the lagoon, while at Pearce Estate Park the river rose to such a level that it merged with the trout pond before starting to recede. A large volume of silt, rocks, branches, and man-made debris was deposited over habitats, infrastructure and riverbanks were washed out, and trees were uprooted. Post-flood restoration is being undertaken with aims to minimize stress to sensitive environments, limit damage to manmade structures, and better understand new river flow patterns and the benefits flooding can bring to habitats.

The North American Beaver is considered nature’s great ecosystem engineer. In search of food, shelter, and protection from predators, beavers fell trees on riverbanks for their dam complexes built in mud, wood, and stone. They typically build up to five feet of dam per day and have been known to rebuild a dam overnight. Dams create upstream ponds, which beavers use to float materials and food. Their dams slow water run-off during floods, sustain flows during drought, reduce water turbidity downstream, and increase water retention capacities of the surrounding landscape. The wetland plants that grow up around dams ameliorate water pollution by absorbing and processing contaminants. With their experiential responsiveness and power to transform their environment, the beaver exemplifies “the new superhero,” a receiver and generator of power in a dynamic environment and using that power to change the world. However, in urban areas where beavers lack predators, they are simultaneously poised as supervillains, literally eating themselves out of house and home and contributing to the decline of riverine forests.

In 1939, the British American Oil Company (BA) acquired 90 acres of land adjacent to the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary from The City of Calgary, who had received the land from Selby Walker as payment for tax debts. B-A used the land to operate a major refinery. Crude oil from Turner Valley oil field was carried to the site in a pipeline and processed into fuels, asphalt, and distillates. B-A distributed these products via rail. B-A’s Inglewood operations contributed to Calgary becoming an administrative centre of the regional petroleum industry. As a result of a merger with Gulf Canada (and later with Petro Canada), the Inglewood refinery was closed in 1973. Gulf Canada continued to operate the facilities as an asphalt plant until 1984, after which most of the refinery was dismantled. The only remaining building is a small, red brick and steel transformer building that once transmitted electricity to the refinery and now transmits symbolic value as a visual reminder of the past. At certain times of year traces of the previous large storage tanks can be seen on the ground.

Cleanup of the former refinery land, renamed the Wildlands, began in 1992 as a joint effort between Petro Canada, The City of Calgary, Rotary Clubs of Calgary, Ducks Unlimited, and the Inglewood Wildlands Development Society. Forty years of oil refining on site had left the soil and water contaminated five metres below ground. Work began with pumping liquid petroleum out of the water table to prevent seepage into the Bow River. A hydrocarbon recovery ditch was excavated and later transformed into a wetland pond, with its spoils used to form an adjacent lookout hill. 58,000 cubic meters of clean soil was brought in to cover certain portions of the site while others were left barren for further monitoring, experimentation, and observation. 35,000 native shrubs and trees have been planted that both remediate the soil through root extraction and metabolic transformation and provide food and habitat for wildlife. Native grasses now cover 60% of the Wildlands. Suncor Energy, which merged with Petro-Canada in 2010, continues mitigation and monitoring efforts in the Wildlands, with phytoremediation and other techniques. More than 1.5 million litres of oil have been removed, and still, asphalt, with a sticky, black shine, occasionally rises to the surface of some areas in the Wildlands.

William Pearce was a visionary “city builder” who advocated for both development of the region’s natural resources and conservation of its public lands. In 1889, Pearce built a grand, sandstone home—affectionately named “Bow Bend Shack”—within the floodplain on his riverine property. The home was named for the distinctive bend in the river at this location. Pearce had moved from Ontario to Calgary in 1884 to become the Superintendent of Mines, charged with regulating all resources in the Northwest Territories. He qualified for the role based on ten years of experience as a professional surveyor, during which time he inspected and regulated Western lands, gaining recognition as a protector of land and water resources for the greater public good. A decade of severe drought in the prairies led Pearce to advocate to protect Calgary’s water resources for public use. His work led to the passage of the Northwest Irrigation Act in 1894, resulting construction of agricultural irrigation canals and the Bow River Weir. After he left civil service, he spent his last days at Bow Bend Shack and was laid to rest at Union Cemetery. His land was donated to The City of Calgary to become Pearce Estate Park. The house was demolished in 1967. Its former site is currently occupied by the SoBow condominium development.

William Pearce imagined Calgary as a “city of trees.” On his property at what is now Pearce Estate Park, he created Western Canada’s first irrigated demonstration farm with a canal and windmill-powered pump drawing water from the Bow River. Here he conducted trials to test the hardiness of extensive species of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants and pioneered bioengineering with the use of bank-stabilizing trees and shrubs along the Bow River. Pearce developed a nursery on his property and worked with his neighbor, Colonel Walker, to try various plantings to improve their properties. Walker also experimented at his estate with plants at his orchards and gardens. To help realize his City Beautiful vision (a turn-of-the-century planning philosophy to introduce beautification and grandeur to urban areas to improve social harmony and quality of life), Pearce advised fellow Calgarians to plant trees on their own properties. In 1899, his influence led The City to take up a pro-tree stance, establishing treeprotection laws and street tree planting programs that led to Calgary’s urban forest. Today, the use of trees for phytoremediation in the Wildlands continues this tradition of experimenting with trees in the urban landscape.

A history of waterway engineering projects, beginning with William Pearce’s irrigation works, characterizes the portion of the Bow River adjacent to Pearce Estate Park. In 1904, a major weir was constructed to divert part of the river flow into canals for inland agricultural irrigation. Because of its concave profile, which was like a ski-jump, the weir created a circulating, downstream undertow. Pelicans feasted on fish trapped in the undertow; but fish weren’t the only ones trapped. By the mid-1970, the Bend in the Bow stretch of river gained the nickname “the drowning machine” due to numerous drownings. To prevent more incidents, a divergence was completed in 2012, named “Harvie Passage” after a major donor, which enabled passage for non-motorized boats and fish while maintaining water diversions from the Bow River. The Passage was a manufactured set of rapids with two channels: one Class 2 and the other Class 3 rapids. It was only enjoyed for one year before major floods in 2013 destroyed the Passage. A rebuilding effort by the Province of Alberta is currently underway.

Bow Habitat Station, in Pearce Estate Park, has attractions that link education with stewardship of wildlife resources. The Station collectively consists of the Discovery Centre, a Trout Pond, an Interpretive Wetland, and the Sam Livingston Fish Hatchery. The Hatchery opened in 1973, named after one of Calgary’s founding fathers. Development of the cutting-edge hatchery was overseen by Alex Sinclair, then superintendent of the Calgary Brewing and Malting Company that operated across the railroad tracks from the Hatchery. Both the Hatchery and Brewery drew its water from the same source: the Inglewood Aquifer, first drilled by A.E. Cross for the Brewery. Today, trout eggs arrive at Sam Livingston, having been harvested from adult fish at Raven and Allison Brood trout stations. The fish are raised to fry. Then, in spring, some are transported by tanker trucks to area lakes. Once there, the fish are released through hoses from the tanks to stock the lakes.