Mountain classics resurrected

History, if unrecorded can be easily lost, and while books provide a permanence, if enough years pass without a reprint the few remaining copies end up on shelves of collectors or shoved in a box in a basement or attic.

To help preserve the history of the mountainous regions of the West, Rocky Mountain Books has released its Mountain Classics Collection, starting with Arthur Philemon Coleman’s 1911 travelogue The Canadian Rockies: New and Old Trails.

The multi-talented Coleman, a geologist, artist, writer, world traveller and mountaineer, spent eight summers travelling the wilds of the Rocky Mountains and the Selkirks by foot, horseback, canoe and raft, just as western Canada was entering a new era with the arrival of the railroad.

During those expeditions he spent three seasons searching for the legendary Mounts Hooker and Brown, which flank Athabasca Pass near Jasper and, at the time, were believed to be 5,000 metres (16,000 ft.). Coleman proved the two peaks were actually much smaller than that at 2,800 metres. He also made two attempts to climb Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies at nearly 4,000 m. (13,000 ft.).

Coleman first came west in the spring of 1884, passing through Calgary, Morley, Banff and Canmore and arriving at Laggan (now Lake Louise) while it was still the end of the rail.

While Coleman made no mention of Banff or Canmore, his descriptions of Morley, Calgary and Laggan, much like the entire book, provide valuable references to early life in this region.

“Last year the old Calgary was east of the Elbow, but the almighty railway had puts its station in a more spacious part of the valley, a mile or two west; and the submissive city packed itself on sleighs or carts, crossed the Elbow and replanted itself near the station as a row of straggling log houses and tents.

Some of the mansions had the curved roofs of CPR boxcars, and the thousand inhabitants sheltered themselves from the weather in all possible ways, many under roofs of prairie sod,” Coleman wrote.

Not at all the Calgary of today; wherein lies the value of this book and indeed the entire Mountain Classics Collection, according to Don Gorman, managing editor at Rocky Mountain Books and the catalyst behind the Mountain Classics Collection.

“You can still get original editions of these, but they’re expensive and they start at $200 to $300 for an ugly copy and they can go as high as $1,000. These are really important western Canadian histories that a lot of western Canadians don’t have access to,” Gorman said Monday (Nov. 20).

Unlike many of the regional history books to hit the shelves lately, which are lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs, the Mountain Classics Collection will have no illustrations. The idea, Gorman said, is to keep the
books affordable to get them into as many hands as possible.

The Canadian Rockies: New and Old Trails, published in September by Rocky Mountains Books, is available for $19.95.

“I think we tend to think that the mountains are just there and we take them for granted, and we do the same thing with our history and our books. This is just poking people with a stick and letting them know that there is some good writing out there that has been forgotten.”

Gorman said he chose Coleman for the first book in the collection, which will be followed in March by Mary Schäffer’s 1911 Old IndianTrails of the Canadian Rockies, as Coleman’s numerous and detailed observations provides some perspective into the birth of western Canada and the rise of mountain culture.

“It was just really interesting to consider what was going on in western Canada 1910-1913, because it was so raw and so basic, and then you think about what was going on at that time and Picasso was painting — the ultra-expression of modernism, and we’re still here swatting flies and using horses to get through the woods,” Gorman said.

Along with the perspective Coleman provides, another strength of the book is his evocative writing, according to Chic Scott, a Banff writer and historian best known for his own book Pushing the Limits: The Story of Canadian Mountaineering.

“He gives us a window into a vanished time in the west, when one could set out for months into an unexplored land and find new lakes, cross unknown passes and climb to untrodden summits. Although these romantic days are now gone, we can, through this book, still enjoy the campfire along the trail and the starry skies of that magical world,” Scott wrote.