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The town of Jasper lies in a narrow valley nestled beneath the jagged Rampart mountain range. As it is the only range removed from the flat grasslands of the Canadian Prairie, and one of the few that passes through the sheer ramparts of the Eastern Rockies, this valley has been inhabited for over 10,000 years.
The first people to settle here were Native Americans, who wandered into the valley at the end of the last Ice Age. Hunting bighorn sheep, deer and elk, they found that the sheltered mountain valleys had a slightly milder climate than the dry and windswept prairies. As they moved farther into the mountains, they discovered that the Athabasca Valley was situated at the beginning of a number of mountain passes that allowed them to travel and settle through the heart of what is now British Columbia, to the west of the Rockies.
The Sarcee tribe became well established in the Athabasca Valley, and for several thousand years was influential in controlling trade between the plains nations and the mountain tribes.
With the arrival of Europeans in North America, however, came a smallpox epidemic that devastated the indigenous people, killing almost 50 percent of the population. In addition, displaced natives, particularly the Iroquois from eastern Canada, moved west ahead of the white settlers, and began to take over the Sarcee's territory. The Iroquois had horses and guns acquired from white traders, and soon wrested control of the eastern Rockies from the existing native tribes.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the North West Company and Hudson's Bay Company began exploring the region in search of new fur trapping and trading areas. Around 1800, the first trading post in the area was established at Rocky Mountain House, 200 kilometres southeast of Jasper. Missionaries soon followed, setting up churches throughout the western prairies and eastern Rockies.
The first European known to have visited the present Jasper townsite was David Thompson, one of Canada's most famous explorers. Thompson passed through in 1810 on an historic mapping expedition for the North West Company that would take him all the way to the Pacific. A post would be established near here in 1824, an offshoot of Rocky Mountain House, which, in 1817, had been dubbed Jasper House after the trader in charge at the time, one Jasper Hawes.
Jasper National Park was created in 1907, just after Banff National Park, some 290 kilometres to the south, had been recognised as Canada’s first. Visitors began to trickle in, but Jasper National Park never saw the flood of tourists that inundated Banff, which saw the railroad come through in 1883, two decades before it reached Jasper. Also, Jasper had slightly different attractions than Banff, and instead of aristocrats, daredevil climbers and skiers, it drew big game hunters, glacier trekkers and naturalists.
In 1911, the Pocahontas coal mine, near the present-day townsite of Jasper, went into production. A small community of miners and their families sprung up and flourished briefly before the mine was closed in 1921 due to low coal prices.
In 1913, a rail line was finally constructed from Edmonton to the Jasper townsite. The construction superintendent, one Lt. Col. S. Maynard Rogers, built the town's first substantial building the same year&mdashnow home to the Jasper Information Centre. The community thrived on railway traffic for a time, but most of the tracks were torn up and shipped to Europe as part of the war effort in 1917. The railway was eventually rebuilt, but was never a huge commercial success.
During the Second World War, Patricia Lake, a small lake in the mountains above Jasper, became the site for a top-secret research project of the British Navy. An "unsinkable" destroyer made of ice was constructed in the winter of 1943. The project foundered, and the ship was scuttled in the spring. Even today, however, scuba divers brave the icy water in the summer to swim amongst the wreckage of one of the strangest warships in history.
The city of Edmonton, which is only a four hour drive from Jasper, became a major oil centre in the 1970s and Jasper began to see more local tourist traffic as weekend travellers came to ski and hike in the mountains and swim in the Miette Hotsprings.
Marmot Basin Ski Area was built in 1966, and soon became popular for its huge, uncrowded alpine bowls and short lift lines. International travellers began to choose Jasper over Banff because of its less formal atmosphere and easily accessible wilderness. While Banff may appear more spectacular, with dark, foreboding forests and sheer mountainsides, Jasper offers open parkland, airy pine forests, and huge but accessible mountains.
Today Jasper is an internationally renowned tourist destination, which still retains its rough and ready small-town character. More remote than Banff and less commercial, it is a treasure that is often overlooked.
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