"The teepees were the Seattle Mountaineers, that Dennison used to pack up to Berg Lke. The Dennisons were pretty well located where the highway runs now.  The big barn and hayshed were where the info centre is. (Mount Robson)  They lived there about 40 yrs. Homesteaded it in 1913."   CARR ARCHIVES

An interview with Tommy Carr, son of Stan J Carr

Q:        How did your family get to Mount Robson? 

When they began to advertise Canada and that there was all of this free land over here, Dad came over on a ship to Montreal.  He kept on coming because his brother was in Calgary.  They had whole trains that were supposed to take people out west where they were supposed to have land.  They came over here with nothing at all.  No guarantee that they would get land.  

He and his brother had great arguments.  He said being a wrangler was a nothing thing to do and Dad should get on the railway where he could make some money.  But Dad just went to work for O’Sullivans.  They were four boys, and they took up a lot of Alberta for running cattle and so forth.  Then they put the big irrigation ditch through the centre of Alberta where everybody was heading to have farms.  And that cut off being able to take the cattle that belonged down in Montana down to the border and switch them for the ones that should be back up in Alberta.  It just cut off the wrangling, so he had to go somewhere else.

Then he went over to Brewsters, a cowboy again - one of Brewsters Dirty Packers - only now he was herding people around.  All up through the mountains at Lake Louise and Banff and up towards Jasper direction sometimes.   

All the time he was out on the ranches there wandering around north east of Calgary, he could see the mountains and he said he was going there sometime.  He worked the ranches all the way up as far as Red Deer.  From just south of Calgary all the way to Red Deer.  After he got married he decided he wanted to go and find a place for himself to start a hunting operation.  He went over in the Caribou for one winter and just about froze to death there.  So he thought it couldn't be any worse here so he came up here (Mount Robson).   He knew some of the park wardens that had moved up from Banff to Jasper when Jasper started to materialize.  

When he got out here the Hargraves were here.  He got the first years work with them doing trips out to the Smokey River and so on.  And then the next year he went looking for land.  He wanted to get right here somewhere and there was a big plot of land just east of us here now.  He tried to get that but it was owned by the Kamloops Land Company - they were snatching land ahead of the rail and then they went bankrupt.  So he couldn’t get it because it was in the middle of a bankruptcy thing.  He ended up in Tete Jaune at first.  Dad bought that for next to nothing in those days. 

REMEMBERING THE COMING OF THE HIGHWAY....

From the CARR ARCHIVES:

I have photos of the old picnics in our field, (where the highway is now), to push for the Yellowhead highway construction. Tom and I would take a chance that the weather would be fine on the long weekend in May, and buy tons of pop, ice cream novelties, (in dry ice), some 'whirly gigs', and with Toms Dad (Stan J Carr) popping the tops of the bottles until his wrists ached, we dished out our wares from the porch of Dennisons old house.  We were never rained out. Good baseball games in the meadow  with rivalry between Edmonton and Kamloops, and speeches from the politicians...

Visual Arts