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Fort Calgary , the city's historical nexus, stands at 750-9th Ave SE (daily May-Oct 9am-5pm; site free; interpretive centre $5.75; tel 290-1875, www.fortcalgary.ab.ca ), a manageable eight-block walk east of downtown; you could also take bus #1 to Forest Lawn, bus #14 (East Calgary) from 7th Avenue, or the C-Train free to City Hall and walk the remaining five blocks. Built in under six weeks by the North West Mounted Police in 1875, the fort was the germ of the present city, and remained operative as a police post until 1914, when it was sold - inevitably - to the Canadian Pacific Railway. The whole area remained buried under railway tracks and derelict warehouses until comparatively recently. Period photographs in the adjoining interpretive centre provide a taste of how wild Calgary still was in 1876. Even more remarkable was the ground that men in the fort were expected to cover: the log stockade was a base for operations between Fort Macleod, 160km to the south, and the similar post at Edmonton, almost 400km to the north. It's not as if they had nothing to do: Crowfoot, most prominent of the great Blackfoot chiefs of the time, commented, "If the Police had not come to the country, where would we all be now? Bad men and whiskey were killing us so fast that very few of us indeed would have been left. The Police have protected us as the feathers of a bird protect it from the winter." Only a few forlorn stumps of the original building remain, much having been torn down by the developers, and what survives is its site, now a pleasant forty-acre park contained in the angled crook of the Bow and Elbow rivers. Moves have recently been made to begin construction of an exact replica of the original log stockade. The interpretive centre traces Calgary's development with the aid of artefacts, audiovisual displays and "interpretive walks" along the river. Among the more kitsch activities on offer is the opportunity to dress up as a Mountie. Across the river to the east is Hunt House , built in 1876 for a Hudson's Bay official and believed to be Calgary's oldest building on its original site. Close by, at 750-9th Ave SE, on the same side of the Elbow River, is the renovated Deane House Historic Site and Restaurant (tel 269-7747), built in 1906 by Mountie supremo Superintendent Richard Deane (free tours daily 11am-2pm). It subsequently served time as the home of an artists' co-operative, a boarding house and a stationmaster's house. Today it's a teahouse and restaurant.
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