History
These days Waterton is on the road pretty much to nowhere - if you're down this way you're here to see the park or on your way to or from the US. It was a different story in the past, for the region provided a happy hunting ground for Ktunaxa (Kootenay) First Peoples, whose home base was across the Continental Divide in the Kootenay region of present-day British Columbia. Around 200 archeological sites betraying their presence have been found in the park. Anything up to 9000 years ago aboriginal peoples crossed the mountains to fish and hunt bison on the prairie grasslands fringing the Waterton region, foodstuffs denied to them in their own aboriginal heartlands. By about 1700 the diffusion of the horse across North America (introduced by the Spanish) allowed rival peoples, namely the Blackfoot, to extend their sphere of influence from central Alberta into the area around Waterton. Their presence and increased mobility made it increasingly difficult for the Ktunaxa to make their habitual incursions, though Blackfoot supremacy in turn was to be cut short by the arrival of pioneer guns and white homesteads. By the mid-nineteenth century the Blackfoot had retreated eastwards, leaving the Waterton area virtually uninhabited. The region was named by Lieutenant Thomas Blakiston, a member of the famous Palliser expedition, in honour of the eighteenth-century British naturalist Charles Waterton. The area's first permanent white resident, John George Brown - or "Kootenai Brown" - was a character straight out of a Wild West fantasy. Born in England and allegedly educated at Oxford, he spent time with the British Army in India, decamped to San Francisco, chanced his arm in the gold fields of British Columbia and worked for a time as a pony express rider with the US Army. Moving to the Waterton region he was attacked by Blackfoot natives, supposedly wrenching an arrow from his back with his own hands. He was then captured by Chief Sitting Bull and tied naked to a stake, but managed to escape at dead of night to join the rival Ktunaxa natives, with whom he spent years hunting and trapping, until their virtual retreat from the prairies. Marriage in 1869 calmed him down, and encouraged him to build a cabin (the region's first) alongside Waterton Lake. In time he was joined by other settlers, one of whom, Frederick Godsal, a rancher and close personal friend, took up Brown's campaign to turn the region into a federal reserve . In 1895 a reserve was duly established, with Brown as its first warden. In 1910 the area was made a "Dominion Park"; a year later it was designated a national park , the fourth in Canada's burgeoning park system. Brown, then aged 71, was made its superintendent, but died four years later, still lobbying hard to extend the park's borders. His grave lies alongside the main road into Waterton Townsite. For all Brown's environmental zeal it was he, ironically, who first noticed globules of oil on Cameron Creek, a local river, a discovery that would bring oil and other mineral entrepreneurs to ravage the region. Brown himself actually skimmed oil from the river, bottled it, and sold it in nearby settlements. In 1901 a forest road was ploughed into Cameron Creek Valley. In September of the same year the Rocky Mountain Development Company struck oil, leading to western Canada's first producing oil well (and only the second in the entire country). The oil soon dried up, a monument on the Akamina Parkway now marking the well's original location. Tourists meanwhile were giving the park a conspicuously wide berth, thanks mainly to the fact that it had no railway (unlike Banff and Jasper), a situation that changed when the Great Northern Railway introduced a bus link here from its Montana to Jasper railway. Visitors began to arrive, the Prince of Wales hotel was built, and the park's future was assured. In 1995, some time after the other big parks, UNESCO declared Waterton a World Heritage Site. Today, the park is becoming ever more popular, with the same tell-tale proliferation of souvenir shops on Waterton Avenue, Waterton Townsite's main street, as you find on Banff town's Banff Avenue.
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