C.W. Gross is the 2021 Historian in Residence

Hello!

My name is C.W. Gross and I am privileged to have been appointed the 2021 Historian in Residence for Heritage Calgary and the Calgary Public Library.

Telling stories about our past, present, and future is the definition of my 23-year career in the museums and heritage field. That career has taken me through the Glenbow Museum, Calgary Zoo, Fort Calgary, and Heritage Park as an educator and interpreter, as well as volunteering with the Calgary Stampede’s Western Showcase. My passion, however, is Victorian-Edwardian science fiction. That, and rocks!

My background is in geology, which I studied at Mount Royal University (then Mount Royal College) before transferring to the Museum and Heritage Studies program at the University of Calgary. I currently serve as the president and public outreach coordinator for the Alberta Palaeontological Society and offer earth science education tours and programs through my own company, Sandstone Prehistoric Safaris – Calgary. At the end of February last year, I published The Ice Age in Western Canada: a poorly-timed book about the last 2.6 million years of history in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia.

I believe that there is no clear line between history and prehistory. Human beings have existed on this planet for at least 250,000 years, of which only the last 6,000 years have been recorded in writing. How many tragedies and triumphs, wars and peace, dramas and sagas unfolded in the first 244,000 years of our history? David Thompson was the first European to record a description of Moh'kins'tsis, the future Calgary, when he wintered with the Piikani in 1787/88…a scant 234 years ago in the 13,300-year history of Indigenous peoples in Southern Alberta.

History goes back much further than the written record. Before the written accounts of explorers, settlers, and immigrants were the recollections of the Niisitapii, Tsuut’ina, and Nakoda peoples, persevered and passed down in oral traditions, stories, ceremonies, sacred bundles, buffalo robes, and tipi covers. These recollections are still shared in the same ways today. And before them, Southern Alberta’s history was preserved in stone. 

Natural and cultural history are closer than we imagine because our shared histories, cultures, and economies are ultimately shaped by the land and its resources. This is especially true of a city like Calgary—built of sandstone, fueled by the natural resource industry, and only a short drive (by Canadian standards) from some of the most famous geological and palaeontological sites in the world.

For example, our freshly restored historic sandstone City Hall was recently unveiled. Built in 1910, City Hall underwent extensive rehabilitation from 2016 to 2020. Veiled beneath tarps, 233 skilled stonemasons, carpenters, electricians, and other tradespeople structurally reinforced verandas and balconies, secured the clocktower, fortified the roof structure and replaced all but 400 of the original red tiles with new ones purchased from the original manufacturer, replaced 1,500 metres of mortar, and replaced 1,350 tonnes of sandstone. Altogether, City Hall is built of 15,522 pieces of sandstone. But where did all this sandstone originally come from?

Turning to the Calgary’s Story collection, I first searched for documentation on Calgary’s sandstone quarries. There were a few documents, including a pamphlet by the Historical Society of Alberta called Calgary in Sandstone, written by Richard Cunniffe in 1969. There was also a somewhat vague map published by the Glenbow Foundation in 1987. When the Central Library reopens, you can examine these resources for yourself.

An interesting thing about Alberta sandstone is that it varies from quarry to quarry. A 2010 Energy Resources Conservation Board/Alberta Geological Survey report on Building Stone in Alberta by C.S. Crocq identifies stone from different quarries by quality and colour ranging from “very yellow” to “buff” to “grey” to “blue.” In the Claresholm railway station, now home to the Claresholm Museum, Crocq identifies stone from two separate quarries. The more yellow stone hails from Calgary (Stone 1 in the image below) and the more greyish from Cochrane (Stone 3).

Thankfully, this kind of investigative work was not needed to track down the stone in as well-documented a building as City Hall. The Glenbow Foundation map did identify the stone for City Hall as coming from the J.A. Lewis quarry somewhere around Beddington Creek and Panorama Hills. With this information I turned to one of a historian’s most valuable resources: people who know more than they do. In my case, it was friends in the Alberta Palaeontological Society.

 The APS is a registered non-profit society comprised of everyone from professional palaeontologists and oil patch geologists to recreational fossil collectors, all united by a shared love of prehistory. I reached out to the Bulletin editor and retired geologist Howard Allen for his insights into the location of quarries along Beddington Creek. You may already be familiar with one of them, being the purported quarry beneath the Split Rock in Confluence Park. Howard’s knowledge of the area is greater than mine (I grew up in south Calgary), and he pointed me towards a few possibilities with the help of Google Maps.

 Final confirmation came with a City of Calgary webpage on sandstone quarries (https://www.calgary.ca/cs/cpb/projects-and-initiatives/historic-city-hall/sandstonequarries.html) that gave the township and range of the J.A. Lewis quarry at NW21-25-R1-W5M. This was right smack at one of the possibilities forwarded to me by Howard. Equipped with this information (and a good parking spot suggested by Howard), my wife and I took an afternoon to visit the place where Historic City Hall came from.

One solution leads to more questions. In this case, the question was: where did the rock that City Hall came from come from?

 Calgary is surprisingly geologically complicated. To the casual observer, sandstone is sandstone. To geologists, on the other hand, which sandstone is which can be a more difficult problem to piece together. Calgary is at the confluence of several geologic formations that makes mapping out our sandstone challenging.

 At the base of Calgary’s bedrock is the Scollard Formation. Most of the Scollard is dated to the Late Cretaceous period, the “Age of Dinosaurs.” Scollard Formation can be seen upstream of Drumheller along the Red Deer River. Calgary is not so lucky as to have dinosaur fossils (Edmonton, with its older rocks, gets those), but the uppermost part of the Scollard is found here. This is just after the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs (that is, the extinction of all dinosaurs that aren’t birds). The Scollard Formation can be seen at the sandstone outcrop just south of the Boothman Bridge, across the river from Edworthy Park.

 The Scollard is contemporaneous with the Willow Creek Formation, which is more common further south. The “type locality,” where a formation was first labelled and defined, is along the Oldman River at the mouth of Willow Creek. What is the difference? The Scollard Formation has coal and mudstones in addition to sandstone, suggesting a wetter and perhaps swampier environment. The Willow Creek includes nodules of calcite and oxidized (rusted) “red beds” that are indicative of a drier environment. Right around Calgary was the transition between these wetter and drier environments. The Willow Creek Formation can be seen dramatically at Raven Rocks in Fish Creek Provincial Park.

This carried over into the later rocks that Calgary’s famed sandstone is derived from. Lying above the Scollard Formation is the Paskapoo Formation, and above the Willow Creek Formation lies the Porcupine Hills Formation. These equivalent deposits date from 62.5 to 58.5 million years ago. Like their underlying formations, they differ by their apparent climates. The Paskapoo suggests a wetter, more northerly climate while the Porcupine Hills suggests a drier climate…a climate regime that continues to this day. The type locality for the Paskapoo is the confluence of the Blindman and Red Deer Rivers just southeast of Blackfalds. Compare the environment there to the dry prairies of the Porcupine Hills along Highway 22, the Cowboy Trail. It was cliffs of the Paskapoo and Porcupine Hills Formations that the Niisitapii used for buffalo jumps, like those at Head-Smashed-In.

As for what we find in the Paskapoo and Porcupine Hills Formations besides construction stone… well… that’s also what my Historian Residency is about!

Over the course of the Spring and Summer, I hope to present many talks and (Covid-willing) tours on Calgary’s natural and cultural history and the intersections between them. I am particularly interested in the Ice Age and in the natural history of our building stones. What do we see in the stones we build with, where did they come from, and what do they mean? At the conclusion of my residency, I aim to put together an exhibit of “Calgary’s prehiStory” at the Central Library that deepens and enriches our cultural connection with Southern Alberta’s geologic past.   

 So keep your eyes peeled to the Calgary Public Library and Heritage Calgary websites for news of future programs! If you are interested in chatting about my work or have questions regarding your own research, you are welcome to book a one-on-one consultation through https://calgarylibrary.ca/events-and-programs/arts-and-culture/historian-in-residence/ or reach me for other inquiries through my website http://www.sandstoneprehistoricsafaris.com/. My book, The Ice Age in Western Canada, can be purchased at https://www.amazon.ca/Ice-Age-Western-Canada/dp/B0858T6N2R.   

C.W. (Cory) Gross is a professional educator with over 20 years of experience in museums and heritage. His primary field is the geology of Western Canada and its intersection with Indigenous, settler, and immigrant histories. In early 2020 he published his first book, The Ice Age in Western Canada.

The Historian in Residence is presented in partnership with Calgary Public Library.