[GreatWhiteEbola]

Originally Posted by Bigtime

My google skills are weak but I am pretty sure it all started with a McIver opinion piece in the herald, which was then rebutted by either Jeremy Klaszus or Chris Turner afterwards. I believe Chris Turner later expanded on the myth in his excellent article on Calgary in The Walrus magazine about a month or so ago.

http://walrusmagazine.com/articles/2...econsidered/2/

CALGARY WAS NEVER actually the Wild West, at least not in the gunslinging sense. For all the romantic nostalgia surrounding that first handful of pioneering ranchers, it was settled primarily by the North West Mounted Police and the Canadian Pacific Railway. Until the Mounties and the trains came, there was no town to speak of. And because the settlement was young even then — younger than Edmonton, which had been a bustling fur trading post for decades, younger than the NWMP’s primary southern Alberta post at Fort Macleod — it never did become the administrative centre of anyone’s map. It was neither the provincial capital nor the main outpost of the federal government back east. It had no established religious power structures, no Loyalist cliques. In Calgary, as its current mayor likes to say, “no one cares who your daddy was,” and no one ever really did. If you can talk your way into the room, you’ll get a hearing, and you might even walk out in charge of something new.

Back in 1912, a smooth talker named Guy Weadick, an eastern city boy who’d learned trick roping and made a living pretending to be a frontier cowboy, came riding into town and convinced four local bigwigs to throw some cash at his travelling circus, and 100 years later Calgary still organizes its summers around the Stampede he sold the city on. Weadick launched an institution and gave the city its founding myth, forever wedding young Calgary to its Cowtown reputation. It is a myth so concise and enduring that even today it continues to obscure the reality of a sophisticated, business-obsessed, hyper-modern city. Even the true nature of this Weadick fellow and his vaudevillian rodeo show have been subsumed by it.

Weadick was by all reports a sincere and charming man, a gifted trick roper and horseback rider, and a passionate, persuasive salesman. A 1952 glossy history of the Stampede describes him as “a long, lean cowpuncher with a quick nervous walk and a Wyoming drawl.” If this sounds like a character in a 1950s Western, that’s because it mostly is: Guy Weadick was born in Rochester, New York, and later spent time in Wyoming and Winnipeg. By the time he arrived in Calgary, the American frontier had been closed for decades, and even nostalgic Wild West travelling shows were on the wane. The inaugural Stampede was conceived as a one-time spectacle, a grand finale.Weadick moved the Stampede to Winnipeg the next year, but the show didn’t catch on there, and so he brought it back to Calgary, where it became an annual event in 1923. Even then, it included many of its current trappings: a parade, a midway, horse racing, free cowboy breakfasts, and several novel rodeo events. But those early Stampedes were varied affairs. There were Model T races and city tours, North West Mounted Police on horseback and Hudson’s Bay Company factors on foot; photos from the first Stampede parade reveal bowler hats and Sunday finery outnumbering cowboy hats and spurs.

The “Indian Village,” a sparsely attended back corner of the grounds nowadays, was perhaps the most unique Stampede feature and its most authentic frontier experience. At the time, Alberta’s First Nations were forbidden to leave their reserves except on short-term permits, and they couldn’t wear their traditional dress or practise their cultural and religious beliefs, on or off the reserve. The local Indian agent initially refused to allow his wards to attend the first Stampede, because it required too many days off the reserve, and he was only overruled after two of Calgary’s most prominent politicians, Senator James Lougheed and future prime minister R. B. Bennett, petitioned the federal government. The First Nations pitched teepees and camped out on the Stampede grounds by the thousands, embracing the event as a rare chance to express their smothered cultures; the Stampede represented the only opportunity most Calgarians ever had to interact directly with their Indigenous neighbours.

Notwithstanding the mythmaking overstatement, there was an authentic wildness to the city that birthed the Stampede, a frontier gambler’s taste for risk that lives on within its glittering office towers. It’s no coincidence that it spawned WestJet and Bre-X Minerals (the positive and negative poles in Calgary’s freewheeling business culture), and I still can’t figure out how Norman Foster managed to convince the city’s largest gas drilling operation to commission Canada’s greenest skyscraper, but any day now they’ll cut the ribbon on the Bow building, Encana’s employees will move in, and it will replace the Calgary Tower as the city’s postcard icon.