With more than two million tourists coming through each year and a plethora of world-class attractions and festivals, Jasper thrives because of the tourist industry.
Even though it started out as a railroad town, tourists played a significant role in Jasper鈥檚 economy almost from the very beginning. Men like Curly Phillips and Fred Brewster capitalized on early tourist traffic, renting horses to adventurers and acting as guides.
In the early 1900s, Brewster was already thinking about how to get visitors to stay in Jasper. In an effort to combat the lack of tourist lodging, he set up a tent city on the shores of Lac Beauvert to house wealthy travellers that came through town.
The Canadian government had similar ideas, planning to transform Jasper into an alpine resort. As the First World War approached, Parks Canada was dividing the town into lots in preparation for development.
But Brewster鈥檚 camps and Parks Canada鈥檚 development plans both ground to a screeching halt when war broke out in 1914: the tent city, which had housed 260 guest the year before, closed completely and virtually no development took place in town until the war came to an end.
But almost as soon as the war ended, Jasper鈥檚 development and tourist traffic took off. Fueled in part by depression relief camps, new campgrounds sprang up across Jasper National Park.
Brewster returned from combat and also got to work establishing several lodges. More visitors were showing up every year.
When the highway finally made it to Jasper in 1940, the town saw a huge surge of people come with it: 85,000 people and 19,000 cars, compared to 21,000 people and 3,000 cars the year before.
Jasper seemed set to prosper. Then, war broke out again, and visitors stopped coming.
鈥淣obody was visiting,鈥� remembers Glenda Cornforth, who lived in Jasper at the time, 鈥減eople had no gas to come.鈥�
Fuel rations meant very few cars drove into the park, and with so few people coming through, the main tourist lodging, Jasper Park Lodge, shut down completely from 1942鈥�46.
But as war completely stymied development, Jasper managed to scrape by, largely thanks to the railroad.
Because rail was so important during wartime, many railroad employees were too important to ship off to war. They stayed, moving huge amounts of raw materials, supplies and people through town.
Jim Baxter was a young teenager living in Japer during the Second World War. He remembers the station teeming with activity.
鈥淭he town, in a way, seemed to be quite busy at that time,鈥� he remembers.
鈥淭roop trains鈥� constantly came through town carrying American soldiers, and steam engines chugged through carrying every sort of military equipment imaginable.
Wanda Garford, a young girl in Jasper during war years, remembers running to the station when the soldiers came through. She was there to hear their bands play, and she鈥檇 end up missing school because she stayed to watch them too long.
鈥淲e鈥檇 whip down to hear those bands play,鈥� she recalls.
Baxter still vividly remembers huge plumes of smoke billowing into the air as the steam engines sat in the yard, warming up.
Aside from the rail station, one of Baxter鈥檚 strongest memories from those times was 鈥渟eeing all the strange people鈥� passing through town.
Conscientious objectors and Japanese Canadians, who were interned near town, came through regularly, and soldiers riding the passing trains often frequented the town.
He also remembers the Lovat Scouts, a British military regiment that occupied the abandoned lodge for two years to train in alpine tactics.
Although the many people drifting through Jasper kept the town鈥檚 economy sputtering along, they didn鈥檛 bring in money like visitors did. With no tourists coming through and money tight, local businesses had a hard time staying afloat.
Garford鈥檚 father owned a garage in town, and the only way he knew to survive was to keep doing work for people, and hope they would eventually be able to pay.
She remembers her family sharing their scant dinners with relatives who didn鈥檛 have work. There always seemed to be a host of people in her house, she recalls, and that made for slim pickings at dinnertime.
鈥淭here were no second helpings,鈥� she said with a laugh, 鈥渨e didn鈥檛 live high, let me tell you.鈥�
Thankfully, the war eventually ended, and the years that followed ushered in the real beginning of the tourism industry in Jasper.
Visitors began flocking to Jasper in droves, and the park developed right long with them.
鈥淎fter the war it just got busier and busier with tourists,鈥� Sandy Robinson remembers.
Twice Jasper faced major setbacks to its development because of war, and twice the railroad kept the town running.
Trevor Nichols
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