Animal Power in Modern Alberta: Transportation

The late nineteenth century was an era of extraordinary change and technological progress in the field of transportation. The most important transportation advance of the nineteenth century, the railway, arrived in Calgary in 1883 and in Strathcona (now Edmonton) in 1891. These emerging urban centres were now connected to the huge markets of eastern Canada and beyond. The docking of the Northcote in Fort Edmonton in 1875 heralded the arrival of steamship technology, which would revolutionize transportation on Alberta’s lakes and rivers over the next several decades. As well, automobiles began to make an appearance on the streets of Calgary and Edmonton in the first decade of the twentieth century. Though viewed largely as a novelty at first, Albertans quickly embraced the technology, and the rate of car ownership exploded in the province over the next twenty years.

From the mid-eighteenth century onward, horses had been central to transportation in present-day Alberta. The arrival of horses had dramatically transformed the way of life of the Plains First Nations peoples in the eighteenth century, allowing for an unprecedented

range of travel and transforming the methods used in their most important economic activity, the bison hunt. Horse trails connected many of present-day Alberta’s fur trade posts in the nineteenth century, part of an extensive transportation system that linked the Hudson’s Bay Company’s posts throughout the region. Prior to the arrival of the railway, early settlements, missionary posts and North-West Mounted Police forts were supplied by brigades of horse- and oxen-drawn carts travelling on horse trails that connected these isolated sites to towns and trading posts. After the arrival of the railway in Calgary and Edmonton, these trails remained part of a network of transportation linking Alberta’s urban centres to the rural hinterland and beyond. For example, the Athabasca Landing Trail connected Edmonton to Athabasca Landing, which in turn became the major node for water transportation routes extending throughout most of northern Alberta. Established in the mid-1870s, the Trail remained a crucially important land transportation route until the arrival of the railway in Athabasca Landing in 1912.

By the first decades of the twentieth century, railways and automobiles were well established as the most important means of transportation in the province. Yet, horses still retained a great deal of their value. Prior to the 1920s, much of the construction on roads and railway tracks was powered by horses used to haul loads of equipment and pull graders in the earliest stages of construction. Furthermore, the lack of quality roads in the first half of the twentieth century made automobile transportation in much of rural Alberta impractical. Horse-drawn vehicles continued to be widely used outside of Alberta’s cities until after the

Second World War, and during the long winter months, horse-drawn sleighs were the most reliable mode of transportation throughout much of rural Alberta.

The importance of animal power in transportation thus adds an important nuance to our understanding of Alberta’s energy history. Alberta is a modern, dynamic province that has embraced technology in the pursuit of resources and the generation of wealth. At the same time, however, a very traditional source of energy—the muscle power of animals—continued to play an important role in transportation until the 1940s.