The Miette Road
The reliefer-built Sulphur Creek Bridge, erected between 1931 and 1932, located along Miette Road.
The Great Depression broke Canada. In the years following the stock market crash, its gross national product dropped twenty-five percent. Personal income in Alberta fell by forty-eight, farm wages by fifty. The value of farmland itself plummeted by forty percent, while nationwide unemployment rose to thirty. Everywhere dust hounded crops and fires plagued town. And yet, nothing was done. Cities, provinces, the Dominion, each squabbled, passing the buck from one party to the other. No-one wanted the responsibility — and price-tag — associated with Depression-relief.
Fortunately, J.B. Harkin’s Dominion Park Branch took a more proactive approach. Where all other levels of government saw the country’s increasingly radicalized unemployed as an unwanted problem, the Park Commissioner saw opportunity. If a series of work camps were erected across Canada’s national parks, he argued, these men’s unused labour could transform them into revenue-generating tourist attractions. “In return,” Eric Strikwerda writes, “the men would get three square meals a day, a warm bed, and a healthy, natural setting in which to wait out the hard times.”
Harkin’s work camp proposal went largely unheeded by Prime Minister Richard Bedford Bennett and the Tory apparatchik — only in October 1932, following years of worsen unemployment, would the Dominion institute such a scheme. Not content to wait, the Parks Commissioner, through some creative problem solving, introduced his own.
In 1930 Parliament passed the Unemployment Relief Act, guaranteeing $20,000,000 in make-work appropriations. The hitch for the Parks Branch was that it prevented federal departments from accessing its funds — relief projects, the Dominion held, was a provincial matter. As a work-around, Harkin struck a deal with the governments of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. In exchange for the provinces financing park infrastructure, the Branch would construct and operate work camps within its boundaries.
The Parks Branch established three major work camps in Alberta. One, at Banff National Park, served Calgary and Southern Alberta’s unemployed population. Two others, at Jasper and Elk Island National Parks, served Edmonton and Central Alberta’s. Most early relief activities at these camps consisted of labour-intensive general maintenance projects. As Bill Waiser writes, however, “Once the availability of a large pool of workers had been assured... a number of major road-building projects were launched,” in addition to the construction of other public-works, such as picnic shelters, warden residences, park gates, and administration buildings.
A major public-works project pursued by the Parks Branch at this time was the construction of a road to Jasper National Park’s secluded Miette Hot Springs. For years, rheumatics reported remarkable results from “taking in its waters,” yet, as the Edmonton Journal wrote, it was “very much in the rough,” with access limited to a pony-trail. The Parks Branch hoped to change that by pursuing plans which would transform the dirt-path into a proper graded, gravelled, and oiled road suitable for vehicle traffic.
Beginning in May 1930, reliefers toiled to meet that objective. Section by section, unemployed workers carved a path through the wild valley between Fiddle Range and Roche Miette, slowly inching the seventeen kilometres towards their destination at a cost of $15,000 per season. And it was per season. Owing to heavy rains, harsh winters, and the concealed location, Parks Branch officials permitted road construction only during the hospitable May-November period. Labourers along the trail pulled double-duty, felling thousands of trees and sinking hundreds of steel and timber piles to reach their deadlines.
Workers returned to Miette Road in May 1931 — officials soon sent them home. Wise to the Park Branch’s ways, Prime Minister Bennett introduced new legislation, the Unemployment & Farm Relief Act, tightening what provinces could and couldn’t spend their funds on. Strikwerda explains that the act, “passed in Ottawa on Dominion Day 1931, would only provide provinces with federal monies to open road-building camps along the Trans-Canada Highway,” in addition to pre-approved building projects. That’s not to say Bennett was wholly unsympathetic to the Branch’s actions, however, and the act did provide funding for certain national park improvements. Unfortunately for the reliefers assigned to Miette, those “appropriations did not include any further expenditure on [that] project.” By then the graded road was two kilometres from its destination.
Dedicated funding came in 1932, and by November 1933, the Journal was reporting that adventurous individuals could reach the springs by vehicle. While “the road is not yet complete as to width, nor is it yet graveled,” the paper wrote, “cars may freely use the road, still under construction, by complying with the regulations of going and coming.” The Parks Branch achieved this by having “one way motor [traffic] over the road to the springs up to two p.m. and return anytime from three p.m. on… to disturb as little as possible the crew at work on the highway.”
Reliefers continued their work for another year. While gravel had yet to be laid down by the road’s formal opening on June 1st, 1934, Fay Parker, the Edmonton Bulletin’s Jasper correspondent, predicted that “this drive will become popular with hundreds of people who never before knew the wonderful sulphur springs existed.” Her hunch was proved correct when, on June 14th, the Journal reported that, for the first time, “the capacity of the old log pool was taxed to the limit, as many Jasper residents as well as tourists enjoyed the hot sulphur waters.”
On November 17th, 1934, Parks officials dismissed their work crews for the last time. After four hot summers, Miette Road was complete. The trail, which “constitutes for its length, one of the finest scenic routes in the park,” employed thousands during the Depression’s darkest days. Those men, their names forgotten by history, tourists, and Parks Canada alike, provided over a million days worth of labour felling trees, laying gravel, and erecting bridges.
Sources:
“Highways in Parks Are Being Greatly Expanded by Dominion Gov’t: National Parks Roads Are Being Extended By Several Governments,” Edmonton Bulletin, July 14, 1930.
“180 Miles Roads In National Parks Are Oil-Surfaced,” Edmonton Journal, November 14, 1930.
“Hot Springs Road Work Is Stopped,” Edmonton Journal, June 6, 1931.
Fay Parker, “Jasper Jottings,” Edmonton Bulletin, November 29, 1933.
Fay Parker, “Jasper Jottings,” Edmonton Bulletin, June 2, 1934.
“Sulphur Pools Draw Crowds,” Edmonton Journal, June 14, 1934.
Fay Parker, “Jasper Jottings,” Edmonton Bulletin, June 21, 1934.
“Graveling Extends Park Availability,” Edmonton Journal, July 30, 1934.
“List Projects On Relief Work,” Edmonton Journal, August 25, 1934.
“Widen Miette Road; Work Camps Close,” Edmonton Journal, November 17, 1934.
Eric Strikwerda, Wages of Relief: Cities and the Unemployed in Prairie Canada, 1929-39 (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2013), 169.
Bill Waiser, “Park Prisoners,” Canada’s History, August 16, 2013, accessed August 10, 2022,
https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/historic-sites/park-prisoners
