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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Alpine club marks Prairie birthplace

Remembering the start of Winnipeg's least likely club

By: Kevin Rollason

Posted: 06/16/2012 3:24 AM | Comments: 0

The Alpine Club of Canada's plaque unveiled on June 15. (BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS) Photo Store

More than 100 years ago, several mountain-climbing enthusiasts decided to create a national club devoted to the sport in a city synonymous with mountain climbing.

Well, actually they chose Winnipeg -- not because of topography but mainly due to the fact the Manitoba Free Press was one of the main founders of the Alpine Club of Canada.

And on Friday, several climbing enthusiasts came together on Smith Street just south of Portage Avenue to unveil a plaque commemorating the club's creation on the very building where its initial meetings were held in March 1906.

Peter Muir, a Winnipegger who is the national president of the organization, said Winnipeg wasn't as odd of a choice for the club's founding as people might think.

"For much of its history, Winnipeg was among the most influential of Canadian cities because of geography and then development, first rivers and then railways," he said.

Muir said Arthur Wheeler, the club's first president, was ready to accept overtures from an American mountain-climbing club to have Canadian mountaineers join them in a Canadian branch after years of unsuccessful efforts to create a Canadian organization.

He said Wheeler made a final push to have a Canadian club set up by writing letters to the editor of newspapers across the country.

One of those letters ended up on the desk of Free Press editor John W. Dafoe and he gave it to the only reporter with any experience in the Canadian Rockies, Elizabeth Parker. She had earlier spent 18 months recovering from an illness in Banff, Alta.

"Ms. Parker set out on a tireless campaign of editorials and articles about the club,+ all based on the out-and-out unacceptability of joining with the Americans," Muir said.

"To disagree with her premise that a Canadian club was essential was to brand yourself unpatriotic and tantamount to a threat to the British Crown."

The plaque itself not only gives a brief history of Wheeler's and Parker's roles in founding the club, along with the Free Press and CP Rail, but also shows a photograph of the founding members with Parker, in a long dress, holding a large climbing rope over her shoulder.

Parker not only set up the meeting for Winnipeg, she cajoled CP Rail to give its organizing members free train fares to Winnipeg and then persuaded the YMCA -- where the organizational meetings were held and where the plaque was put up -- to give free accommodation.

The Manitoba Historical Society website says Parker Avenue was named in Parker's honour. Besides being a founder and first secretary of the Alpine Club, she also was instrumental in forming both the local Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) and the Women's Canadian Club, as well as being first secretary of the Winnipeg Travellers' Aid Society.

Parker, who wrote a column, The Bookman, when she began at the paper, went on to write A Reader's Notes daily from 1912 to 1940. She worked 36 years as a journalist. She died in 1944 and is buried in St. John's Cemetery.

Muir said the Alpine Club, which has member chapters from coast to coast, named one of its 30 huts, used for shelter on mountain-climbing trails, Elizabeth Parker Hut. It is located on Lake O'Hara in Yoho National Park.

André Mahé, president of the club's St. Boniface chapter, said the plaque was a joint project between his club and the Manitoba chapter.

"We've been working for the last five years to put up a plaque," Mahé said.

"Winnipeg was a very important city out west in those days."

Allan Schepens, CP Rail's director of shared services in Winnipeg, said the company is proud to have played a role in creating the club.

Schepens said a number of CP executives have been members of the club through the years and Sir Sanford Fleming, CP's president in 1906, was the club's honorary president.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 16, 2012 B2

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