Calgary: The City and the Petroleum Industry since World War Two

In the relatively short span of 100 years Calgary has expanded from a lonely police post into a burgeoning metropolis with a population of close to one half million. This remarkable growth has in fact been .of a sufficiently interesting character and extent to have marked the foothill city as a subject of much scholarly interest over the past decade and a half. With the exception of Vancouver and Edmonton no other Canadian city has grown so rapidly to such a size. But Vancouver's enlargement has not been so substantially concentrated in the post World War II period, nor has it been as closely associated with the development of a single industry. Clearly it is the Leduc-generated oil boom and the almost continuously buoyant Alberta economy that accounts for the spectacular urbanization of that province. However, while the petroleum based economy has underpinned the development of both Calgary and Edmonton, it is argued here that the character of the impact varies in a way that has reinforced those features that have always distinguished the southern city from the provincial capital. In large part this has to do with the fact that Calgary's intimate connection with the oil industry began a generation before this enterprise made much of an impact upon Edmonton. The consequences of this longer direct connection with the developing petroleum industry were of both social-cultural and economic significance and to gain some perspective on the remarkable growth that commenced with the major oil discovery at Leduc in 1947, some aspects of Calgary's earlier development must first be considered. Within a few weeks of the arrival of the police the dominant trading company on the southwestern high plains, the I.G. Baker Company of Fort Benton Montana, constructed a company store, to be joined later the same year by the patriarch of western commercial enterprise, the Hudson's Bay Company. Located well south of the traditional western trade route that linked Fort Garry (Winnipeg) to Fort Edmonton, Calgary did not advance beyond being a minor local trade centre. Though the post did develop as an important stop on the Old North Trail that linked Fort Benton on the Missouri with Fort Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan, even here the focus of the trade was on the larger and longer established community of Edmonton.