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Michael is on a quest to get his environmental footprint as low as humanly possible. So he built his own off-grid Tiny House. But downsizing and minimizing weren’t enough. He had to take more drastic measures, altering his lifestyle in some extreme ways, all in the name of saving the planet. But when it comes to his goal, he still feels in over his head. He doesn’t know if all the downsizing, minimizing, reducing, reusing, recycling, and sacrificing make a difference. It’s time to bring in the experts.
Join Michael as he sits down with scientists, policymakers, industry leaders, and environmental experts to figure out how to effectively reduce his footprint in all aspects of life. From food and fast fashion to cars and caskets, he gets into what the worst culprits really are and how we can all make more informed choices when it comes to the impact we have on the planet.
If you have feedback or would like to be a guest on In Over My Head, please email: info@inovermyhead.com
(00:00):
This season was made possible with support from the government of Alberta's Heritage Preservation Partnership Program and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Southern Alberta.
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Well, I'm in over my head, no one told me trying to keep my footprint small was harder than I thought it could be. Well, I'm in over my head, what do I really need? Tryin' save the planet, oh will someone please save me? Tryin' save the planet, oh will someone please save me?
(00:33):
Welcome to In Over My Head. I'm Michael Bartz. While looking into the unique history of our provincial parks, I want to learn about the archeological significance of Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park. It was time
to dig up some history.
(00:45):
My name is Shari Peyerl. I'm a trained archeologist and a historian and an author. I always knew I wanted to be an archeologist, so I took my degree in Bachelor of Science and Master's Degree, and both those
were at the University of Calgary. And I worked doing research there, helping with the public programming, teaching people how to understand and do archeology. And then I worked for a contract company and taught for about 10 years introductory archeology and anthropology classes at a local college. Stopped to have a child and I've worked as in the labs doing analysis. My specialty was studying animal bones and how people use them, and I worked as an archivist for a little over a year, and I've also
worked as a librarian for about a year. And I do oral history interviews for the museum here. So lots of different history-related things, and I love to write about them. And so I write some local columns for the local newspapers about interesting people or historical topics, whatever seems to be interesting at the moment.
(02:05):
Yeah, maybe tell me a bit about Glenbow Ranch, Provincial Park. Where is it? What is it about? Tell me about it.
(02:12):
Glenbow Ranch, Provincial Park is located between Calgary and Cochrane, along the Bow River, predominantly on the north side. That's where all the access is, and it's part of the great trail that runs across Canada. And so you can go from Calgary all the way to Cochrane through the park. It's recently had its eastern boundary connection to Calgary, opened to, Hasgain park so you can hike or bike through, but the main access is off of Highway one a down glenbow road and to the visitors center parking area in the center of the park. And then from there you can hike or cycle on the trails. Their park is about 3,300 acres of protected land, and there are about 40 kilometers of paved and shale track or
trails that you can traverse, all different kinds of elevations. So it's a river valley, so there's some pretty big coulee with some nice hills to climbs, so you can get pretty fit if you want.
(03:18):
Lots of people train down there with running or other kinds of training. So lots of fun. It's beautiful. The scenery is amazing. As soon as you drive down the road into the park and you park your car, you're at that parking lot, you get out and you look to the west, and you could see these amazing mountains. In the early 19 hundreds, they started up a sandstone quarry there. So you had the sandstone quarry and
the workers' quarters where they lived, and the local landowner decided that he could make a little bit of money. So he laid out a village and tried to sell lots to the quarry workers. And then he built a commercial area, so there was a store, and the train station moved there and the post office was there. And then they built a granary there and he was trying to get it all going.
(04:13):
And eventually, things sort of fell apart. The quarry closed, the people moved away from the village, and he ended up selling his property to his friend and his lawyer, Eric Harvey, the Harvey family, ended up expanding the ranch because Eric Harvey was a lawyer who ended up involved with the oil boom. So he became a philanthropist eventually, and they gathered all this ranch land, went down the generation's ranching, and then in 2011, the family decided that they were going to donate the land to the province to be a park. Well, it opened in 2011. It took a few years to get there, obviously.
(04:54):
And I want to talk more about, because this is what the focus of your book is about the village and the quarry and such. What years was the village actually in existence or people were there?
(05:06):
The quarry opened in 1906, and they had workers coming to work there. The company kind of went through a boom period in 1909 when they got a big contract to build the buildings for the Alberta government. And they started to expand at that time. And at one point it was the largest sandstone quarry in all of Canada. And so they had a lot of workers, they had a bunkhouse for the single men, but if they had families, they'd have to commute to Calgary. So the local landowner said, Hey, let's have a
village here. And so some of the people built their houses there and moved their families in. So people lived in the village from 1909 until the last one left in 1927, even though the quarry closed in 1912, 1913, if they could find local work as for their surrounding ranchers or farmers, then they did that and some of them stayed. And then the land was sold in 1934 to the Harvey family, and it all reverted back to ranch land. So the preservation is amazing. The village itself was never plowed up or destroyed in any way. So it's easy to do archeology there. Same with the quarry that was also really well preserved. And there's all kinds of indigenous First Nations sites in the park as well, again, because it's preserved ranch land.
(06:31):
And so one thing, Shari, that I found interesting with this quarry is it that the sandstone itself was actually used for a lot of the buildings in Alberta, right. Tell me a bit about some of the buildings that the sandstone was used for.
(06:42):
The reason that I called the book Alberta's Cornerstone is because it provided the sandstone for the major political buildings in Alberta. So the legislature building exterior is almost entirely out of Glenbow Sandstone government house where the Lieutenant governor used to live also in Edmonton is also, its exterior is Glenbow sandstone. There are political buildings still standing in Calgary that are built of it. Calgary Courthouse number two, McDougall Center, which was built as the normal school or the teacher's training college also built out of Glenbow Sandstone. It was one of the very first, and I think it's one of the most beautiful sandstone buildings that the city has. So this quarry is unique because it provided this sandstone that built the government buildings when Alberta became a province and doing the research on it at McDougall's school, for example, I can look at the one door and I know the name of the man who built it, and I know how long he spent carving those details around that window and around that door. And it really makes it mean more when the name of the person and what their life might have been like.
(07:53):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And yeah, it was really, really taken by some of the stories of some of the people that had lived in this village. There was a lot of hardship, there was a lot of struggle, there was a lot of
interesting things that were going on, different people, different stories. One person that comes to mind is Ida McCormick. Tell me a little about her.
(08:11):
She was neat. She was the first person that I really started with to research because there was a photograph of her published in the local history book with her name. And so it was the first person I had
a visual image of and tried to find out more about. And it turns out that she was born in Ontario to a large family, and her and sister never married. They took up professions. The sister was a dressmaker,
and Ida became a bookkeeper and learned the math and the accounting and that sort of thing. She came west, she ended up working for the quarry company, the Quinlan Carter Limited Company, and the descriptions of her vary depending on what source you're reading. So she was referred to either as a secretary, a bookkeeper, or an accountant, and to our ears. Those all have different roles and they have different values.
(09:03):
And she probably shifted over time what she did as the quarry company developed as well. So she was the only female working for this company, and it was quite big. They had at one point reputed to have 150 labourers working for them in the quarry. So it's pretty big. She's managing a lot of records and that sort of thing. And the census for 1911 gives information on the previous year, and so we can find out how much she earned when she was working there. And at that time, in 1911, there was herself and they listed her as the bookkeeper, and then they had a stenographer who was male, and they had the accountant or proprietor, I guess they listed him as the secretary proprietor who owned it or was one of the owners of the quarry. So she, Ida made 34 cents an hour, and the stenographer made 35 cents an hour.
(10:06):
So even though she probably had a lot more experience than him and a lot more responsibility, she made less than he did. So then I did some research and tried to find some stats. And at that time it was typical that there weren't very many women in that field, and they made about half the amount of money that men did at the time. And I just kept researching and found out that I could actually pick her out of the statistics that the government collected because she was the only woman of her age bracket in Alberta working in the mining industry. So that was kind of neat to find out a bit more about her. She had gray eyes and gray hair, and she was single her whole life and never had kids, but she helped to run
the Sunday school at the quarry. So maybe that was a way for her to talk to the other women, hang out with kids. She did come from a really large family, so maybe she enjoyed that. And then when the quarry moved into Calgary or the company moved into Calgary, she moved with them. And then she worked for a couple of other companies in Calgary until she moved back east to Ontario because she was sick and she died in 1918 from breast cancer.
(11:20):
When you describe that, you're looking into her life and who she was and kind of her work and her experiences. Yeah, I guess it's interesting. What is that like for you as an archeologist when you're discovering someone and learning about them? What sort of feelings come up for you when that process is happening?
(11:38):
Oh, it's really exciting for me to do the research. So even though when you say archeologists, people think that you dig in the ground, I do do that. I have done that. But when you're doing a historical site,
you want to find out every clue that you can. I research all of the genealogical or historical sources that I can to try to piece together the story of this person's life. And I also would do that and try to trace their
family history forward in time so that I could find any descendants who might exist, because they very often have photographs, and although they're taking a picture of grandma with the dog in the background, there are buildings or there's a landscape, or there are other clues. So you can piece all these things together if you have enough clues. And so it's like being a detective in a way. It's a lot of fun. It's exciting, and it's a bit of a thrill when you pick up the phone and you try to call somebody and
find out that, hey, they are interested in sharing their story. And I've met over the phone some really lovely people and become friends with some of them and chat on the phone about our lives in general
rather than just the project. So it's a really exciting thing to do.
(12:59):
Does anyone come to mind specifically that you can think of that you got to know through this research?
(13:04):
Oh, yeah. There's Grace. She was amazing. I was researching a complicated family, and I was trying to find, it was the Park family, and so I was trying to find their adopted daughter, and she was adopted
from the Wall family. And so there were two families involved. And when I was researching the park family, I traced forward in time and I found the daughter, the adopted girl three months after she had died because I found her obituary, even though I'd been looking for her for a couple of years. So I was a little heartbroken that I'd missed her. I called the funeral home from the obituary listing and gave them my name and number and asked if a relative wouldn't mind talking to me about them. And Grace called me the next day and told me about Lorna Park, who used to be Lorna Wall, and it was a very distant connection to her.
(14:01):
It was through her husband, and she shared their story with me, and she sent me all kinds of photographs and amazing pictures of little Lorna, adorable child and all about her life. And Grace had spent time with Lorna. So she told me what she was like as a person, and that was pretty amazing. Lorna worked for the advancement of education and care for women and children. So she was an amazing person, and her dad was the doctor, Dr. Park, and he was also amazing. And when Grace and I were
talking about it, she decided she wanted to donate Dr. Park's materials, like his clothes, like his war medals, that sort of thing. And she didn't know who to donate them to. So I put her in touch with the
provincial archives and museum in Alberta because Grace wasn't living in the province anymore, and she felt that this history was Alberta history, and it was really important. So she donated those items to the
museum so that everybody in Alberta would have access to them instead of just being in her closet. So she was an amazing, amazing person. Lovely lady.
(15:06):
Yeah. And yeah, what I appreciate about that, I think of when you just think of archeology generally, you think of you're digging up these artifacts in the ground, but you don't maybe really think about the
people who are still around or the family connections as much. So yeah, I really appreciate that. Maybe tell me a bit more about Dr. Park.
(15:24):
Dr. Park is an amazing guy. He started off as a school teacher in Ontario, and then he decided to become a doctor. And in 1904, he came west, and when he got to the top of the hill at Cochrane, he thought it was the most amazing view he'd ever seen, and that was where he was going to be. So he got a room in the hotel, got set up as a doctor, and he was covering a huge area as many pioneer doctors did. Sometimes he'd have to ride 20 miles on horseback to get to a patient. He did many notable things in
that region and in the Cochrane area in the rural area. He also ended up in 1911 being the doctor for the Morley Reserve for the Stoney Dakota peoples. Some of the things that he did, let's see. He asked one of
the local families when they were building their new house, if they could please build an extra couple of rooms so that they could have a hospital in Cochrane.
(16:19):
So he encouraged the first hospital to be built, and he worked out of there. He managed a smallpox outbreak in Cochrane and managed to get people vaccinated and helped the other people who got sick to get better. Nobody died, so that was great. He had to do an emergency appendectomy on a little girl in her father's ranch house on the kitchen table. And she survived. And the family became very close to the Park family. And when she grew up, she got married and he delivered her babies, and they named one of them after the doctor, Dr. Park went back to Ontario in 1906 and married his sweetheart and brought her out west, and they became the pillars of the community. She played the organ for the local church. They were very generous. She'd go with her husband out on his calls, and he credited her with the increase in his practice the first year that they were married because she was so wonderful.
(17:18):
He got more patients and they never had biological children of their own. But when Dr. Park was looking after the Wall family who lived in Glenbow, they lived in a tent and they had a girl and two boys, and then the mother became pregnant again, and when she gave birth, she died the baby. And so the park family ended up adopting the little girl. And so that's why I was tracing the family, trying to figure out the story of those two families and how were connected After they adopted their little girl, the first
World War came up and Dr. Park volunteered. He ended up becoming a doctor serving in England and France. He became very ill in France and ended up spending most of his time being a patient himself first in France, and then in England, he caught typhoid, typhoid. He had tuberculosis that he had to be treated for, and he ended up with chronic colitis as well.
(18:21):
And his medical records show that they recognized that some of those problems were a result of his service. So when he came back to Canada, he was released as medically unfit. In November of 1918, he came back and he reenlisted and he served at the Colonel Belcher Hospital for Veterans taking care of them, and he became district administrator for the Department of Veterans Affairs as it's known today. It had a much longer title at the time. So he rose to the rank of major and retired, spent his whole life really working to serve others while he was in Calgary. He was on a whole list of different charity organizations. So yeah, he was a very giving person. The whole family was.
(19:08):
Yeah. And so thinking about Dr. Park makes me think of, actually, there was a nurse, right, Elsie Black.
Tell me about her.
(19:15):
Well, she was another amazing person. I think anybody in the health services is an amazing person. She decided to be a nurse. She studied in Calgary, although she was originally from the United States. She was the valedictorian of the very first class for the Holy Cross Hospital in Calgary. And when she graduated, her very first assignment was at Glenbow, and a historian recorded it, and that's where I got the story from. So she came out with the doctor on a call, and it was wintertime the end of winter, and
they arrived and they had to trek from the train station for a half mile to get to the tent at the village where the people were sick. The husband had a skin infection of his face that was so bad. He was almost
unrecognizable, and the wife had plural pneumonia, so that means her lungs were filled with fluids.
(20:10):
So she was having a hard time breathing, and they were sort of wedged in this little bed together suffering. And their little baby was wrapped up and bundled on the floor. So the doctor gave Elsie her instructions, and then he had to go back to the city and she was left there. And she stayed with the family for three weeks. And she started off by finding a neighbour who could take the baby, and then she found somebody else, give them another bed so she could separate the patients. And she slept on the floor. And keep in mind, they're living in a tent in the wintertime, and a storm came up and it knocked the chimney of the stove pipe down. So she had to repair that. She was also in charge of taking care of
their animals. So unfortunately, the animals didn't cooperate very well with her.
(20:52):
So the cow ran away and the chicken stopped laying on top of doing all of that and taking care of these patients every day. She had to walk that half mile through the snow to make a telephone call to report back to the doctor on the progress of her patients. So she managed to help them and heal them. And after three weeks, spring had arrived and she had succeeded on her first case. There was a photograph of her in one of the history books about the hospital where she studied because she was that
valedictorian. And I found the photograph, but it didn't have any captions in it. When I looked at that issue of that photograph, and I looked at it and I thought, which one of these women, these five or six women, which one of them would be a valedictorian? Which one is Elsie? And I picked her out, and it was kind of neat because she just had this expression of confidence and determination, and I thought if anybody could manage a situation like that, that would be heard. And it was.
(21:50):
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess when you're describing that there's so many details there of the chimney falling over and making the call and all those things, how do you get that level of details just from reading historical accounts? How do you get so much detail from that?
Well, in her case, Elsie had spoken with someone and had given them the story, and they had written it down and recorded it. So when I was trying to find Elsie, I contacted the hospital where she'd studied. I contacted the Nurses Association. I was trying to find Elsie's records to see if I could find out who her patients were so I could find out more information about the story. And they basically didn't have any of those records. And they said that they wouldn't have had any of those records because she would've preserved the names for privacy reasons at the time. So I was kind of lost there, and I had to try other ways to try to figure out who her patients might've been.
(22:46):
And how did you do that?
(22:47):
Well, there was the census in 1911, and there was a description that she had given about the family, and they were Scottish, a bra, Scottish lad was the actual quote, and a wife to match him who was also Scottish. And I knew that they had to have a child who was small enough that they could leave it on the floor and it wouldn't walk away on them while they were sick in bed. So then I looked at the census to find somebody who would fit. It was a year after when the census was taken, so there's a bit of calculation there. And so I came up with some options, and there was also a local history book that had recorded who lived in tents in the village at that time. So I kind of cross-referenced those and came up
with an idea that it might be the McKickney family.
(23:34):
Yeah. One thing Shari I found was interesting when I was reading your book, it's like you're discovering these people and who they are and where they came from and such. And then I was surprised to see
that you actually had a loose family to one of the people or the families. Right. Tell me a bit about the George Ray family.
(23:50):
Oh, well, that one was a surprise. As I was researching, I would look at the census and try to think, who do I want to find out about next? What makes this person on this piece of paper different or interesting or unusual? And so there was a group of men listed as living in the same house, but there were no women present. And I thought, wow, for men, they're not getting their food from anybody else. They're looking after themselves. That's pretty interesting. So I started researching them, and George Ray was one of those men, and I looked at passenger lists and that sort of thing, and I found out that he had come to Canada with his brother-in-law, and George came and lived in Glenbow and worked at the
quarry. And as I was trying to find out more about him, I was struggling. I couldn't find very much information.
(24:39):
And so I decided I would go on to one of the online resources where you can find family trees. And generally, I don't rely on those when I'm doing research because they're so riddled with errors. A lot of people aren't very rigorous in their research before they post online what their family tree is. Sometimes it's useful though, you might find a clue that you could substantiate in some other way. So as I was going through for that family, I did find an online tree of him, and I found that I could contact the person who had placed that information, and it seemed kind of reliable. And so I thought I'd take a chance and make contact. But before I did, I always try to find out as much as I can about that person and their file. And there were a bunch of little thumbnails pictures of things, and hey, there was an actual family photograph of George Ray, so that made me think I was on the right track.
(25:34):
I'd found somebody who had information that was reliable. But as I was going through the rest of the thumbnails, I thought one of them looked kind of familiar. And when I clicked it open, it was a picture of
my great-grandfather's family, and I had no idea how they could possibly be related because I have done my own family research and I had never come across the Ray family. And so when I contacted Tom, the man who had posted his ancestral family tree, I asked him about George Ray, and he told me the story of what had happened with him. And then I said, and by the way, can you tell me why you have this photograph? And so he did. And it turned out that George Ray was his paternal ancestor, and my family was related on his maternal side. So he tried to explain to me how we were related, and I'm pretty good at that sort of thing, but I ended up having to draw a diagram and then write it down. So I'm going to have to actually read to you how I'm related. I can't memorize it. Tom's great, great, great grandfather's brothers, granddaughter, married the half brother of my great-grandfather, Harry. So it's very, very, very
remote
(26:48):
And obviously very much a surprise for you.
(26:51):
Yeah.
(26:51):
Did it kind of change? I know it seems like when you describe some of these people, you're bringing it to life. Did it come to life even more when something that was a direct loose but direct family connection?
(27:01):
Absolutely. I'm afraid I'm quite an emotional person, so I was kind of jumping up and down when I found out that I actually got to be remotely related to the project that I was working on.
(27:11):
And even if I remember from the book, there was the Bain family. And then you found out that actually someone who lived down the street from you was part of that family too, right?
(27:21):
Exactly. And again, completely shocking. And when you think about it, I mean, I'd seen, I think this person was a real estate agent or something, and I'd seen the name on the real estate ads, on the bus benches, and I thought, oh, isn't that funny? It's the same name I'm researching. And lo and behold, they were actually the same family.
(27:39):
And to me, I feel like when we're looking at history even a few hundred years ago, it's so easy to disconnect from it and just see it as generic. And obviously you're bringing a lot of those people to life, but it seems like you can find those connections that, oh my goodness, this was a great, great
grandfather connection or my neighbour connection. So it just seems like it kind of brings those people to life a little bit more. Right?
(28:03):
Well, it also brings you as a group together more, I think, too. And that's the thing that I guess struck me. My husband used to tease me, when are you going to write the book? If you keep on this researching all the time, you're going to find out everybody is related to each other, and actually, you know what we are. And so it helps you to empathize with people in the past when you can see similarities or family ties to them. That's why people do genealogy, I think, because it's a way to bring that past to life and empathize with those people so long ago. And when you look at indigenous lives in history too, people always think of archeological remains as being something that you dig up from thousands of years ago.
And they're still living objects often to the people who are alive today. It's an ongoing, ongoing story and ongoing family. So yeah, we're all related.
(28:52):
Yeah. And I guess, yeah, I think we could talk a bit about just your project specifically. We didn't get into that quite yet. Tell me about your specific archeological project that you undertook
(29:04):
In 2017. I ran my first excavation. I was 50 years old at the time. I had my degrees. I had worked in consulting, but I took a break to have my family and I wanted to get back into it. And I loved working in Glenbow Ranch, and we were doing some really neat excavations in 2013 and 2015, digging up a foundation of a building and finding some cool artifacts and some interesting stories to go along with them. And we were looking for the bunkhouse, which was the largest residential structure at the quarry.
And so that was my project in 2017, was to find the bunkhouse. And I had a pretty good idea where to look. And we set up some test pits and found that I worked entirely with volunteers. Everybody who excavated there was a volunteer for the assistant that I hired through a grant for the government to pay them to help with their training. And we found the bunkhouse and we learned from what we found, how it would've been built, which I thought was pretty neat. And when I knew where it should be, it turned out that I actually had an image that showed it in a very far distant background, and that was one of the first photographs that a family had shared with me from the Wall family. And so that was pretty
interesting and exciting to be able to do that.
(30:28):
Yeah, yeah. And you say you had an idea of where it was not like it was just sitting up over there, you actually had to look for it. What was that process like?
(30:37):
Well, you again use lots of different clues. So I used the historical accounts that had been recorded from the men who worked there describing it. I used old photographs that showed the landscape. I walked across the landscape and looked for pits like a big sort of a cellar kind of an idea. And you also use vegetation. So in the area where I thought it should be, it looked like the historic photograph showed a
depression. There was a depression there in 2017, and that area had invasive grasses. And so anytime that there's a disturbance in that region, the natural fescue grasses get disturbed and the invasive species quickly move in and take over. So essentially there was a very green rectangle, and that was where the building was, and hiding underneath all the shrubbery. When we removed some of it, we could see the actual stones that were related to that structure.
(31:44):
And those, I presume, very exciting for you when you finally discovered it.
(31:49):
Well, as you're doing an excavation, you're peeling away such a small amount of earth at a time that it takes a while for you to realize. And what happened there was unusual because they started grazing that area with cattle on my last day of my excavation. They had put up a little protective fence around our excavation so that the cattle wouldn't fall in, and so that we could work without having cattle trample us. And then when we came back and looked, we could see where they had chewed down all the shrubs, and it really exposed the area quite well where that depression was.
(32:20):
And you talked about how you figured out how it might've been built, and that was interesting. Tell me about that.
(32:26):
So the excavation we did in 2013 and 15 on a small structure had a cobble foundation all the way around. So it was really clear that it was a foundation where I was excavating. There wasn't a nice little outline to show us where we needed to be. There was a lot of debris from the building when they took it down. It had been salvaged for lumber after it was no longer being used, and it was the way that the remains were lying. There were boulders that had lumber lying on top of them, and there were nails. And when we saw unused nails underneath the lumber sort of sandwiched in that lumber and boulder, it showed us that the nails had been lost there before the lumber was placed on top of it. And then the
structure was built on top of that. Most of the nails that we found were bent nails that had been pulled out of the lumber when they were dismantling it, and those were on a layer above that.
(33:29):
So how they had built that area for that building was they had used intermittent supports. So they used the natural boulders that were there, and maybe they built some brick foundation pillars kind of thing. And then they built the building on top of that. And because we knew that it was a two-story building from the historic accounts, and also from that one photograph that we had, we knew that they could not have used long pieces of lumber from the base all the way up to the roof, which was sort of the old fashioned way of building. They would've used the more modern kind that we do, like building a house of cards where you build a wall, then you make the ceiling, and that's the floor of the next level. So
that's how they would've built this one.
(34:12):
So when you are doing this dig and you're looking for evidence of the bunkhouse, did you find anything interesting aside from just the building itself? Were there any other artifacts that you found that had a
story?
(34:24):
Yes, there were a couple. One of them was fragment of ceramic, and when the volunteer found it, he was quite excited to find this piece of ceramic and it looked like a piece of a white teacup. And we picked it up and flipped it over, and it was painted pink on the other side. It's called pink bisque. It has to do with how it's fired, and it was actually a fragment of a doll's face. And so the question was why is there a doll's face at a bunkhouse where there would be a bunch of single men living? And there's a number of ways that fragment could have gotten there. One of the ways is that there was a little four-year-old girl who was part of the family who ran the bunkhouse. So it could have been her doll, or it could have been related to the doll fragments that we found next door in previous years at the other house that was excavated.
(35:14):
So the question was, which doll did it belong to? In this case, the little girl who was four years old and living at the bunkhouse ended up dying. She died from scarlet fever when she was very little in Calgary. And her little brother who was also alive at the time also died. So when I contacted a descendant of that family, they didn't know about those very much detail about those older siblings who had died. So that was a dead end. I did do research after the book was published though about that doll and I managed to find a photograph online that matches the fragment of the doll's face. So I now know exactly what model of doll that was, and I know what they named her too. She was called Flora Dora. And from the
photographs I found in the research I did about that doll, there were two forms of the doll's head, and one had one kind of body and one had another kind of body. And for one of those instances, they put on
porcelain arms from the elbow down. And the other fragments that we have of the doll seem to match the arm. So they're tied together, but which house the doll belonged at is another question.
(36:24):
Yeah, yeah. I guess maybe you'll never know. This project that you undertook, it was your first one that you led, right? And it was challenging, right? There was some deadlines to meet. How was that
experience for you? How was the experience of your first project that you led? What was that like for you?
(36:43):
Scary, exciting, and then changed as time went on when you're excavating. I'd run excavations before, but this one I had permits in my own name. So I was ultimately responsible for completing everything,
including the reporting. And when people think about archeology, they think about all the fun stuff that digging outside and all that kind of thing. But the majority of the work comes afterwards. The cleaning
and cataloging of every artifact. They all have to be numbered and identified, and then you have to crunch all the numbers, and then you have to write a really boring government report, and you have to
do everything exactly right according to all the forms and bureaucracy and everything. So it took a huge amount of time, and that was very depressing and hard to work through. And it took three years really
for the project to reach its ultimate conclusion.
(37:35):
And I guess going into it in the book you talked about maybe you were a bit naive about it, but yeah, I'm still interested in that. I think especially like you talked about this was your first project in your fifties,
whereas maybe some archeologists would probably have done several by that point. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it feels like to me it was a bit of a risk that you had to take and to really take this on. So yeah, for me, I dunno if there's any sort of emotions or thoughts that come up for you for that, but yeah, what was that like for you in your fifties, taking on something like that? How'd that feel for you?
(38:09):
That's a tricky question to answer. I mean, I wanted to do what I'd been trained to do. I wanted to show that I could do it. I wanted to do a good job. So I thought, well, my child is growing up. Maybe I can go
back and work for an archeological consulting company. Maybe I can get a job going forward in this field and I'll prove that I can do it. And I proved I could do it, but I also learned that as dedicated as I was to the research, I couldn't get the satisfaction personally out of the process that I wanted. I had more fun doing the historical research than writing the archeological report. And life is so short that you don't want to do something that's going to have a very long timeframe. So three years to finish one project is a long time. And in general, I mean, I didn't put it in the book, but in general, archeologists fall into two categories doing research for a university or doing consulting, and they're driven by different things. The university professors have to continually work and publish, and sometimes their projects get delayed, and the consulting companies have to work so fast that they can't do all the fun research necessarily. So I wanted the best of both worlds and I couldn't really have it and get paid.
(39:37):
And then going through that experience, obviously you needed to do that to learn that. And then you said your priority shifted, right? So you're doing more of the investigative research as opposed to the archeological digging, right?
(39:49):
Yeah. I'd much rather do the research and write history and make it meaningful than to catalog things that get dumped in a warehouse and people don't go and look at again, or you have to write a report.
And I guess that's what I found when I wrote the government report. I met every requirement that they gave me, including making it very impersonal and dry because it has to be scientific. And I'm a scientist.
I'm trained in science, but so much of the story was missing. And I'm also a storyteller, and that's why I wrote the book, because I knew that there was so much history that I knew that nobody else had taken the time to find, and I didn't want that to be lost. And I thought that was the most important part. If you just look at archeological reports, you miss what makes things important.
(40:45):
You can say, this site is a unique site, like Glenbow quarry is an archeological unique site, but you don't have the stories that make it come to life and make you understand what it would've been like at the time and why it really is unique. So by doing the history to go with the archeology, you can put that story together with it. And then if you can tell people, this is an important place and here's why all these
interesting and exciting people lived here, and they did all these neat things that not only affected Alberta history, but they affected North American history or world history. And so we need to take care
of this place because it's important because of the people who lived here and because it's a unique site, and of course because of all the ecological reasons that we want to protect Glenbow Ranch Provincial
Park.
(41:41):
Yeah. Tell me a bit about what makes this park important ecologically.
(41:46):
So Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park says it right in its title. It's a ranch, and it's a ranch for a reason. It is a fescue grassland, and it also has of course, the wetland areas with it. And Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park preserves these important ecological systems, the rough fescue that is there is a native plant that is vulnerable to disturbance and cannot be restored once it's damaged. So I was explaining about how we could see the invasive grasses. It's an amazing plant because its roots go down several meters and it retains its protein better than other grasses. So that's why it was so great for the bison and why cattle today can use it so well. So it's great for winter grazing, that's why the ranchers came. But once you dig
it up, you have lost it. And its roots, as I said, go down several meters.
(42:44):
So it's very drought tolerant. It filters out the water very well. And it also is great at storing carbon. It's like old-growth forest, but grasses. And instead of being above ground where it can burn, it's below ground where it's safe and storing that carbon really well. So that's the grass that's important there. But there are also all kinds of plants and animals there that are at risk. Aside from the fescue, there are many species at risk. I'm just going to tell you some of them. There's the long-tailed weasel, the
American badger, the little brown bat, the wandering garter snake, the western tiger salamander, one of my favorites. And there are four different species of bumblebees that are also at risk that are living in
Glenbow Ranch, the Ashton Cuckoo Bumblebee, the Western Bumblebee, Leys Cuckoo Bumblebee, and the yellow-banded bumblebee. So when there's all this talk of helping out the pollinators, there's some really important ones there.
(43:45):
And of course, you've got all the birds too. There's over 30 species of birds that occur in the park that are at risk. And the one that the Glenbow ranch is focusing on this year is Sprague's pipet. It's a songbird,
and it requires large areas of native prairie for its breeding. And because it needs that big space, if you find it, you know that it's protecting the grasslands in the way that if it's there, it's like an umbrella species. That means the grassland is there and the other species that need that grassland are also there. So we do have it at Glenbow Ranch. So all of these different plants and animals are so important, and without them, we're going to lose so much diversity, and the grasslands are already decreasing so quickly, and this is a rare space where it's preserved.
(44:34):
And in talking about that at the end of the book, you talked about maybe some development concerns that were coming up. Tell me about that.
(44:41):
That's the scary part when I start talking about Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park. The Alberta government is considering building a large reservoir to hold water to prevent further flooding in Calgary and to help them provide more water to Calgary. So it's not like it would just be a reservoir in case of a flood. It would always have water, and the water level would go up and down, so it would flood the lower areas of the park, including much of the historical resources that I've talked about and the ecological grasslands that I've talked about. But it would also cause erosion between the high and the low water points of the reservoir as well. And that kind of damage not only alters the park, but it damages that
rare fescue grassland that can't be replaced, and that's decreasing rapidly. It's one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world, if not the most. So it's a tragic thought that they could even do that. The park was donated by private family to protect it forever, for all Albertans, and for the government to be considering destroying that and reneging on their promise to preserve it for the sake of the people who live in the city at the expense of the planet, doesn't seem right to me.
(45:59):
Yeah, absolutely. And if people are concerned about that, what can they do?
(46:04):
Well, there's lots of things that you can do at all different kinds of levels to help preserve Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park. When you visit, you can follow the basic etiquette, stay on the designated trails, keep your dogs on their leashes so that they don't destroy some of those plants and animals. Don't pick the wildflowers, a lot of them, it kills them and they'll be gone forever. You can donate or volunteer at the park with the Glenbow Ranch Park Foundation. You can volunteer to be a steward and help educate people. You can donate funds to help them battle to keep the park. Currently, they're fundraising to do a small study so that they have some statistics on the flood lines that could occur and what ramifications that would have for the park so that they have their own data to address the government's proposal. Definitely write your MLA and say that this park is important to you and to everyone, and you use it all
the time, and here's why they should preserve it. Make your voice heard. We've shown already in Alberta that if people rally up to save parks, that maybe somebody will listen. And not to say that we don't think that flood prevention is important, but the Glenbow East Reservoir option is only one of the options that they're examining. So there are other options that they could use if they needed to.
(47:32):
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Do you ever think the archeologists of the future, do you ever think they're going to be looking back and this was Shari and this is what she did, and I dunno, do you ever think about
that, about the legacy you're leaving?
(47:44):
I think everybody, especially as they age, starts thinking, what kind of a legacy? Are they going to leave? Some people have kids, some people don't. Some people do important things, some people don't. I think about, yeah, I want to leave something behind. And if I'm the one who's done the research on this story and I don't tell it, then it won't be preserved. So that's why I wrote the book so that when I'm gone, those stories won't be gone and somebody will be able to pick it up and use the end notes and the bibliography and continue the research and find out more interesting stuff that I had no idea about. And that's part of science, and I think that's part of being a good steward of the planet, is trying to preserve
something the best that you can so that somebody in the future can build on that knowledge and create something new.
(48:32):
You even say some people do important things and some people don't, but in some of those stories you told in your book, some of those people were just regular people. So I feel like you don't have to be an
important person, but you still have a story to tell.
(48:45):
Well, I think that's maybe the way I said it is they become famous or well-known, but everybody's important. And that's really the theme of the book, I think, is that everybody's contributing to the history of tomorrow. So even though somebody might think that they're not making that much of a contribution, I guess the stereotypical one is people think of homemakers in the 1950s, women stayed at home and raised their kids. What did they do for the world? You know what? They raised that child
and that child maybe did something that impacted something else. It's like the Butterfly Wings story. Everybody contributes and you don't know how your contribution is going to carry forward or impact
things. I mean, for history. Yeah, we think the stereotypical, what we learned from the past, I wish we would learn from the past, but if we don't learn anything else, we can learn that we're all in it together and we all do something that helps somebody else in some way. And if we try to be more caring and try to protect the beautiful places on the planet, then maybe they'll last a lot longer and help somebody else in the future.
(49:56):
Next time on Remembering Alberta Parks, I learn about the history of Miquelon Provincial Park and the importance of park interpretation programs
(50:06):
In terms of experiences, they can be life-changing. There have been examples of the young kid attending an interpreter program and saying, that's what I want to be. I want to be a wildlife biologist when I grew
up. Or they might return home after visit to the park to say, that was an enriching experience. Let's go again next year. It could be as simple as that. Parks can really impact people in a lot of different, we just
don't know when and where that will occur, so we have to be ready and available to support them.
(50:34):
I Over My Head's Remembering Alberta Parks was produced by Michael Bartz with production assistance from Shinichi Hara. Special thanks to all the guests who gave generously of their time and expertise.
(50:43):
I'm trying to save the planet, oh will someone please save me?
(50:53):
This season was made possible with support from the government of Alberta's Heritage Preservation Partnership Program and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Southern Alberta.