Welcome! The Calgary Heritage Initiative presents a series of articles throughout 2025 commemorating the 150th anniversary of the construction of Fort Calgary at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers, an important meeting place for people for millennia. Each month we’ll present one era in Calgary’s history.
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First Nations: Life on the Prairies
~14,000 years ago to A.D. 1810
The lushness of the Dinosaur Age became today’s drier prairies after the ice sheets retreated. Alberta’s climate today is notorious for oscillating between extremes: cold winters, hot summers, with some years being exceptionally wet followed by periods of dryness, even drought. This explains the lack of forest cover east of the mountains.
Prairie
French explorers had no concept for a tree-less, open grassland. They chose to call it prairie, their word for “meadow”.
Meadow is a good word, since the prairies have natural vegetation other than grasses, such as violets, crocuses and the prickly wild rose (the official flower of Alberta. For your interest, the official grass is rough fescue, a year-round source of forage found everywhere in Alberta). There are also lush river valleys and coulees throughout.

Lord Lorne’s party on south bank of Red Deer River, looking southwest, Alberta, 1881 (Glenbow Library and Archives Collection)
On the Great Plains of North America evolved all sorts of mammals capable of surviving on grassland, particularly and most famously, the buffalo, also known as the plains bison.
The North American bison are descended from Asian steppe bison that migrated across the Bering land bridge over the last 200,000 years. The North American bison is related to but different from the buffalo in Africa (the horns are different, for example). When Europeans arrived, they saw the bison herds but called them buffalo, and the word has stayed in our common usage. Some estimates put the bison population between 30 and 60 million when Europeans arrived.
Human survival on the open plains depended on hunting. A primary food source was the abundant herd animals. It’s hotly debated whether humans are responsible for the extinction of the great ancient mammals of North America – the mastodon, the long-horned bison, and the giant beaver (you can see these fossils too at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, see January’s article).
We’ll leave that debate to the scientists and instead focus on the peoples who migrated to and inhabited this land since the end of the last Ice Age.

Bison latifrons, found 1825, fossil buffalo skeleton from the Pleistocene, Cincinnati Museum of Natural History & Science, Ohio, 2007 (James St. John, via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
Hot Springs
It’s generally thought the first humans to cross into North America entered the Mackenzie River Valley. They proceeded southward along the eastern slopes of the Rockies in what is believed to have been an ice-free corridor between the receding Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets. In this corridor, the first peoples encountered geothermally heated groundwater, commonly called hot springs.
Between the folded and pressured layers of the Rocky Mountains, water seeps into cracks, is exposed to heat, and returns to the surface as healing mineral pools and springs. These were probably welcome respites for the intrepid hunter-gatherers, and remain so to this day.
Stonesmiths
One of the oldest dated sites of human habitation in Alberta is at Vermilion Lakes, dating back roughly 11,000 years. The site contains a fire pit surrounded by postholes, stone artifacts and bone chips.
Other early habitation sites contain fluted projectile points likely used as spear tips. Wally’s Beach south of Lethbridge on the shore of St. Mary Reservoir contains evidence of point-making and their use in hunting, with some points containing traces of animal blood. Archaeologists have also found tracks from ancient mammals, including woolly mammoth, camel (the only ones found in Canada), and horse.
There’s also evidence of quarrying. These locations are found all across the Great Plains and in the Rockies, with artifacts uncovered in Alberta being traced to origins some distance away. Yellowhead Pass near Jasper is the source of obsidian, in North Dakota is located honey-coloured chalcedony, and at Mount Edziza, B.C. is found a glossy, volcanic obsidian. A very hard, multi-colored quartz called Etherington chert is found along the ridge of the Livingstone Range in southern Alberta.
Also found were spear blades made from obsidian sourced at volcano locations in Oregon but uncovered near Grande Prairie, AB. This lends some mystery to the migration patterns of peoples into the Americas and to when exactly the ice-free corridor was fully open from north to south. Was Alberta populated separately from both the north and the south?
To the Blackfoot peoples, this distant history is not so distant. According to tradition, anything older than two days ago is in the realm of “just is”. The past is kept through the repetition of stories and the recitation of oral histories that preserve cultural memories. Scientific dating is interesting but it’s the presence and memory of the Blackfoot people that really matter.
Pictographs and Petroglyphs
We can see the cultural presence of the first peoples in their pictographs. At Radium Hot Springs, B.C., either the Ktunaxa or Shuswap peoples painted images in caves near Sinclair Canyon. Terribly, these were destroyed when Highway 93 was widened in 1965.
Thankfully, preserved pictographs and petroglyphs are found at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, Áísínai’pi (“it is pictured / it is written”) National Historic Site. The park is located on the Milk River in southern Alberta (the only river in Alberta that flows into the Mississippi River basin rather than into Hudson Bay). It contains the greatest concentration of rock art on the Great Plains.
Along the river are found the famous hoodoos (a word that’s derived from African dialects). How were they formed?
On the edge of the Western Interior Seaway, sediments were laid down. When ice sheets turned to meltwater, the soft sandstone eroded, which exposed harder sedimentary rocks. Valleys called coulees were formed along with giant, tall, thin spires of rock, called hoodoos.
In Blackfoot tradition, these formations are the handiwork of Náápi and the area itself is the centre of Nitawahsin (“the original land”). Áísínai’pi received UNESCO World Heritage status in 2019.
Uncovered in the coulees was evidence of campsites, including tipi rings. These are stone circles once used to weigh down buffalo hides on the outside of tipis. Their presence indicates the area was used for shelter and sourcing food.
Also found were carvings in the unique rock formations, called petroglyphs. Their presence points to the sacredness of Áísínai’pi, a gathering place to seek the guidance of the Spirit Beings that dwell in the hoodoos. It was also a place to recite creation stories and cultural memories.
At Áísínai’pi, the First Peoples’ physical and spiritual worlds touched. This is shown by the carving of shield-bearing humans along with animals, such as antelope and bison, various objects, and mythical figures, like the Thunderbird.
In Alberta, the geography and landscape are alive and sacred. The land provided for the First Peoples, and today it is essential to Indigenous culture and to our prosperity; it is the very fabric of our society.

Áísínai’pi National Historic Site of Canada – rock carvings, 2011 (Matthias Süßen, via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump
The First Peoples survived in Alberta with the seasonal round, an annual migration across the landscape for suitable habitat and to follow buffalo herds. There’s evidence found throughout southern Alberta of bands resting close to the Rockies, when buffalo wintered in the forest. During springtime, the herds moved into the prairie and, by summer, the bands followed.
When saskatoon berries ripened at mid-summer, bands gathered together for the Sun Dance. This is a major ceremony, where the relationship between people and nature is honoured and renewed. Communal hunts gathered food for the ceremony’s offerings. As fall settled in, bands separated and headed toward their wintering areas, preparing buffalo pounds and jumps along the way.
It’s at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in the Porcupine Hills that this part of the seasonal round is spectacularly preserved. After gorging on the prairie’s summer bounty, herds moved toward the mountains. When they entered the Hills to water and forage, several bands would join together to steer them towards a precipice. Buffalo runners, mainly young men camouflaged under hides, used their knowledge of herd behaviour along with the strategic placement of stone markers to steer hundreds of animals toward the cliff’s edge, where the buffalo would be forced over by the sheer weight and momentum of the herd.
It was both an energetic and grim event.
Such was the necessity of surviving the winter. Below the cliff, camps were set up to dress and butcher the carcasses, with the animals providing dried meat called pemmican for food as well as materials for clothing, shelter, fuel, tools and trade.

Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, West of Fort Macleod, AB, 1912 (Glenbow Library and Archives Collection)
Today, the area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that preserves and interprets the ancient culture of the Plains Peoples, who thrived before the pyramids were built.
The museum was designed to blend in and respect the natural area. It’s built into the rock face as a series of terraces, which are covered with rock and vegetation. The building won a Governor General’s Award for Architecture in 1990.

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Center, 1996 (LBM1948, via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International)
Meeting Places
Because it’s an area where prairie meets foothills and rivers and creeks confluence, Calgary is rich in Indigenous history and culture. Indeed, Calgary has 10 times the number of known archaeological sites than Edmonton.
The confluence of the Bow River and the Elbow, called Mohkinstsis (“elbow”) in Blackfoot, was a vital place to tap the river valley’s resources and keep tabs on the buffalo, who headed down the escarpment along today’s Edmonton Trail to water at and ford the Bow River.
At Nose Hill, evidence of inhabitation are still being uncovered and remembered. There are dozens of stone circles in the area, pointing to the Hill’s importance in the seasonal round.
One stone circle was excavated in 2023 and is thought to be a Blackfoot summer camp and a likely location for a lodge. Tools and shells were also uncovered, which were likely used to make beads and other decorative objects. Some remnants on the Hill date back as far as 8000 years ago and some as recent as 500. These finds will be cared for and displayed at the Royal Alberta Museum.
At Paskapoo Slopes, the location of Canada Olympic Park/Winsport, there is evidence of buffalo jumps and related campsites on the upper benches. The area is perfect for both enjoying the view and monitoring the area. At its bottom are located smaller, more temporary sites, perhaps used in wintertime. Today, the area is a dense aspen forest but in history, grazing bison and controlled burns by Indigenous peoples kept tree growth to a minimum.

Tipi rings, a rough circle of glacial cobbles, Grasslands National Park, SK, 2023 (Cephas, via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)
There is also evidence of a transition in hunting practices. Around 1500 years ago at 12 Mile Coulee, spear throwing gave way to the bow and arrow.
Indeed, the Bow River gets its name for the reeds that grow along its banks that were used to fashion bows. The Blackfoot name for the river, Makhabn, means “river where the bow reeds grow”.
John Muir, famous American naturalist, was right when he said, “In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks”.
To Be Continued Later this Month
– Anthony Imbrogno is a volunteer with The Calgary Heritage Initiative Society/Heritage Inspires YYC
– All copyright images cannot be shared without prior permission






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