4th edition
ISBN: 9780978237516
C$19.95/US$19.95
186 pages
Paperback
6 x 9 inches
May 2007

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Banff Springs Hotel history: An introduction
 

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Banff Springs Hotel History

Bart Robinson

When Morley Roberts, an old railroad man, arrived in Banff in the summer of 1925 it had been 42 years since he’d visited the area. Things had changed. Old man Goss, the fellow who ran the snakebite cure still on Whiskey Creek had long since disappeared, perhaps a victim of his own libations. The town was no longer Siding 29, a random assortment of dusty shacks and tents at the foot of Cascade Mountain, but Banff, a bustling little alpine village which most immodestly claimed to be the centre of the greatest mountain playground on the continent, perhaps the world. And, most shocking of all, there was a castle rising majestically above the banks of the Bow River. The town was hard enough to accept, but Morley found a rock palace in the wilderness just a bit too much: “It had no business being there,” he said, “for when I was thereabouts so long ago no one could have thought of it.”

Morley visited and toured the anomaly—felt its walls, looked through its windows, talked to its inhabitants—and decided the building, like Banff, was a dream, and, like a dream, at once beautiful and absurd. The castle was the Banff Springs Hotel and it was not a dream. But it was beautiful. If it were absurd, well, there was a method in its madness.

Nor is the hotel today any less real than it was when Roberts visited—but many people who experience the hotel for the first time are overcome with the same emotions which Morley felt on his trip in 1925. The first-time visitor’s inevitable questions are nearly programmed in their lack of variation: “What’s that? What’s it doing there? Who built it? Who owns it? Why? When? What for? How much?” To answer these questions, one must go back to the years following the confederation of Canada and read the news about a struggling young company called the Canadian Pacific Railway.

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