Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
could be easily taken down and packed
up for transportation. They consisted of
a thin cone-shaped structure made with
the woody stems of shrubs and covered
with hides sewn together with animal
tendons.
The fi rst Europeans to exploit the nat-
ural resources of the Canadian West took
refuge in palisade forts that doubled
as fur trading posts during peacetime.
They erected these rectangular struc-
tures between the mountains and the
plains during the fi rst half of the 19th
century to protect themselves from
warlike Aboriginals. Some interesting
reconstructions can be found in a num-
ber of places.
On the West Coast, peace and easy liv-
ing provided a fertile environment for
the introduction of Loyalist architec-
ture from Upper Canada, as evidenced
by Victoria's St. Ann's Schoolhouse
(1858)—replaced in 1871 by St. Ann's
Academy when the schoolhouse was
deemed too small—and Wentworth
Villa (1862). These structures are shin-
gled and painted white, and have sash
windows with small panes of glass.
During the second half of the 19th cen-
tury, this type of building quickly gave
way to elaborate Victorian architecture,
which made maximum use of the re-
gion's abundance of soft wood, which
was easy to cut and turn mechanically.
5
St. Ann's Academy in Victoria.
© Provincial Capital Commission
Canada, and a false front that concealed
a smaller interior. Some of these façades
were adorned with a prominent cornice
or a whimsically shaped parapet.
Upon completing its transcontinental
railway in 1886, Canadian Pacifi c began
building a nationwide network of lux-
ury hotels and took particular interest
in the Canadian West from the outset.
It erected hotels and train stations in
the Château style, which over the years
became the company's trademark and
the country's “national” style. The Banff
Springs Hotel, erected in 1903, and
the Empress Hotel in Victoria (1908),
both graced with tall, sloping roofs
and adorned with Renaissance details,
at once reminiscent of the manors of
Scotland and the châteaux of the Loire,
are the fi nest examples.
With Canadian Pacifi c's construction
of a transcontinental railroad and the
opening of coal mines in Alberta and
British Columbia, all sorts of new towns
sprang up, each with its own destiny
in store. During their fi rst years of
existence, all of them had boomtown
architecture, characterized by rows of
buildings with prefabricated wooden
structures, often imported from eastern
At the beginning of the 20th century,
British Columbia residents of English
and Scottish extraction began develop-
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