Fort Macleod: All Existing Things Soon Change

Time is like a river made up of the events that happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away, too.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV:43

After spending the Heritage Day long weekend with the wife and cat visiting Fort Macleod, a town of about 3,100 just over a hundred miles south-by-southeast of Calgary, I came away with a souvenir tee-shirt, an overwhelming desire for a real holiday, and a sense of sorrow for the pale shadow of its lost ambitions that is Fort Macleod today.

It all seemed to start with such promise. Colonel James Macleod came to the chinook-swept grassland at a bend in the Oldman River with a battalion from the Northwest Mounted Police in 1874, though perhaps it was telling that the townsite bearing his name would take shape ten years later two miles upstream because of the fort’s original island location’s vulnerability to floods. For the next thirty years, the emerging crossroads drew a staggering variety of dreamers, schemers, and the occasional shattered femur in conjunction with the Canadian Pacific and the Calgary and Edmonton Railways, and in a wild fit of starry-eyed optimism, the town fathers dropped the “Fort” from the Town of Macleod on the grounds that it would be unworthy of a ten-line railway nexus rivalling not only Lethbridge, thirty miles due east, but Calgary itself in size and economic importance.

The railways jilted Fort Macleod at the altar, naturally, decamping to Lethbridge and to Calgary as they consolidated their operations elsewhere in 1912. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 would further drive away both labour and capital, leaving Fort Macleod sufficiently overextended and beggared ten years later that the Alberta provincial government would force the town to accept a low-interest consolidation loan that forbade the issue of municipal debt for capital spending for the next fifty years. What could not be petrified in amber was consequently left to rot.

Perhaps I was expecting more of Historic Main Street to remain standing in its faded brick and sandstone grandeur before we went to Fort Macleod, but what I saw of the district transcended mere disappointment. The frontier architecture of Main Street is confined to one city block, and even that truncated stretch consists of patches of anachronistic vinyl siding filling in the gaps between the commercial blocks of a century long passed. The rest of Main Street is lost but to memory and to silver tincture, buried in a morass of tarmac, cinderblocks, clapboard motels, and thistles and crabgrass elbowing themselves out of the cracks in parking lot pavement.

There was much wringing of hands in last Sunday’s edition of The Fishwrap about the tenebrous state of Fort Macleod’s heritage architecture, although some lovingly maintained gems still exist in the form of the 1912-vintage Empress Theatre and the century-old Reach Block. But the defining metaphor of Fort Macleod’s history is not so much the reconstructed wooden palisades of the Police Museum as it is the empty, boarded-up brickwork shell of the four-storey American Hotel at the west end of Main Street, abandoned to nature and to the limpet-like motel buttressing its eastern wall. And indeed, the future of Fort Macleod may not be so much the Alberta Police Academy, slated to open in 2010 in homage to Fort Macleod’s policing roots, as it is the reconstruction of Highway 2 and Highway 3 on the town’s southern outskirts—an uncomfortable and none-too-subtle reminder to Fort Macleod of the world passing it by.