Henry James Warre's and Paul Kane's Sketches in the Athabasca ...

figure 2.6I.S. MacLaren. Site of JasperHouse II and View of SynclineRidge, Makwa Ridge, andRocky River Valley,August 1996.this case, we have Warre’s sketch (Fig. 2.3), with a paucity of trees onSyncline Ridge in the immediate background, as evidence that Kane’srecord accords with another’s. Thus, although a comparison of twophotographs of the same landscape taken 160 years apart is not possible, 15the pictorial evidence, if assessed with circumspection, is sufficientlyreliable to permit an informed observation about the changes fromsavannah to forest undergone by the Athabasca River valley around thesecond location of Jasper House since the era of the fur trade. Surely,some wood would have been harvested for a variety of needs at a furtrade post, but such routine harvests over the 15 years between 1829(when Jasper House was moved from the far [northern] end of thenBrûlé Lake to this location, across the Athabasca and downstream fromthe mouth of Rocky River) and 1846 can hardly account for the relativeabsence of trees on the slopes of Syncline Ridge. 16 One is far moreinclined to attribute the difference to the effects of policies of firesuppression and prevention during the first 90 years (1907–1997) of thevalley’s existence as part of a park.Similar evidence appears in Jasper’s Lake, the first (because easternmost)sketch of the valley that seems to have survived (Fig. 2.7). 17 Kanedrew it while at the mouth of Solomon Creek, just downstream on theAthabasca where it narrows back into a river from the widening calledBrûlé Lake (now Brule Lake, formerly called Jasper Lake, and not to beI . S . M a c L a r e n 47