Hugh Drummond Allan was born in Scotland and came to Canada around 1907. He became a British Columbia Land Surveyor in 1912. His professional work was carried on mainly in the Kamloops district, where he resided, and the North Thompson River valley. In 1913 he surveyed in the Canoe River area. “From Mile 49 on the Grand Trunk Pacific I proceeded with my party by wagon and reached the Canoe River in one day,” he reported.

Allan was shortly predeceased by his wife and infant child, whether before or after his enlistment after the start of the first World War in 1914. He returned to Scotland and enlisted in Princess Louise’s (Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders). In March 1916, Allen, then second lieutenant, made a will in which he bequeathed all his fortune to “Mrs. Kelly,” the mother of his late wife, Gladys Irene Frederika Allan. “[A]nd I declare that I leave nothing to my own relatives not from any want of affection but because they are much better provided for than my late wife’s relatives and I have not a great deal to leave.”

Sometime in 1916 he was wounded, and in 1917 he was killed leading his company at Croiselles, France.

His estate was probated in 1917, coming to a value of $5540. In March 1918 his executor discovered that “there was due to the said deceased from the Imperial Pensions Department the sum of $532.96.”

The National Archives of the U.K. has officer service records pertaining to Lieutenant Hugh Drummond Allan of Princess Louise’s (Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders).

There is another Canadian figure of Scottish birth named Hugh Allan [1810–1882], a shipping magnate.

A. L. (Peter) Withers was a national park warden in Jasper from 1920. He owned one of the two pairs of skis in town, and during the winter of 1921 he used his skis to make his winter patrols [1]. Withers appears in a 1921 photo of a Jasper hockey game [2].

In 1924 he accompanied Allen Carpé [1894–1932] and Rollin Thomas Chamberlin [1881–1948] in climbs in the Cariboo Mountains, including first ascents of Mount Titan (now Mount Sir Wilfrid Laurier), Mount Challenger (now Mount Stanley Baldwin) and Mount Albreda [3, 4].

In 1930 Withers was one of a group of five Jasper men who skied to Banff, leaving Jasper on 14 January 1930 and following what is now the Icefields Parkway. Joe Weiss, Vern and Doug Jeffery, and Frank Burstrom were his partners. During the previous summer they had travelled by horse to several cabins in Jasper and Banff and stored bags of food for the trip. Near Saskatchewan River Crossing they were met by two Banff wardens who had snowshoed out to look for them. The trip was a bit easier after that as they had broken trails to get them to Bow Lake and then to Lake Louise and Banff. They arrived just in time for the Banff winter carnival on 4 February [5].

In March of 1930, Withers assisted in packing the party of Russell Hoadley Bennett [1896–1981] of Minneapolis, Clifford White [1902–1964] of Banff, and Joe Weiss of Jasper on their “attack on Snow Dome,” which failed “because of faulty planning conjoined with protracted bad weather” [6].

Rollin Thomas Chamberlin was a professor of geology at the University of Chicago who made numerous guided climbs in the Rocky and Selkirk Mountains in 1910, including the Lake Louise, Lake O’Hara, Field and Glacier areas. In 1924, Chamberlin, Allen Carpé [1894–1932] and A. L. (Pete) Withers made a number of first ascents in the Cariboo Mountains, including Mount Titan (now Mount Sir Wilfrid Laurier) and Mount Challenger.

Allen Carpé was an American engineer and mountaineer who was a member of the Alpine Club of Canada from 1920.

In 1924 Carpé, Rollin Thomas Chamberlin [1881–1948], and A. L. (Pete) Withers went up Tête Creek “and made some fine climbs, among them Mount Sir Wilfrid Laurier.” [1]

In 1925, he was a member of the expedition that made the first ascent of Mount Logan. He lost his life on Mount McKinley in May 1932, as the leader of a party making scientific observations relating to cosmic rays.

Carpé’s name appears with and without an accent in various documents.

Dalby Brooks Morkill [1880–1955]

b. 1880 — Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada
d. 1955 — Vancouver, B.C., Canada

Morkill came to British Columbia in 1898. He received his commission as a British Columbia Land Surveyor in 1910. Morkill was employed in 1912 by the British Columbia government making surveys on the Fraser River between Horsey Creek and Holmes River. In 1913, with Alan S. Thompson, Morkill surveyed between the Goat River and Catfish Creek. Morkill worked on the Alberta-British Columbia Boundary Commission surveys north of Yellowhead Pass in the early 1920s. Subsequently Morkill surveyed in several other areas of the Province. During his last years he spent summers at his residence at Barkerville and winters in Vancouver. He was president of the Association of BC Land Surveyors in 1928.

Samuel Prescott Fay [1884–1971]

b. 1884
d. 1971

“Pete” Fay as he was known to his friends had been a member of the [American Alpine] Club for 59 years at the time of his death last August [1971]. His qualifications for election in 1912 were four seasons in the Canadian Rockies beginning in 1906. In 1914 he joined a Smithsonian expedition which left Jasper, Alberta in June for the purposes of exploration, mapping and the collection of birds and mammals in the northern Rockies. Reports were filed with the Biological Survey in Washington. In mid-October the party met a trapper who showed them an old newspaper with reports of the first weeks of World War I of which they had no inkling. For the next three or four days they traveled non-stop to reach Hudson Hope on the Peace River.
Pete graduated from Harvard in 1907. During World War I he joined the American Field Service to drive an ambulance in France and later served with the Air Force in France and Belgium. Afterwards he was associated with an investment counseling firm in Boston for many years. Aside from two years on the Council (1930-1932), he did not take an active part in Club affairs, though he attended frequent meetings. Frail health confined him to his home for the last ten or more years.

Charles Doolittle Walcott was an American paleontologist and director of the Smithsonian Institution from 1907 to 1927. He made several field trips in the Canadian Rockies, discovering the Burgess Shale fossil bed in 1909, sponsoring the 1911 Alpine Club of Canada–Smithsonian Robson Expedition (he was unable to attend in person due to the death of his wife Helena in a train crash on June 11), conducting his own investigation of the Mount Robson area in 1912, and attending the 1913 Alpine Club of Canada Camp at Mount Robson where he continued his geological investigations.

Walcott was married three times — to Lura Ann Rust [1843-1876], to Helena Breese Stevens [1858-1911], and to Mary Morris Vaux [1860-1940]. By his second wife he had four children: Charles Doolittle Jr. [1889-1913], Sidney Stevens [1892-1977], Helena Breeze [1894-1965], and Benjamin Stuart [1896–1917]. Charles died while a student at Yale, and Benjamin was killed in action in France in 1917 flying for the Lafayette Flying Corps.

When Walcott traveled to the Canadian Rockies during the summer in search of fossils, often his wife and children would accompany him on his expeditions.

A French Canadian author and explorer of the Pacific Northwest, Franchère joined the Pacific Fur Company as a merchant apprentice, arriving at Fort Astoria on the Tonquin. After Astoria was sold to the North West Company, Franchère returned to Montréal overland in 1814, crossing the Athabasca Pass on May 14. He was employed for a time by John Jacob Astor in Montréal. He wrote Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America, published in 1819:

On the morning of the 14th of May we began to climb the mountain, which is very steep. Fortunately the preceding night had been cold and the snow was frozen hard enough to carry our weight. We had to rest every few minutes, the climb being very difficult and the exercise exhausting. Finally after two or three hours of unbelievable effort and fatigue we reached the summit and followed in the footprints of those who had gone before us. Our route lay between two high mountains and soon became tiring because of the depth of the snow, which being softened by the sun’s rays, could no longer bear our weight as it had done in the morning, so that we had to walk in the footsteps of those ahead of us, sinking up to our knees as if putting on an enormous pair of boots at each step. At last we came to a hollow that our guide said was a small lake, though we could not recognize it as it was covered in snow, and we stopped there for the night. These lakes (for there are two) are situated at the summit of the face of the mountain [1].

(The lakes are the Committee Punch Bowl.)

Kane was an Irish-born Canadian painter, famous for his paintings of First Nations peoples in the Canadian West and other Native Americans in the Columbia Departmentof the fur trade.

A largely self-educated artist, Kane grew up in York, Upper Canada (now Toronto), and trained himself by copying European masters on a “Grand Tour” study trip through Europe. He undertook two voyages through the Canadian northwest in 1845 and from 1846 to 1848. The first trip took him from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie and back. Having secured the support of the Hudson’s Bay Company [founded 1670 – dissolved 2025], he set out on a second, much longer voyage from Toronto across the Rocky Mountains.

On October 6, 1846, Kane left Edmonton for Fort Assiniboine, where he again embarked with a canoe brigade up the Athabasca River to Jasper House, arriving on November 3. Here he joined a large horse troop bound west, but the party soon had to send the horses back to Jaspers House and continue on snowshoes, taking only the essentials with them, because Athabasca Pass was already deeply snowed in that late in the year. They crossed the pass on November 12 and three days later joined a canoe brigade that had been waiting to take them down the Columbia River to Fort Vancouver (present-day Vancouver, Washington) and Fort Victoria (present day Victoria, British Columbia).

On both trips Kane sketched and painted First Nations and Métis peoples. Upon his return to Toronto, he produced more than one hundred oil paintings from these sketches. The oil paintings he completed in his studio are considered a part of the Canadian heritage, although he often embellished them considerably, departing from the accuracy of his field sketches in favour of more dramatic scenes.

Cautley was the original Alberta and later also the Dominion representative on the Alberta-British Columbia Boundary Commission, which conducted surveys in the Mount Robson region from 1917 to 1924.

The Alberta boundary commissioner was responsible for surveying the boundary in the passes. Cautley was an experienced surveyor, having obtained his first commission in 1896. Although Cautley was responsible for the surveys in the passes, the location of the monument positions was decided collectively by the Commission, which included as British Columbia commissioner Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945].

Cautley andWheeler wrote the reports for the Commission and supervised production of the maps After 1924 Cautley went to Ottawa with the Department of the Interior and was responsible for the survey of many of the national park sites in the maritime provinces.

He came to Canada at the age of 17 and became attached to a firm of surveyors in British Columbia. Later, he went north into the Klondike at the time of the gold rush and was engaged in the recording and inspection of mineral claim surveys. Upon termination of the gold rush, his footsteps led to Edmonton where he formed the land surveying firm of Cautley and Cote. Later, he went into partnership with his brother Reginald Hutton Cautley. Cautley was a charter member of the Alberta Land Surveyors’ Association, and was the Association’s president in 1914.