Banff — Hot Springs, Railway & National Park
Cave and Basin National Historic Site
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
The Cave and Basin is often called the birthplace of Canada's national park system.
In 1883, Canadian Pacific Railway workers William and Tom McCardell and Frank McCabe publicized the hot springs and competing claims followed. The federal government refused private ownership and created a hot-springs reserve in 1885. In 1887 a much larger area became Rocky Mountains Park.
But “discovery” is the wrong word. Parks Canada recognizes that Indigenous peoples had gathered and held cultural practices at these thermal waters for generations.
The creation of the park altered those relationships and restricted Indigenous access.
This site therefore contains two beginnings: the beginning of a federal national-park system and the beginning of a new regime of state control over an older cultural landscape.
The cave's warm water looks timeless. The legal idea surrounding it—public park—was a nineteenth-century invention with both benefits and costs.