Riding & Outdoors
Lessons about Canada's cowboy country — and life
By DANA JOSEPH
The last time I was in Canada, the smoke from wildfires was so thick it smelled like all of Alberta was being barbecued. The iconic image of Lake Louise was completely obscured — you could barely see across the light-blue water to the mountains, and the peaks were lost in hanging gray air.
Daryl Benson, Edmonton, Alberta photographer
Canada's Kananaskis Country in Alberta has been the setting of many westerns. Rides from Brewster Kananaskis Guest Rnch take you through lots of Hollywood scenery.
The wildfires were a fitting backdrop for my burned-out state. In desperate need of a wilderness cure, I had canoed across Lake Louise under the smoky sky. Hiked a couple of miles up to Lake Agnes teahouse for a pretty lake view, some jasmine tea, and something sweet. Climbed glacial rock piles around Moraine Lake. Sat by the rushing Pipestone River eating an ice cream cone. It seemed like nothing — not even waking up in Anichini sheets in a five-star hotel and a two-and-a-half-hour massage at the Post Hotel's spa — was going to get me in a better frame of mind.
And then I met the Brewsters.
At the tail end of my trip, I'd tacked on a few days at Brewster Kananaskis Guest Ranch. A famous name in Canada's cowboy country, the Brewsters are one of the original pioneer cowboy families; they've been in Kananaskis Country — between Calgary and Lake Louise — for more than 100 years. The scenery they've called home for generations has been the scenery in many a western, but Hollywood got there a long time after the first Brewsters did.
Irish immigrants who left their native land just prior to the potato famine, they settled initially in Ontario. But son John Brewster had the West in his blood and followed the Canadian Pacific Railroad to Banff, making a home with his wife and young family in the Alberta Rockies. Soon he was supplying dairy to the Canadian Pacific Railroad hotel in Banff as well as to the surrounding community. In the late 1800s John began wintering his herds at the base of Yamnuska Mountain (from the Stoney Indian word meaning "end mountain" and/or "the flat-faced mountain"), where he established a homestead that would become Kananaskis Ranch on the banks of the Bow River.
Alamy.com/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis
Marilyn Monroe on the set of The River of No Return, 1954
It was the next generation that really set the Brewster family on its wilderness course. John's sons Bill and Jim said no to delivering milk and instead became expert mountain men — before they were even men: At ages 12 and 10 they took their first guests on a pack trip. Generations later, the Brewsters are still taking people out on pack trips into the wilderness. While some family members are running the stables at Lake Louise, throwing barn-dance barbecues, running a lodge in Banff, and outfitting other Western adventures (the family sold its huge tour-bus operation years ago), it fell to Janet Brewster and husband Kevin Stanton to take over the family guest ranch, which remains much as it was when Missy Bagley Brewster opened it in 1923, continuing a guest-ranching tradition that had actually begun in Montana in the early 1900s.
When I met Janet Brewster, she was manning the desk at the guest ranch with the direct manner of a woman who has taken care of cowboys, kids, and horses all her life. Behind her was a huge blow-up photo of a group of girls from a private girls' school in Stowe, Vermont, on their annual trip to the Brewster guest ranch, circa 1928. Wishing I had their chaps, bobbed hair, and fresh-scrubbed youth, I dumped my stuff in my no-frills cabin then went for a walk to have a look around. Though the Trans-Canada Highway and other intrusions of the New West — a mining operation at the turnoff for instance — were too close to properly call this wilderness anymore, the setting was otherwise mountain-idyllic. The Bow River right over there, the confluence of the Bow and the Kananaskis so wide it seems like a lake, enveloping mountains everywhere. The sun set behind the peaks in the wildfire haze, and I called it a day.
The next morning, our group rode out from the ranch stables by the river for a couple of hours in Yamnuska mountain-range countryside. The Bow Valley has been the setting of numerous movies, most famously and most recently Brokeback Mountain, Legends of the Fall, and Open Range, so it felt right to see it on horseback for myself. Wranglers — led by Lacey Brewster Stanton, who was about to head to college in Wyoming for a rodeo/horsemanship program — pointed things out, but I was back enough in the string to lose myself in silence. On my right, a steep drop to the riverbed — a natural gorge courtesy of glaciers. On my left, mountain faces. Trees, river, trees, river. Cliffs on the other side of the river. A few rapids. I periodically turned around in my saddle to take in the Western panorama that I had just ridden through. I was beginning to be able to breathe deeply again.
That afternoon, I went river rafting. It wasn't until I was actually on the river that I learned it was the River of No Return — not the metaphorical river of no return, but Marilyn Monroe's and Robert Mitchum's River of No Return. In 1953, Hollywood went to Alberta's Bow Valley to mine box-office treasure. Saskatchewan with Alan Ladd and Shelley Winters and The Far Country with Jimmy Stewart brought directors, producers, crews, and stars to Canada's own West. But the news that got the whole Bow Valley in a fever was that Marilyn Monroe would be coming to film River of No Return, her first starring role in a western.
The film crew spent 50 days shooting on the banks of the icy river. During production, Marilyn sprained her ankle on the river and was off the set for several days. The story goes that bellboys at The Banff Springs Hotel, the film's base during the Canadian filming, would flip a coin every morning to see who would be the lucky one to push Marilyn around in her wheelchair. It was rumored the injury was a way to get back at director Otto Preminger, who had plenty on his plate: constant rain, Mitchum's drinking, and Marilyn's acting coach/surrogate mother, Natasha Lytess. Marilyn insisted on having her on the set, and Lytess' coaching was at odds with Preminger's direction. When the frustrated director called the film's producer in L.A. and got Lytess banned from the set, Marilyn one-upped him and called Twentieth Century-Fox exec Darryl Zanuck and threatened to leave the picture. Monroe won, and Preminger is said to have directed his anger at her. The sprained ankle was possibly Marilyn getting payback. Whatever the truth, there are photos of her laid up with a bandaged foot and crutches during filming. Somehow she managed to cowgirl up and get the movie done. And I managed the rapids just fine.
Which brings me to Janet Brewster, who one evening was two-stepping at the ranch in red ropers. A couple of days earlier, I'd been out in the backcountry with Kevin. We'd trailered horses to the remote cabins used for pack trips. It was raining, and visibility was almost zero. Though we couldn't see the million-dollar mountain vistas, we did see three grizzlies along the road. We rode in the rain, kicked back in a rough cabin with cheese sandwiches, apples, and cookies, and I felt something like peace. Around twilight back at the ranch, I fished in the rain, caught nothing, and felt something like a cleansing. When the sky finally cleared and the sun came out the next day, I commandeered a golf cart, checked out the links that Janet's dad built, and felt something like playfulness.
So I was feeling better by the time I crashed some wild Swedish gathering in the ranch's "donut" tent — an ingeniously designed building of the original Brewster patriarch's creation. There were toasts with Aquavit followed by a big barbecue and dancing to a country band. Janet Brewster was out on the floor in her red ropers not missing a beat. Only a few days before, I learned, she'd had one foot in a cast. It was just the shot of gumption I needed. It called to mind a certain Marilyn Monroe filming in bad weather with a sprained foot. The Western way, I realized anew, was to face the weather of your life with guts. Marilyn kept making the movie. Janet Brewster kept working and got back to dancing as soon as she could. Me? I had to face the fire and rain, pull my boots on, and just keep riding.
Brewster Family Collection
Margarite Jones (fifth from left) brought students from a Vermont private girls' school to the Brewster guest ranch annually for many years.
The way it was at the ranch
Figuring that travelers on their way to Banff would enjoy a stopover and the chance to get out into the Canadian wilderness, Missy Bagley Brewster opened her family homestead as a guest ranch in 1923. Brewsters have been taking guests into Alberta's pristine mountain wilderness ever since. In June 1936, Missy described the experience like this:
" ... At Kananaskis you will find a western family, with the real old style western spirit and hospitality. ... The rides surrounding the ranch are lovely, either over the trails into the high mountain sections, through the foot-hill country on the Stoney Indian Reservation or plateau riding. ... On these trips we leave the corrals with our lunch tied to the backs of our saddles, ride to one of the numerous lakes near the ranch, explore the surrounding country, swim, cook our meal over a campfire and then ride back in time for dinner at night. ... When the day's riding is over ... one is glad to sit on the cool verandahs and watch the sun turn the sky to gold as it sinks behind the mountain tops, and when the shadows grow long on the hillsides and the peace of the night settles down we are glad to go inside where the fire throws its flickering light over all, and join in the games at the pool table, story telling, dancing, singing or just ‘set' and ‘let the rest of the world go by.' ...
"Or it might be our night meal we take out, climb to some high plateau to watch the sunset, rest and chat awhile and then all ride home together through the moonlight. ... On moonlight nights a campfire is often built on the bank of the river in front of the ranch house. This is always an occasion for a happy time. The Bow and Kananaskis Rivers reflecting the moon on the mountain peaks make a very beautiful setting. A number of our guests get their first enthusiasm for camp life around this fire and plan for their first camping trip after listening to the thrilling tales of those who have slept beneath the stars."
Issue: December 2009
