a club for the people

Mountain guide Konrad Kain's application for membership in the ACC. It is an example of the earlier style of membership application used by the ACC. Courtesy of Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, ACC fonds, Executive papers, 1906-45.

In March, 1906, the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) was formed in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Winnipeg is not a town renown for it’s towering verticality; it’s highest point, located outside the city in the northwest corner of the St. James-Assiniboia district, measures in at a whopping 240 meters above sea level. Hardly a new world Matterhorn. It was not for its status as an alpinist’s Mecca that “Winterpeg” was selected as birthplace for the nation’s first alpine club, but for the very Canadian reason of “meeting halfway.” It was roughly the center of the Dominion, making it at least a symbol of unification, and it was home to an important catalyst to the club's founding: the ineliminable Elizabeth Parker, mountain lover and journalist whose propagandistic efforts in the Winnipeg Free Press rallied the nation’s mountaineers.

The ACC’s origin story has been told many times. Parker and co-founder Arthur Oliver Wheeler each gave their accounts in early volumes of the Canadian Alpine Journal; and the story has since been told by professional historians. PearlAnn Reichwein’s Climber’s Paradise, is a recent and excellent contribution to Canadian mountain history and the history of mountaineering more generally. In broad brushstrokes, the story goes as follows: In 1902, Tufts College professor, Charles E. Fay, founded the American Alpine Club, and generously offered to his friend A. O. Wheeler to incorporate Canadians into a “North American Alpine Club” in which the “North” was silent. Wheeler, a patriot and an imperialist, desired a club for Canada’s own but was frustrated by the apathy he encountered in his fellow Canadians. Finally, in exasperation, he penned a letter to three major newspapers asking his compatriots to join him in establishing a Canadian branch of the American Alpine Club. For his apparent lack of love of country, he was given a lashing in words by Winnipeg columnist M.T., Parker's nom de plume. Wheeler and Parker joined forces and with twenty rail passes to Winnipeg from anywhere in the country courtesy of the CPR, they and Canada’s mountaineering elite founded the Alpine Club of Canada.

The Canadian club was in many ways based on the first amateur alpine club, presumptuously christened The Alpine Club by its London founders in 1857. The London club was itself modeled after British learned societies like the famed Royal Society and it was generally believed that the Alpine Club was made up of the intellectual aristocracy. Mountaineering historian, Peter Hansen, dispelled this myth in 1995 by analyzing the biographies of early club members. He concluded that it was primarily comprised of businessmen and lawyers, what historians refer to as "gentlemanly capitalists." But what of the Canadian club, founded sixty years later in a far flung corner of the Empire? What did its members do to earn their climbing time?

I have been unable to find detailed biographies for each early member of the ACC; the Canadians were not so assiduous in their record-keeping as were the British. Yet we may gain an appreciation for the club’s professional make-up through less direct means.

Early ACC members and guides, Yoho Valley, 1907. Photographer: Byron Harmon. Image source: Wikimedia Images.

As in the London club, members were elected into the several classes of membership: Honorary, Life, Associate, Active, and Graduating. Prospective members required nomination by three active members that was then voted on by all active members. The paper application forms used between 1906 and 1945, tell us who wanted to be part of the Alpine Club of Canada, and give us a sense of who became involved. Between 1906 and 1918 the form did not provide a space for occupation, instead requesting “full name and title.” Some applicants interpreted this to mean profession, others left it blank. After the Great War, the application format changed; rather than ask for title, they asked explicitly for occupation. And, unlike the earlier form, which merely asked for “qualifications,” the new application laid out a table with explicit headings: “expeditions,” “names of guides and companions.” This may have been a response to some applicants writing, “In good health” as a qualification for membership on the older forms.

From the start the Canadian club diverged significantly from it’s London template by allowing female members. The Alpine Club didn’t accept women into its ranks until 1974. In the young, sparsely populated Dominion of Canada, club organizers couldn’t afford to be sexist. Besides, it was only thanks to a woman’s intervention that the club came to be at all. The incorporation of women affected the club’s occupational make up. Of the 551 applications I examined, teachers were the most represented category at 84, followed by business and government workers at 70. “Housewife,” or in one case “spinster,” was considered a legitimate answer and accounted for at least 23 applicants and likely some of the women who left their occupations blank; nurses accounted for 19.

There were also horticulturists, professors, chemists, professional alpine guides, one hair dresser, and one “instriment maker.”

The application form used after 1918. Courtesy of WMCR, ACC fonds, Executive papers, 1906-45.

Like the London club, the ACC aligned itself with the image and institutions of science. Officially, the club's first objective as stated in the constitution was, “The promotion of scientific study and the exploration of Canadian alpine and glacial regions.” Of its original seven honorary members, there was one Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a member of the French Académie des Sciences, and a professor of languages. There was undoubtably more, less decorated participation in the natural sciences that cannot be gleaned from membership applications. The decades around the turn of the twentieth century were the apogee of the amateur scientist. ACC members like the Vaux family of Philadelphia —whose official occupations would have been artist or housewife, lawyer, and architect— contributed substantially to glacier studies in the Canadian west. Such people were not liable to write, “naturalist” as their occupation and are invisible as knowledge-producers unless we know more about them.

Not every applicant needed an official form. Occasionally, as in the case of elite members, high level club officials submitted applications on their behalf, scribbled on plain pieces of paper. This was especially common in the early days of the club when founding members like Wheeler exercised considerable influence. A case in point is the election of Colonel Aimé Laussedat, father of the photographic survey technique that Wheeler used to great effect in the Canadian Rockies and Selkirks. Laussedat was elected to Honorary membership in 1907, the year of his death, and his image graces the inside cover of the second edition of the Canadian Alpine Journal.

Laussedat's application, signed by members of Canada's alpine "glitterati." WMCR, ACC fonds, Executive papers, 1906-45.

There are obvious shortcomings with my method of analysis. Not every applicant specified their occupation and not every application represents a member. As I said above, this method gives us only an appreciation for the kinds of people who believed there was a place for them in the Alpine Club of Canada.

Believing that one deserved a place in the club was insufficient for membership. Reichwein has shown that the election system could be manipulated to block the election of "undesirables." This blackballing took on racial tones in the case of Jewish applicants in the interwar years, and for applicants of Asian descent. According to Reichwein, "In practice, the nomination and election of candidates for membership acted as an exclusionary process that reinforced a socially homogeneous group character."

Yet, compared to the London club, the early ACC incorporated a wide variety of professions and people. What we can say from the above is that despite its tiered membership categories and racial conformity, it was seen by many applicants as a club of the people. The occupations of those seeking membership in the Alpine Club of Canada spanned the hopes and dreams of a fledgling nation.

For more on the history of the Alpine Club of Canada, see PearlAnn Reichwein, Climber's Paradise: Making Canada's Mountain Parks, 1906-1974, 2014.

For more on the London Alpine Club, see Peter H, Hansen, “Albert Smith, The Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain,” 1995.