A Civil Engineer From Chilliwack Who Made the Rocky Mountains a Public Highway
In September 1922 a civil engineer in his mid-thirties drove an automobile from Banff to Invermere. The trip took seven hours over a road that was still rough in places, two years before the federal-provincial agreement said the road had to be finished. The engineer was the man in charge of building it. His name was James Morey Wardle, and the road he had just opened was the Banff-Windermere Highway.
It was the first motor road built across the Canadian Rockies. It is now Highway 93 South. Most Albertans drive it without ever hearing the name of the man who built it.
Queen’s, the Fraser, then Ottawa
Wardle was born in Chilliwack, British Columbia on June 26, 1888, the son of a merchant who had come up from the Cariboo Gold Rush. He studied civil engineering at Queen’s University from 1908 to 1912. During those summers he worked as a draughtsman in the lower Fraser Canyon, surveying for the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway. By the time he graduated, he had four years of real construction site experience under his belt. That was a common kind of education before the war and a rare one after it.
After a brief stint as town engineer in Chilliwack, Wardle arrived in Ottawa in spring 1913 and took a junior post with the Department of the Interior, attached to the new Canadian Parks Branch under James Harkin. His official task was topographical surveys. The actual work was building roads in places that did not have them.
By summer 1915 he was working under locating engineer Andrew Wellington Gray on the road up Mount Revelstoke, the route that survives today as the Meadows in the Sky Parkway. After Gray went overseas in July 1916, Wardle became acting Chief Highways Engineer for the Parks Service at twenty-eight years old. The promotion came not because of a connection but because there was a war on and somebody had to do the work.
Banff in his thirties
On July 1, 1918, James Morey Wardle became the Superintendent of Rocky Mountains Park, which is what Banff was officially called at the time. He held the post until 1921. He was the first man appointed to run a Canadian national park on engineering merit alone. The Dominion Government had abolished the patronage system for parks superintendents in November 1917. Wardle was the test case. From then on, Banff would be run by people who actually knew what they were doing.
In 1921 he became Chief Engineer of the National Parks Branch. He held that role for fourteen years.
The first car across the Rockies
The Banff-Windermere Highway file landed on his desk in late 1919. He took it over from the original engineer in charge, Lieutenant Harry Haffner, who had been killed in Belgium in May 1916. Wardle finished what Haffner had started. He drove the first automobile over the route in September 1922. The highway opened to the public in late June 1923. A government slogan postmark went out from Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria, and Winnipeg post offices that summer reading GOVERNMENT MOTOR HIGHWAY BANFF-WINDERMERE OPEN JUNE 30TH 1923.
The road became the last link in a 5,000 mile motor circuit that connected sixteen national parks in Canada and the United States. Tourism in Banff was no longer just a railway business. It now had wheels.
The Geographic Board of Canada named Mount Wardle and Wardle Creek for him on the western edge of Kootenay National Park. Both are visible from Highway 93 South.
What came after
Wardle’s career did not end with Banff. He served as Chief Engineer of the National Parks Branch until 1935, then briefly as Deputy Minister of the Interior, then as Director of the Surveys and Engineering Branch in the new Department of Mines and Resources from 1936 to 1947. From 1938 to 1941 he sat on the British Columbia–Yukon–Alaska Highway Commission, the body that planned the Alaska Highway during the Second World War. He served as International Boundary Commissioner from 1947 to 1951. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1946.
Wardle was elected the first president of the Trail Riders of the Canadian Rockies in 1925 and held the post until 1929. He helped design the aluminum buffalo badge that was issued to every car entering a Canadian national park starting in 1925. He served as president of the Banff Rotary Club. He kept building.
Old Banff Cemetery
James Morey Wardle died in Calgary on May 18, 1971, eighteen months after his wife Maud. His daughter Dorothy outlived him by thirty-two years. All three are buried together at the Old Banff Cemetery, in the town he ran for three years and the park he served for the better part of his working life.
The mountain on the right side of Highway 93 South as you climb toward Vermilion Pass is named for him.
It is a fitting headstone.
