From the region’s first Aboriginal visitors through the coming of the railway and the discovery of hot springs to modern times, this limited edition BANFF: A HISTORY OF THE PARK AND TOWN represents a synthesis of E.J. (Ted) Hart’s 40-year career as a Canadian Rockies historian. Numbered from 1 to 1,000 and signed by the author, each copy of this very special edition has a cloth and printed cover enclosing 292 well-researched pages covering the entire history of Banff National Park and the town of Banff.

From the author:
The 125th birthday of Banff National Park in 2010 and the centennial of the Canadian Parks Service in 2011 are good benchmarks for an assessment of the history of Banff National Park and its town, Banff. Parts of the story have been written about in several books, including early works such Harriet Hartley Thomas’s From Barnacle to Banff (1945) and Dan McCowan’s Hilltop Tales (1947), and later efforts such as Esther Fraser’s The Canadian Rockies, early travels and explorations (1969) and parks historian Fergus Lothian’s four-volume A History of Canada’s National Parks (1970s). But apart from my own work in the late 1990s (The Place of Bows and The Battle for Banff), which examined the history of the entire upper Bow Valley, no real effort has been made to write a comprehensive history of the town and the park since Eleanor Luxton’s Banff: Canada’s First National Park, published in 1975. In this work I will attempt to rectify that by bringing together the results of a 35-year career researching and writing about Banff in a single, comprehensive volume. Because of the story’s breadth it is impossible to include everything, and I have therefore made an effort to concentrate on the main themes driving the story forward. It is, on reflection, an attempt to show how two somewhat disparate entities, Banff National Park and the Town of Banff, have attempted to adapt to each other through the vicissitudes and victories of over a century of side-by-side (or one-within-the-other) existence. It is not only the story of a national park and its urban centre but the tale of vibrant and interesting people and of human adaptation to conditions so unusual that they are unique in Canada, and indeed in the entire world.

– E.J. (Ted) Hart

E.J. (Ted) Hart is the executive director of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, Alberta. He has been actively involved in the archival and museological fields of Canadian Rockies history for nearly thirty-five years and has served as mayor of the town of Banff.

E.J. (Ted) Hart's profile page