Finally! A lively and original history of Jasper National Park by a leading Parks Canada historian. Lavishly illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs and maps, Jasper: A History of the Place and It's People begins in the 1800s when the area was the domain of hunters and trappers and moves on to describe the transformation wrought by the building of two railways through the area at the beginning of the twentieth century to the jewel in the Canadian wilderness crown that is Jasper Park today.

It was the railway construction that inspired the creation of the park in 1907. For the next forty years Jasper was the sleeping giant of Canada's national parks. Large and attractive, it was also among the least visited of the national parks. These attributes enabled it to retain its rustic wilderness mystique well into the 1950s. It was renowned for its backcountry trails, its legendary horse outfitters (whose stories are told here), and its picturesque big game. But as the biggest of the national parks south of 60, it shared many of the typical problems of those parks in the twentieth century. Issues of game and forest management, road building and tourism-central topics in Jasper's history-were also main topics in the history of the broader national parks program. The completion of the Icefields Parkway and the Yellowhead Highway brought automobile tourists to the park in greater numbers through the 1950s and 1960s. Today, as one of Canada's most famous attractions, tourists and locals continue to explore its many natural splendours. Taylor's Jasper will also allow them to explore the park's human history as well.

Born on March 16, 1937 in Nipawin, Saskatchewan, Jim Taylor of West Vancouver was B.C.'s most widely-read sports columnist. Taylor began his newspaper career in 1954 as a part-time sports reporter at the Daily Colonist in Victoria and later wrote for the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Province and the Calgary Sun. He became a nationally syndicated sports columnist, author, and broadcaster. His 1987 chronicle of Rick Hansen's wheelchair journey, Man In Motion, reputedly had a record first printing for a B.C. book. In addition to Taylor's books on Wayne Gretzky, entitled Gretzky:The Authorized Pictorial Biography with Wayne Gretzky, and B.C. Lions` Jim Young, entitled Dirty Thirty. Taylor is credited with the re-write of a Soviet journalist's biography of Igor Larionov. In 2004, he compiled The Best of Jim Coleman: Fifty Years of Canadian Sport from the Man Who Saw it All. A member of the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame and the Canadian Football League Hall of Fame, Taylor was awarded a lifetime achievement award by Sports Media Canada in 2000. He began his writing career as part-time high school sports reporter, drank beer from the Stanley Cup, saw Paul Henderson score "The Goal" in 1972, predicted rookie placekicker Lui Passaglia wouldn`t last with the BC Lions more than one season and wrote more than 8,000 newspaper columns. He recalls his half-century as a sports writer in Hello, Sweetheart? Gimme Rewrite!

Jim Taylor's profile page