Maggie Thom's Blog - Posts Tagged "alberta"

I started to introduce you to where you travel in Canada in my suspense novel, Captured Lies. Last week, we started in Calgary, which is essentially where the story really gets going. Bailey and Guy leave Calgary at night, as they are being chased by a man who is intent on killing Bailey. Only she has no idea why. She is trying to travel back in time to places that her and her recently deceased mother, lived when she was a child. As they moved a lot and usually on the street it was really tough for Bailey to figure out where she needed to travel to, to get answers.

She heads to Jasper but her goal is really Valemount, BC. (we'll visit her next week).

Jasper, Alberta is one of the most beautiful places in Canada. I love the mountains so I might be a bit biased but it is absolutely stunning. The first recorded visit to the area was that of David Thompson ( a great name if I do say so - my maiden name - no I don't think he's related), in 1810. In 1813, The Northwest Company built a settlement which became known as Jasper House, which was then abandoned in 1884. In the early 1900's the government established Jasper Forest Park which became Jasper National Park in 1930 (http://jasper-alberta.com/default.asp...).

In Captured Lies, you take a drive up Highway 93 to Jasper, sadly they do it at night so they miss...

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Last week you visited Valemount, BC, a beautiful hidden Canadian gem.

In Captured Lies, Bailey and Guy have had to leave there really fast as the bad guy has found them and is intent on killing them.

So Guy and Bailey head to Edmonton, another place that Bailey had lived as a child. I'm not sure I mentioned this before but Bailey lived on the streets and on the run with her mom. Bailey never really knew why just that sometimes her mom would come and pull her from school in the middle of the day and she'd never see it or the friends, if she'd made any, ever again. By returning to Edmonton Bailey is hoping to find some answers maybe by tracking down some of the people that she remembers. She knows the odds are pretty remote that any of them are alive.

So how did Edmonton come to be? In 1795, the Hudson Bay Company built a fort on the edge of the North Saskatchewan River, which was name Fort Edmonton. It is suggested that it was named that after Sir James Winter Lake, the deputy governor of the Hudson's Bay Company who came from Edmonton, in Middlesex, England.

The fort was known for trading, dispatching brigades to remote outposts, planting food and grain crops in the spring, harvesting them in the fall, and hunting and fishing to obtain meat for the fort's inhabitants. In the 1840s, with the arrival of Methodist and Catholic missionaries, things slowly changed. The Methodists built a church outside of the fort walls in 1870 and started really the city of Edmonton.

With the gold rush in the 1890's many people stopped in Edmonton on their way north. Then the railway arrived in 1902, providing an easier means of travel to the remote area. The biggest change happened in 1947 when black crude oil (or as some called it black gold) was discovered just southwest of Edmonton near Leduc, the city benefited greatly and grew exponentially after that...
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