Calgary sits where Bow and Elbow rivers make an ‘elbow’
Calgary is Alberta’s largest city: 1,306,784 in the city proper and 1,481,806 in the metro in 2021, ranking third among Canadian cities and fifth among metros. Treaty 7 nations name the meeting of Bow and Elbow rivers as an elbow bend.
Teen cartographer David Thompson wintered with Piikani along the Bow in 1787 while with Hudson’s Bay Company, an early written waypoint before ranching and oil booms.
Pre-Clovis people lived in the area at least 11,000 years ago, and it has been home to the Siksika, Kainai and Piikani of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Nakoda and the Tsuutʼina; the Blackfoot name for the city is Mohkínstsis. In autumn 1875 Inspector Éphrem-A. Brisebois led fifty Mounties of F Troop north from Fort Macleod to build a North-West Mounted Police post meant to stop American whisky traders. Colonel James Macleod proposed the name in 1876 after Calgary Castle on Scotland's Isle of Mull, where he had spent summers, and Treaty 7 transferred title to the region in 1877.
From 1881 Ottawa leased ranch land of up to 100,000 acres for a cent an acre a year, drawing settlers, and the I. G. Baker Company drove in the first cattle herd that year. The Canadian Pacific Railway arrived on 15 August 1883 and built its station on land it owned across the Elbow River, pulling the town core onto that section. The railway's own headquarters moved from Montreal to Calgary in 1996.
In January 1884 the hotel builder James Reilly circulated 200 handbills calling a public meeting, and on 18 February a first school opened for twelve children under teacher John William Costello, paid for with $125 raised by a citizens' committee. Calgary was incorporated as a town on 27 November 1884, and any male British subject over 21 owning $300 of property could vote for its first mayor. Today Greater Calgary hosts Canada's second-largest cluster of head offices among the country's 800 biggest corporations.
Source: Calgary
