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Joseph Howse was a fur trader and an explorer. There is a Howse River, a Howse Mountain, a Howse Pass and on some very old maps of the United States, there is a trading post near the town of Kalispell, Montana named Howse's House. Joseph Howse built a fur-trading post called Howse's House which at one time was the most westernly of all the Hudson's Bay Company forts. Joseph Howse was lucky growing up in Cirencester, England because he was one of the few children that got a good education and became a writer. At the age of twenty-one, he left England and set sail for Rupert's Land, as Canada was called then. He had a job as a clerk for the Company of Adventures of England trading into Hudson's Bay. Joseph Howse landed in Rupert's Land through the Hudson Bay at York Factory. He landed in a 200-ton frigate called the, "King George." Joseph stayed two years in York Factory, working as a clerk, keeping the Company's records. York Factory fort buildings were set up on pilings because the land around Hudson Bay was flat, barren and prone to flooding. The fort kept sinking and the cellars had to be pumped out every two or three days. Joseph knew the different kinds of fur and what each was worth in trading goods. The Company didn't give Indians money. It gave tokens stamped with the letters M.B. for Made Beaver. The Indians got one token for a prime-quality beaver pelt. So if a blanket was worth then M.B.'s, the Indian would have to give the trader ten of his best beaver pelts. Joseph had to learn how to survive in the bush..........to get food, fish, hunt for hares, ptarmigan and caribou, canoe and portage and snowshoe. He had to learn the different Indian languages so he could deal with his customers. In Spring time when the ice went out from the rivers and the Cree Indians arrived in canoes with their furs and set up tipis outside the fort walls. Joseph would be too busy to be bored. He'd have to size up pelts of animals like beavers, marten, lynx and otter, work out their value, then trade the pelts for things like metal pots, woollen blankets, knives, iron tools or glass beads. Most of Joseph's customers were Cree. They hunted over a large area, larger still when they started trading with the white men. They looked for furs and buffalo all the way from Hudson Bay in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west to Great Slave Lake in the north. Joseph got along with the Cree people because he traded fairly. He took the time to learn their languages, he visited them in their tipis and got to know their families. We don't know exactly where it happened because he and the Indians were always moving, but he fell in love with a Cree girl and asked her father if he could marry her. She took the English name of Mary. Joseph got along so well with the Indians that in 1809 the Hudson's Bay Company sent him on his longest trip yet, west along the North Saskatchewan to Edmonton House or, as they sometimes say, Fort Edmonton. Joseph Howse met David Thompson in 1809 at the Kootenay Plain, a level meadow in the middle of mountains at the headwaters of the North Saskatchewan River. When they met, David Thompson going south the Joseph was on his way back to Fort Edmonton after scouting a pass through the Rocky Mountains. In 1810, Joseph Howse made another long trip. He left Fort Edmonton with sixteen men, including four Indian guides, and became the first man from the Hudson's Bay Company to cross the Rocky Mountains and travel south into what we now call Montana. He used the same route across the Rockies that David Thompson of the North West Company had used three years earlier. It was David Thompson who officially named this pass across the Rockies after Joseph Howse. So this is how Howse Pass got its name. Howse Pass is the link between the headwaters of the Howse River, a branch of the North Saskatchewan River, and Blaeberry River, a tributary of the Columbia River. Howse Mountain is nearby. After all his travelling through the west, Joseph retired back to Cirencester, England and spent his later years writing a book called A Grammar of the Cree Language. Joseph left his family back in Rupert's Land because the Hudson's Bay Company didn't allow them to travel along. They had tried it in earlier days but Indian wives were lonely in England and got sick. Later, people stayed, and settled around trading posts along the Red River, and that's where many Metis families were raised.

Howse Pass (elev. 1,525 meters), occasionally touted in recent times as a practical highway route to shorten travel time between Edmonton and Vancouver, was crossed in 1810 by Joseph Howse, a Hudson's Bay Company trader. The pass had been crossed earlier in 1807 by David Thompson, who gave it the name Howse Pass on his 1814 map. Howse had been in charge of Carlton House, near present-day Prince Albert, Sask., from 1799 to 1809. He retired to England in 1815.

The Mistaya Canyon trailhead is located at kilometre 71, and from this point forth be on the lookout for black bears and the other large animals that call this area home. While crossing the bridge over the North Saskatchewan at kilometre 76 in the spring of 1996, park wolf researcher Carolyn Callaghan watched a gray wolf loping along the river's edge directly below.

This area is known as the Saskatchewan River Crossing, or The Crossing, because it is where the pack trains of the explorers and fur traders in the 1800s used to cross the river on route to the wilds of British Columbia. It is the meeting place of the waters of the Howse River, the Mistaya River and the North Saskatchewan.

To understand why to preserve the Howse, take a hard lookat the Bow Valley

The pristine Howse Valley: You can count on two hands the few which remain.

You can count the principal wild valleys of Banff National Park on two hands: the Alexandra, the Cascade, the Pipestone, the Clearwater, the Siffleur, the Red Deer, the Palliser and the Howse. Although the integrity of some is threatened by logging, by gas and oil exploration, and by recreational development outside the park, these valleys are large enough, and in some cases remote enough, to have withstood the pressures of development originating within the park.

With their spectrum of relatively pristine habitats, they stand as mute counterpoint to the Bow, the Spray, the Mistaya, the North Saskatchewan, the Minnewanka and many lesser valleys that have forever been transformed by road access and subsequent development. They anchor the waning promise that Banff National Park can continue as a viable ecological reserve, with a wild, still-beating heart.

To propose a new road into any of these wild valleys is to fire a crossbow bolt into the gut of wilderness. Nonetheless, the ill wind of clamour for a "Howse Pass Highway" is once again blowing from central Alberta. The 1988 management plans for Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay national parks called for the survey and legislation of wilderness. Environmentalists applauded. In Banff National Park, such surveys would result in protection by order in council of 93% of the landscape. But almost eight years later, the Canadian public is still waiting for Parks Canada to comply with this instruction, contained in a document of its own making. The impediment? The surveys are time-consuming and costly.

By way of contrast, in a span of just over three years, Parks Canada will have shepherded the proposal to twin 17 kilometres of the TransCanada Highway in Banff National Park from political promise to actual pavement. In doing so, it will have spent approximately $30 million of the taxpayers' money. The public requires no more lucid example of the grossly misplaced priorities of Parks Canada--the agency charged with preserving and protecting for all time Canada's natural heritage, and whose first priority is supposed to be the maintenan

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