Alberta historical timeline

Alberta's human history runs from the buffalo hunters of the plains through the fur trade, the Mounties, the railway and the great settlement to the oil age, and it left the evidence standing: the drive lanes of the buffalo jumps, the whisky-fort palisades, the sandstone downtowns rebuilt after fire, and the derricks of Leduc.

Chronology

1. 10,000 BC – AD 1750 First Nations reach the area by at least 10,000 BC; the Blackfoot, Cree, Tsuut'ina and Stoney Nakoda hunt the plains bison, driving herds over cliffs at Head-Smashed-In for six thousand years and carving the rock at Writing-on-Stone; by about 1730 the horse and the gun reach the western plains and the Blackfoot push the Shoshone south of the Red Deer River by 1780.
2. 1670 King Charles II grants the Hudson's Bay Company the whole Hudson Bay watershed as Rupert's Land; Anthony Henday makes the first written account of the country near present Red Deer and Edmonton in 1754–55; the North West Company's Peter Pond builds a post in 1778 and Alexander Mackenzie founds Fort Chipewyan, the oldest settlement in Alberta, in 1788; Fort Edmonton follows in 1795.
3. 1821 The Hudson's Bay and North West companies merge under British pressure, and the HBC runs the country until 1870, when it hands Rupert's Land to the new Dominion of Canada; American whisky traders move north to forts like Whoop-Up near Lethbridge, and the Cypress Hills Massacre of 1873 shocks Ottawa into action.
4. 1874 The North-West Mounted Police make the 900-mile March West, shut the whisky trade and build Fort Macleod and Fort Calgary; the Blackfoot Confederacy and Stoney sign Treaty 7 at Blackfoot Crossing on 22 September 1877, after Treaty 6 across the centre in 1876, and the bison are gone by 1881.
5. 1883 The Canadian Pacific Railway reaches Calgary; workers find the hot springs at Banff, and in 1885 the government reserves them as Canada's first national park, Rocky Mountains Park; open-range ranching spreads across the foothills and the Bar U becomes one of the great ranches.
6. 1891 The great immigration begins: 170,000 Ukrainians and settlers from across Europe and the American Midwest take up the parkland and prairie, and the Calgary–Edmonton railway of 1891 draws the corridor; the Frank Slide buries part of a Crowsnest mining town on 29 April 1903, killing up to ninety.
7. 1905 Alberta becomes a province with Saskatchewan on 1 September, named for a daughter of Queen Victoria, with Edmonton the capital; Jasper Forest Park is created in 1907, Elk Island in 1913, Wood Buffalo in 1922; the Calgary Stampede is founded in 1912.
8. 1947 Imperial Oil's Leduc No. 1 strikes oil on 13 February, opening the conventional fields that make Alberta rich and Calgary a corporate city; the Trans-Canada and the Queen Elizabeth II highways knit the province together; the Icefields Parkway is completed in 1940.
9. 1967 The Great Canadian Oil Sands plant opens at Fort McMurray, beginning commercial oil-sands production; the boom builds Calgary's and Edmonton's towers and, off the 2014 price crash, a long recession; Alberta's politics stay one-party -- Social Credit to 1971, the Progressive Conservatives to 2015.
10. 1988 Calgary hosts the Winter Olympics, the first in Canada, with the ski events at Nakiska and Canmore; the Royal Tyrrell Museum opens at Drumheller in 1985 and the mountain parks become a World Heritage Site in 1984, joined by Dinosaur Provincial Park, Head-Smashed-In and Writing-on-Stone.
11. 2013 The worst floods in Alberta's history hit Calgary and the foothills in June 2013; the Fort McMurray wildfire of May 2016 forces out 88,000 people and becomes the costliest disaster in Canadian history; the Jasper wildfire of July 2024 destroys a third of the town; the United Conservative Party governs from 2019.

What survived, and how

The buffalo jumps and rock art survived because they were too vast and remote to destroy and, since the 1980s, protected as World Heritage. The bison themselves survived in Elk Island's fenced herd, which restocked the plains and Banff. The sandstone downtowns of Calgary and Lethbridge stand because they were rebuilt in stone after fire. The parks survived because the railway wanted the tourists and the country made them national. What the fires take -- Fort McMurray, Jasper -- the province rebuilds, and the oil that built it is now its hardest question.