A compass which belonged to Jasper Park’s first superintendent has finally led its beneficiary to the place where it was originally used.

When Vancouver’s Tim Timberg inherited an antique compass from his grandmother, he had scant idea the connection the artefact held to Jasper National Park. However, after a little family research, and with help from his mother, Marion, Timberg learned that the item belonged to Jasper Forest Park’s first Superintendent.

John William McLaggan, who was born in 1860 and died fighting a forest fire in 1930, was born in Nashwaak Bridge, New Brunswick. He was the eldest of 16 children and helped work the family farm until 1889, when he travelled overland to Alberta.

It was his short but significant stint with the Canadian government which is McLaggan’s most consequential—and perhaps controversial—contribution to this country’s legacy.

Now, more than 110 years after McLaggan helped establish Jasper National Park, his great grandson has come to Jasper to return an item which surely helped the former government official find his way through Jasper’s vast valleys.

Timberg has bequeathed the compass—which still works perfectly—to the Jasper Yellowhead Museum and Archives. Archives Manager Karen Byers met with Timberg and his mother to accept the gift and learn more about McLaggan.

“It’s important,” Byers said. “We knew a bit about the man but now we know more about his life.”

McLaggan played a fairly prominent role in the creation of Jasper Forest Park. He was the man who, on behalf of the government of the day, bought up land from the park from the settlers. Depending on the version of history you read, McLaggan was either responsible for helping found the national park, or was the man who evicted the Metis and made false promises about helping them relocate.

“Apparently, McLaggen had no authority to promise anything,” writes amateur historian Stuart Taylor in his essay Evicting the Metis. “He was simply using language to get these families to leave their homes [and] the Metis families agreed only because they’d been assured that they’d easily be able to maintain their preferred lifestyle at new locations.”

For McLaggan’s granddaughter, Marion Timberg, she sees him as a man who had an unpleasant job to do, but a job all the same.

“John McLaggan was given a job and he did it,” she said. “The Liberal government had asked him to buy and obtain the land for the park. He did not follow through in the results of this, not did the government ask him to.  He obviously cared about Indigenous people when he provided them with caribou.”

Marion is referring to another point in her grandfather’s career, when McLaggan engaged in an empathic, if not audacious, mission to help Indigenous tribes in northern Alberta. After a reconnaissance in the upper Athabasca region wherein he discovered food-poor First Nations bands, McLaggan headed a party which barged a herd of caribou from Hudson’s Bay to Edmonton, along the North Saskatchewan River. The animals were then herded north from Edmonton, then ferried across the Athabasca River where they were turned loose.

“I’ve been told that they thrived and that it was a good idea as it provided food and clothing for the northern tribes,” Marion writes in her forthcoming self-published book, Not a Schoolmarm, told in the voice of her mother, Mary Arneson.

Marion didn’t know her grandfather—he died five years before she was born—but the stories she heard about him gives her the impression of a stern, serious man. An anecdote from his days as Jasper Park Superintendent lends credence to that picture: McLaggan, while riding through the park on horseback during the first winter of his post, came across a man with a team of horses, pulling a sleigh loaded with liquor. Liquor was not allowed in the park and the official very methodically broke every bottle and poured the liquor out onto the snow.

“But one bystander couldn’t abide the waste,” Marion writes. “After Pa left, the man found a tin cup and scooped it full. He sold ‘scotch on the rocks’ at five cents a cup!”

For Tim and Marion Timberg, these stories, and the artefacts, help bring a family member’s past to life. For Byers, it’s exactly the reason the Jasper Yellowhead Museum and Archives exists.

“The compass is one thing but the stories that go along with it are amazing.”

Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com