On Sept. 14, 1907, the federal government signed an order in council setting aside roughly 13,000 square kilometres of the Alberta Rockies as Jasper Forest Park, the reserve that would later become Jasper National Park and that, within three years, became the legal basis for evicting the Metis families already living in the Athabasca Valley.
The order was issued under Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, the reserve took its name from Jasper Hawes, a clerk who operated a North West Company trading post in the region in the early 19th century. Sources render his surname variously as Hawes and Hawse. The post, known as Jasper House, gave its name first to the valley, then to the park, and eventually to the town.
The decision had less to do with wilderness preservation than with railway track. Two transcontinental lines, the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern, were preparing to push through the Yellowhead Pass, and Ottawa moved to reserve the land ahead of them. The Canadian Encyclopedia notes the intent was to develop Jasper as an alpine resort on the model of Rocky Mountains Park, today’s Banff, complete with a station, hotels and a service town. Britannica puts the original reserve at about 5,000 square miles, or roughly 12,950 square kilometres.
The railway arrived in 1911, when the Grand Trunk Pacific laid track through the reserve and established a divisional point it called Fitzhugh. The settlement was renamed Jasper, and it remains the only sizeable townsite inside the park today.
The order in council also set in motion one of the less-told chapters of Canadian park-making. The Jasper Yellowhead Historical Society and the Mountain Metis, the descendant community that traces its roots to the valley, both record that seven family homesteads were operating in the Athabasca Valley when the reserve was created. They belonged to John and Marie Moberly, Ewan and Madeleine Moberly, William Moberly, Adolphus Moberly, Adam Joachim, Isadore Findlay and Lewis Swift. In August and September 1909, eviction notices were served, giving the families until March 1910 to leave. The Moberly, Joachim and Findlay evictions followed in 1910 and 1911.
Park administrators at the time classified the families as squatters, according to the Jasper Yellowhead Historical Society, and worried their presence would complicate the plan for a pristine tourist destination. New park regulations also prohibited the hunting and trapping the households depended on for food. Many of the displaced families resettled in the Hinton and Grande Cache areas, where the Mountain Metis community remains based today.
The reserve’s status shifted repeatedly over the following decades. In 1911 it came under the administration of the newly created Dominion Parks Branch, and the word “Forest” was dropped from the name. In 1930, with the passage of the National Parks Act, Jasper was formally designated a national park at close to its present boundaries, making it the largest national park in the Canadian Rockies. In 1984, UNESCO inscribed Jasper on the World Heritage List as part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks, alongside Banff, Yoho and Kootenay.
The anniversary lands in a period of rebuilding. On July 24, 2024, a lightning-caused wildfire driven by drought conditions swept into the townsite after thousands of residents and visitors had been ordered out two days earlier. Parks Canada, the lead agency on the response, estimated that 358 of the town’s 1,113 structures were destroyed, roughly a third of the community. CBC News reported that Jasper marked the first anniversary of the fire in July 2025, and Parks Canada released reports on the fire’s cause and progression in October 2025.
The Jasper Yellowhead Historical Society now publishes a land acknowledgement recognizing more than two dozen Indigenous nations with historic ties to the Athabasca Valley, and descendants of the evicted families have returned in recent years for commemorations. The valley Ottawa set aside on a September day in 1907 is still, 119 years later, working out what that decision cost and who it belonged to.
