The Weird Weir

By Joe Donnelly

Belly Can

According to City Hall’s latest figures, there are 1,680 people living in Inglewood. Almost all these residents have at one time or another gazed down at the Bow River Weir—a glance from their landing Westjet, maybe while strolling the river path on a lover’s arm, perhaps from the back of dad’s bicycle, could be cycling to or trudging home from that downtown job, casting lazily into a trout pool, or looking up between chapters of Tuesdays With Morrie. The weir, and its mesmerizing waterflow, is a communal contemplative experience. And longstanding: Inglewood’s been here 131 years, the weir 100.

What do Inglewoodians notice when they lean over the weir? The slick pull of the crest surely. The sound—is it the rushing of water or the slap of auto tires or the diminishing thunder of a plane’s takeoff? The smell of ozone. Certainly the sight of pelicans. More remotely the diving loons. Ducks. Gulls. An occasional pouched fish. But directly across the river, if only the Deerfoot din would give it a rest, there’s a whole history to be absorbed.

Semi Arid
In 1863 surveyor John Palliser submitted his report on southern Alberta, describing this part of the prairie as semi-arid and not agriculturally useful. (For a time the region stretching from Red Deer to Lethbridge to Medicine Hat was referred to as the Palliser Triangle.) When the CPR came through twenty years later, a great deal of their land grants fell within this triangle. Before the CPR could sell this land to settlers, therefore, it had to be made arable. Irrigation was the answer.

And by the first years of the last century, imperative—what with Sifton and the federal government enticing droves of immigrants from Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, the Ukraine, continental and insular Europe. Canals and reservoirs were urgently needed.

The government of Canada had in the 1890s assessed the cost of irrigating the prairies and decided the central government couldn’t afford it. Landowners would have to foot the bill. Enter the CPR Irrigation and Colonisation Company, owner of millions of acres in the Palliser Triangle. To make any irrigation scheme feasible, the government allowed the CPR to bunch its land grants into continuous blocks. In 1903 the CPR began digging a canal on the banks of the Bow opposite William Pearce’s Bowbend property. More than a century later the headgates of that canal are still visible though the canal itself is buried beneath the Deerfoot and its parade of semis.

Lloyd Boettcher, a member of the Inglewood Silver Threads board of directors, had a paper route in the 1940s that took him from Bridgeland to Mayland Heights. One of his customers lived in a house next to the canal headgates. Lloyd has always remembered the customer’s name because of the location of his home: Mr. Salmon. That house too has disappeared beneath the Deerfoot.

Dammed Bow
Jim Asplund in his splendidly illustrated Rivers We Love: Southern Alberta’s Lifelines rates the Bow River above the Nile and the Amazon among the world’s great rivers. Asplund fails to note that the Bow is one of the most manipulated of Alberta’s mountain streams. There are four dams on its short run from the Rockies to Bow Island: the earliest is the Ghost Lake dam (1911), then the Seebe dam, the Bearspaw and the Bassano. At Bowbend in Inglewood likewise there have been, or soon will have been, four weirs.

The first weir was a temporary wooden structure built in 1906 to divert water into the canal which CPR had just finished digging seventeen and a half miles from Calgary to Chestermere. Water began flowing to the surrounding farmlands in 1907. The rate charged settlers was 50 cents per irrigable acre.

When the Chestermere canal was dug, Alberta was not yet a province. When the provincial administration was set up in 1905-06, William Pearce and J.S. Dennis were actively promoting the management of water resources with both levels of government. (Pearce had worked for the Dominion’s Department of the Interior for 30 years, but in 1904 he went to work for CPR and remained their employee until his retirement in 1926.) Pearce and Dennis were successful in bringing the governments onside. The irrigation system that was developed is still functioning. The Palliser Triangle irrigation is now centred near Strathmore.

In 1912 a concrete weir replaced the 1907 wooden structure. Four electrically-operated headgates were installed at the head of the canal. This second weir had 23 joined sectors, controlled by a rail-mounted cab which ran along the top of the weir. The sector weir was connected to the headgates on the north bank by an elevated cat walk.

This weir was removed in 1972. The old iron headgates are still there, about 200 feet downstream from the present weir, but no longer in use. An outline of the second weir is visible on the river bed but only from the north side of the river. On the south bank the only trace of this second weir is some few feet of old concrete embedded in the riverbank.

Another bit of connected history from this same period (1912-1914) has also disappeared from nearby: the brothels. Located just on the west side of the railroad bridge (immediately across the river from Inglewood Village), these houses had more than 50 working girls and flourished during the pre-WWI building boom. The St. George’s Island bridge accommodated more than picnicking families.

Forbidden Passage The present weir, the third one at Bowbend, was constructed from 1972 to 1975. A new entrance to the irrigation canal with five headgates was dug upstream. The first part of this canal was actually a tunnel since it went under the Deerfoot, which was also being constructed at this time. The canal surfaces on the other side of the highway just below Max Bell.

The main and most problematic feature of the new structure is that it is a crest weir running the entire width of the river, except for the fish ladder and the three sluicegates at the north end. The present weir is not passable. And the hydraulic roller created at the base of the weir is dangerous.

The fourth weir (more accurately the 3.5 weir) has not yet been built. A multi-partnered project, the Bow River Weir proposes the removal of the crest weir and the engineering of the river bed with pools and rapids to provide a safe passage for boaters and rafters and game and wildlife along the south bank (to be called Harvie Passage) while insuring a sufficient flow of water into the Chestermere canal. The five headgates and three sluicegates won’t be altered. The Parks Foundation, lead partner, indicates in its newsletter that construction on this 6.4 million dollar project will be completed in 2008.

Will Inglewoodians miss those contemplative moments above the weir?