) Ephrem Brisebois, Controversial Major with the NWMP

28) Ephrem Brisebois, Controversial Major with the NWMP

Major Ephrem-A. Brisebois was a soldier, an officer of the North-West Mounted Police (N.W.M.P), a civil servant. He was born in South Durham, Quebec, on March 7, 1850. He died in Winnipeg on February 13, 1890. And, he almost gave his name to the City of Calgary.

The French-Canadian Ephrem Brisebois was chosen as one of the original commanding officers of the newly-formed N.W.M.P in 1873. His military credentials were earned as a soldier for the Union Army in the American Civil War, and he volunteered for three years in Italy as a member of the Pontifical Zouave. Upon his return, he left for Western Canada.

In the summer of 1875 he was commissioned to build a fort on Rivière-des-Arcs (now the Bow River in Calgary). In early 1876, Colonel A. G. Irvine, Assistant-Commissioner of the N.W.M.P. visited the new fort on the Bow River with Colonel Macleod. The two visitors were surprised to learn that Inspector Brisebois had given an order for the fort to be named "Fort Brisebois". Immediately, Irvine canceled the order because Inspector Brisebois did not have the authority to do so. Also, Inspector Brisebois was not a subordinate or well-liked leader of the post.

Colonel Macleod immediately suggested the name of Calgary, in honour of a bay he had once visited in Scotland. In a letter to the Department of Justice in Ottawa, he asked permission to call the new fort, Fort Calgary. With a favourable written response from Ottawa in hand, Colonel A. G. Irvine in turn issued an order giving the city of Calgary the name it now bears.

After retiring from the N.W.M.P., Brisebois acted as a civil servant for several years. During the rebellion of the North-West in 1885, he resumed military service to defend southwestern Manitoba. Following his death in 1890, he was acknowledged as a "vigilant, industrious, intelligent, active and honest civil servant."

His name has not been completely forgotten in Calgary. Brisebois Drive was named in his honor.
By Denis Perreaux

29) Eric Harvie, One of Alberta's Greatest Philanthropists

In 1934 he bought the Glenbow Ranch between Calgary and Cochrane, which is now a provincial park. In 1941 he bought up a large parcel of land outside of Edmonton. Imperial Oil made a deal with Harvie to look for oil on this land, and struck it big. The Leduc No. 1 oil strike in 1947 jumpstarted Alberta’s oil industry after World War II and made Harvie one of the wealthiest men in Canada overnight. He was able to quit working in 1955 and dedicated the rest of his life to charity, travel, and his passion for collecting. He started the Devonian Foundation, which funded museums and arts centres all over the country (including the Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum in Banff). In 1966, he donated his collection of art, rocks and minerals, military artifacts, and antiques to the people of Alberta, and set up the Glenbow Museum to take care of it. Harvie became an honourary Blackfoot chief in 1962, an officer of the Order of Canada in 1967, and passed away in 1975.

By Cory Gross

30) Father Albert Lacombe-Famous Metis Priest

In March 1852 he left for Lac St. Anne near Edmonton. Here at Lac St. Anne he witnessed the fur trade first hand and made many friends within Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1860 Father Lacombe received his final vows as a priest. In 1865 he started a missionary called Our Lady of the Prairies and travelled south with Alexis Cardinal (a Blackfoot Metis man).

Father Lacombe was very helpful and kind to the Cree and Blackfoot during the smallpox outbreak of 1870-72 on the prairies. During the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in Alberta in the early 1880’s, Father Lacombe served as a chaplain in the railway construction camps along the line. He was trusted by both the Canadian Pacific Railway, as well as the Cree and Blackfoot peoples. He listened to the Cree and Blackfoot concerns over the building of the railway on their lands. He also helped ease any disagreements that came up between the Cree and Blackfoot peoples and the railway. In return the Cree and Blackfoot promised Father Lacombe that they would not be part in the Northwest Rebellion when it started in 1885.

In his later life, Father Lacombe was too weak to continue to help the Cree and Blackfoot so he dedicated his remaining years to helping the poor, the elderly and orphaned children. He helped open the Lacombe Home for Orphans in what is now South Calgary. Father Albert Lacombe passed away in 1916 at the age of 89.

By Tom Elder

31) Father Jean Baptiste Thibault

Father Jean-Baptiste Thibault was a Catholic priest and traveling missionary. Born in 1821 at Saint-Joseph-de-Lévis, Québec, he was ordained in Saint-Boniface in 1833. Despite opposition from the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), many French Canadians and French-Catholic Métis were petitioning St. Boniface for a permanent Catholic mission in what would later be North-Central Alberta.

After studying the Cree language, it was in 1842 that Father Thibault was sent west as a missionary. In that same year, he performed 20 marriages and 353 baptisms in vast area he traveled, demonstrating the need and desire for a permanent Church presence.

What Indigenous peoples called God’s Lake and Lake of the Spirit, and what the HBC would later call Devil’s Lake, would be renamed Lac Ste. Anne by Father Thibault in 1843. And it was in 1844, that the Lac Ste. Anne Mission was established as the first permanent Catholic mission in Alberta. After ten years of work, Thibault was recalled to St. Boniface and handed his work off to Fathers Rémas and Lacombe.

It was said that Father Thibault was appreciated for his soft manner, although his timidity did not always serve him well in the rough West. In 1869, Father Thibault was asked to use his influence to help negotiate with Louis Riel and the Métis who contested the incursion of Canada into Rupert’s Land (most of the prairies before 1870). Unfortunately for the Canadian government, Thibault seemed to be more effective in strengthening the resolve of the Métis. His gentleness did not serve John A. Macdonald’s goals very well.

Despite Thibault’s difficult and groundbreaking missionary work early in his career, his personality was always better suited to the quieter life of the priest tending to his parish, rather than the more ambitious political roles assumed by others like Lacombe. And it was while in the role of simple parish priest that this extraordinary pioneer died at the end of his career in Saint-Denis, Québec on April 4, 1879, at the age of 68.

By Denis Perreaux