We both woke up early and realized that today was Elisa's Birthday. It's one of those milestone birthdays and we are a little bummed out that we aren't home having a big party with all the family over. Oh well, the party will have to wait for when we are back home. Elisa has been wanting to go to Vegas to see Donnie and Marie at the Flamingo. So for her birthday I got us 4 tickets to go to the Flamingo on November 18th. That will be 2 weeks after Krista and Travis' wedding and I'm hopeful we will be recovered by then. It's also tough to celebrate a birthday when we have both been dieting. But this morning, Elisa threw all caution to the wind. She had one fried egg, a little bit of hash browns and some fried mortadella. I had one of my protein shakes. There will be plenty of time for celebrating a little later.
Today was a transit day for us. We are headed down to the Tri-Cities (Pasco) area in Washington State to visit my brother Tim, his wife Becky and their daughter Rene and her family. It would be a pretty long trek to Pasco from Banff, so we decided to break it up and today we will be stopping in Fort Steele, British Columbia. It will be a relatively short leg for us today - about 4 hours. Tomorrow, we'll head on down to Pasco and that will be about a 6 hour jaunt. I chose Fort Steele, because I read that it is a historic frontier town in British Columbia that has a well preserved frontier town. The ride down from Banff was pretty smooth, there wasn't a lot of traffic so we made good time. However, once we got down the other side of the Rockies, the sky was grey with smoke from the fires to the South and West of us. Fortunately, we aren't choking on smoke, but the smell of smoke is definitely in the air.
We pulled into the Fort Steele RV Resort around noon and we had a chuckle about their very liberal use of the word "Resort". There isn't much to this place, but it is clean, the staff was friendly and we were able to get a pull through site and that made setting up very easy. After we set up we had some lunch. Elisa had some roasted chicken and cole slaw and I had some broth and a protein shake. There is one very nice thing about this "Resort" they have good wifi. I was able to get my blog posts from Thursday and Friday posted. After lunch, we hopped in the car and went to the Fort Steele Frontier Museum. When we made our cross country trip in 2012 we saw a number of these frontier town museums when we were going across the great plains. Most of them were very sparsely preserved and almost like ghost towns. Kudos to the citizens of Fort Steele, their frontier town museum is the best we've seen. They have managed to preserve much of the original town.
A little background is in order. Fort Steele popped up in the 1880s, when the local band of Indians forcibly retrieved one of their own people from the local authorities. The Indian had been accused of murdering 2 miners that were working in the area. With this incident, tensions between the Indians and local miners were heightened. A contingent of troops from the Northwest Territory Mounted Police was dispatched to the area. The troop was led by Mounty Sam Steele. Sam and his troop of 30 men arrived in the summer of 1880-ish. The first had to set up a garrison, which they did by chopping down 300 trees to make log cabins. Sam Steele was a big and imposing man but a man of great character. His orders were to restore the peace between the locals and the Indians. The he got to the area he investigated the charges against the Indians and found no evidence to charge them. The charges were dropped and order was restored with the Indians.
A town quickly rose up around the police garrison. The growth of the down was fueled by a gold and silver rush and by 1869 many buildings began to pop up. The town reached its peak in the 1890s. It had 3 busy streets lined with stores, banks, schools, bakeries, black smith shops and livery stables. By the late 1890's the Canadian Pacific Railway was planning its way up the valley. Unfortunately, the railway ended up bypassing the growing little town of Fort Steele and instead it chose to stop at near by Cranbrook some 15 miles to the south of Fort Steels. In those days 15 miles might have well put the railroad in another country. That coupled with the fact that the gold mining began to peter out set the little town of Fort Steele into a death spiral. By the early 1900's the population dwindled to some 50 residents. Most of the business proprietors chose to move on to Cranbrook and many of the buildings of Fort Steels began toe decay. Given the harshness of the environment, it didn't take long for most of the building to begin to collapse. If not for the efforts and hardworking and dedicated descendants of some of the original founders of Fort Steele, this town would no longer exist. They began to renovate and recover many of the old buildings. Today, this is one of the best preserved frontier villages we've seen.
That's all for now.