Enslaved in a 'Glorious Playground'

This photo shows the entrance of the Jasper internment camp which was located here from February to August 1916. The camp was one of a number of forced labour camps established for 'enemy aliens' in Canada's national parks. The internees were primarily set to work building roads, but also used for whatever other tasks the recently established Dominion Parks Branch could devise for them.
Jasper National Park was established in 1907 after the Grand Trunk Pacific railway was planned to run through the Yellowhead Pass. By the time the First World War started, only minimal park infrastructure had been built, and Jasper's few inhabitants were thrilled for the opportunity to have internee labour help improve the park and the little town at its heart.

This wintertime photo of internees under guard at the Jasper camp must have been taken sometime soon after its opening in February 1916.
The internees had been classified as 'enemy aliens' for being born in countries that Canada was at war with, including Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. During the war some 8,579 enemy aliens were sent to internment camps like this one, and over 3/4 of the total came from the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire. Almost all the men interned at this camp came from the Habsburg dual-monarchy including Ukrainians (the majority), Poles, Croats, Serbs, Italians, Slovakians, Slovenes, Czechs, and Hungarians, to name just a few.
In the decades before the war, these immigrants were discriminated against by the British-dominated Canadian society. Their treatment as a racially inferior 'other' laid the groundwork for their wartime internment in forced labour in camps like this one.

In this photo we can see internees chopping wood and clearing forest in the dead of winter.
The War Measures Act of August 1914 created a legal framework for interning these people and making them do forced labour. In almost all cases they were not interned on security grounds: Very few of them felt any allegiance to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Most thought of it as a hated oppressor that they had come to Canada to leave behind.
There is little evidence that government policymakers and police officials ever regarded these 'enemy aliens' as a threat to Canada's security. An editorial in the Winnipeg Free Press wrote: "there has never at any time been any question as to the loyalty of the majority of Slav settlers. They will be faithful sons of their adopted country."¹
This didn't matter because those "Slav settlers"—now enemy aliens—were competing with other workers for scarce jobs in Canada's recession-wracked economy. Once interned they could also be forced to work on jobs nobody wanted in conditions that no free workers would voluntarily agree to.

Here we see a number of internees sitting for a photo under the watchful eye of several guards with bayonets fixed on their rifles. Behind them you can see one of the breathtaking mountain vistas that Jasper National Park is internationally renowned for. The Dominion Parks Branch and Jasper's inhabitants were eager to benefit from the work that the Austro-Hungarian enemy aliens would be forced to do.
As the Edmonton Journal wrote: "Jasper Park will see the biggest development this year that has yet been undertaken, and its fulfillment will render the park much more attractive."¹

In this photo we see internees stacking firewood as they are clearing ground for the camp. An October 1915 article in the Edmonton Journal describes the plan for the Jasper camp:
"It is proposed to quarter the prisoners in huts which will be constructed by them, with the aid of soldiers. These will be warmly built and the food and accommodation will be up to the best standard… they will each receive twenty-five cents a day, which is the pay of a German soldier on active service. International law requires this to be made when prisoners are required to work."¹

Here we see four mustachioed guards posing for a photo in front of some tents. Most of the guards at Jasper appear to have been veterans of First World War battlefields sent home to recover from their extreme mental and physical trauma. Once they had somewhat recovered, they were assigned to "undertake the less vigorous duties at the internment camp."¹
As it turned out these men had often not completely recovered and did not make particularly effective or benign guards, likely exacerbating the miseries of the internees. It's hard to tell—eyewitness accounts from both internees and guards at Jasper are rare.
Based on the experience of better-documented camps like Banff and Kapuskasing, we can surmise that being a guard at Jasper was a miserable job and a very undesirable posting. Just like the internees, they did not wish to be there. As a result they likely often took their frustrations out on the internees. At those other camps neutral diplomats visited and reported many internee complaints of beatings and bayonetings, frequent threats of being shot, weeks spent shackled in solitary confinement, and punishment diets of bread and water.

Several internees standing in the camp's laundry, surrounded by clothes they are attempting to dry before the next day's labour. The conditions that the internees were expected to work under were deplorable. Their diet consisted of fewer calories than the government recognized was r equired to support a man labouring, and the food they did receive was of poor quality. Hunger was a constant complaint. The weather conditions were also a problem. They had inadequate clothes but were expected to work in severely cold temperatures in the first several months of the camp's operation, and then had to work in sultry heat.
Their daily routine usually consisted of marching out from their unheated bunkhouses to a work site, followed by eight hours of work without regular breaks, and then being marched back to camp. One senior officer noted that these marches could "amount to practically a day's work in itself."¹
Almost no internees left any written records of their experiences, and it is only through the stories that they told their children and relatives that we are today able to understand what their experience was like.
In Sandra Semchuk's recent book The Stories Were Not Told, Andrew Antoniuk recounts the story of his uncle who was interned here. It provides a rare glimpse inside the camp. "He felt he was a slave labourer there in the internment camp in Jasper National Park."

This was the bridge across the Athabasca on the Old Fort Point Road that was worked on by the internees. The current bridge was built in the 1930s.
The Jasper camp was not a success. During the spring of 1916 the internees went on hunger strike in protest about the poor quality of food and were soon "locked in a war of wills" with the camp's guards and officers.¹ It was the first such strike in one of the Dominion Parks Branch's forced labour camps. As the work in the main Jasper camp ground to a halt, a small satellite camp set up at Maligne Lake was completely crippled by strikes.
The anodyne language in the Dominion Parks Branch's 1916 annual report explains the result:
"The construction of the road to Medicine Lake was to have been accomplished by means of alien labour, but owing to difficulty with the prisoners only from 10% to 15% of the number interned at the Maligne camp were available for roadwork. As it was of no advantage to the Parks department to continue the camp under these conditions, work was closed down on August 15th and the camp subsequently disbanded."²
It quickly became apparent that the entire scheme was becoming untenable. The Parks overseers blamed the camp's commandant, Major Hopkins, for failing to overcome the prisoners' resistance. Later, an intrigue was to come to light indicating that the major's adjutant, Lieutenant Bury, was conspiring with Parks staff to take the commandant's job. They apparently believed the ambitious young lieutenant would be more effective in extracting labour from the internees.

A view of the Athabasca River and the bridge that the internees repaired across it.
By the time the internment camp in Jasper had opened in 1916, it had already become clear that the internee labour camps were becoming unnecessary due to the shortage of workers. Canada was already struggling to meet the recruitment quotas set for the war in Europe, and industry was clamouring for access to this pool of enemy alien labour.
By April 1916 the government had decided to release all "non-dangerous" enemy aliens and parole them to work in various industries across Canada. There the internees were still required to report monthly to parole officers, technically forbidden from leaving their jobs (though this proved impossible to enforce), and frequently abused by their employers. But they were theoretically to be paid market wages, and not forced to live under the harsh military discipline of the camps.
When the camp closed in August 1916, all but 22 of Jasper's 208 internees were paroled to work in the railways, at coal mines, and on various farms around Alberta. The remaining 22 were considered "dangerous" and sent to the Lethbridge camp.

Two horsemen on the Athabasca Bridge.
In May 1917 the Edmonton Journal quoted a speech given by a representative of the Dominion Parks Branch:
"I have come to remind you of the wonderful playgrounds right at your own front door… Grander, vaster and more glorious scenic beauty than Switzerland with its alps… All these scenic features have been opened up by scenic roads and trails… most wonderful scenes await the tourist and the Canadian."¹
As Waiser writes of the camps:
"The cruellest blow was being confined in what were being widely promoted as Canada's national playgrounds. For several years thereafter, the words 'these are your parks… Come and enjoy them' would haunt many immigrants who, despite their wartime treatment, had decided to make Canada their home."²
The development of Canada's national parks would utilize camp labour again with the 'relief camps' of the Great Depression, and then with Japanese internees during the Second World War.