Produced in conjunction with our Summer 2024 exhibition The O'Hara Era, the book To See What He Saw by Stanley Munn and Patricia Cucman focuses on the Lake O’Hara work produced by English-Canadian artist and Group of Seven member James Edward Hervey (J.E.H.) MacDonald, R.C A. (1873–1932) between 1924 and 1932. The book documents MacDonald’s seven trips to Yoho National Park in the Rocky Mountains of eastern British Columbia, Canada, and presents a detailed catalogue of the resulting en plein air sketches and the subsequent studio works completed during the last nine years of his life.
The book features more than 200 of MacDonald’s western works from this period, organized geographically with en plein air sketches and studio work illustrated side by side. Each sketch is accompanied by at least one present-day photograph, many of which are taken from the exact rocky perch where MacDonald sat. This pairing enables the viewer to see what MacDonald saw and to understand how he processed the landscape before him.
Enjoy this excerpt from To See What He Saw: J.E.H. MacDonald and the O'Hara Years 1924-1932 available for purchase from the Whyte Museum Book Shop. Reproduced with permission of Patricia Cucman.
Introduction
In July 2000, in Le Relais Day Shelter at Lake O'Hara, British Columbia, a small group of campers and lodge guests attended a presentation about the O'Hara work of James Edward Hervey (J.E.H.) MacDonald; this book's authors were among them. The presenter, Lisa Christensen, showed images of MacDonald's O'Hara sketches done in the mid to late 1920s. Lisa also had a copy of a photograph of MacDonald, Peter and Catharine Whyte, and Adeline Link sitting in an informal camp in Opabin — the "Shalesplitters." Another copy of the photograph was hanging in the upstairs balcony of Lake O'Hara Lodge. We had seen it often but had not understood its significance.
In 2003, Lisa was back in Le Relais and presented from her now-published book The Lake O'Hara Art of J.E.H. MacDonald and Hiker's Guide. We had our copy with us. During the evening someone said, "It would be impossible to find exact locations for these sketches." We determined to learn more about MacDonald's trips to O'Hara, his sketches, and the resultant studio works, and the hunt was on to find the Opabin Shalesplitters location.
It wasn't until 2006—three O'Hara visits later—that we stood, at last, at the Shalesplitters site where the billy cans were still stashed in their hiding spot.
As we sat there, we realized that we were sitting at an exact painting site. Seeing how the vegetation had evolved since the 1920s facilitated the finding of other painting sites. That week, we sat upon several rocks where MacDonald had been seated while he painted; near one of these was a remnant of paint, the first of several that we would find.
That winter, we researched MacDonald's O'Hara works and collected images. Searching for and photographing the painting sites added a purpose and dimension to our hiking that had not been anticipated. With every new visit, more painting sites and artifacts were found. It became possible to understand how MacDonald had seen O'Hara and how he had translated it to his sketches.
Since that first discovery, we have collected more than two hundred images of MacDonald's western sketches, drawings, and studio works, and have documented the locations of all but two. Photographs of what lay in front of MacDonald's paint box from the exact, or as near as possible, location were captured for all but a handful of the works.
Along the way, Rod Green, initially at Masters Gallery and later at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, provided much support. From our first encounter at Masters—"Are you the people who found the pots?"—Rod was excited about our "hobby" and encouraged us in many ways in the early days. On our first meeting, Rod casually handed us a sketch to hold in our hands. He later shared images of works that came through Masters' doors, introduced us to key contacts, and assisted in other ways too numerous to itemize throughout the last four years. Without Rod, it is doubtful that this hobby would have blossomed into this book. He kept poking at us to do something with it.
One of the contacts attributable to Rod is Susan MacDonald, great-niece of the painter. Susan generously shared relevant materials from the Estate of Thoreau MacDonald, giving us permission to include photographs, the transcript of the 1929 diary, and excerpts from several letters. Susan cheerfully fielded all our questions: "Susan, how big is the paper that this letter is written on?"
With this support, the project expanded to include all aspects of McDonald's trips to O'Hara. Letters and diaries were transcribed and historic photographs collected with a view to fully understanding his time at O'Hara. The project became so large it was difficult to know how to share it; subsequently, it was set aside in favour of other pursuits.
In 2020, Rod asked us to share our work with Anne Ewen, Chief Curator, Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. When Anne saw the scope of the project, the concept emerged to use the work as the basis for an exhibit at the Whyte Museum to commemorate the 100th anniversary of MacDonald's first visit to O'Hara. Anne was committed from the start and remained so throughout the four years that it took to wrap it up. She seemed to never doubt that it could be done—even when the authors were not so sure.
Amie Lalonde, Registrar and Assistant Curator, Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, applied her invaluable attention to detail and assisted us in tracking down painting images and permissions so the entire body of MacDonald's O'Hara work could be included in the book.
There is much written about the Group of Seven and the individual members of the Group by art historians and scholars. We are neither art historians nor art scholars and do not attempt to embellish those scholarly writings.
These pages do not include significant information about MacDonald's work outside O'Hara. Rather, within these pages the reader will find discussions of MacDonald's seven western trips and a detailed catalogue of the resulting en plein air sketches and subsequent studio works completed in the last nine years of his life.
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The work as originally conceived by the authors is finished herein. It is our hope that this volume will be of use to art collectors, enthusiasts, historians, students, teachers, galleries, museums, and auction houses. This information can be a starting point for researchers to further explore other aspects of this portion of MacDonald's legacy.
Because the O'Hara landscape is presented through MacDonald's brush as it was a hundred years ago and as it is "today" through the recent photographs of the same landscape, the comparison presents a body of data for those whose interests lie in the study of alpine flora, climate, and environment.
Chapter One
A Hinterland Far Beyond Algoma
MacDonald's seven cross-country trips to O'Hara on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) carried him from Toronto, through Ontario, and over the prairies into southern Alberta. The tracks ran through downtown Calgary and across the foothills to Banff, and thence, 5 kilometres west of the Continental Divide to Hector Siding where he alighted on the shore of Wapta Lake. The last leg of his journey was on horseback, 13 kilometres up Cataract Valley to reach CPR's Lake O'Hara Bungalow Camp. Today, Lake O'Hara is described as a backcountry experience, but the Lake O'Hara Bungalow Camp, and its fabled surroundings, that MacDonald experienced were much more rustic than would be appreciated by many today.
It is necessary to describe O'Hara and its surroundings of the time, in order to understand the personal artistic focus that O'Hara would become for the last nine years of MacDonald's life, 1924 through 1932.
MacDonald's travel across the country brought him to a land that was raw, vibrant, and exciting—a deep hinterland of which he knew nothing until Lawren Harris urged him to experience it himself. At O'Hara, MacDonald found a new theatre in which to explore the expression of Canadian nature — a place where he could apply the aesthetic that Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven had conceived at Algoma and elsewhere. O'Hara, not yet part of Canada's Yoho National Park, was a spectacular jewel at the heart of a region that was being prised open by surveyors, railmen, mountaineers, miners, and artists.
Before the migration of Europeans to southern Alberta, the land had been inhabited by ancestors of the Blackfoot Nations for centuries and the area was accessible via several well-established migration routes. Post-Confederation, and prior to 1883 when the CPR reached Calgary, the most expedient route into southern Alberta for both goods and travellers was up the Mississippi River to the Missouri River as far as Fort Benton, Montana (near Great Falls)—the northern limit for paddle steamers. From Fort Benton, ox-cart trains (bull trains) made the trip overland across the Canadian border, to Lethbridge, to Fort Macleod, and finally along the old Macleod Trail to Calgary. This was summer travel only.
The arrival of the railroad ended the bull trains; but still, in 1924, the far reaches of the Rocky Mountains were not easily accessible beyond the limits of those steel rails.
In the fall of 1883, the CPR extended the rail line through to Laggan, known today as Lake Louise. Lake Louise itself was not known to settlers until a Stoney Nakoda guide brought packer Tom Wilson to see Horâ Juthin Imne, "Lake of Little Fishes." Wilson recognized the extraordinary potential of the spot. Tourism became part of the CPR's business plan, and the company built the first modest log cabin on the shores of Lake Louise in 1890. While this cabin burned down in 1893, it marked the beginning of the exploitation of the spectacular beauties that awaited travellers in the mountain parks.
But before tourists, there must come the means by which to bring them. Twelve thousand railway workers were recruited to press onward with the construction of the railway into British Columbia.
In 1884, the railbed was laid through the Kicking Horse valley west of the Great Divide in what is now Yoho National Park. This was audacious due to the rugged nature of the Pass and the Gorge. The Ktunaxa (Kootenay) and Secwépemc (Shuswap) peoples used the longer but easier route up the Ottertail and through McArthur Pass as a seasonal migration corridor between Columbia Valley and Bow Valley and the open prairies beyond. In 1885, the eastern and western portions of the CPR met in British Columbia at Craigellachie. Construction in the Kicking Horse Valley was slowed by the difficulty of construction; men were living along the line in 1884, and trails such as those to Sherbrooke and Ross lakes are surely lasting marks of their presence.
The "Big Hill" over the Kicking Horse Pass west of Wapta Lake was intended to be temporary. The 4.5 % grade was terribly steep for trains; three men were killed when the first train to attempt the run suffered a brake failure and derailed. Other serious accidents punctuated the twenty-five years that the Big Hill was in use before the 1900 completion of the Spiral Tunnels.
In 1886, CPR promoted the creation of "Mount Stephen Dominion Reserve," a 6-kilometre reserve around Field, BC, which included the traditional lands of the Ktunaxa Nation.
After several incremental extensions, in 1930 the reserve was renamed Yoho National Park, the same year that Rocky Mountain Park was renamed Banff National Park. MacDonald's seven trips west to paint at O'Hara occurred before the modern limits of Canada's mountain parks were set.
GROWING AWARENESS OF LAKE O'HARA
Outdoor people—mostly mountaineering people—had been accessing O'Hara for perhaps 30 years before MacDonald's first visit in 1924. J.J. McArthur, of Dominion Land Survey, visited Lake O'Hara in 1890 and brought back word of O'Hara's rugged beauty, and the mountaineering community took notice. Soon after, the CPR introduced Swiss guides to attract and aid climbing activity. Initially, guides were available just during the summer months, but by 1912, the CPR had built a permanent house at Golden, BC, for the Swiss guides (Figure 1.4).
O'Hara was a spectacular place for climbing, and it would have attracted more than just climbers were it not so raw and remote.
In 1912, the first permanent cabin at O'Hara was built by the Government of Canada in the Alpine Meadow; the structure, named Wiwaxy Cabin, was intended as a way station for climbers on their way to or from the Lake Louise area via the passes (Figure 1.5).
![FIGURE 1.5: F.V. Longstaff Prints. [ca. 1930-1950]. Lawrence Grassi fonds. V240 / 11/в / PA-866 to 875. Archives and Library, Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/cd2968_34ef14e05de84d1aba3f9a5351e2ff6e~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_756,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/cd2968_34ef14e05de84d1aba3f9a5351e2ff6e~mv2.jpg)
About this same time, the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) leased two acres of land on the south shore of Lake O'Hara near Opabin Creek for use as a site for the building of a hut: this was the site of a tent camp during the summers and was a staging point for climbers. Lillian Gest wrote that there were four iron stakes and a cairn marking the spot where the ACC was to erect the hut, but that plan was not effected after the CPR donated the original Wiwaxy Cabin and the 1919 Wiwaxy Lodge to the ACC in 1931.
The ACC held its camp at O'Hara many times through the years; in 1921 it was in the Alpine Meadow and in 1925 the annual gathering was located on the ACC lease on the south shore of Lake O'Hara. MacDonald would capture this camp on canvas.
The beauty of O'Hara had been brought to the attention of a broader public by the railway painters, and perhaps most notably by John Singer Sargent who travelled from Boston to the Canadian Rockies in 1916. Sargent painted first at Twin Falls. That trip was fraught with difficulty—snow and rain made travelling hazardous, and one of the falls was not flowing—so Sargent had to settle for painting midway down the single falls. His painting, Yoho Falls, is hanging today in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
Sargent wrote to a friend that one of the tribulations of that trip was the falls pounding and thundering all night, and that he stood it for three weeks before leaving. He then travelled into O'Hara where the conditions were rustic but he declared O'Hara to be the most beautiful lake he had ever seen. His large canvas (97.5 by 116.2 cm), painted at the shore of Lake O'Hara at a place forever enshrined with the name Sargent's Point, is an artistic benchmark for this classic view of the lake.
Sargent transported this large canvas to Boston, sold it to Harvard's Fogg Museum in November of that year, and the painting remains hanging there today. It is hard to fully appreciate, at this remove, the extent to which this famous canvas may have excited tourists as well as art lovers. The timing of the CPR's commissioning of Wapta Bungalow Camp in 1921 may have been influenced by the fame of Sargent's painting in the societies of New England. At any rate, the new Wapta Bungalow Camp became, in effect, the gateway to O'Hara (Figure 1.7).
![FIGURE 1.7: Wapta Camp. [between 1903 and 1942]. Byron Harmon (Banff, Alberta). Byron Harmon fonds. v263/NA-5476. Archives and Library, Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/cd2968_52de89333ee64f999db5142dd6f2dbc3~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_616,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/cd2968_52de89333ee64f999db5142dd6f2dbc3~mv2.jpg)
The CPR could see that, to draw more visitors to Wapta and O'Hara, more amenities were needed; in 1919, a larger cabin-originally named Wiwaxy Lodge and known today as Elizabeth Parker Hut—was built beside the seven-year-old Wiwaxy Cabin at O'Hara. In 1921, the CPR operated the O'Hara Camp with these two cabins and five tents. By 1922, five small cabins were clustered around the two Wiwaxy cabins, and by 1924 the Lake O'Hara Bungalow Camp had swollen to eleven small cabins scattered in the Alpine Meadow around the two main cabins.
To further support mountaineering, in 1922, the Swiss guides completed construction of a hut at Abbot Pass.
Mountaineers could travel through O'Hara and rely on the Wiwaxy cabins, Lake O'Hara Bungalow Camp, the ACC staging area by the mouth of Opabin Creek, and the new Abbot Pass Hut high above Lake Oesa.
By this time, the CPR was ardently promoting the nascent tourism trade in the mountain parks with bungalow camps at Wapta, Lake O'Hara, Yoho Valley, Emerald Lake, Moraine Lake, Storm Mountain, Vermilion, Sinclair Hot Springs, and Lake Windermere. O'Hara was the only bungalow camp that was not accessible by vehicle. It was Wapta Bungalow Camp that eased the arduous travel needed to access O'Hara.
To further this new tourist trade, CPR offered rail passes to Canadian artists, enabling them to travel across the country to paint the Canadian landscape. The resulting images were to be used in brochures and advertisements for rail travel, grand hotels, and bungalow camps.
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Chapter Two
MacDonald's O'Hara Legacy
Lawren Harris was largely responsible for convincing MacDonald to take his first of three trips to Algoma, Ontario, in 1918. Paul Duval writes that this was "a decision that was to prove momentous for Canadian art."
It may be argued that Harris's 1924 urging for MacDonald to travel west—specifically to Lake O'Hara Bungalow Camp—was equally momentous. While the Algoma work was key to the establishment of McDonald's artistic reputation, the O'Hara work shows a renewed joy and celebration for nature.
It most clearly aroused something new in the man and the artist. It is said that there resides in each person the perfect landscape in which they are at their best. It appears that, for MacDonald, the mountains touched him as no other landscape had and his last western works from 1932 show him to be truly at the top of his game, revealing glimpses of more greatness to come. MacDonald travelled more often to O'Hara than to Algoma, Georgian Bay, or Algonquin Park.
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MacDonald was reluctant to travel west; it was his wife, Joan, who ultimately pushed him to board the train in Toronto in August 1924, courtesy of a CPR artist's pass. Four days later—after an overnight in Banff—he stepped of the train at Hector Siding, swung onto a saddle horse, and followed a guide to begin a new period in his painting life. Like many who recall their first glimpse of the Canadian Rockies, MacDonald was taken immediately by the beauty and grandness.
To continue reading To See What He Saw: J.E.H. MacDonald and the O'Hara Years 1924-1932, pick up your copy available for purchase from the Whyte Museum Book Shop in Banff, Alberta.
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