Recently I have become really addicted to Canadian local trade tokens. They can be found for cheap (less than $1 each, usually), and they really fit with my interest in local history. I realized that there is no good source of information for them on the Internet, so right now I am trying my best to add as many Canadian local tokens as I can to the Numista catalogue. By my estimation I have scanned and uploaded images of about 230 different tokens. (My motivation is self-interest: if there's good information on the Internet about these tokens, maybe their values will recover to the point where they trade for $5 each like they did in the 80s!) Another recent achievement was my completion of the regular series of trade tokens from Grande Prairie, Alberta (excluding a scarce brass issue from 1964). So I figured I could show off both of these accomplishments by making this post.
Grande Prairie, population 55,000, is the seventh-largest city in the province of Alberta. It is the largest city in the Peace River Country, a Northern geographical oddity - the lands around the Peace River are well-suited for prairie farming (in fact, they are apparently the world's northernmost lands suitable for growing grain), yet they are separated from the rest of agricultural North America by a thick belt of forest. This is quickly noticeable from satellite, where a glance at northern Alberta and British Columbia will reveal a strangely-shaped patch of lighter land surrounded by wild green. The city is also known for its proximity to large populations of the trumpeter swan, a bird that was hunted to near-extinction in the prairies but survived in the less-populated North.
The first few tokens are all based on the history of Grande Prairie, so the first issue starts out early on, depicting a scene from the Canadian fur trade. The desire for beaver furs in Europe was what first motivated Europeans to enter Canada's interior, and by the 1800s they had set up lightly-populated forts everywhere from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic. Like many other western Canadian towns, Grande Prairie began as a fur company trading post, established in 1880. (These posts are also responsible for some interesting and descriptive place names, like "Rocky Mountain House" - but that's a story for later)
The first pioneers faced a tough journey through the forested lands separating the Peace Country from the rest of the Canadian Prairies, but were rewarded with abundant unsettled land. This token depicts the traversing of one of many obstacles on the way to the "Mighty Peace". However, the date here seems incorrect, because the Edson Trail (linking Edson and Grande Prairie) was only opened in 1911.
The few settlers that made the brutal trip from Edson soon established a church, but the land was still mostly empty - most would-be pioneers preferred to stay nearer to Edmonton or Calgary, the province's two largest cities, thus avoiding serious inconvenience.
The first train pulled into Grande Prairie in 1916 - this was the key factor that enabled the settlement and development of the region to really take off. By 1919, Grande Prairie surpassed the magical 1,000 population mark that allowed it to be officially incorporated as a town.
The evocative phrase "la grande prairie" was attributed to a French minister, whose descriptions of the land reportedly attracted numerous settlers to the area. I don't live in the Peace Country, but I do live in a flat place and I can say that it's quite difficult to make pictures or other depictions of the flat prairies look nice - but I think this token does a great job of capturing the general look of the region, with its gentle rises and falls.
The famous Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived in 1908 - I have no idea if Grande Prairie was particularly lawless before they came, but the R.C.M.P.'s role was usually to ensure that settlement proceeded in an orderly fashion, as all kinds of people showed up to claim their piece of the mostly empty prairie. (As usual, the native peoples, some of whom had themselves fled to the Peace Country to avoid settlement further South, got shafted - but there was no large-scale violence.)
1,000 people make a town, but it takes a few thousand more to make a city. These thousands came to Grande Prairie after oil was discovered just south of Edmonton in 1947. The presence of oil turned Alberta from a mostly agrarian province into Canada's richest, as more and more petrochemicals were rapidly discovered all throughout the province (the 1947 strike was blind luck, so the surveyors wanted to make up for lost time). The economic vitality brought by oil exploration finally allowed Grande Prairie to beat out its rivals Peace River and Dawson Creek (two other major towns in the Peace Country) and file for official city status.
The boxer Willie de Wit trained in Grande Prairie, won some amateur titles, and went on to compete for Canada at the Olympics. Sports statistics aren't my strong suit, so honestly I haven't been able to figure out exactly how well he did, but he didn't get the Olympic gold (he won silver) and ended up becoming a lawyer instead. That's definitely not a worst-case scenario - I always wonder if the local personalities depicted on these kinds of things still fondly remember the time that they got their face put on a bunch of currency tokens. Maybe they just find it embarrassing, or don't remember at all.
The 1987 issue saw the abandonment of the trumpeter swan obverse and a significant time skip - no tokens were issued in 1985 or 1986. This particular token is evidence that the people of Grande Prairie do mostly the same stuff as people elsewhere in the prairies - but I didn't even know that there
were championships for chuckwagon racing. The legend "Series One" here seems to be a bit over-optimistic, because there are no subsequent similar issues.
Interestingly, these two tokens are made out of the same alloy as the loonie, the famous Canadian one dollar coin. It's a unique metal combination called "aureate bronze", and it's unique because no matter how badly you mistreat it or wear it out, it never goes dark and tarnishes. Next time you find a worn-out 1987 loonie in your change, be impressed that after nearly 30 years of mistreatment those coins are still golden-coloured - compare that to the new different-composition issues from 2012, which are already turning ugly after just 3 years.
The last Grande Prairie issue (according to the 1993 Standard Catalogue of Canadian Municipal Trade Tokens and Notes - the trade token fad was mostly over by 1993, but you can never rule out the existence of subsequent future issues) features another National Championship, this time for hot-air ballooning. I wouldn't know how hot air ballooning could be judged as a competitive sport, but I'm sure that the championship looked great from the ground. This token also commemorates the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the first settlers to Grande Prairie. The skyline below the hot air balloons is evidence - Grande Prairie has come a long way.
Many series of Canadian local tokens are somewhat incoherent, but the Grande Prairie issues definitely tell a story, and they are rendered quite artistically as well. So I am happy to be able to share them with you.
Posted 07/05/2015 09:04 am
