Father Pierre Jean DeSmet, a Belgian-born missionary, travelling just to the west of Crowsnest Pass in 1845 wrote prophetically:

"the quarries and forests appear inexhaustible, and having remarked large pieces of coal along the river, I am convinced that this fossil could be abundantly procured. What would this now solitary and desolate land become under the fostering hand of civilization?"

Indeed he was not wrong, the coalfields of the Crowsnest contain reserves that run to the billions of tonnes and by the end of the nineteenth century their time had come.