IN THE SHADOW OF THE ROCKIES: DIARY OF THE CASTLE MOUNTAIN INTERNMENT CAMP 1915 - 1917

It is a little-known fact that during the First World War and in the immediate postwar period (1914-1920), Canadian Internment Operations imprisoned more than 8,000 individuals. The majority of those interned were civilian non-combatants, Ukrainians and other immigrants who had come to Canada from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to work in industry or to settle on western homesteads. Twenty-four receiving stations and internment camps were established across Canada. A camp at Banff/Castle Mountain operated between 1915 and 1917. More than 600 internees were put to work on various projects in Rocky Mountain Park (now Banff National Park), which was being developed at that time as Canada's first national park. The diary of the Banff/Castle Mountain camp provides detailed insight into the practice of Canada's internment policy during the First World War and reveals a unique episode in the human history of Canada's national park system.

Bohdan S. Kordan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Studies, St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. He has co-edited several documentary and essay collections on statecraft and ethnicity in Canada. Together with Lubomyr Y. Luciuk, he coauthored A Delicate and Difficult Question: Documents in the History of Ukrainians in Canada (1986). His most recent publications include Canada and the Ukrainian Question, 1939-1945 (2001), Enemy Aliens, Prisoners of War: Internment in Canada During the Great War (2002), and A Bare and Impolitic Right: Internment and Ukrainian-Canadian Redress (with Craig Mahovsky) (2004). Peter Melnycky is a research historian with Historic Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Culture and Multiculturalism. He has written extensively on the history and material culture of the early Ukrainian settlement community in Canada. His publications include Shelter, Feed and Dray: A Structural History of the Radway Livery Barn (1989) and Badly Treated in Every Way: The Internment of Ukrainians in Quebec During the First World War.