Alberta Pioneer "Storey": Ontario to Fort Macleod

By Leslie Grauer

The first family member to arrive in Alberta was Hiram Bates, a North West Mounted Police (NWMP) constable and descendent of a Loyalist family. Hiram arrived in Pincher Creek with the second police contingent in 1877. He would later marry Lizzie STOREY of Kemptville, Ontario, where he attended school with her siblings. Hiram settled near Macleod, farmed and operated businesses in town.

The second to arrive was Charles Craig and his family. Charles was the grandson of Ulster-Scot immigrants who settled in Gloucester and Carsonby, Ontario in 1820-1840. He and his wife, Jane Smirle (born in Morewood, Ontario), married in 1879, headed west in the early 1880s with two daughters in tow, one of whom was my grandmother. Charles and Jane must have been attracted by the bountiful (free) land near Fort Macleod, as the family settled there before their first son was born in 1888. The land adjacent to their property was set aside as a reserve for the Piikani (Piegan) near Brocket, thus they observed first hand some challenges the first nations people endured while adapting to Treaty 7.

By 1891, Charles’ ranch operation allowed him to hire four hands, one of them James Gordon Storey, future son-in-law. James was then 26 and his future wife, Nellie, was 11. Nellie attended school with Colonel James Macleod’s children.

Next to arrive was Samuel Hetherington, joining the NWMP in Winnipeg, posted to Fort Calgary in 1885 and becoming one of Samuel “Steele’s Scouts” for the Louis Riel Rebellion. Thereafter, he policed the completion of the C.P.R. railway and, as Staff Sergeant, led an expedition to the Yukon circa 1898, when the gold rush attracted many to the North. In 1899 in Macleod, he married Annie Storey of Kemptville. Sam’s NWMP colleague, Thomas Stockton, arrived in Alberta in1887 and also married a Storey sister, Ida Caroline, in 1898. Thomas, a carpenter by trade, helped construct the new fort at Macleod when it was moved from its original site.

Grandfather James Gordon Storey was 6’3” tall, by my father’s account, but dad may have exaggerated a bit. James was born near Kemptville, Ontario, his grandparents’ stone home built in 1838 still in the family. James’ grandparents were Robert Storey, an 1818 Scottish immigrant from Berwick, Scotland, and Peggy Woolery, daughter of a German soldier who fought with the British during in the 1776 U.S. War of Independence and a Loyalist mother. James left Ontario in the early 1880s, traveled to Iowa and Sacramento, probably earning his keep and honing his skills as a ranch hand. Our family traditions suggest that James was a skilled driver of 12 horses. By 1891, he was working in Alberta on the Craig ranch; by the 1890’s, he had obtained his own land patent near Macleod.

Hearing of the benefits of Alberta living, other Storey family members were enticed to move west in 1892. James’ mother, Mary Ann; sisters Lizzie, Annie and Ida; brothers, Herbert and William joined James in Alberta. Mary Ann also brought her father, James Main, in 1894. Having established the Renfrew Cattle Company, James married the daughter of his former employer, Nellie Craig, in 1900. After her marriage, Nellie sang and played the banjo at Macleod venues, while her “liberated” husband babysat his young sons!

It was on that ranch near Macleod that my father was born before Alberta was a province. He and his cousins were charter students of the one-room McBride Lake School, 12 miles from the ranch, today the site of a wind farm operation. Dad told stories of Jerry Potts, the Métis NWMP guide, known to his uncles, and of his many haying and other responsibilities on the ranch. He left school at age 15 to take a position as a bank clerk to help the family financially.

Today, the family Alberta ranching tradition continues and other descendents of Dad, his eight siblings and cousins are widely dispersed across Canada and the U.S.