Drumheller

Drumheller takes its name from Samuel Drumheller, who bought the homestead of Thomas Patrick Greentree in the Red Deer River valley, had it surveyed as a townsite and put the lots on sale in 1911, the same year he began mining coal nearby. The railway arrived in 1912, and the settlement became a village in 1913, a town in 1916 and a city in 1930. Coal fuelled spectacular growth: the population rose from 312 in 1916 to almost 3,000 in 1931, and mining camps and hamlets spread along the valley at Rosedale, Wayne, East Coulee, Midland, Nacmine and Newcastle. Drumheller became the largest coal-producing city in western Canada.

The Bleriot Ferry began carrying traffic across the river in 1913, and in 1931 the Star Mine suspension bridge was built so that miners could walk to work. The boom lasted until the end of the Second World War, when coal lost most of its value. The Atlas Coal Mine in East Coulee, worked from 1936, was among the last, closing in 1979, the year the site of the old Midland mine became a provincial park.

Fossils gave the valley a second life. The provincial government announced a palaeontology museum in 1981, and the Tyrrell Museum opened in Midland Provincial Park in 1985, gaining its royal title in 1990. In 1998 the city merged with the surrounding Municipal District of Badlands No. 7, absorbing the old mining hamlets and becoming Alberta's largest town by land area, and the valley is often called Dinosaur Valley.

Dinosaurs are the town's identity. The local stretch of the Red Deer River valley, about 2 kilometres wide and 28 kilometres long, is known as Dinosaur Valley, and the badlands' exposed layers of rock are rich in fossils. The Royal Tyrrell Museum is both a public museum and a research institution, and finds are still made by chance: in 2020 a boy hiking in Horseshoe Canyon discovered a dinosaur fossil 69 million years old. The 26-metre fibreglass Tyrannosaurus rex by the river, which visitors can climb inside, is a landmark of the town.

The mining past is the other strand of local memory. The Atlas Coal Mine, a National Historic Site with Canada's last standing wooden coal tipple, preserves the working life of the valley, and the suspension bridge and the hamlets along the Hoodoo Trail keep the names of old mines and camps.

Each July the Canadian Badlands Passion Play, a staging of the life of Jesus, runs for two weeks in the Badlands Amphitheatre, its home since 1991. Life is otherwise that of a prairie town: friendly, informal and quiet once the summer visitors have gone.

The town had 7,909 people at the 2021 census, a little fewer than five years earlier, spread across the main townsite and the former hamlets along the valley. Tourism is now the main industry, drawing day-trippers from Calgary and summer families to the museum, the canyons and the town's campgrounds, pools and spray park. A federal prison and a regional medical complex are large employers, and natural gas and oil have replaced coal among the resource industries; the town has said it wants to move towards renewable energy such as wind power.

Life follows the tourist calendar. Summer brings full motels, busy restaurants and traffic on the Dinosaur Trail; the ferry stops for the winter, many seasonal businesses close and the town returns to its own quieter routines. The steep, narrow valley shapes everything, from the long strung-out layout of the town along the river to the roads that climb out of it on to the farmland of the plains above.

Drumheller's food is that of small-town Alberta rather than anything distinctive to the valley. Steakhouses and pubs serve Alberta beef, the province's pride, alongside sandwiches, burgers and pub food, and family restaurants and diners line the highway south of the river for travellers heading to and from the museum.

The wider Alberta table appears here too: perogies, the potato and cheese dumplings brought by Ukrainian settlers, cabbage rolls and kielbasa sausage at church suppers and community events, and pies and jam made with saskatoon berries, the small purple fruit of the prairies. Bison is farmed in the province and turns up as burgers and steaks.

For a day on the trails most visitors pack a picnic, since there are few places to eat between the sights on the Dinosaur Trail and the Hoodoo Trail. A drink in one of the town's pubs at the end of a hot day in the badlands is the local habit.