An Interpretation

James G MacGregor: Edmonton's Mr. History
by Lawrence Herzog

The discovery of an arrowhead on his parent's homestead near Westlock stoked in James G. MacGregor as fascination with natural and human history that was to shape the next eight decades of his life. Trained as an electrical engineer, MacGregor went on to write 20 books on the history of the west, becoming our city's best known and most published chronicler of the past.

More than 25 years after it was last published, MacGregor's account of our city called "Edmonton: A History" remains the most definitive chronological historical sketch of our city's birth and growth. His remarkable ability to see the people he wrote about makes the stories come alive with humanity, passion and insight. Perhaps his own humble beginnings have something to say about that because his family's story is like that of thousands of immigrants who came to this country early in the century, drawn by opportunity and the promise of a better future.

James Grierson MacGregor was born in 1905 in Dornoch, Scotland. The family - little Jim and his mother and father - emigrated to Canada just a year later and settled 12 miles from Westlock. MacGregor wrote about those early days in North-West of Sixteen, a book published in 1958 and which was his most personal work and, in later years, he regarded as his best book.

Originally, MacGregor had decided to be a Methodist missionary but at St. Stephen's College in Edmonton he fell in with a group of boys all bound for engineering, and so that's where he went, too. He graduated from the University of Alberta in 1929 and went onto a career in the electrical industry, serving 25 years with Canadian Utilities. In 1952, he was appointed Chairman of the newly formed Alberta Power Commission - a post he held until his retirement in 1970.

How he found time to research and write, while raising a family and juggling the responsibilities of the job, is beyond me. His first book was Blankets and Beads, published in 1949, and which he wrote at the urging of his wife Frances who told him that, after travelling around the prairies for so many years, he knew more about the fur trade than anyone else and should pen a book.

The volume was a hit and it paved the way for more to come, including The Land of Twelve Foot Davis (1952), A History of Alberta (1972), Father Lacombe (1975) and, of course Edmonton A History, first published in 1967. His works were among the first Alberta history books to be written for the reader, not the historian, and they made history accessible to a whole new audience.