Calgary

Related Category: Canadian Political Geography

(kăl´gərē), city (1991 pop. 710,677), S Alta., Canada, at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers. The largest city in Alberta and the fastest-growing major city in Canada, Calgary is a corporate, transportation, and financial center for Canada's oil and natural gas industries. Other industries include a mushrooming high-technology sector and flour milling, meatpacking, brewing, and lumbering. The city also is a wholesale and processing center for a large agricultural and stock-raising area.

Calgary is the site of the Univ. of Calgary, the Glenbow Museum, and the second largest zoo in Canada. The Calgary Stampede, inaugurated (1912) by Guy Weadick, an American trick roper, is an annual rodeo and agricultural fair. Calgary hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics and is home to the National Hockey League's Flames and the Canadian Football League's Stampeders.

The city began (1875) as the second post of the Northwest Mounted Police and expanded with the arrival (1883) of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Calgary's early economic growth was based on the burgeoning open-range cattle industry and the opening of S Alberta to cash-crop farming. The discovery (1914) of oil at Turner Valley began an expansion that has made Calgary one of Canada's fastest-growing cities.