The pioneers of Little Chicago included my mother-in-law, Barb Coutts, and her mother, Kitty Leman. Kitty and her husband, Pete, both immigrants from Britain, were trying to farm with little success in Agassiz, British Columbia, when more than 20 wells sprang up in Little Chicago, their flares lighting the town. Kitty, with her daughter in tow, arrived to capture some of the money sloshing around with a cook wagon that catered to oil workers.

Pete eventually quit farming, was named postmaster and set up an adjacent store. The opening of the post office, apparently on orders from Ottawa, brought an end to the Little Chicago name. The official replacement was Royalties.

Today Royalties isn’t even a ghost town, it has vanished. While a few pump jacks still buck up and down in the area, Leduc changed the equation and the town gradually withered away, its buildings knocked down or hauled away. Alongside Highway 22, uphill from Longview is its only remnant: a memorial cairn topped by a miniature derrick and surrounded by photographs from the glory days, including one of Pete’s store and post office, and interpretive panels.

Aside from a brief spell in Calgary during the mid-1950s, Barb went on to live most of her life in Ontario before her death in 2000. But her name still lives on in the foothills even if her onetime hometown doesn’t. On the back of the cairn she is listed, as Barb Leman, among the people who attended the Royalties’ long vanished school before serving in World War II.

Trans Canada