The Store with the Pictures

Harmon Gallery and Gift-shop, ca 1920’s, photo Byron Harmon || All photographs in this scene were printed by hand in Byron’s darkroom.

Welcome to my first Mountain Tale.

My fascination with my grandfather’s photographs began when I was a young girl, growing up in Banff.

Mom and me walk downtown nearly every day. We say hi to Mr. Evans the butcher and our friend Jock McCowan in White’s Groceteria then we visit Dad and go for coffee at the Paris Tearoom. My Grampa took pictures of the mountains. He built a big building with pictures all along the top of the walls and hanging from the ceiling and up and down the posts that hold the roof up. Now Dad prints those pictures in a room with spooky red light. Grampa’s pictures tell me stories.  Like Ike Mills talking to his dog friend who has his paws on Ike’s shoulders. Ike’s stable is out back behind our store and I go there to watch his horses. There’s one picture of Ike pulling porcupine quills from his dog’s nose while he sits there with his eyes closed. He sure does love Ike. In Dad’s office there’s a big picture of Grampa wearing a cowboy hat and chaps standing with his horse in front of a teepee. Aunty Aileen says he never dressed that way but he must of cause he’s in that picture. I never met Grampa cause he died before I was born but Mom did. His ghost was sitting on the steps of his old house the first day she came to Banff. She said he just wanted to check her out. I wish his ghost would visit me.

Ike Mills with Mt. Redoubt, Banff National Park, in background, Byron Harmon, 1932

Photographs of Ike Mills and his dogs were among my favourites.

Ike Mills was a remittance man from Robin Hood Bay, Yorkshire, England. He escaped the gentrified life in favour of life in the frontier town of Banff, renting out horses for trail rides in the summer and running a dogsled business in the winter. Ike and his wife Alma, a concert cellist who he met at Banff Springs Hotel, lived in a small cabin behind the Harmons Building, a site which is now the Municipal Building and parking lot in Banff. As a young girl I loved to watch his horses.

Ike was an experienced veterinarian, who had an extraordinary rapport with his dogs. I learned this from the journal my aunt, Aileen Harmon, kept of her trip to Mt. Assiniboine with her Dad, Ike, and his dogs in 1934.

…When Ike goes to Calgary he goes down to the veterinary stables and helps with the dogs and cats. He wants to have a racing team of red setters…. Ike ran away to sea on the sailing vessel owned by his parents who told the captain (who looked like a bulldog, the worse for a scrap) to treat him rough. When he fought with another boy he had to carry water from the pail to another across the deck with a teaspoon. Caught swearing, he had to balance the capstan bar for five minutes during a heavy swell (4 in.² and 4 feet long). Deserted at Montreal and went into the bush for 17 days, chopping wood, chopped his toe off.