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Have you ever known a salesman who took “no” for an answer? That’s the first reason Rocky Mountain House has a well-built highway through the beautiful scenic West Country. The David Thompson Highway was named after the fur trader, surveyor and map maker. A Ford dealer named Ernie Ross, and a handful of other Rocky Mountain House businessmen did not take “no” for an answer. This group of businessmen, later known as the Trail Blazers, set out to prove to the Alberta Minister of Highways that their request to build a highway west of Rocky Mountain House on to the Banff-Jasper route was a reasonable project – one not to be dismissed off-handedly. David Thompson was an inspiration to Ernie Ross and his Trail Blazers. The surveyor and map maker had left the Rocky Mountain House trading post in 1807 on his way to find a route to the Pacific Ocean for the NorthWest Company of fur traders. Traversing the territory west from the post by canoe and on horseback, David Thompson had succeeded in climbing the Howse Pass, and marked the quickest way for travel into what is now British Columbia. Why should residents of Rocky Mountain House and other communities of central Alberta have to travel the long way around (south to Banff or north to Jasper) to get to the interior of British Columbia? That was the question that wouldn’t leave Ernie Ross alone.
There are 184 kilometers (115 miles) of forests, creeks, muskeg, rocky plains, and steep cliffs between Rocky Mountain House and the Banff-Jasper route. In the late 1920s, there were also three coal mining communities: Alexo, Saunders, and the town of Nordegg. Nordegg, although a bustling community of around 1,500 people in 1925, was only accessible by rail. But Ernie Ross had been selling cars to the hard-working families in Nordegg. In fact, he had sold 50 automobiles to them by 1930, even though they had only 2.5 miles of road within the town to drive on, and would have to pay $25 to ship their car back out to Rocky Mountain House on the train to travel anywhere else in Alberta. Twenty-five dollars was an outrageous amount in 1930 in Alberta, as the price of gas was around 10 to 15 cents a gallon.
Ernie Ross, E.S. Brett, the local hardware store owner, William Ellenburgh, the local painter, and Bill Schierholtz, the newspaper editor, as well as Bill Bradshaw, farm equipment dealer, all agreed that Rocky Mountain House should have a good road to connect their community to the tourist destinations of Banff, Jasper and even through to Golden, B
