A nostalgic piece of prose written by one of the Lovat Scouts about their time in Jasper and the Mountain Motors Fire."The Drugstore Commandos"by Sydney Scoggie (May 29, 1976)The main body of the Scouts then arrived in January, to take up residence round the shores of a frozen Lac Beauvert in a Jasper Park Lodge stripped for this purpose…The Scouts were made welcome in Jasper. The townsfolk found room for all 600 of them when they were off duty. And when they were not eating cinnamon toast with their hosts, getting to know their daughters, or yarning with exiled Scots like the Watsons, there was the Chaba cinema, Big Jan's skating rink, Olsen's drugstore with Doreen, and when their monthly ration came round, the liquor store. Given more beer and whiskey this Jasper would have been heaven on earth, bathed in sunshine, lit with stars, and having the best property of all from the soldier's viewpoint, remoteness from the battlefront. Scouts look back on those days, for all the hard work, as the happiest time of their lives…The Scouts did not think of themselves as defenders of Democracy or anything fancy like that. They left notions like that to the Oban Times, copies of which arrived with the mail from home. They thought of themselves as the Drugstore Commandos, and far from pining for the hardships of the bush they preferred sitting on stools in Olsen's drugstore drinking coffee, listening to the juke box, and chatting up the alluring Doreen who worked there. Also the local Mountie was so often there that he seemed to have no other function in the town. It was alleged that the Lovat Scout Squadron Leaders ingratiated themselves with Doreen by scrubbing her floors in the evenings. At least one of the Scouts married into the town…EpilogueA fire which gutted a Jasper garage, causing concern to the Chinese proprietor of the Monceau café next door, may be seen either as an act of God or a Freudian accident, seeing that it was started by a primus stove on which the Lovat Scout storemen were brewing tea. It was a common sight to see a column of steam rising into the air from some railroad locomotive, there to turn pink in the sun. Now it was a thick, black cloud that rose in the air under which much of the Regiment's stores were destroyed. It is reported that a 48 set was thrown out of the burning building and rolled onto the road. A regimental signaller kicked it back again. "Get back where you belong," he said.The glory of the Scouts' arrival in Jasper was equalled by the ignominy of their departure. Perhaps some Scout did it, thinking to escape the law in the imminent departure of the Regiment, perhaps it was a citizen of Jasper who hoped suspicion would fall on the Scouts, but a jeweller's shop was burgled on the eve of the Scout's entrainment for the east and valuables stolen. Assisted by senior officers of the Regiment the local Mountie had the boys paraded on the railroad platform and searched. The valuables were not found, and the crime remains one of the unsolved mysteries of Alberta.