Ozada

Ozada

Ozada: A short-lived coal mining dream on the wind-swept barren flats.

Life's pleasures were simple during Bryan Fleming's earliest years. He was five-years-old when his father Vince moved his family from Nordegg's alpine wilderness in Alberta's Big West County to the barren flats at Ozada, a new mining community inside the Stoney Indian Reserve at the confluence of the Kananaskis and Bow valleys. Although the towering Rocky Mountains south and west of Ozada provided spectacular viewscapes, Fleming's immediate new home appeared desolate and remote.

Calgary was 80 kilometres to the east. The Trans-Canada Highway was not yet built. Children had to travel five kilometres west to get to a one-room school in Seebe. There was no television. Radio reception was poor. There were no playgrounds. There was only the Bow River, a few kilometres north, to drop in a fishing line, and the vast flat expanses of the reserve to allow for late afternoon, after school horse rides. The winds constantly howled, blowing frantically across the flats, causing children and adults alike to twist, grimace and seek refuge behind any meager form of cover that could be found along the barren landscape in and around Ozada.

"One of my sisters played piano. Frequently kids just gathered up in our house and sang," said Fleming, a retired Calgary engineer now living in Canmore. "But Ozada was a mining town and there was a lot of partying." With the exception of the passing trains and truckers who hauled coal into Ozada from Ribbon Creek, almost nobody visited. For some, Ozada and the nearby flats were already God-forsaken places

Bryan Fleming at his former home.

Three kilometres southwest of the site, an abandoned Second World War German prisoner-of-war camp was eerily silent, except when the winds swept fiercely over
the flats, and mournfully wailed.

Ozada Second World War German prisoner-of-war camp in 1943, about four kilometres southwest of the Ozada townsite. The camp was in operation for less than a year during 1943 and 1944 to house German prisoners captured in the Africa campaigns. They were then transfered to camps near Lethbridge.
Photo courtesy of Rafter Six Resort Ranch.

Barbed wire remnants at the former German prisoner of war camp.

Stones mark the entrance way to a prisoner-of-war
tent entrance at the site of
the former German Second World War camp, three kilometres southwest of the Ozada townsite. The camp was in operation for nine months in 1943 and 1944.

A cement foundation, probably from one of the guard towers, at the Second World War camp.

Although Ozada was remote and desolate, entrepreneurs in far away places had big dreams for the distant settlement. In fact, their dreams went as far back as the turn of the 20th century when an ambitious German businessman named Martin Cohn was singing the praises of the Nordegg coal fields, the prime venture of Toronto-based Brazeau Collieries.

Bryan Fleming searching for coal briquettes at Ozada's long abandoned mine tipple site.

Cohn, who later legally changed his last name to Nordegg, was the leading figure behind Brazeau, a company which had also secured the coal mining rights in the Ribbon Creek area of Kananaskis Valley. The Nordegg coal fields were developed decades before Ribbon Creek. But in 1947, Brazeau, under its subsidiary company, Kananaskis Exploration and Development Company, finally began operations at Ribbon Creek.

Even after nearly half a century since Ozada's operations closed, coal still litters the service road leading up to the tipple's ramp where trucks from Ribbon Creek would dump off their loads of coal.

Although a mine and a townsite sprang up, Ribbon Creek, also known as Kovach, had no tipple or processing plant. As well, there was no railroad. It was decided to haul the coal out by truck and process it at Ozada, then only a train whistle stop on the Stoney Indian Reserve. To get operations going at both Ribbon Creek and Ozada, Brazeau transferred many of its Nordegg employees, including Vince Fleming, who ran Ozada's scale house near the tipple and processing plant.

Above and below right: Ozada's tipple in 1959. Photos courtesy of Verda McAffer

Bryan Fleming at a tipple ruin.

A long coal slag pile stretches into the horizon towards the Rocky Mountains in the northwest.

Above, right and below left: Ozada's tipple was demolished in the early 1970s.

A fallen wooden building near Ozada's tipple site.

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