Charles Ora Card: Founder and Colonizer

Photo of Charles Ora Card, the founder of the town of Cardston, Alberta, the first Mormon settlement in Canada. He has been referred to as "Canada's Brigham Young".

When Charles Ora Card first stepped foot in Canada in 1886 he was a refugee from religious persecution in the United States but he didn’t come to claim refugee status. He came to find land for others like himself, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who were being arrested for the practice of plural marriage in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming in the 1880’s. After a quick trip into British Columbia and then to Calgary in the North West Territories (Alberta after 1905) he was directed to go down to the Southwestern part of the country to find the mountains and grazing land he was searching for. The land sat on the South border of the Treaty 7 Nation and just a few miles north of the International boundary of Canada and the United States.

The following year in May 1887 he returned with a small number of men and women to make a land claim, plant gardens, crops, and lay out a community along the Lee Creek. On June 7th the rest of the first company arrived being eight families. These men, women and children all had pioneering experience and came prepared to stay and build up a settlement in their new country. They worked together to see all were housed before winter arrived, each family building a 15 by 15-foot log home to shelter them from the winter snows and cold. After all were housed, they could add on to the home as needed. Card was the ecclesiastic leader and later the first mayor of Card’s Town. From this settlement within just a few years nine other settlements within a 20 miles radius sprang up as more immigrants came from the USA.