William Adolph Baillie Grohman (April 1, 1851 – February 11, 1921) was an Anglo-Austrian author[1] of works on the Tyrol and the history of hunting, a big game sportsman, and a pioneer in the Kootenay region of British Columbia.
Grohmann was born in 1851 in Gmunden, the eldest son of Adolf Rheinhold Grohmann (1822–1877) and Francis Margaret 'Fanny' Reade (1831–1908). He spent much of his youth in Tyrol in Austria, and could speak Tyrolese dialect like a native. His early years were spent at the Schloss von St. Wolfgang in the Salzkammergut, which had a famous garden. His father had mental breakdown and in 1861 had to be committed to an asylum. He was educated by private tutors and at Elizabeth College, Guernsey. In 1873 his mother bought the semi-derelict Schloss Matzen in the Tyrol, near the branch of the Zillertal and the Inn Valley.[2] As a young man Grohmann roamed out from the family castle to hunt chamois and deer in the surrounding high alps, wandering for days through the still-remote Tyrolese mountain villages. His two earliest books, Tyrol & the Tyrolese (1876) and Gaddings with a Primitive People (1878), provide a rare first-hand insight into Tyrolese folk customs and the austere, isolated existence of pre-industrial Alpine village communities. He was an expert mountaineer and made the first winter ascent of the Großglockner, the highest mountain in Austria (3798m), on 2 January 1875,[3] and was a member of the Alpine Club. He is credited as being one of the first to introduce skis to the Tyrol, having been sent four pairs by his father in law, the railway magnate Tom Nickalls, who had a hunting lodge in Norway – he started using them in 1893, as is related in an article in The Field in 1937,[4] by his daughter Olga, who herself became an early member of the Innsbruck Ski club. The article in The Field includes photographs of WABG's wife Florence on skis in 1894 – the earliest known photograph of a woman on skis in the alps. Skis were also introduced to the Tyrol the same year at Kitzbuhl[5] by Franz Reisch.
A crack shot and a passionate big-game hunter, he travelled out to the American West many times the 1870s and 1880s to shoot big game when the Rockies and mountain states were opening up to sportsmen. His book Camps in the Rockies (1882) gives an account of his travels through Wyoming and Idaho, both as a "topshelfer" (a rich comfort-laden sportsman) and later on – more to his boyhood taste of stalking with Tyrolean mountain huntsmen – roughing it with trappers and Native Americans. Although written in a style of detached amusement to entertain armchair Victorian readers, this work, like his earlier books about the Tyrolese, has careful and sympathetic passages on American Indian and local customs, and gives a valuable first-hand account of the American and Canadian West just before and after the arrival of the railway. He ranged widely over the Pacific Slope and the Central Rockies and explored unclimbed peaks in the Selkirks.
Baillie Grohman liked the new country he found so much that he returned to British Columbia in the 1880s as a pioneer, investing through the Kootenay Company Ltd, a London registered company which obtained a concession of 78525acres to develop the Upper and Lower Kootenay valleys.[6] The company was capitalised at £100,000.00 in 20,000 shares of £5 each, (roughly $1,000,000 at the time)mostly raised in Ottowa.[7] [8] He wrote a number of articles for British magazines promoting the possibilities of British Columbia.[9] In his youth he had seen how the embankment of the Inn River in the lower Inntal had turned unproductive flood land into profitable farmland and so envisaged that a similar control of the Kootenay River and a lowering of the water levels of the Kootenay Lake would create large areas of fertile farmland. This plan was thwarted by political pressure from the Canadian Pacific Railway and others,[10] [11] who managed ultimately to get the concession revoked and awarded to rival interests. Probably his restless and outspoken temperament and privileged background was not well suited to the political manoeuvring needed to mollify the Provincial Colonial Administration and counter the machinations of the CPR and other interests.
Before the concession was revoked the Kootenay Company was held to one of the conditions of its grant – that it must build a canal to connect the Columbia River and Kootenay and William Adolph Baillie-Grohman. The canal,[12] [13] took a massive investment and because of the railway, was pointless (only two ships ever used it) and the project failed.[14] It is now a historic site at Canal Flats, British Columbia. [15]