Thisbeautifulvalleywas named afterthe nineteenth-centuryexplorerandhunter David Jackson. Afterhespentawinterinthearea, hisfriendsstartedtocall it "Jackson's Hole."
Entrepreneurs and con men sunk dozens of wells around Fort McMurray in the second half of thenineteenth century. (One enterprising German immigrant who claimed to have struck oil apparently poured the stuff down thehole himself.) Eventually, it became clear that there was no oil, and attention turned to mining the bitumen.