According to the Victorian writer John Ruskin (1819-1900), 

"Mountains are the beginning and the end of natural landscape ... having been built for the human race as at once their schools and their cathedrals". 

The CPR hoped that tourists would flock to the West to commune with the mountains.

After the last spike completed the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, Cornelius Van Horne, the astute General Manager, was desperate for ways to reduce the staggering debt load that resulted from the construction of the mountain rail sections. One strategy to raise revenue was to exploit the public's growing fascination with wilderness experience and mountain scenery. To service the anticipated rush of tourists, Van Horne ordered the construction of a series of hotel dining stations along the main line through the mountains. One of these was Mount Stephen House in Field which was finished in 1886 at a cost of $20,000. Its interior was executed in high Victorian style -- complete with gas lights, heavy brocades, pump organ and caged canaries. Some of the workmen building Mount Stephen House spent their free Sundays scrambling across the step slopes of the surrounding mountains. One day, a group of now-forgotten carpenters discovered abundant and well-preserved "stone bugs" high on Mount Stephen -- a locality later known simply as the Trilobite Beds. The carpenters' discovery was to have profound implications for Canadian Cambrian paleontology in the twentieth century.

These trilobites from Mount Stephen are truly spectacular. Virtually every slab on this mountainside boasts complete trilobites -- some are gleaming black and stand out sharply against the buff-coloured siltstone; others are evident by being slightly raised from the matrix in bas-relief. Ogygopsis is, by far, the most common fossil in the Trilobite Beds. This trilobite has the size and outline of a child's shoe-print and it possesses an uncommonly large tail for a Cambrian trilobite. A close second is Olenoides which has a tail fringed by spines. Charles D. Walcott, the expert on Cambrian trilobites in North America, borrowed all the collections from the Trilobite Beds and determined that these fossils were Middle Cambrian in age (500 Ma). However, he had to wait until 1907 when he became head of the Smithsonian Institution to collect from this site himself. The next year he wrote an account of the fossils of Trilobite Beds; including simple, if somewhat dated, directions on how to collect fossils at this site,

The best way to make a collection from the "fossil bed" is to ride up the trail on a pony to about 2000 feet above the railroad, collect specimens, securely wrap them in paper, place them in a bag, tie the bag to the saddle, and lead the pony down the mountain. A fine lot can be secured in a long day's trip, 6 am to 6 pm.

Don't try to follow these directions now -- a lot has changed in Yoho National Park since Walcott's time. We doubt that a pony can be obtained in Field these days and, in any case, it is illegal to collect fossils from any national park without a special permit. Regrettably, because visitors walking across the mountainside thickly covered by fossiliferous siltstone slabs have, over the years, inadvertently damaged this important site, Parks Canada has recently found it necessary to close off all access to the Trilobite Beds. Walcott continued to collect Cambrian trilobites from the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Returning to Field across Burgess Pass in August, 1909, he made the fossil discovery of his life -- the celebrated Burgess Shale fauna, but that's another story.

Further reading:

Rudkin, D.M.
1996 :  The Trilobite Beds of Mount Stephen, Yoho National Park. In Ludvigsen, R. (ed.), Life in Stone: A Natural History of British Columbia's Fossils, p. 59-68, University of British Columbia Press.