Oil in the Rocky Mts
You provide part of the answer in your preamble to the question: you were reading a work of fiction. Any resemblance of events and people in the book to actual events and people was" purely coincidental"- and intentional.
You say the book was published in 1947 . This fits nicely into a period when there was much excitement and interest in oil exploration in western Canada and the first big commercial oil well was struck in Leduc, Alberta in Feb 1947.
The author was probably playing in to this interest , and as a fiction writer was free to invent place names and locate them wherever he liked, even if geology was against te idea of finding oil right in the convoluted young Rocky Mountain range.
British Columbia does have some oil , but this is currently being sought offshore , and the older oil field is north east of the mountain zone in the Peace River area around Fort Saint John
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