As Calgarians worry that this past weekend's white supremacist rally will reinforce their image as intolerant rednecks, they may want to recall former premier Ralph Klein's famous quote about "creeps and bums" coming to Alberta and causing trouble.

On Saturday, Calgary police had to call in reinforcements when a white-pride march organized by the Aryan Guard deteriorated into a violent melee as counter-protesters lobbed rocks and tin cans at the group.

The reputed main organizers of the Aryan Guard -- Kyle McKee and Bill Noble -- are not originally from Alberta.

Mr. McKee, an admitted neo-Nazi, is from Ontario, where he flew a swastika from his rented house in Kitchener before moving to Alberta four years ago.

Before Mr. McKee moved out of the Kitchener house, it was trashed on April 29, 2005, during a party where people smashed windows and hurled a refrigerator and a stove onto the street. During the party, giant swastikas were chalked on the street and a swastika was painted on the fridge.

The damage to the house was so extensive, it had to be condemned.

Mr. Noble, a self-professed white nationalist from B. C. now living in Alberta, is alleged to have set up two white-power Web sites. The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies issued a warning in 2007 that Mr. Noble was focusing his energies on Calgary.

One People's Project, an organization that monitors and publishes information about alleged racist organizations, has been tracking Mr. McKee and Mr. Noble and the rise of the Aryan Guard for several years.

"While there doesn't appear to be a single leader, the gang was founded by Kyle McKee primarily," the group's Canadian chapter says on its Web site. "There are some well-known Western Canadian neo-Nazis who have joined the group, first and foremost being Bill Noble."

The group says that after an arrest in Fort St. John, B. C., Mr. Noble moved to Edmonton, where he began to associate with other neo-Nazis, including Nathan Touchette.

Mr. Touchette was a roommate of Mr. McKee's at the house in Kitchener. The two told the Waterloo Record in April, 2005, that they were members of Blood and Honour, a white-power organization that took its name from the motto of the Hitler Youth, Blut und Ehre. At the time of their notoriety in Kitchener, Mr. Mc-Kee was 19 and Mr. Touchette, 26. Both drywallers, they told the paper they planed on moving to Alberta because there was more work and "a better skinhead scene."

The presence of white supremacists is nothing new to Alberta. Ku Klux Klan groups have been documented in the province dating back to the 1920s, and there was a KKK cross-burning at Provost, in eastern Alberta, in 1990. But Alberta is far from the only Canadian jurisdiction to deal with the issue.

There was a cross-burning in Moncton, N. B., in 2001, and some of Canada's most notorious figures in the white-pride movement have been from the east, including Ernst Zundel, Gary Schipper, Wolfgang Droege, Paul Fromm and George Burdi. The white-supremacist Heritage Front was also Ontario-based.

But none of this has deterred people from posting comments about the supposed intolerance of Albertans on the Web sites of various news organizations since the Aryan Guard's clash with protesters in Calgary on Saturday.