Frontier Cattle Ranching in the Land and Times of Charlie Russell (review) (original) (raw)
Related papers
University of Calgary Press, 2015
to embrace strikingly similar cultural and agricultural ways though they operated a world apart and under very different ecological, climatic, and topographical pressures. To elaborate on the latter statement is, one hopes, to make a worthwhile contribution to both Canadian and Australian scholarship. Over a century ago, Frederick Jackson Turner in America and, later, Russell Ward in Australia, argued that conditions in a frontier region brought a deterioration in the traditions to which migrating people had been accustomed in their original society. 1 This stimulated new ideas and values that deeply affected the way they went about their day-today lives. In its most fundamental form, the two men's common thesis is simply that frontiers alter human behaviour. With respect to the early grazing industry in each of these countries, that line of reasoning is beyond doubt. 2 But in demonstrating that early Anglo society in their West was not merely an expansion of that society found in the United States, Canadian ranching historians have tended to employ a metropolitan analysis that stresses the predominance of Eastern laws, legal agencies, and culture. 3 Down under, ever since Henry Reynolds estimated in 1981 that over one hundred fifty years European invaders killed some twenty thousand Aborigines, researchers have been examining the process whereby indigenous societies were dispossessed of their territory. 4 Some have disputed Reynolds's findings, igniting in the process a heated battle about both numbers and blame. 5 The ensuing controversy has encouraged frontier scholars to concentrate almost exclusively on race. The present study attempts to illustrate how a wide range of "New World" conditions in both countries affected the lives of the first ranchers and gave them a common set of challenges that, for a time at least, they handled in much the same way. At the operational level, this is discernible in the ranchers' adoption of the so-called "Texas system" to work their herds. 6 That system was the most basic, unrefined, and extensive form of agricultural production in existence. Anglo-Americans originally embraced it after the annexation of Texas from Mexico in 1845. 7 Like the Mexican graziers before them, the Anglo cattlemen allowed their stock to "range indiscriminately over a large surface of country, thirty, forty, and even fifty miles in extent." 8 Key to the system was low costs. 9 Huge spreads of tens of thousands of acres were established with little more capital expenditure than what was required to build the most rudimentary facilities for the cattle and some
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2017
father (his daughter Jennifer Surridge co-edits these diaries-a Herculean endeavour); he was a devoted husband. He also noted with cute acronym every instance of sexual congress with his wife, Brenda, and rated each act with one word (''admirable,'' ''surprising,'' etc.). At the end of each year he tallied up his performances and explained any falling off (partner away on vacation, intermittent bouts of impotence). His bigotries and prejudices abound (the Irish, Jews, etc.), some excusable for the times, but not all. In a period of increasing demand for women's equality, he refused to admit females to Massey College (this was the early 1960s, not the mid-nineteenth century). But then, Robertson Davies always suffused himself with an anachronistic air, with the high-Victorian tilt to the prophetically bearded visage declaiming graphically his stubborn allegiance to English literature's greatest century, even if the time had passed-most unfortunate-some hundred years earlier. Davies could always turn a phrase, delight with a stentorian sentence, but there are too few in these selections from the many sorts of diary he kept. These records are more mundane reports than revelatory musings, and much is pedestrian, even boring. The stretches of tedium can still be interesting generally for the picture they paint of the thoroughly Anglo-Canadian culture of mid-twentieth century. The insider portraits of the members of the highly influential, and somewhat dilettantish, Massey family also recommend a sporadic reading. But mainly these diary excerpts will be of interest to those readers who have the desire and time to learn a lot more about three things: the vicissitudes of the staging, touring, and precipitous closing on Broadway of the Guthrie-directed dramatization of Salterton's second novel, Leaven of Malice; the founding and furnishing of Massey College; and the daily Robertson Davies 1959-1963.
Looking Beyond Border Lines: North America's Frontier Imagination
2017
American territorial borders have undergone significant and unparalleled changes in the last decade. They serve as a powerful and emotionally charged locus for American national identity that parallels the historical idea of the frontier. But the concept of the frontier, so central to American identity throughout modern history, has all but disappeared in contemporary representation while the border has served to uncomfortably fill the void left in the spatial imagination of American culture. This book focuses on the shifting relationship between borders and frontiers in North America, specifically the ways in which they have been imaged and imagined since their formation in the nineteenth century and how tropes of visuality are central to their production and meaning. Looking Beyond Border Lines links ongoing discussions in political geography and visual culture in new ways to demonstrate how contemporary American borders exhibit security as a display strategy that is resisted and undermined through a variety of cultural practices.
The Social Fabric of the American West
The Historian, 2004
SINCE THE EARLY 1990s-and the appearance of several important overviews and manifestos in western and frontier history-there has been an impressive surge of high-quality historical scholarship. When I accepted David Wrobel's assignment to write an essay taking stock of the field, I should have realized what a challenge it would be. Although I spent the late 1990s reading a good deal of new work-in preparation for a revision of Robert V. Hine's survey of frontier history-looking back at the last dozen years of book reviews in the Western Historical Quarterly is a sobering reminder of how difficult it is to keep up. So I must begin with a caveat. This review does not pretend to objectivity. Not only are there new books I haven't read, but I am also partial to some topics over others. I count myself among those who take a frontiers approach to the study of western history. Other historians adopt a more strictly regional perspective, but I'm fascinated not only with the trans-Mississippi West but all the "wests" that preceded it. Migration, dispossession, resettlement, the creation of markets, the construction of ethnic labor systems, metropolitan growth: for me these subjects and themes are part of the larger story of the colonization of native North America by peoples from elsewhere. I continue to believe that the creative tension between a frontiers and a regional perspective greatly enlivens our field. Rue the day orthodoxy prevails. 1 One of the notable things about western history at the beginning of the new century is the prominence of ethnic history, close studies of the many different peoples and cultures that made up the social fabric. Consider the ethnohistories of Indian peoples and nations. One of the most notable is Frederick E. Hoxie's Parading through History (1995), which details the transition of the Crow people of south-central Montana from nomadic to reservation life. Employing field work as well as traditional research in archival collections, Hoxie narrates the Crows'