Acknowledgments

I first want to thank the donors who established the Imperial Oil-Lincoln McKay Chair in American Studies at the University of Calgary. Their generosity provided the resources to support my research, enabled me to share it, and allowed me to employ gifted graduate research assistants whose work contributed to these essays and other publications. Many thanks to Sean Marchetto, Laurel Halladay, Jamie Warren, Christine Bye, Tim Cole, Amy McKinney, Gretchen Albers, Andrew Varsanyi, Victoria Buckholz, Erin Millions, Stuart White, Celeste Sharp, Kayla Grabia, and Shawn Brackett for all your help. Many of these young colleagues aided with more than one lecture. Shawn Brackett, Andrew Varsanyi, and Amy McKinney continued to help as I prepared this book for publication. Laurel Halladay prepared the Index. It’s been a joy to work with all of them.

Deans Stephen Randall, Kevin Quillan, and Richard Sigurdson were gracious in their support of the Chair’s Lectures and their post-lecture hospitality. I am grateful for their support. Many thanks as well to the colleagues who provided advice and support over the years. Jeremy Mouat, Sarah Carter, Douglas Francis, Donald Smith, Heather Devine, Michel Hogue, Catherine Cavenaugh, and Sheila McManus were all enormously supportive and generous with their own research as I explored Canadian history. Jewel Spangler, Frank Towers, and Michael Tavel Clarke, fellow Americans and Americanists at the University of Calgary, shared the experience of border crossing and teaching Canadian students about the United States. Jeanne Perrault provided useful comments on an early draft of Chapter Five. Adrienne Kertzer helped me track down documents for Chapter Ten. Dr. Suzzanne Kelley, Editor in Chief of the North Dakota State University Press, provided timely assistance as this book neared publication. Heartfelt thanks to University of Calgary staff members Deborah Isaac, Karen McDermid, Marjorie McLean, Marion McSheffrey, Brenda Oslawsky, Lori Sommers, and Sarah Stevenson who made life in the History Department pleasant and who provided essential staff support for the Chair’s Lectures. Thanks as well to Ginger Rodgers and Shauna Selezinka who provided staff support for the Torches Passed and Present conference.

The audiences who attended the Chair’s Lectures energized and engaged me with their comments, insights, and stimulating questions. I am grateful to all the colleagues, students and members of the public who attended over the years. I was perpetually surprised by their interest and support, and never more so than on April 10, 2008, when I was scheduled to give my lecture on Race in America. I awoke to a heavy spring snowstorm and slogged to campus through streets clogged with wet snow, certain that I would find almost no one at the lecture when I got there. I learned a lot about Canadian endurance that day. I found a packed room, including my friends Max Foran and Gordon Fairchild who had driven over 50 kilometers from Priddis. I remain grateful and touched by the loyalists who showed up year after year, including Barbara Grant, Temple B’nai Tikvah friends Susan Podlog and Shauna Switzer, and two friends we lost too soon, Jack Switzer and Heather Foran. Don Smith, Nancy Townshend, Gordon Fairchild, and Max Foran also made the trek from Calgary to Corvallis, Oregon for the 2005 conference of the Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association, where my 2006 lecture originated as my presidential address. Then they came to hear it again in Calgary. My colleague George Colpitts offered similar support at my presidential address at the 2015 Western History Association conference in Portland, Oregon. I am grateful to everyone who showed up over the years.

My research was supported, as always, by professional archivists. I am indebted to the staffs of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; the California State Historical Society, San Francisco; the Lake Region Heritage Center, Devils Lake, ND; the Minnesota Historical Society; Library and Archives Canada; and the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. I owe an enduring debt to the late John Brennan, Director of the Western History Collections at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for trusting me as an undergraduate intern with the archives of the Western Federation of Miners/International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. That job launched my research on the Cripple Creek District and western mining labor. When I asked Dr. Brennan why he’d entrusted me with a major collection, he smiled quietly and replied, “That’s how we all learn.” I’m grateful for his trust and mentorship, and to the WHC staff who made working in their archives a pleasure over the years.

The Chair’s Lecture for Chapter One was originally prepared for “The California Gold Rush as a World Event,” a lecture series sponsored by the University of California, Sacramento to commemorate the Sesquicentennial of the California Gold Rush. After my 2000 Chair’s Lecture, it was published in Kenneth N. Owens, ed., Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), copyright 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska, and appears here by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. I am grateful to the Pacific Historical Review for granting authors permission to reprint our own work. In this case I thank them for the option to print an earlier version of Elizabeth Jameson and Jeremy Mouat, “Telling Differences: The Forty-Ninth Parallel and Historiographies of the West and Nation,” Pacific Historical Review 75:2 (May 2006) in Chapter Four and Elizabeth Jameson, “Dancing on the Rim, Tiptoeing through the Minefields: Challenges and Promises of the Borderlands,” Pacific Historical Review 75:1 (February 2006) in Chapter Five. Thanks as well to Susan Wladaver Morgan, David A. Johnson, and Carl Abbott for their editorial support (and nudges). And special thanks to Jeremy Mouat for allowing me to publish our co-authored work. Chapter Thirteen is a shortened version of my presidential address for the Western History Association conference in 2015. The full version was published as “Halfway Across That Line: Gender at the Threshold of History in the North American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 47:1 (Spring 2016). I am grateful to Oxford University Press, publisher of the Quarterly, which does not require authors to obtain permission to reprint our work. I am also enormously grateful to WHQ editor Anne Hyde and former editor David Rich Lewis for all their support, editorial and beyond.

Thanks to the Minnesota Historical Society for permission to reprint “Hidatsa Indian woman hoeing squash with a bone hoe,” and to Colin Dunn for his assistance (even on a Saturday morning). Thanks to the Institute for Regional Studies at North Dakota State University, Fargo for permission to reproduce “Emma Beske outside her homestead shack near Streeter, N.D.” and “Homestead sod shack of Ambjør Hagen, Grandfield Township, Eddy County, N.D.,” and huge thanks to John Hallberg for all his help with those images.

There is one acknowledgment I would like to make but can’t. I quoted portions of Carl Sandburg’s poem, “For You,” in Chapter Fourteen and made every effort to locate the copyright holder for the poem, without success. If I have the opportunity, I will happily acknowledge the rights holder in any future editions of this book.

The University of Calgary Press was the ideal publisher for Thresholds, Walls, and Bridges. I am grateful for the early encouragement and enduring patience of Press Director Brian Scrivener. Thanks, too, to Editorial Coordinator and organizational wonder Helen Hajnoczky; Marketing Specialist Alison Cobra, who, among much else, settled the debate about a subtitle; and Graphic Designer and cover designer extraordinaire Melina Cusano, for book design, help with the illustrations, and for a cover I love. I couldn’t have asked for better professional support.

Much of the transformation of the lectures into the manuscript I submitted to the Press occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, which created difficulties finding peer reviewers. I am especially grateful to the two thoughtful reviewers for the generous comments they provided while navigating the personal and professional stresses of the pandemic. This volume is better for their insights. Francine Michaud was a delightful colleague in the history department before we both retired and a joy to work with as a copy editor. I am especially grateful for the support of George Colpitts, editor of The West series at the University of Calgary Press, for his longstanding support of my work and of this project.

When he was nine years old, my son Daniel announced in early May, “I am not going to try to talk to you until your finals are over and your grades are in.” I was astonished that he was already so aware of the academic calendar, and sad that he had already felt its high-stress periods. I am grateful for his support, understanding, and patience through it all, including joining me in our move to Canada. My family remains my most important anchor and support. Thanks, and love to Alice Caddow, Philip Jameson, Marjorie Cypress, Ariel Caddow, Nicole Caddow, Iran Ramirez, Peter Steward, and Matthew Vinet.

Most of all, I am grateful for Daniel, Barbara, Stanley, and Spencer Lenfest-Jameson. You light my world. This is for you.