4 Telling Differences: The 49th Parallel, the West, and the Histories of Two Nations
November 4, 2003
With Jeremy Mouat
One of the pleasures of working at the University of Calgary was the opportunity to talk with Canadian colleagues about our respective Wests. Histories that speak across national borders require knowing the histories on both sides, recognizing that different stories, symbols, and social languages connect national identities. My first piece of that ongoing project compared how frontiers, borders, and the West have functioned in the histories and national identities of two nations. This was risky: I was comparing histories of the U.S. West, which I know well enough to know how much I don’t know, with Canadian histories that most Canadians knew better than I. Such a comparison requires conversations and collaborations across intellectual and international boundaries.
This essay began with one such conversation when I met my colleague Jeremy Mouat at the 1991 Mining History Association conference and we chatted about our respective work on western gold-mining communities.1 Dr. Mouat, with typical efficiency and generosity, began sending me articles about western Canada that soon stretched a rapidly expanding file, at first labeled simply “Mouat.” Eventually, our conversations led to a joint article from which, with Dr. Mouat’s kind permission, my lecture and now this essay were drawn. Portions of this essay were written by each of us, but those portions were not simply assigned by our countries of birth—I wrote some of the sections on Canadian historians and Jeremy wrote some on American historians.
The lecture came while we were still working on the article. It was rapidly getting longer and denser in response to editors’ requests, and it benefited from audience responses to my lecture.2 I focused in 2003 on some histories that might illuminate comparative and transborder Wests. More than defining the debates about frontiers, regions, and identities in both countries, I wanted to suggest their contours and the challenges of the historical borderlands, where the histories of states intersect the histories of people, economies, and ecologies. I began with three images to suggest the challenges and potential of this project.
* * *
Few images better reveal the arbitrary nature of the border between Western Canada and the western United States than those recorded by the survey crews who first marked the 49th Parallel. Both the photographs taken by the British photographer and the paintings of the “Official Artist” assigned to the American survey party show a rough-cut running in an unnaturally straight line through forests and over hills, off into the distance. Nothing but the surveyed boundary separates the land on either side of the border.
We might contrast this image with a scene from John Sayles’ film, Lone Star, a film that is all about borders, national, social, and personal.3 At one point, Sheriff Sam Deeds, played by Chris Cooper, crosses the Texas border into Mexico in search of information. He approaches El Rey de las Llantas (the King of the Tires). “You’re the sheriff of Rio County, right?” says El Rey. “Un jefe muy respectado” (a very respected leader). El Rey leans over and draws a line in the dirt with a Coke bottle. “Step across this line,” he says. “Ay, que milagro!” (ay, what a miracle!) “You’re not the sheriff of nothing anymore. Just some Tejano with a lot of questions I don’t have to answer. A bird flying south, you think he sees this line? Rattlesnake, javalina, whatever you got. You think halfway across that line they start thinking different? Why should a man?”
The Sheriff replies, “Your government’s always been pretty happy to have that line. The question’s just been where to draw it.”
To which El Rey responds, “My government can go fuck itself. And so can yours. I’m talking about people here. Men.”4
And a final image: an aerial photograph of the Milk River crossing the 49th Parallel, which illustrates that a bird flying north can in fact see the U.S./Canadian border, etched through different patterns of land use and property division in only a bit over a century since the Boundary Commission drew the line across the continent. People rather than nature created the differences on either side of that line. And some of those people were historians.
The 49th Parallel became a border in the 19th century, as the British and American governments divided the territories over which each claimed sovereignty. The agreement following the War of 1812 formally recognized the parallel as a border from the Great Lakes to the Rockies. West of there, the two states simply agreed to a vague “joint occupation.” The 1846 Oregon Treaty extended the border along the 49th Parallel to the Pacific, and around the southern tip of Vancouver Island. The border, however, remained dynamic, and for over a decade unmapped, as two emerging nation states sought to assert control over the enormous western territories they claimed.5
Authority flowed from east to west, but traffic flowed in all directions. People traveled north or south across the border, seeking asylum or economic opportunity; the line held particular significance for each border crosser. These tensions would be written in competing narratives that emphasized east/west or north/south axes of economies and migration, and, more recently, in comparative and borderlands histories.
The various contested meanings assigned to the border emphasize that neither states nor national identities are fixed or absolute, but are historically constructed, and re-constructed.6 In Canada and the United States, frontier, region, and a common border have shaped different histories and different identities, as historians participated in that process of telling the differences.
* * *
The Canadian and U.S. Wests share a crucial similarity: the incorporation of western Canada and the American West within transcontinental states during the 19th century was in both cases a deliberate nation-building exercise and was recognized as such. The processes of national expansion differed, however.
The United States gained Britain’s land east of the Mississippi River in 1783, at the end of the Revolutionary War. Within seventy years, the new nation stretched to the Pacific Ocean and claimed all the territory that became the forty-eight contiguous states, acquiring this vast area through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Treaty of Oregon with Britain the following year, the Mexican-American War which secured the northern third of Mexico in 1848, and the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. The purchase of Alaska from Russia followed in 1867, and, finally, the claim to Hawaii in 1898. The phrase “Manifest Destiny” hardly explains this process that imprinted U.S. history and imagination with images of inexorable westward expansion.
Canadian histories followed different trajectories, reflecting both the processes of state formation and of national imagination. The fur trade, for instance, drew Europeans to both Wests long before Canadian Confederation or U.S. independence, but it has figured more prominently in Canadian histories, thus starting the narrative further west from the beginning. The isolated and distinct colonies of British North America did not go through the unifying process of a revolutionary war. Thus, Anglo-Canadians could celebrate the virtues of a civilization transported from Britain to North America, while American historians, represented most formatively by Frederick Jackson Turner, sought to explain what—besides a war—separated the United States from Europe.7
* * *
Frontiers, borderlands, regions, and the border itself have been defined differently over time, and across internal and national boundaries. U.S. historians have generally distinguished frontiers from borders. The Canadian border did not fit U.S. understandings of frontiers, formalized in 1893 by Frederick Jackson Turner, for whom a paucity of White people defined frontiers and divided savagery from civilization. In 1892, the U.S. Census Bureau fixed a frontier line of Euro-American density “beyond which the country must be considered as unsettled”; similarly, the Superintendent of the Census declared the frontier closed in 1890 because there was no longer an unbroken line of settlement with two or fewer Euro-Americans per square mile—which is how he defined the frontier. As soon as there was a square mile with three or more Euro-American settlers, by this definition the frontier ceased to exist.8
In contrast, frontiers in Canadian historiography have often been defined in the European sense of borders, particularly geographic borders that separate regions as well as nations. Geography in part divided the Canadian West(s) into prairie and British Columbia, a division that avoids the messy debates about the precise borders of the West in U.S. historiography, or efforts to fit the Pacific Northwest into a region that explorers and historians defined by aridity.9 Canada’s frontiers have been drawn by geography. In the words of J. M. S. Careless: “The unrelenting granite of the Precambrian Shield straddled the midst of the country, not the richly fruitful Mississippi Basin, agrarian heartland of the United States. Agricultural frontiers that loomed so large in Turnerian perspectives were in no way as predominant in the vistas of the north.”10
The border, however, was. The 49th Parallel looms large in Canadian imagination, dividing what is and is not Canadian.11 The border functions much as the frontier did in Turner’s history, as the line that divides American cultural savagery from Canadian civilization.12
Specific understandings of national origins and colonial relationships led to distinct notions of frontier and region in the two countries. These distinctions are reflected in differences in the historical narratives that are our national creation stories. If a creation story explains, often in mythic terms, how a people come to a place and claim it as their own, then Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis became the creation story of the U.S. nation state, not simply describing its expansion but also providing an ideological basis for it. No precise equivalent exists in Canada, since the frontier never “explained” Canada as Turner claimed it explained the first phase of American history.
Turner’s frontier thesis, arguably the most stubbornly influential work of any historian, identified a succession of westward-moving frontiers as the seedbeds of American character and institutions. Americans’ ongoing encounters with a series of frontiers made America different from Europe, created individualism and democracy, and forged the crucible in which European immigrants formed not a mosaic but a “composite nationality.”13 Turner’s frontiers marked the progress of Manifest Destiny and justified the conquest of occupied land through late-19th-century assumptions about the nature of progress. These frontiers—the dividing lines between “savagery and civilization”—moved inexorably from east to west, occupied by an equally inexorable sequence of Indian traders, hunters, soldiers, ranchers, miners, and farmers.14 Turner recognized that this process was colonial, that with each frontier the U.S. claimed the continent. American history, he announced in 1893, was “in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”15
Turner considered himself a U.S. historian, not a historian of the frontier or the West. He provided an early conceptual road map for American historians, to be challenged, refuted, refined, and re-defined. In Canadian historiography, there is no canonical figure of quite the same stature or confidence, arguing with the same simplicity.
Harold Innis is perhaps the closest Canadian equivalent, largely for The Fur Trade in Canada, published in 1930. As the expansion of American investment, American capital, and American culture through radio and motion pictures was of growing concern to many Canadians, Innis attacked the frontier thesis and called for “a philosophy of economic history or an economic theory suited to Canadian needs.”16 The Fur Trade in Canada elaborated his staples thesis, which argued that Canada had natural and inevitable borders, and that a logic explained its existence and its growth. The fur trade was one of a series of staple industries, the specific conditions of which dictated the form and character of Canadian development, including its territorial expanse. As Innis summarized, “The present Dominion emerged not in spite of geography but because of it.”17 The Canadian West provided staple raw materials to be developed by eastern and foreign capital. Persistent inequalities, therefore, marked the relationship between the West and central Canada.18
Both Innis and Turner located key resources, whether free land or staples, at the heart of national development; each assumed a hierarchy of cultures and races; each saw White men as the principal agents of national progress, although Innis recognized the economic value of Aboriginal and Métis labor. But the frontier thesis wrote innovation from the western margins of an expanding nation. Canadian staples frontiers lay in the North and West, but Innis wrote and imagined Canada from the metropolitan center. He did not, like Turner, separate wilderness and civilization, but rather he saw staples development from a combination of natural bounty, technical skill, and industrial export markets. Transportation fueled the growth and decay of key staples industries—rivers for furs, rails and ships for minerals and agriculture. Each staple generated a particular regional economy and identity, centered on a regional metropole, which in turn was dependent on central Canada, which in turn served the European metropolis.
Harold Innis’s West, like Turner’s, required fur traders, miners, ranchers, timbermen, fishermen, and farmers to furnish staple resources to the metropolitan center. But they did not function as mythic heroes to forge the wellspring of Canadian national character. Neither frontiers nor staples explained Canada.
For Turner, unlike many of his disciples, the closing of the frontier in 1890 marked the end of the first period of American history. By the 1920s, he, too, emphasized resource development, announcing to his Harvard students that: “Failure to use resources will submit people to subordination of a superior type which does.”19 Innis’s staples thesis, in fact, bears some resemblance to Turner’s contemporaneous but less-famous theory of sections. As early as 1914 Turner wrote of “Geographic Influences in American History.” In 1925 he published “The Significance of the Section in American History,” defining sections, or regions, as changing historical constructs of some combination of environment, culture, and economy. The “West,” he wrote:
wherever found at different years thought of itself and of the nation in different ways from those of the East. It needed capital; it was a debtor region, while the East had the capital and was the creditor section. The West was rural, agricultural, while the East was becoming more and more urban and industrial. . . .[T]he frontier stressed the rights of man, while the statesmen who voiced the interests of the East stressed the rights of property.20
In the 1920s, both Turner and Innis discussed how resources mapped regional borders and dependencies. Turner described dependencies between sections, while Innis envisioned a series of unequal relationships among regional and national metropoles and hinterlands. These formative differences influenced debates and shifts in the evolving historiographies. The first of these underscored the differences between how the Mexican and Canadian borders have been represented in U.S. histories. In popular imagination and national historical narratives, from perspectives mostly Euro-American, the Mexican border divides Americans from “others,” from darker and mostly poorer people clamoring to come north. The contests for territory that preceded U.S. sovereignty fostered a school of Borderlands history, founded by Herbert Eugene Bolton, whose The Spanish Borderlands appeared in 1921. It complicated Turner’s emphasis on western frontiers by concentrating instead on cultural conflict and on the north/south frontiers of New Spain and Mexico. Ironically, and to Bolton’s considerable discomfort, another north/south axis operated in his book, which was extensively revised and edited by Constance Lindsay Skinner of British Columbia.21 Both Bolton’s borderlands and Innis’s northern frontiers superimposed north/south migrations over Turner’s westward moving frontiers.
From the 1930s through the 1960s historians’ interpretations shifted in response to environmental limits, international expansion, and the cross-border movements of people, capital, and communications. During the 1930s, historians confronted limits imposed by nature and economic depression. As Eden shriveled into the Dust Bowl, Americans revisited their own creation stories to explain human adaptations to difficult landscapes. The key U.S. text was Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains (1931), which focused on aridity as the environmental factor that defined the region. Webb interpreted regionalism in terms of technological adaptation to this difficult environment. The six-shooter, windmill, and barbed wire became key innovations that enabled settlement on the Plains.22
Canadian scholars assessed environmental limits more somberly. In Settlement and the Forest Frontier in Eastern Canada (1936) and The North American Assault on the Canadian Forest (1938), Arthur M. Lower expressed, according to J. M. S. Careless, “the pejorative view of metropolitanism as inherently subjugating and exploitative, sucking a territory dry because ‘business had to go on’.”23 Both Webb and Lower recognized limits. For Webb they were environmental. For Lower they were rooted in capitalism and U.S. exploitation of Canadian resources. Webb optimistically asserted the potential for technical intervention to overcome environmental obstacles. Lower took a less optimistic view, writing of environmental degradation rooted in capitalist exploitation and the greed of the metropole to the south.
Walter Sage also addressed the relationship of U.S. interests for Canadian regionalism in a 1937 essay that argued that Canadian regions—the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, and British Columbia—were economically distinct and had closer relations with the adjacent United States than with each other. The focus on separate regions and on north/south economies created nascent tensions for Canadian nationalism and for the place of regions within national histories.24
As international attention turned toward war, historians on both sides of the border re-examined the boundaries of national character and national sovereignty. Turner’s frontier thesis bore the attack. South of the border, George W. Pierson surveyed professional historians’ assessments of the frontier thesis and published their multi-faceted critique in a two-part article in 1941.25 Fred Shannon and others refuted Turner’s concept of the frontier as a safety valve that drained potential class conflict, challenging the frontier thesis for resting in outdated social theory, for its neglect of both continuities and the grimmer side of the frontier experience, and for ignoring important aspects of American development, including the costs of farming free land and farmers’ indebtedness to capital.26 The frontier thesis, if beleaguered, has proved stubbornly resilient. Ray Allen Billington’s Westward Expansion, for instance, went through six editions from 1949 through 2001. But since the 1940s the Turner thesis has been repeatedly contested, its claims to “explain” American character repeatedly challenged. Alternatively, it has been recognized and dissected more for its mythic appeal than for its historical accuracy.
Canadian historians in the early 1940s delineated the national character at the southern boundary. The 1940 meeting of the Canadian Historical Association focused on the frontier thesis and George F. G. Stanley’s rejection of it from a decidedly Anglo-Canadian perspective. If Innis wrote a creation story of Canadian economic development, Stanley wrote the Canadian counter-narrative to Turner’s frontier. Stanley emphasized both environmental adaptation in Canadian development and political and cultural continuity. He faulted the emphasis on “one important internal factor,” the frontier, to the exclusion of “the many external factors,” most notably the French, British, and Spanish heritages that colonial pioneers brought with them.27 They adapted to “primitive, uncivilized” environments, where they were “obliged to adopt many of the ways of their savage neighbors or to invent new ways and means to meet immediate ends.”28 Thus, Canadian pioneers adopted snowshoes, moccasins, canoes, Red River Carts, new grains, and farming methods. But government, law, religion, and social institutions changed far less than technology.
Stanley emphasized key distinctions between the Canadian and U.S. experiences. The Canadian frontier was still open to the North.29 The Laurentian shield placed a great barrier between eastern and Western Canada. And in accordance with British tradition, the Canadian government laid great emphasis on law and order. To combat “rampant lawlessness, drunken orgies,” “Indian unrest,” and American whiskey runners, Canada established the North West Mounted Police, who set out from Manitoba for Alberta in 1874. Law, order, and efficient administration thus predated Anglo-Canadian settlement of Rupert’s Land.
The police were present at the conclusion of the Indian treaties; they shepherded Sitting Bull’s Sioux back to the United States; they assisted the Department in gathering the plains tribes upon the reservations and brought justice to red and white men alike. Doors might henceforth be left unlocked and cattle unguarded; the drunken riots ceased and there was an end to Indian bloodshed.30
By contrast, in the U.S.:
. . . the frontiersman quickly outdistanced effective administration, hence the lawlessness which characterized the history of the American West. . . .The fighting plainsman of American history, has, however, no counterpart north of the boundary. The Canadian frontier was peopled by peaceful, law-abiding ranchers, farmers, and government-encouraged colonists. Here the settler looked to organized justice and to the Mounted Police for his protection and not to the rifle over his door.31
Stanley celebrated the arrival after 1870 of a “racially homogeneous” population, “not infrequently Conservative in politics,” that brought “the social and political patterns of Canada and Great Britain.”32 He realistically assessed Anglo-Canadian motives to incorporate Rupert’s Land into the nation. Confederation was spurred by fears that Britain might settle convicts in the Hudson’s Bay territory, fears of American aggression, and by desires for the resources and agricultural potentials of the western lands.33
These conclusions came largely from Stanley’s interpretation of the period from 1870 to the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. He left curiously untheorized the next period, which he called the last stage of frontier settlement, a period that brought international settlers to the prairies from the United States, Iceland, Belgium, Ukraine, Sweden, and Hungary, and religious and ethnic minorities like Jews, Mennonites, Doukhobors, and Hutterites. By 1911 the prairies were, he said, “a polyglot mixing bowl” —which sounds less elegant than a mosaic. Apparently, unlike the British, French, and Spaniards, these new immigrants shed much of their traditional baggage at the border. The “polyglot” character of the prairie population might, however, explain militant agrarianism and demands for provincial autonomy. Agrarian movements, though, were the products not of the frontier but of economic conflicts “between producers of primary products selling in an open market and the producers of secondary products selling in a closed market.”34 Stanley thus linked Innis’s staples thesis with Anglo culture and Anglo political institutions. The history of the West could be explained by neither alone. Nor did the West explain Canada except in contrast to the United States.
There was, however, dissent from the sharp separation of the two Wests. Walter Sage rebutted Stanley, insisting that “There was one frontier of settlement for the whole of America” and that the American frontier moved into Canada after 1885. He critiqued Stanley for focusing narrowly on prairie agriculture, because Turner’s frontiers included ranching and mining, and the B.C. mining frontier was a northward extension of the California gold rush.35
The dominant professional opinion in both countries seemed to discredit Turner. But his West continued to define an increasingly mythic American national identity which acted as a foil for Canadian difference, located increasingly in the Canadian North. In Dominion of the North (1944) Donald Creighton located the national purpose in Sir John A. MacDonald’s National Policy, whereby the railroad, protective tariffs, and recruited prairie settlers established mutual dependencies that revolved around wilderness.36 In 1946, W. L. Morton challenged both Innis and Creighton from a regional perspective, for casting the West as a mere colony of the imperial center and constructing a false “uniformity of the metropolitan culture throughout the hinterlands . . ..”37 Morton argued that the West’s “few, though great resources,” “harsh and hazardous climate,” and “inflexible economy” changed “people and institutions greatly from those of the humid forest regions of the east.”38 He, too, emphasized the “open flank to the north. This,” he argued, “became a permanent frontier, an enduring demarcation line between wilderness and farmland, between north and south. Ragged, flexible, moving far north in the far northwest,” it was an “impenetrable” and permanent frontier that distinguished Canada from the U.S. because it was a force of limitation, not progress, because it necessitated dependence “on one’s fellows, on cooperative skills, on communal capital” in contrast to U.S. frontier individualism.39
As the Cold War escalated, the differences were drawn increasingly along international borders. In the U.S., the Iron Curtain replaced the frontier as the line between savagery and civilization, while a mythic West came to represent what united Americans. From 1945 through the 1960s, attention shifted to the unifying power of a West inscribed in myths, symbols, and stereotypes. In 1950 Henry Nash Smith published his Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth about a mythic West that entered the cultural mainstream and was transmitted to succeeding generations.40 It was an apt introduction to a period when Hollywood westerns represented national dramas, from McCarthyism “High Noon,” in which Sheriff Will Kane (played by Gary Cooper) faces an outlaw gang alone without the support of his town, to the Cold War “Dakota Incident,” in which a politician’s support of hostile Indians despite the threat they pose represents Americans’ denial of the Soviet threat.41 Consensus historians emphasized national unity and downplayed internal inequalities and disagreements. Earl Pomeroy challenged the significance of regional environmental differences in 1955, arguing, like Stanley, that there was far greater continuity than innovation in the West, not only of political forms, but of architecture, religion, and other basic institutions as well. The environmental adaptations heralded by Webb and conceded by Stanley became temporary compromises, abandoned as soon as settlers could flee their sod shanties and build frame houses. Pomeroy described what united the West and the nation, but not what made America in the first place, not where the transplanted institutions originated. Like Stanley, his consensus denied racial diversity: he insisted that Spaniards had little influence in the Southwest and ignored other sources of internal difference.42
The significance of the frontier remained unsettled in the postwar era but was debated in new terms in new contexts. Historians turned to what Turner might have called “the second phase” of U.S. history, and a regional post-1890 West. Gerald Nash explored the urban 20th- century West, where World War II marked a regional turning point sparked by war industries, military spending, population migrations, and tourism.43 Nash went further, to insist that the West (or at least California) had become the national trendsetter both economically and culturally. This was ironically true as Hollywood projected one New Old West after another, beaming their images to international audiences, from John Wayne’s characteristic frontier rugged individualism to the revisionist vision of a range war in Kevin Costner’s “Open Range.”44
The North’s significance as a Canadian symbol entered the political arena in 1958, when Prime Minister John Diefenbaker articulated his “Northern Vision” in the course of a political campaign that focused in part on the role of American investment in Canada, winning a landslide victory as the defender of Canadian nationalism.45 Ramsay Cook focused on the North in 1971, noting that the frontier had never touched the Canadian imagination as it had in the U.S., but rather “the concept of the North . . .provided many imaginative and nationalistic Canadian writers a nature symbol to develop. If the cowboy was the hero of the frontier in the United States, the Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman was the Canadian symbol—a symbol not only of law and order, but of metropolitan penetration of the frontier.”46
As frontiers became symbols, a renewed regionalism emerged in the post-frontier era, manifested in Canada in the Prairie School of history to which University of Calgary historians made outstanding contributions. Place and landscape anchored the discourse in new regional historical journals: BC Studies (1968); Acadiensis (1971); Prairie Forum (1976).47 In the U.S., regionalism led to the founding conference of the Western History Association in 1961, and the Western Historical Quarterly in 1970. Yet while historians of the American West continued to assume the significance of their region for national histories, historians of the Canadian West have focused more on regional identities and particularities.
U.S. consensus histories, particularly the Myth and Symbols School, saw the West and western images as sources of national unity and identity. Increasingly, counter-readings of these myths probed what both Turner and Stanley considered the less admirable side of frontier character, dissected for instance in Richard Slotkin’s trilogy, Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment and Gunfighter Nation.48
As the U.S. abandoned isolationism, some historians who believed in the formative influence of the frontier disputed its exceptional influence on the United States. In opposition to the consensus emphasis on the nation, they called for comparative and international histories of global frontiers. Herbert Heaton pleaded with his colleagues in 1946 to abandon “academic isolationism” for a comparative approach to the frontiers of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Latin America, and Siberia. All Wests dealt with common issues: “how to alienate the land, foster manufactures, construct internal improvements, get banks that stayed open, and devise currencies that stayed acceptable.”49
Heaton saw Canadian development as continuous with the U.S. frontier: settlers moved north as the good land was taken in the U.S.; lumber development followed over-exploitation of U.S. forests; as the U.S. food surplus for export dropped, Canadian wheat found more European markets. He identified, too, a common theme of environmental costs: “The nineteenth century skimmed the cream off the new world; we are now down to the milk, and some of our descendants may have to get their drinks from the faucets.”50
In a similar vein, Paul Sharp argued in 1950 that the U.S. frontier did not close in 1890, but moved north, as some 1.25 million Americans sought new opportunities in the Canadian West from 1890–1920, as well as Europeans and eastern Canadians. “Affected by a sort of nationalistic astigmatism,” he wrote:
historians have looked only as far as “49 degrees north” for the story of westward movement, of which the settlement of the Canadian West is actually the final chapter in the Anglo-American conquest of the Great Plains. . . .The mass migration into the Canadian West was the last advance in the long march that had begun on the Atlantic seaboard.51
Sharp traced the efforts of the Canadian government and the Canadian Pacific Railway to attract these settlers, and the significance of the 1896 U.S. Populist defeat, after which Populists like Henry Wise Wood and John W. Leedy moved north seeking a more promising ideological environment. Many Populists were drawn to prairie provinces that offered hail insurance laws, direct taxes on land values, few taxes on farmers’ personal property, and laws discouraging land speculation.52
Canadian homesteads attracted religious and ethnic colonies to dot the “polyglot” prairies, like the Mormon migrants to southern Alberta, welcomed by the Ottawa government who reassured uneasy Albertans that “the territory is already organized, and has its laws in regard to property and civil rights and relations, including the subject of marriage.”53 The 49th Parallel, Sharp argued, “became a far more formidable barrier to historians than to the men and movements they sought to describe. The ranchers on the northern plains, for instance, often ignored this boundary in their search for adequate pasturage, and cowboys sought employment with outfits in Alberta as freely as with those in Wyoming and Montana.”54
As the U.S. expanded its global aspirations, American historians expanded frontier history to encompass the globe and emphasized continuity and similarity throughout the North American Wests. What from the U.S. appeared to be continuously expanding frontiers of culture and development stimulated Canadian resistance to American cultural, political, and economic encroachment.
The historiographies of both countries through the 1960s thus trace narratives that explain the continental claims of both nations and that defend national identities, following separate historical trajectories of colonization and global engagement. Turner’s frontier thesis is consistent with the imperial visions of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Innis’s vision was shaped partly by a concern with growing American influence in Canada as well as by his resentment that the U.S. and Britain disparaged Canada’s role in World War I. The 1930s debate recognized environmental and economic limits, limits that seemed to some Canadian historians to characterize and inform Canadian interdependence and collectivism, and to some Americans to stimulate further innovation even as they cautioned against the more celebratory interpretations of western opportunity. The Cold War brought from an America discarding isolationism an expansive vision of U.S. frontiers marching northward into Canada, but no parallel recognition of Canadian immigration and influence in the United States. Sharp, for instance, focusing on the northward-moving Populists, omitted an earlier southward migration that brought some of the most outspoken Populist leaders, like Henry Loucks, from Canada to the United States. Canadian historians responded to distinguish the Canadian frontier experience from the United States’, to reinscribe historical distinctions at the 49th Parallel, and to locate frontiers of limitation and of potential growth in the Canadian North.
After the 1960s the historiographic terrain shifted yet again. The optimism and exceptionalism of the Old West became hard to maintain through the lenses of 1960s Civil Rights struggles, Vietnam and Bosnia, the atomic Wests of Los Alamos and Hanford, or global warming that threatened the frontiers of the Canadian North. Social historians turned their attention to relationships of unequal power, to social boundaries more than regional or national ones. New ethnic histories rejected the cultural hierarchies of Turner and Stanley and instead documented the high costs of Native peoples’ survival.55 On both sides of the border, historians focused on how previously invisible actors participated in Making Western Canada, The Black West, The Women’s West, and so on. Social inequalities prompted U.S. historians to reinterpret western history as The Legacy of Conquest or The Roots of Dependency. Richard White summed some of these power relationships in the old cowboy song he chose to name his synthesis, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own.56
The West as a place dependent on eastern capital, plundered for its resources, and subordinate to the federal government are themes developed in the U.S. by New Western historians.57 Like Innis in the 1920s and 1930s, William Robbins, for example, emphasized the “broader influence of capitalism on the country’s historical development. The failure to reckon with capitalism,” he argued, “indicates, in part, an unwillingness to confront significant power and influence in our culture, a tendency that is widespread, especially so in the study of the American West.”58
Recognitions of limits and conquest undercut some of the celebrated differences between the two Wests. The distinction between the wild and violent U.S. West and the orderly and civilized Canadian West emphasizes that warfare was more commonly used to colonize Native peoples in the U.S. than in Canada. That is true, in part because Canada’s First Nations were aware of the carnage to the South and sought to avoid it. Sarah Carter, Hana Samek, and Robin Fisher have all challenged the notion that a more orderly process led to significantly different outcomes for Canada’s First Nations than for Native Americans. As Martin Robin quipped, “one cannot excuse a robbery by describing it as orderly.”59
If New Western histories addressed similar topics on both sides of the border, the New West has generated more heat south of the 49th Parallel, largely, I think, because the stakes are different: the Old West did not shape Canadian national histories. U.S. and Canadian historians have debated with equal fervor the relative merits of social and national political histories, but the contested icon in Canada was a central Canadian housemaid’s knee, not Turner’s celebrated frontiersmen.60
Tensions between political histories and social historians’ emphases on difference and on social and geographic mobility led directly to new definitions of frontiers and borders as borderlands where people of different cultures met. Instead of clear lines of separation or the linear trajectories of frontiers and migrations, Howard Lamar and Robin Winks, among others, investigated frontiers in comparative international perspectives.61 These new frontiers wrote gender, colonialism, race, and power into the categories of comparison. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, in their 1981 anthology The Frontier in History, argued that “one of the least persuasive claims of the frontier hypothesis is that American frontiersmen had faith in the equality of all men, an assertion which is contradicted by the fact that the same frontiersmen excluded Indians, Mexicans, and blacks from equal status.”62 Lamar and Thompson reconceived frontiers as multi-racial encounters between indigenous people and intruders, in which “the experience of the indigenous society is as significant as the intrusive one.” “We regard a frontier not as a boundary or line,” they wrote, “but as a territory or zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct societies.”63
The new social histories problematized the significance of the constructed boundary at the 49th Parallel by focusing on the people, economies, and physical environments that crossed it. The key categories of frontiers and borderlands were redefined in terms of interactions that negotiated power, difference, and identities. Gloria Anzaldúa, and Sarah Deutsch defined frontiers/fronteras as zones of cultural contact, places where intimate but often-unequal exchanges occurred. Sylvia Van Kirk blazed the trail to these borderlands with Many Tender Ties, which placed Indigenous and Métis women, and intimate relationships at the center of the staple Canadian fur trade.64
It has been harder to maintain the focus on human interactions after the colonial periods, when the subjects of historical narratives became the new nations. The lenses of national history have often filtered the dynamic stories of migrations back and forth across the border.
Recent discussions of borders, frontiers, and borderlands have centered on Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron’s 1999 article “From Borderlands to Borders,” which argued that in the 19th century the “shift from inter-imperial struggle to international co-existence turned borderlands into bordered lands.” New borderlands historians, including Michel Hogue in publications from his University of Calgary MA thesis, have countered that the borders remained porous, while significant social barriers were erected to separate people of different races within North America’s bordered lands.65
Viewed through the lenses of race, class, and gender, the border can be re-mapped to chart what Sarah Carter has called “categories and terrains of exclusion” in our respective Wests.66 Rather than following progressive and linear movements across the continent, these maps follow the back-and-forth movements of people, capital, technology, and markets that illuminate what links and separates our histories. The border has remained selectively and unequally porous. Canada excluded African American singer and activist Paul Robeson and U.S. whiskey runners; the U.S. fears that dark-skinned terrorists might slip through Immigration Canada. The Sioux used the border strategically to escape the U.S. cavalry, just as the Cree and Métis fled south after the 1885 Rebellion, remaining in Montana and North Dakota despite periodic efforts by the U.S. government to deport them. To Sharp’s northern homestead frontier, we might add Canadian women who moved south to file for homesteads in their own names as they could not in Canada. Wage working miners, ranch hands, threshers, cannery workers, domestic servants, and lumber workers followed the labor markets back and forth across the 49th Parallel.
As we develop comparative, transnational histories we enter arenas in which all the categories—economy, citizenship, race, ethnicity, and borders themselves—have different, contingent, historically changing and power-laden meanings. Those meanings construct national identities, to be sure, but they intersect personal and local identities as well.
Paul Sharp cautioned historians over a half century ago not to “stop at a line which existed only on a map.”67 Imagine then, the histories that drew westward moving lines across the continent, the line in the dirt at the 49th Parallel. I was drawn across these borders as I followed miners, farmers, and people fleeing racial or religious persecution, and I realized that, as they entered different national histories, no histories linked them to the kin they left behind. I did not think about my own family’s transnational migrations until I moved to Canada and pondered the complex identities that linked my father with his English Jewish parents, or me with a grandfather I never knew who is buried in Montreal.
The historical borderlands connect complex webs of territory, privilege, exclusion, and identity. We all cross some borders; we all police some. Most of us also inhabit some borderlands where territories are redefined, and identities are constantly renegotiated. History can be one such borderland, crossing state and social boundaries to re-chart the lines that separate and connect people, to re-map the borders that divide and link our histories. It will fall to historians of these borderlands to listen to the silences that remain to be heard there, and to tell the connections and the differences that may bridge their boundaries.
Notes
I am grateful to Dr. Jeremy Mouat for his partnership in this project, for introducing me to the histories of the Canadian West, and for years of good conversation and friendship. This lecture was part of a larger work in progress when I delivered it in 2003. It benefitted from the critiques of colleagues. I thank Drs. Sarah Carter, R. Douglas Francis, Donald Smith, and Sheila McManus for sharing their expertise in Canadian history and their insights about the comparative histories of the U.S. and Canadian Wests. I also thank the terrific University of Calgary graduate students in western and borderlands histories for all they taught me in our seminars. Finally, thanks to the Pacific Historical Review for permission to publish this earlier version of our article, to editors David Johnson and Carl Abbot for their patience and prodding during the long gestation of the finished article, and to Susan Wladaver-Morgan for her keen editorial eye and for shepherding the article through the production process.
Additional Sources: Andrew Varsanyi addressed the lack of attention to Henry Loucks in his MA thesis, “Principle vs. Pragmatism: Henry Loucks and South Dakota Populism 1884–1900” (master’s thesis, University of Calgary, 2015).
1 See for instance, Jeremy Mouat, “Mining in the Settler Dominions: A Comparative Study of the Industry from the 1880s to the First World War (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 1988); Roaring Days: Rossland’s Mines and the History of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 1995); and “The Genesis of Western Exceptionalism: British Columbia’s Hard Rock Miners: 1895–1903,” Canadian Historical Review 71:3 (September 1990): 317–45.
2 That article was a work in progress when I delivered my lecture, and it benefitted from comments from colleagues that day. It appeared as 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): 183–230. We were gratified that it received the Louis Knott Koontz Award for the most deserving article to appear in the Pacific Historical Review in volume year 2006.
3 Lone Star, written and directed by John Sayles (1996; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers).
4 Lone Star.
5 The Northwest Commission began its survey in 1857, but the Northern Boundary Commission did not to begin to survey the boundary across the prairies until 1871.
6 The literature on this topic is large and growing. Important works include Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Geoffrey Cubitt, ed., Imagining Nations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Canadian contributions to this growing dialogue include Ian Angus, A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997); Veronica Strong-Boag, Sherrill Grace, Avigail Eisenberg, and Joan Anderson, eds., Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998); W. H. New, Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998); H. V. Nelles, The Art of Nation-building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec’s Tercentenary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and Ian McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review 81 (2000): 617–45.
7 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in History, Frontier, and Section: Three Essays by Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. Martin Ridge (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 62–71. Turner first delivered “The Significance of the Frontier” as a paper at the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago, July 12, 1893, coinciding with the World’s Columbian Exposition in that city. Extra Census Bulletin 2, April 20, 1892.
8 Extra Census Bulletin; John T. Juricek, “American Usage of the Word ‘Frontier’ from Colonial Times to Frederick Jackson Turner,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110 (1966): 33.
9 For the significance of aridity in the U.S. West, see Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1931) and Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). For the significance of rivers and water in Canada see, for instance, Donald Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760–1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1937); Gerald J. J. Tulchinsky, The River Barons: Montreal Businessmen and the Growth of Industry and Transportation 1837–53 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); and John H. Wadland, “Great Rivers, Small Boats: Landscape and Canadian Historical Culture,” in Changing Parks: The History, Future and Cultural Context of Parks and Heritage Landscapes, eds. John S. Marsh and Bruce W. Hodgins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 1–33. For debates about mapping the U.S. West, see Donald Worster, “New West, True West: Interpreting the Region’s History,” Western Historical Quarterly 18 (1987): 141–56; David M. Emmons, “Constructed Province: History and the Making of the Last American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 25 (1994): 437–59; and, David M. Emmons, “A Roundtable of Responses,” Western Historical Quarterly 25 (1994), 461–86.
10 J. M. S. Careless, Frontier and Metropolis: Regions, Cities and Identities in Canada Before 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 54.
11 For example, a manifesto of Canadian left nationalism was entitled Close the 49th Parallel Etc., ed. Ian Lumsden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970) and Richard Gwyn’s reflections on the position of Canada appeared as The Forty Ninth Paradox: Canada in North America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).
12 Although the point is made satirically, the popular television series “Due South” as well as Rick Mercer’s “Talking to Americans” (featured on the Canadian comedy show, “This Hour Has 22 Minutes”) both played on this.
13 Turner, “Significance of the Frontier,” 75–76.
14 Turner, “Significance of the Frontier,” 62–71.
15 Turner, “Significance of the Frontier,” 59.
16 Harold Innis, “The Teaching of Economic History in Canada,” in Harold Innis, Essays in Canadian Economic History, ed. Mary Q. Innis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956), 3 (originally presented as a paper in May 1929, and published in 1930).
17 Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada (1931; rev. ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956), 393.
18 For example, Innis argued that “Western Canada has paid for the development of Canadian nationality, and it would appear that it must continue to pay. The acquisitiveness of eastern Canada shows little sign of abatement.” Harold Adams Innis, A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (1923; rev. ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 293–94. The book was a revised version of his dissertation, completed at the University of Chicago.
19 John W. Gaus, “Lecture Notes,” February-June 1920, Turner Papers, University of Wisconsin Archives, quoted in Allen G. Bogue, “The Significance of the History of the American West: Postscripts and Prospects,” Western Historical Quarterly 24 (1993): 53.
20 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Section in American History,” in Ridge, History, Frontier, and Section, 94.
21 A student of Frederick Jackson Turner, Bolton produced extensive borderlands scholarship. See Herbert Eugene Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century: Studies in Spanish Colonial History and Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1915); and especially The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921). For a more recent Borderlands history, see David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). For Skinner’s role in editing and revising The Spanish Borderlands, see John Francis Bannon, Herbert Eugene Bolton: The Historian and the Man (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1978), 134–40 and Jean Barman, “Constance Lindsay Skinner and the Marketing of the Western Frontier,” in Canadian Papers in Rural History, 10, ed. Donald A. Akenson (Gananoque, Ont.: Langdale Press, 1996), 81–116.
22 Webb, The Great Plains.
23 H. A. Innis and A. R. M. Lower, eds., Select Documents in Canadian Economic History, 1783–1885 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1933, two volumes); A. R. M. Lower, Settlement and the Forest Frontier in Eastern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1936); The North American Assault on the Canadian Forest: A History of the Lumber Trade Between Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1938); and J. M. S. Careless, Frontier and Metropolis: Regions, Cities and Identities in Canada Before 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 54.
24 Walter N. Sage, “Some Aspects of the Frontier in Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Association, Annual Report, 1928; and, “Geographical and Cultural Aspects of the Five Canadas,” Canadian Historical Association, Annual Report, 1937. The two essays were published together as a pamphlet, Walter Noble Sage, Canada from Sea to Sea (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1940), which was used as a school text and regularly reprinted up to the 1960s. Chad Reimer provides an excellent overview of Sage’s work in “The Making of British Columbia History: Historical Writing and Institutions, 1784–1958” (PhD diss., York University, 1995), 311–62.
25 George Wilson Pierson, “American Historians and the Frontier Hypothesis in 1941 (1),” Wisconsin Magazine of History 26 (1942): 36–60, and George Wilson Pierson, “American Historians and the Frontier Hypothesis in 1941 (2),” Wisconsin Magazine of History 26 (1942): 170–85.
26 See Fred A. Shannon, “A Post-Mortem on the Labor-Safety-Valve Theory,” Agricultural History 19 (1945): 31–37; George Rogers Taylor, ed., The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History (1949; repr., Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1971); Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Turner and the Sociology of the Frontier (New York: Basic Books, 1968); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, “A Meaning for Turner’s Frontier, Part I: Democracy in the Old Northwest,” Political Science Quarterly 69 (1954): 321–53.
27 George F. G. Stanley, “Western Canada and the Frontier Thesis,” Canadian Historical Association, Report of the Annual Meeting, 1940, 105. Stanley thus forged a sort of intellectual middle ground, somewhere between the optimism of Webb’s environmental adaptations and Earl Pomeroy’s later emphasis on institutional and cultural continuity from East to West. See Earl Pomeroy, “Toward a Reorientation of Western History: Continuity and Environment,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41 (1955): 579–600. I am grateful to Donald Smith for his insightful comment at my lecture. Smith pointed out that Stanley spoke in 1940, after Canada had entered World War II, and before the United States entered the conflict. For Stanley, to paraphrase Dr. Smith, Canada had committed to saving western civilization, while the U.S. remained mired in its own savagery.
28 Stanley, “Western Canada and the Frontier Thesis,” 106.
29 Stanley, “Western Canada and the Frontier Thesis,” 107.
30 Stanley, “Western Canada and the Frontier Thesis,” 109.
31 Stanley, “Western Canada and the Frontier Thesis,” 109.
32 Stanley, “Western Canada and the Frontier Thesis,” 110.
33 Walter N. Sage also emphasized this point in, “Some Aspects of the Frontier.”
34 Stanley, “Western Canada and the Frontier Thesis,” 114.
35 Sage, “Some Aspects of the Frontier,” 115–16.
36 Donald Creighton, Dominion of the North: A History of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1944).
37 W. L. Morton, “Clio in Canada: The Interpretation of Canadian History,” in Approaches to Canadian History, ed. Ramsay Cook et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 42–49.
38 Morton, “Clio in Canada,” 43.
39 W. L. Morton, “The ‘North’ in Canadian Historiography,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Series 4, 8 (1970): 35, 40. Lyle Dick examined Morton’s subsequent role, in the late 1950s, in attempting to forge a canonical history of Canada: “‘A Growing Necessity for Canada’: W. L. Morton’s Centenary Series and the Forms of National History, 1955–80,” Canadian Historical Review 82 (2001): 223–52.
40 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950). For the development of this genre, see also Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Weslayan University Press, 1973); The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialism, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985); and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992).
41 Carl Foreman’s screenplay for “High Noon” was influenced by his experience when he was forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Foreman, who had been a member of the Communist Party from 1938–1942, testified that he had belonged to the Communist Party but refused to name other members. That experience reinforced a theme throughout his screenplays of an individual struggling with a hostile society. Because of his refusal to cooperate with HUAC, Foreman was blacklisted by Hollywood after the production of “High Noon.” “High Noon,” United Artists, Stanley Kramer, producer, 1952; “Dakota Incident,” Republic Pictures, Herbert J. Yates and Michael Baird, producers, 1956.
42 Pomeroy, “Toward a Reorientation of Western History.”
43 Gerald D. Nash, The American West in the Twentieth Century: A Short History of an Urban Oasis (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977); Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Gerald D. Nash, World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
44 “Open Range,” Touchstone Pictures, Kevin Costner, producer, director, and actor, 2003.
45 On the origins of Diefenbaker’s northern vision and the politics that surrounded it, see Peter C. Newman, Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 139–41, 196–99. For a summary of the 1958 election campaign, see J. M. Beck, Pendulum of Power: Canada’s Federal Elections (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 311–28.
46 Ramsay Cook, “Frontier and Metropolis: The Canadian Experience,” reprinted in Cook, The Maple Leaf Forever: Essays on Nationalism and Politics in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 154–55. For more recent reflections on this point, see the theme issue, “Representing North,” Essays on Canadian Writing, 59 (1996); Sherrill E. Grace, Canada and the Idea of the North (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); Renée Hulan, Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), esp. the Introduction, “A Northern Nation?,” 3–28; and Janice Cavell, “The Second Frontier: The North in English-Canadian Historical Writing,” Canadian Historical Review 83 (2002): 364–89.
47 For examples and accounts of the various Prairie historiographical traditions, see R. Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer, eds., The Prairie West: Historical Readings (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1992, 2nd ed.), esp. Gerald Friesen, “Historical Writing on the Prairie West,” 5–26; J. R. Miller, “Native History,” and John Herd Thompson, “The West and the North,” in Canadian History: A Reader’s Guide, Vol. 2, Confederation to the Present, ed. Doug Owram (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 179–201, 341–73; Royden Loewen, “On the Margin or In the Lead: Canadian Prairie Historiography,” Agricultural History 73 (1999): 27–45; and Robert Wardhaugh, ed., Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture and History (Winnipeg: University of Winnipeg Press, 2001), passim.
48 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation.
49 Herbert Heaton, “Other Wests Than Ours,” Journal of Economic History 6, Issue Supplement: The Tasks of Economic History (1946): 51.
50 Heaton, “Other Wests Than Ours,” 52, 59.
51 Paul F. Sharp, “When Our West Moved North,” American Historical Review 55 (1950): 287. See also Paul F. Sharp, “Three Frontiers: Some Comparative Studies of Canadian, American, and Australian Settlements,” Pacific Historical Quarterly 24 (1955), 369–77. Sharp’s dissertation, The Agrarian Revolt in Western Canada: A Survey Showing American Parallels (supervised by the Canadian historian A. L. Burt at the University of Minnesota), was published in 1948 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948).
52 Sharp, “When Our West Moved North,” 290. Sharp also quoted Winnipeg’s newspaper The Grain Growers’ Guide, 5 (1 March 1922).
53 Sharp, “When Our West Moved North,” 295.
54 Sharp, “When Our West Moved North,” 299.
55 One of the challenges of comparative history is culturally sensitive terminology. We attempt to use the terms preferred by the people to whom we refer; hence we use “American Indian” or “Native American” when referring to Native peoples in the United States and “First Nations” for Canada. “Native peoples,” as we use it, crosses the national boundaries of North America.
56 William Loren Katz, The Black West (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1973); George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988); Sucheng Chan, Douglas Henry Daniels, Mario T. Garcia, and Terry P. Wilson, eds., Peoples of Color in the American West (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1994); Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women’s West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987); Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
57 See for instance, White, “It’s Your Misfortune” and William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994).
58 Robbins, Colony and Empire, 8.
59 Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774–1890 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992, 2nd ed.); Hana Samek, The Blackfoot Confederacy, 1880–1920: A Comparative Study of Canadian and U.S. Indian Policy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farms and Government Policy (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990); Martin Robin, The Rush for Spoils: The Company Province 1871–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972), 44.
60 The reference to housemaid’s knee is from J. L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998), 72–73. To quote Mark Sholdice, “Jack Granatstein’s 1998 jeremiad Who Killed Canadian History? was the opening shot of the History Wars, a fierce conflict about the meaning and purpose of our nation’s past. Academic historians, he satirically concluded, had abandoned traditional military and political history in order to specialize in topics like ‘the history of housemaid’s knee in Belleville in the 1890s.’” Mark Sholdice, “The History Wars in Canada,” The Toronto Review of Books 6 (Spring 2013): 7.
61 Howard R. Lamar, “Comparing Depressions: The Great Plains and the Canadian Prairies Experiences, 1929–1941,” in The Twentieth-Century West: Historical Interpretations, ed. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 175–206; Howard R. Lamar, “Coming Into the Mainstream at Last: Comparative Approaches to the History of the American West,” Journal of the West 35 (1996): 3–5; Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Robin W. Winks, The Myth of the American Frontier: Its Relevance to America, Canada, and Australia (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1971); Robin Winks, “Regionalism in Comparative Perspective,” in Regionalism in the Pacific Northwest, eds. William G. Robbins, Robert J. Frank, and Richard E. Ross (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1983); Donald Worster, “Two Faces West: The Development Myth in Canada and the United States,” in Terra Pacifica: People and Place in the Northwest States and Western Canada, ed. Paul W. Hirt (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1998), 71–92.
62 Thompson and Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” in Lamar and Thompson, The Frontier in History, 4, 7.
63 Thompson and Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” in Lamar and Thompson, The Frontier in History, 7.
64 Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: aunt lute books, 1987); Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman & Winnipeg: University of Oklahoma Press and Watson & Dwyer, 1980). See also Peggy Pascoe, “Western Women at the Cultural Crossroads,” in Trails: Toward a New Western History, eds. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 40–58; “Editors’ Introduction,” Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, eds., Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 3–16.
65 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 814–41; John R. Wunder and Pekka Hamalainen, “Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays,” in “Forum Essay: Responses: Borders and Borderlands,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1229–34; see also Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “Of Lively Exchanges and Larger Perspectives,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1235–39. Michel Hogue, “Disputing the Medicine Line: The Plains Crees and the Canadian-American Border, 1876–1885,” Montana: Magazine of Western History 53 (2002): 2–7. In this article, Hogue described the Canadian Cree in the late-19th century—a period that Adelman and Aron contend was marked by the creation of “bordered lands”—and argued that, for the Cree, the border remained porous, while significant social barriers were erected to separate people of different races within North America’s bordered lands.
66 Sarah Carter, “Categories and Terrains of Exclusion: Constructing the ‘Indian Woman’ in the Early Settlement Era in Western Canada,” Great Plains Quarterly 13 (Summer 1993): 147–61.
67 Sharp, “When Our West Moved North,” 300.