Montana Business and Canadian Regionalism in the 1870s and 1880s

Abstract

common assumption in the historiography of Canadian national policy is that the: Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) forged the political, economic, and social bonds between the southwestern Canadian prairies and eastern Canada.1 In fact, this is not the case. The business activities of two Montana retail and government contracting businesses-T. C. Power & Brother and I. G. Baker & Company, which operated in the 1870s and 1880s in northern Montana and Alberta and Saskatchewan-indicate that the important ties between eastern Canada and the high plains were in place before the arrival of the CPR in 1883. Power & Brother and Baker & Company not only recognized these ties but also helped to establish them. They recognized Canadian territory as distinct from American territory, and both companies actively supported the Dominion government and encouraged it to assert its political authority in the southwestern prairies. Historians' distorted view of the impact of the CPR may be the result of assuming that the Canadian prairies were an American hinterland before 1883 and that the CPR drove companies such as Power and Baker out of Canada. Paul F. Sharp sums up this line of argument in his book Whoop-Up Country: The Canadian-American West, 1865-1885. He says, When the Canadian Pacific Railway reached Medicine Hat in 1883, the close ties between the American and Canadian areas were broken.2 The evidence provided by the T. C. Power papers, which have