One West, One Myth: Transborder Continuity in Western Art

Abstract

In American and Canadian literature, the notion of one West, two myths seems plausible. large W Western--formula fiction in which violence resolves a conflict between good and evil--expresses distinctly American cultural values, the argument goes, constituting a Puritan morality play. And it is also possible to argue for subtle differences in the presentation of the American and Canadian Wests even in a grimly realistic, transnational literature like the prairie or farming novel in which the heavy hand of environmental determinism would seem to impose sameness. (1) theme of the Melting Pot, for example, appears more pronounced in such American novels as Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918) and O.E. Rolvaag's Peder Victorious (1929 than in comparable Canadian prairie novels also concerned with the immigrant experience such as Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese (1925) and Frederick Philip Grove's Our Daily Bread (1928). Does the same holds true of imagery? Is there, in Canadian representations of the West, more emphasis on farming and family, on an arcadian idyll rather than on the whoop-and-holler action, violent conflict and rugged individualism so prominent in American Western art? Of course, the promotional literature and the accompanying illustrations issued by railways and governmental agencies on both sides of the border emphasized the fecundity of the land and abundant cereal crops or fruit trees or whatever was particular to the area being promoted. And there is a whole prairie school of art showing wheat fields and grain elevators silhouetted against towering skies. Notably, in his useful anthology Images of the West: Changing Perceptions of the Prairies, 1690-1960, Douglas Francis devotes attention to the idea of the Canadian West as the promised land, the garden of the world; cowboys and cattle are conspicuous by their absence. (2) Indeed, the coats of arms of two of the three Prairie Provinces--Alberta and Saskatchewan--feature grain. Only Manitoba's displays a ruminant, a majestic buffalo, leaving cattle shut out entirely. (3) But if Alberta's coat of arms is content to honor its farming potential at the expense of its grazing industry, it does include the snowcapped Rockies. Tourist imagery, naturally, emphasizes nature at its grandest, with soaring mountain peaks and all the possibilities for alpine recreation--from trail hikes and rides, skiing and climbing, to simple contemplation of the scenery from the veranda of a hotel set on the shore of a glimmerglass lake. (4) Hunting and fishing in the West produced its own body of literature and illustration squarely within the venerable tradition devoted to outdoors adventure. (5) But heritage was also always part of the tourist sales pitch: an Old West, gone with the wind and magic in memory. Nostalgia doted on the picturesque. In the imagery popularized by Western art, cowboys and Indians ruled on both sides of the border. It has become something of a truism in the historiography of the Canadian West to insist that its ranching frontier was distinctive from that of the American West. A strong British tradition, enforced by the arrival of the North-West Mounted Police in 1874, outweighed American elements, the reasoning goes, producing a respect for law and order that virtually eliminated the wild and woolly antics so prevalent to the south. (6) What might be referred to--politely--as the Lewis G. Thomas school of ranching history, followed his pathbreaking 1935 Masters thesis on The Ranching Period in Southern Alberta. As a member of a southern Alberta ranch family himself, educated in Okotoks and Calgary and then at the University of Alberta and Harvard, and an unabashed anglophile, Thomas was convinced that the refined culture of the ranch community is Southern Alberta was quite distinct from the rougher, cruder American culture below the border. (7) He and his followers acknowledged strong American influences in the earliest history of the Canadian range and in practical matters of cattle management, but otherwise discounted them. …