Prairies and Plains: The Levelling of Difference in Stegner's Wolf Willow

Abstract

If there is any place where citizens of Canada and the United States should come close to being one people, that place would be the unbroken reaches of the plains states and prairie provinces. For these prairies and plains were settled at roughly the same historical moment by similar class of people who share to this day pioneering culture. question is whether this one region has been divided by political myth--on the one hand, by myth of the western frontier, based on mystical faith in the deculturating effects of wildness; on the other hand, by myth of the northern frontier, based on the continuity of nordic culture carried overseas and by inland waterways. first myth, associated with the American historian F.J. Turner, is continentalist, predicated upon an Emersonian view of nature; the second, associated with the Canadian historian W.L. Morton, is trans-Atlantic, predicated upon view of northern culture as shaped by long succession of Viking frontiersmen,... Bristol traders, and Norman fishermen (Morton, 92). From this latter perspective, the idea of One West already begs the question of regional unity by effacing the geographical term an historical marker for Morton of a distinct and even an unique human endeavour, the civilization of the northern and arctic lands (Morton, 93). From this standpoint, then, prairies and plains would not be synonyms for the same geographical space, but opposing signs for distinct forms of cultural memory. Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow (1962) is an ideal text to explore this cultural question, since it was written by western American novelist at the height of his powers after visiting his boyhood home on the prairies--Eastend, Saskatchewan, near the northern border of Montana--where he spent six formative years from 1914 to 1920. Better yet, Stegner admits that his historical sense came late, making him almost wholly product of his natural environment, one of those prime sufferers from discontinuity, like all children who grow up in newly settled country (111). I intend to show, however, that Stegner unwittingly imports western frontier myth which tends to forget French exploration and settlement in the Northwest, and thus is oblivious to Norman influence in the region. And the noble attempt of Wolf Willow to negotiate the distance between prairies and plains largely fails to read the differing cultural memories encoded in these two signs. From the outset, Stegner is keenly aware of the ambivalence of his attempt to straddle two cultures, somewhat in the manner of lake he mentions in the Cypress Hills which has two outlets, one flowing south toward the Gulf, the other north toward the Bay. At first, it seems that because the place itself is so ambiguous in its affiliations ... we felt as uncertain as the drainage about which way to flow (8). And yet the boy already understands that there are horizons in time, as well as space, that can shape one's destiny, that there may even be watersheds of culture that force us into one affiliation or another: In winter, in the town on the Whitemud, we were almost totally Canadian. textbooks we used in school were published in Toronto and made by Candians or Englishmen; the geography we studied was focused on the Empire and the Dominion ... But if winter and town made Canadians of us, summer and the homestead restored us to something nearly, if not quite, American.... Our plowshares bit into Montana sod every time we made the turn at the south end of the field.... Our summer holidays were the Fourth of July and Labor Day.... We learned in summer to call McLaughlin Buick. (84) Recognizing different words for the same thing anticipates the possibility of finding differing histories of the same thing. In long history section, Preparation for Civilization, particularly in two chapters entitled The Medicine Line and Law in Red Coat, Stegner shows how the forty-ninth parallel has indeed been policed by myths and stereotypes. …