Preface: Sharing the West(s)

Abstract

In perhaps the most quoted passage in his oft-quoted Wolf Willow (1962), Wallace Stegner wrote that 49th parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in (81). As one of us has occasion to say, below, and David Williams asserts here as well, Stegner's book occupies a unique position in understanding the similarities and differences shared by the Canadian and United States western regions as historical and cultural spaces. An unusual book in that it marries history, memoir, and fiction between one set of covers, Wolf Willow is all the more unusual by actually straddling the Canada-U.S. border as it runs from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. That is, Wolf Willow, like Stegner himself, is divided in two by virtue of its dual appreciation, its parallel understanding, of Western culture as found in Canada along with its appreciation of the Western culture found in the United States--each similar to, yet different from, the other. That border is a fact, certainly, but it is also culturally something of a fiction--drawn in 1818 to divide the Hudson's Bay and Missouri/Mississippi watersheds, the border is both an impediment (witness the ongoing crisis in the cattle industry) and an artificial division between similar Western cultures and landscapes. This special issue of The American Review of Canadian Studies was borne of much the same impulse as Wolf Willow. It avowedly intends to set the histories, myths, and cultures of the two northern North American Wests side by side for purposes of comparison, discernment of differences, and mutual illumination. As has in recent years become a regular feature in these pages, this special issue derives from a thematically defined conference. But this one is unusual in that it owes to three conferences: the first, entitled One West, Two Myths, was held at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming in May 2002; the second, entitled One West, Two Myths: Comparing Canadian and American Perspectives, was sponsored by the Glenbow Museum and held in Calgary in October 2002; the third, entitled Narrating Frontiers: Transgressions and Exchanges Along North American Borders, was sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University of Berlin, and was held there in July 2003 as a part of the Institute's fortieth anniversary celebrations. As might be imagined, in each case there were both overlapping and new speakers and, given geography--national as well as physiographic--there were different audiences. It is probably fair to say that the farther we were from Wyoming--home, of course, not only to Buffalo Bill but also to that quintessential Western narrative, Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902)--the less overwhelming the popular Myth of the American West. The idea itself was Carol Higham's. Attending the 1999 Western History Association meetings in Portland, Oregon and there participating in several comparative panels, she thought that the time had come for a conference that would focus exclusively on comparing the Canadian and American Wests. During the meetings she buttonholed Lillian Turner of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, asking whether her museum might be interested in hosting such a conference. A month later, at the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States meetings in Pittsburgh, she asked me, Robert Thacker, as then Editor of The American Review of Canadian Studies, if I would be interested in the idea as a special issue. Always on the lookout for such ideas and a Western specialist myself, I enthusiastically endorsed and joined the project. From there, the idea for the conference and its subsequent volumes spread quickly. I ran into Byron White, then director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, who brought Dr. Robert Pickering, Deputy Director of the Buffalo Bill, into the discussions. Particularly exciting was the way the conferences married the academy with the world of museums--the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and the Glenbow are two of that world's jewels, as conference participants were later able to see. …