Cowboys, Gentlemen and Cattle Thieves: Ranching on the Western Frontier. (Reviews/Comptes Rendus).

Jones, David C.

Warren M. Elofson, Cowboys, Gentlemen and Cattle Thieves: Ranching on the Western Frontier (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000)

FOLLOWING L.G. THOMAS, David Breen, Simon Evans, and others, Warren Elofson continues the strain of Western Canadian historiography on cattle ranching. Unlike most of his predecessors, Elofson stresses the overriding importance of the frontier environment and the American influence on the industry. It is part of an old, old question -- how much of what happened is indigenous, how much imported?

Elofson draws a close connection between Montana and Alberta, and he notes that British and Eastern concerns often hired American managers for their herds. Yankee wranglers in Alberta had a savvy bred in their homeland. The thesis is carefully delineated, and the author's gaze is very focused, resulting in an interesting study of just 158 pages of text. The book covers the period from the 1870s to 1914.

By 1884 the cattle industry in Southwestern Alberta was greatly concentrated in the hands of the Big Four companies, and within twenty years all these conglomerates had sold out. The era of the big ranches was short and troubled. As Elofson says, "Ranching in its pure form was uneconomical, and it disappeared almost as suddenly as it started." (157)

Elofson is particularly strong in narrating the horror of bad winters, prairie fires, and cattle stampedes, and his background as a rancher adds a considerable authenticity. His chapter on the evolution of technique, involving the need for planting, stooking, stacking green feed, upgrading herds, grain feeding, fencing, etc., is valuable. His examination of crime is engaging.

Something may be lost, however, in the rigorous focus on just cattle ranching. In the vast promotional literature directed at immigrants in this period, for example, American propaganda claimed that a certain kind of humanity was created in the Midwest and that the developing composite in Canada would be a close kin. There were too many similarities in usages, traditions, and experience. This pervasive mood -- and scene-setting would richly strengthen Elofson's two central claims -- of the frontier and Americans greatly influencing ranching. Likewise, just a little more concentration on the farm settlement story would also enhance Elofson's claims for American influence. The truth is that by 1914 Southern Alberta was Literally filled with American settlers from Nebraska, Kansas, Idaho, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and particularly North and South Dakota. This land settlement phenomenon was very much a part of the Americanization context. It is not just ranching that had a strong American flavor; the entir e influx had it.

Perhaps also even a short discussion about sheep ranching as it related to cattle ranching would broaden the study. The animal most adapted to drought, snow cover, and harsh winters was a sheep, not a steer. Across the period Elofson discusses, there were hundreds of thousands of sheep in Southern Alberta. What role did the sheep rancher play in the cattle story? We know that sheep largely displaced cattle in large sectors of the Southeast in the years just after Elofson's 1914 termination, but the process had already begun by then. And it adds considerable strength to Elofson's claim about environmental factors. In fact, the environment was the key to the transition.

Elofson's contention that the Canadian frontier was more lawless than we have been led to believe is at least partly made. As he notes, this is not a comparative study of crime on both sides of the border, but that makes drawing conclusions difficult. Much has been made by Breen and others of the fact that there were no range wars in Canada like the ones to the south, a fact that Elofson acknowledges. But one of the strongest reasons for that absence relates to the process of settlement in Alberta that favoured the cattlemen in the beginning, at the same time that settlement was delayed until the American midwest filled along with the better lands of present-day Saskatchewan. So in Alberta, one did not have as many opportunities for range wars, because one of the antagonists was largely missing -- the settler.

Then, just as the cattle industry was hammered in the winter of 1906-07, fell to its weakest, and began a retrenchment, the arid Southeast was opened for settlement, and land rushes there began in 1908. What cattleman would want a range war after winter had killed half or more of his stock? The High River Trading Company, for instance, had pastured 1,200 head on the Red Deer River in autumn 1906, and had only 75 left by spring. (90)

Perhaps the settlement propaganda was right after all -- in the struggle between 10,000 steers and a single seed of grain, the seed had won-and all without a fight! Thus the bloodied and bludgeoned cowman probably saw it. And likely the thousands of new sodbusters agreed. So the timing of events and the timing of settlement had a great deal to do with the absence of range wars here.

Cowboys sports a superb cover which is in keeping with the high quality graphic designs now emerging from university presses. At the same time, when time itself seems shorter, the brief, concentrated length of this volume is much appreciated.