One West, Two Myths: A Comparative Reader

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

“The Canadian and United States Wests share many elements: native
peoples, immigration from the interior, the east and the west, natural
resources, cattle, wheat, mining development of the Western metropolis,
separation politics of the West, etc. So what exactly makes the United
States West exceptional? Is it a cultural difference, a political
difference? How do the similarities mask important differences? Is the
Canadian West exceptional in its own way? Or are both Wests merely
distinct?”

This is the rather fuzzy proposition posed by the editors. In
responding, the contributors were asked to employ the methodology of
comparative history.

Elliott West isolates the forces that drew the boundary between, and
the geographical shapes of, Canada and the United States. Donald Worster
argues that national outcomes differed because cultures and the
character of the natural domain were not identical in Canada and the
United States. Gerald Friesen focuses on a persistent Canadian
inclination to suspect that economic integration with the United States
represents the continuation of a consistent American campaign to align
Canadian political and social culture with their own models.

Beth LaDow and Michel Hogue, respectively, trace the final attempts and
ultimate failure of Native and Metis peoples to maintain their
independence by seeking refuge and game back and forth across “the
medicine line,” as the border was known. Sheila McManus demonstrates
how Canada and the United States made the international border between
Alberta and Montana a reality (if a work in progress) by applying
hierarchical assumptions of race to land entitlement.

According to Molly Rozum, what unites the inhabitants of the
transnational ecological zones characteristic of the interior plains is
a common sense of place. For Peter Morris, the border in the vicinity of
Fort Macleod was both permeable—permitting Americans to settle the
region in large numbers—and nation-defining in respect to mental
mapping, divergent government policies, and the differing political
economies that they encouraged.

Taken individually, these are important essays that offer insight and
provoke thought. Each considers, to a greater or lesser degree and from
an individual perspective, the matter of unity and diversity. That in
itself is sufficient reason to bring them together in this volume. Taken
collectively, however, they lack the coherence and drive that one
expects to find in a monograph.