Ranching with Lords and Commons.

David W. Leonard is Project Historian—Northern Alberta, Historic Sites
and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development, the author of
Delayed Frontier: The Peace River Country to 1909, and the co-author of
The Lure of the Peace River Country: A Fost

With the cattle industry coming to dominate American Northwest shortly after the civil war, it was probably inevitable that the industry would soon stretch north to the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. With Canada’s acquisition of Rupert’s Land in 1870, and especially with the decision of 1881 to direct the Canadian Pacific Railway through the Kicking Horse Pass, interest in this region as cattle country became strong, especially amongst investors in eastern Canada and Great Britain.

Among the major ranches to dominate the region during the 1880s was the Oxley Ranch, located on two major leases northwest of Fort Macleod. This was begun in 1882 by an Ontario farmer and Shorthorn breeder named John R. Craig. Craig had just published Grazing Country of the Dominion of Canada in Edinburgh, and he managed to attract the interest of the British MP, Alexander Staveley Hill, and the Earl of Lathom, a prominent English cattle breeder, in the ranch to be known as Oxley, which was named after Hill’s country home. Hill took the position of managing director, and Craig the ranch manager. Craig immediately moved to the newly acquired grazing leases, which totalled 100,000 acres, and hired some ranch hands. He also began to construct some ranch buildings, the headquarters being located at The Leavings, a short distance northwest of present-day Claresholm. Craig then headed for Montana and began to acquire cattle.

The tribulations endured by Craig form the substance of a book he composed on his adventures called Ranching with Lords and Commons, published in 1903. In addition to describing the problems of running the ranch for distant and uninformed owners, the book provides an excellent expose of the ranching culture in general in what is now southern Alberta in the 1880s. This reprint by Heritage House is a welcome addition to Western Canadian history as so few of the original copies appear to exist.