Forging the Prairie West

David W. Leonard is the project historian (Northern Alberta) in the
Historic Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development. He
is also the author of Delayed Frontier: The Peace River Country to 1909
and the co-author of The Lure of the Peace R

Forging the Prairie West is probably not the most appropriate title for
this addition to the Illustrated History of Canada series. As the author
points out, the region’s culture has been mainly inherited, while its
economy has been characterized more by natural resource exploitation
than by creative development.

The author knows the details of his subject, although it should be
noted that the first railway to the Peace River region was the Edmonton,
Dunvegan & Pacific in 1915, not CN in the 1920s. More problematic are
some of the book’s general statements. Few non-Canadians will accept
the view that “Canada was the country hardest hit by the international
economic collapse [of the early 1930s].” Western cattlemen may cringe
when reading that their industry is “a modern capitalist reworking of
an ancient pastoral way of life” and that to sustain their herds,
their ancestors “massacred” predatory wild game. In one respect, the
ranchers get off lightly: “however hard they were on the plains
environment,” Thompson writes, “the cattlemen made less destructive
and thus more sustainable use of the semi-arid southwest corner of the
Prairie West than farmers could have.”

The book’s engaging photographs were taken from a variety of
repositories. Regrettably, the volume is far too compact to do justice
to many of them. At times, the print on the maps is impossible to read.