Cowboys, Gentlemen and Cattle Thieves

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Range wars and hired gunmen were unknown in the Canadian West, as were
battles with Indians. “Does this mean,” asks University of Calgary
History Professor W.M. Elofson, “that the Canadian frontier deserves
the title ‘the tame West’? The answer, surely, is no.” This is one
of the theses of this engrossing history of ranching between the Cypress
Hills and the Rockies circa 1870–1912. Its emphasis is on the impact
of the environment and the American cowboy, each of which, the author
says, has been downplayed in favor of studies of the cattle barons and
their financial backers in Eastern Canada and in England. This resulted
in what Elofson calls a “top-down” history, which gave a
“distinctly British flavour to the Canadian West.” It is his
objective “to present a picture that gives the majority their proper
place” by examining the era from the level of the ordinary cowboy. He
brings more than a historian’s academic training to this study. When
he writes of the terrors of a cattle stampede or the incomprehensible
difficulties of a lengthy cattle drive, he does so as one who has been
there; he is a third-generation Alberta rancher.

Elofson has pored over surviving diaries, correspondence, police
reports, and newspapers. His presentation is thoroughly documented and
his tale is a remarkable one of catastrophic ignorance about a harsh
environment, and of whiskey smugglers, prostitutes, and the ever-present
cattle rustler. In telling it, he says, “It is necessary to argue
directly against one of our most cherished myths about Canadian western
society and the North-West Mounted Police.” He argues persuasively
that the frontier, inhabited almost entirely by single men, was
impossible to police with the small force sent west. Stagecoaches and
trains were robbed. Six-shooters were worn. “By any standards ...
there was considerable gun-fighting.” Cattle rustling was endemic.
Elofson leaves us with this provocative thought: “Surely police
opinion is compelling evidence. If the men in charge of enforcing the
law felt that rustling was rampant, would it not be rather perverse of
posterity to assume the opposite?”