Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1995
Abstract
It is more than a decade since scholars like L. G. Thomas and David H. Breen challenged the assumption that the Canadian ranching frontier was a straightforward case of technological and land-use diffusion from the United States. Breen argued that the Canadian government had played a significant role in bringing the range cattle industry into being within the North West Territories during the 1880s and went on to trace the manner in which the Department of the Interior overtly supported the ranchers for the next twenty years. Under this regulatory umbrella, upheld by the forceful presence of the North West Mounted Police, a society evolved that sought to preserve the best features of the familiar old world in a new and expansive environment. What emerged was not an experimental frontier society seeking new freedoms, but rather a conservative community that saw its mandate as the maintenance of imperial Victorian values.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:1 (Winter 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.