Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1983
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 1983, pp. 79-91.
Abstract
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a number of factors combined to promote the rapid advance of the ranching frontier throughout the Great Plains of North America. The demands of rapidly growing urban populations in the northeastern United States and north western Europe provided an apparently insatiable market for meat. The grasslands were linked to these markets by an expanding railway network and steamships that crossed the Atlantic on regular schedules. Rumors of the huge profits to be made from investments in mines, railways, and ranges lured a flood of risk capital to the West. The interplay of these and other factors in the United States has been subjected to intensive scrutiny by writers and researchers from a variety of disciplines. The fact that ranching dominated the land use pattern of much of the Canadian West for a vital twenty-year period is much less well known.
It was the cattlemen who initiated settlement in the foothills and valleys of the Canadian Rockies and explored the short~grass prairies around the Cypress Hills. During this brief period of unchallenged occupation, a new volume of population was spread unevenly over the land, new patterns of circulation and interaction were established, and new and longlasting elements were added to local society. Yet settlement studies of the Canadian prairies have paid but scant attention to the ranching frontier and pass from discussion of the fur trade to analysis of homesteading and the wheat economy.
The tacit assumption has been that ranching in Canada was merely an extension of the Cattle Kingdom of the United States and hence was hardly worthy of particular study. This was certainly the view exp,essed by A. S. Morton and J. F. Booth, who contributed to the benchmark study Canadian Frontiers of Settlement during the 1930s. More recently, W. L. Morton endorsed this point of view and summarized in these words: "The advance into the plains, led by the spearhead of the Canadian Pacific Railway, had begun as a broad front of settlement to Indian Head, to Regina, until the dusty core of Palliser's triangle was reached, and the farming frontier from the east was stopped by the ranching front advancing from the south." At this level of generalization it seemed obvious that ranchers north and south of the line were linked by common objectives, used broadly similar techniques, and faced the same challenges.
Comments
Copyright 1983 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln