Review of Town and City: Aspects of Western Canadian Urban Development Edited by Alan F. J. Artibise

Authors

John C. Hudson, Northwestern UniversityFollow

Date of this Version

Winter 1983

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter 1983, pp. 50-51.

Comments

Copyright 1983 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Western Canada's settlement is neatly divided at the Rocky Mountain front. West of there, the population is urban and the scattered clusters of people are separated from one another by miles of wilderness; on the prairies to the east there is a network of farms, small towns, and cities dominated, in turn, by a handful of metropolises. This valuable collection of papers by sixteen Canadian urban historians and geographers treats urbanization in both of these western Canadian realms, providing a balanced geographical coverage and giving the reader a consistent view of town formation, ranging from the smallest of places to the largest.

The prairies (Canada's counterpart for the American term "Great Plains") were settled from east to west with the construction of railway lines and with the assistance of public lands disposal acts. As in the United States, a network of railroad-created service-center towns grew up to handle the trade brought by the ethnically diverse farm population. The prairies were agricultural, and the center of wholesaling, transportation, and grain marketing was Winnipeg, which, by 1911, was Canada's third largest city and unquestionably the primate city of the vast, agricultural prairie region. In an interesting essay Paul Phillips traces the recent decline of Winnipeg's dominance while Calgary and Edmonton have emerged as leaders in a new regional economy now based more on energy than on agriculture.

For the far-western half, three papers on Vancouver and Victoria (by Robert McDonald, C. N. Forward, and Patricia Roy) detail the 50 remarkable role reversal that occurred after the Canadian Pacific's 1886 founding of Vancouver. Victoria, the long-time regional capital of the British northwest coast, was soon replaced by Vancouver, and although the latter was a mecca for the unemployed western drifter who could drift no farther west, the city soon established itself as Canada's link to the Orient as well as to the growing cities of the U.S. Pacific borderland.

John Selwood and Evelyn Baril give a fascinating account of the Hudson's Bay Company's attempts to make cities in the Canadian West. Although the company owned major portions of the townsite at both Winnipeg and Edmonton, the HBC had next to no impact on stimulating urban growth in the region where it once virtually determined the location of trading centers. Individual essays on Regina and Moose Jaw (J. William Brennan), Strathcona, which later became part of Edmonton (John Gilpin), Leth bridge (A. A. den Otter), Calgary (separate essays by Max Foran and Henry Klassen), Edmonton (Carl Betke), and Saskatoon (Lewis H. Thomas) show that urban promotion was much the same from one city to another. In most cases the booming of prairie townsites involved free-wheeling entrepreneurial ethics and cozy partnerships between government and railroads much like those that occurred in the United States. In his own essay, editor Alan Artibise makes clear the role that individual boosters had in promoting their cities, and he observes that, without their leaders, Canada's prairie cities would have amounted to much less-a conclusion he also balances against economic theories of urban location and growth.