Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Winter 1983

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter 1983, pp. 30-38.

Comments

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

Abstract

In 1879, the prolific dime novelist Edward L. Wheeler produced a narrative entitled Canada Chet, The Counterfeiter Chief, set in "a location as hitherto quite neglected by the pen of the novelist and veracious historian-i.e., in the British possessions to the North-west of Minnesota." If, as Wheeler suggests, American writers were indifferent to the Canadian West in the nineteenth century, this lack of attention can be related to a number of considerations, the most obvious of which is the fact that Americans were sufficiently occupied by the undeveloped regions within their own border. The westward experience in the United States was a nationalistic phenomenon, related to the visions of freedom and unique identity that preoccupied the collective thought and imagination to the exclusion of extraterritorial regions, except insofar as these regions occasionally figured in ideals of continental or hemispheric unity.

Wheeler's comments on American neglect of the Canadian West require some qualification. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a small but steadily increasing American expression of interest in the Canadian prairies. This interest, as it emerged in economic and demographic activity and the rhetoric of "manifest destiny," has been documented by modern American and Canadian scholars. Little attention has been devoted, however, to the image of the region as it appears sporadically in imaginq.tive writing. The importance of this image is well established in scholarly tradition. "It is a truism of history," as Robin Winks has pointed out, "that what people believe to be true is more important than what 'in fact' actually happened, since they act upon their beliefs, not on 'the facts." Henry Nash Smith, in his classic study, Virgin Land: The American West in Symbol and Myth, has provided the definitive demonstration of the interaction between imaginative vision and empirical experience as they refer to the West.

As Virgin Land illustrates, the literary images inspired by the western frontier were not necessarily incorporated into distinguished works of art. Writers such as Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman used impressionistic or symbolic conceptions of the West in various contexts, but the detailed literary exploitation of the region was left to the traveler, the journalist, and the writer of formulaic adventure fiction. This generalization is particularly applicable to the American image of the Canadian West, elements of which are found in travel narratives, feature magazine articles, and adventure fiction in the dime and nickel novel formats. This American writing about Canada is, comparatively speaking, neither extensive nor artistically significant; but a scrutiny of some examples may add to our understanding of the American conception of the western frontier.

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