Review of High River and the Times: An Alberta Community and Its Weekly Newspaper, 1905-1966 By Paul Voisey

Authors

Bert Deyell, University of Calgary

Date of this Version

Spring 2005

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring 2005, pp. 130.

Comments

Copyright 2005 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Paul Voisey investigates the town's storyteller rather than the story of High River. Dismissing postmodernist media theories of communication as too abstract, Voisey opts for informal textual analysis: his personal interpretation. The pages of the High River Times, supplemented with personal papers of the proprietors and archives at the Glenbow Museum, evidence a cycle common to small town prairie history: boosterism, economic hardship, reappraisal, and reactionary rural idealism.

The Times initially declares the potential of High River in term of progress, says Voisey; the local weekly newspaper becomes a publicity agent for speculators, governments, and railways. But economic and geographical limitations eventually alter the story, he adds. The High River Time's editorial slant thus adjusts from metropolitan progress to small town virtue.

Voisey thoroughly explores how the Times helps High River to rediscover its past, creating an identity through its cowboy heroes and rodeo legends. He gleans from the weekly's pages what sets the southern Alberta foothills community apart from most Plains settlements, scattered over rolling grassland to the east and south: the Stampede. The history of High River becomes inseparable from the story of cowboys, ranches, and rodeos. High River loses to Calgary for metropolitan status, he notes, but wins a legitimate share in the fame surrounding the Calgary Stampede. While many communities of the Plains struggle for identity, manufacturing links to celebrities of popular culture or building contrived tourist attractions like commercial theme parks, Voisey argues High River reinvents its authentic ranching history into the legend of the cowboy.

Yet Voisey's rigorous attention to details occasionally distracts rather than informs the reader; a more critical scholar might want the Times's struggle with the Social Credit government more developed. The tension between commercial imperatives and freedom of expression becomes particularly salient to the Clarks, the weekly's owners. Because local private advertisers are few and government sources like paid notices and printing contracts represent an opportunity to fill the void, Charles Clark, the founder, faces the prospect of publishing a government gazette rather than legitimate news. In particular, the weekly's struggle with the Social Credit government over the Alberta Press Act seems compelling; the Times plays a central role in successfully resisting formally codified government censorship.