Review of Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society by Lesley Erickson

Authors

William Katerberg, Calvin College

Date of this Version

Summer 2012

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 32:3 (Summer 2012).

Comments

Copyright © 2012 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

Abstract

Westward Bound is a detailed study of sex and violence in Canada's prairie provinces and British Columbia-the circumstances and causes of that violence, its policing and prosecution, and the role of both in the shaping of class, race, and gender relations during the settlement era. Lesley Erickson's study can be read profitably along with studies of the us. West, such as David Peterson del Mar's Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West (2002). Erickson makes few comparisons to the US., framing her analysis instead mostly in relation to historiography on other parts of Canada and Britain. But her book provides valuable material for historians of the Great Plains and the larger American West.