A Literary History of the American West

The Northern Boundary

THE OFFICIAL BOUNDARY between the western United States and western Canada was begun in 1818 from the northwesternmost point of the Lake of the Woods; it ran due south for some miles at about the 95th meridian, and then along the 49th parallel to the divide of the Rocky Mountains. Unable to determine the sovereignty over the region from the Rockies to the Pacific between Spanish California at 42°ree; and Russian Alaska at 54°ree;40', Great Britain and the U.S. agreed that this Oregon Country, some 360,000 square miles, should be free and open to the nationals of both countries for a term of ten years. Even before the decade was out, in 1827, the two nations indefinitely extended this principle of amicable disagreement, and only in 1846 was the completion of the 49°ree; boundary line from the Rockies to the Strait of Georgia, and thence through the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Pacific, agreed upon.

John Cawelti, in The Six-Gun Mystique (1975), analyzed the American Western as "a brilliantly articulated game" which "takes place on a certain kind of board or field whose shape or markings indicate the significance of a particular action." The Canadian border, the northern boundary of the U.S., has almost inevitably functioned for the western American imagination as one edge of this board; the struggles to establish and defend approaches to, or passages across, this edge become significant actions. The border became the Indians' "medicine line," the unreached goal of Chief Joseph's long retreat and Sitting Bull's refuge. Comparable motives for seeking the border are as much aggressively seized possibilities as flight or escape. Discovery of gold on the Fraser River in 1858 and in the Cariboo country in 1860 drew Americans in such numbers as to threaten nullification of the border conventions of 1846. Mormon migration from Utah to southern Alberta beginning in 1887 was motivated as much by rich new soil as by the desire to escape political persecution. The transborder area became variously the stable protection of the Queen's justice, or an even more remote and mysterious wilderness, variously freedom in the "great woods" or exile in "the land of endless snow." If the border has functioned as device or setting, its history as a locus of shared exploration and exploitation, of political dispute, commercial rivalry, and free and frequent migration, has also served the western writer as subject. The border is, in this more general sense, some measure of conventional regulation for the human conflicts and collaborations generated by the common occupation of a region by two (and more) nations and now reflected in the literature of both. In his meditation on the boundary line in Wolf Willow (1962), Wallace Stegner writes: "For the 49th parallel was an agreement, a rule, a limitation, a fiction perhaps but a legal one, acknowledged by both sides; and the coming of law, even such limited law as this, was the beginning of civilization in what had been a lawless wilderness. Civilization is built on a tripod of geography, history, and law, and it is made up largely of limitations." Stegner is right, but it is also true that students of the American West must resist one such limitation–the temptation to become not only a regionalist, but a nationalist, chauvinistically forgetting that the history of western continental literature often ignores the political boundary and grows from its roots deep in common experience, a common language, and the common heritage of British and European culture.

The history of the northern continental interior prior to the drawing of the international boundary is the history of the fur trade, dominated by the Hudson's Bay Company which from 1670 held charter to Rupert's Land: the drainage of the Hudson and James Bays, the Red River valley, and the valleys of the north and south branches of the Saskatchewan River. The Company's monopoly was repeatedly challenged by independent traders who organized in 1783 as the NorthWest Company, which remained in often violent competition, especially on the Red River and the Columbia, until the two companies merged in 1821. Many of the most interesting early narratives of travel and discovery came from these "Nor'westers," and among the best is Travels and Adventures in Canada (1809) by Alexander Henry the elder. Born in New Jersey, Henry was one of the first whites to penetrate the Canadian prairies, reaching the valley of the Saskatchewan by 1776; so vivid are his accounts that Francis Parkman borrowed almost verbatim from them for The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851). Another Yankee prominent in the fur trade was Peter Pond of Connecticut. Soldier, mapmaker, and explorer, Pond opened the Athabaska country, and penetrated as far as Great Slave Lake. He left what has been called a "fascinating, but amazingly illiterate journal," the remnant of which, edited by R. G. Thwaites, is in Wisconsin Historical Collections (1908). Two other Yankees in the fur trade are Daniel Williams Harmon and Alexander Henry the younger, nephew of the senior Henry. Harmon's Journals of Voyages and Travels (1820) and the younger Henry's narrative in New Light on the Early History of the Greater North West, edited by Elliott Coues in 1897, are notable largely as records of the encounter of lingering Puritan morality with the sexual customs of the trade frontier. Harmon, for example, refused the traders' practice of abandoning Indian wives, returning with his to Vermont and formal marriage. Harmon is the subject of The Grand Portage (1951), a novel by Walter O'Meara. These Yankees were in distinguished company including three Bay traders, Henry Kelsey (the first white to record–and in doggerel verse–seeing the Canadian prairies), Anthony Henday (the first to record a sight of the Rockies), Samuel Hearne (the first to reach the Arctic Ocean by an overland route), and, preeminently, the Nor'wester Alexander Mackenzie, the first to travel the river given his name to the Arctic and the first to cross the continent to the Pacific. Mackenzie's Voyages from Montreal through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in 1789 and 1793 (1801) reveals clearly the intrepid character of the Scots who were so often in the forefront of Canadian development. Poe borrowed from Mackenzie's Voyages for his unfinished "Journal of Julius Rodman." The pioneering explorations by land that established British claims to the Northwest were completed by the perilous descent of Simon Fraser (born in Vermont in 1776) by the river bearing his name to the Pacific in 1808. A definitive text of all of Fraser's known Letters and Journals was edited by W. Kaye Lamb in 1960. Perhaps the most valuable source of sheer information about the early Northwest is the work of David Thompson, who spent twenty-eight years there as explorer, mapmaker, naturalist and pioneer ethnographer of the Indians. In addition Thompson had considerable skills as a storyteller and his shrewd portraiture, sense of humor, and ear for dialogue make his records, collected and edited by Victor G. Hopwood in 1972 as Travels in Western North America, 1784–812, a constant delight. The contemporary Canadian poet, John Newlove, has drawn on Thompson's work for his poem, "The Pride."

On his third and last expedition, the great British explorer James Cook found the harbor of Nootka on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1778, which became for the subsequent quarter century a crossroads of trade, particularly in the fur of the sea otter, and a center for international political struggle. The founding figure for Canada's west coast is George Vancouver, who meticulously filled in the details of Cook's outline of the coast from Oregon north; Vancouver's Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, 1790–95 (1801) is useful to the geographer but of slight narrative interest. Victor Hopwood, author of the admirable chapters on early explorers in the Literary History of Canada, describes how the Americans secured their first toehold claim in the Northwest: "Against Vancouver's great accomplishments must be placed his failure to recognize the mouth of the fabled River of the West, passing it in April 1792 with the comment, `not considering this opening worthy of more attention.' Within two weeks Robert Gray in the Columbia entered the estuary and named the river for his ship, making the outstanding American discovery on the west coast of America." The several accounts connected with Gray's discovery are collected in Voyages of the "Columbia" to the Northwest Coast (1941) by F. W. Howay. One literary curiosity of this period is the diary of John Jewitt, a blacksmith captured after the massacre of his Boston shipmates by the Nootka Indians in 1803. Jewitt's account was enlarged in 1815 as Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt, a lively and exotic Pacific Indian captivity story to be compared with the more familiar ones of the Atlantic frontier, and more noteworthy because Jewitt's editor and collaborator was Richard Alsop, one of the Connecticut Wits more noted for eastern sophistication than western adventure.

American enterprise in the Pacific trade centered in John Jacob Astor's fort on the Columbia, established in 1811 and captured and purchased by the Nor'westers in 1813. Washington Irving's accounts in Astoria ( 1836) owe a debt, only grudgingly acknowledged by him, to at least two "Canadians" among what he called the "scribbling" clerks of the Pacific Fur Company: Gabriel Franchère's Relation d'un voyage à la côte du Nord-Ouest de l'Amerique ( 1820; translated into English, 1854) and Ross Cox's Adventures on the Columbia River (1831). Another Canadian, Alexander Ross, in AdVentures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River (1849), has left a markedly less reverent account of Astor's enterprise than Irving's. Not surprisingly, the events surrounding Astoria have become a staple for the historical novel; Gilbert Wolf Gabriel's I, James Lewis (1932) and John Jennings's River to the West (1948) are typical.

Despite Astor's bold moves, the Oregon country was under the effective control of the British until well into the 1840s. Any student of the literature of this period should be familiar with the several publications of the Hudson's Bay Record Society, particularly the letters and journals of George Simpson, after 1839 governor-in-chief of the Hudson's Bay territories; Simpson's skills as an administrator incorporated the Columbia into the largest and most efficient system for producing furs the world had known. The Society also published the records of Dr. John McLaughlin, chief factor at Fort Vancouver, whose accomplishments in the area earned him the occasional title of "the Father of Oregon." The Society has also published Peter Skene Ogden's Snake Country Journal in two volumes covering the years 1824–1827. Ogden's colorful adventures as a Bay trader include his successful rescue of the survivors of the Whitman massacre in 1847, a task dependent on his shrewd knowledge of the region's Indians. He may have been the "Fur Trader" whose Traits of American Indian Life and Character (1853) attempted to correct sentimental portrayals of "the noble savage," although the work has also been attributed to his contemporary, Duncan Finlayson. Ogden's exploits figure in Don Berry's delightful "informal history" of the unequal contention between the American and Canadian fur traders, A Majority of Scoundrels (1961). A darker view of the effect of the fur wars on the Indians is presented in Vardis Fisher's novel, Pemmican (1956).

The Bay Company's control of the Oregon country was terminated by what the historian John Bartlet Brebner, in his invaluable North American Triangle: The lnterplay of Canada, the United States and Great Britain (1945), calls "the most remarkable anomaly in the occupation of North America– the unpredictable American leap across the empty western half of the continent in order to settle Oregon and thereafter to try to goad Great Britain into withdrawing from the Pacific Coast. This exploit was effectively accomplished in five years, 1841–1846." This wave of migration, moved in part by the reception of Irving's Astoria and Adventures of Captain Bonneville (first titled The Rocky Mountains, 1837), began with missionaries, whose enterprise had been earlier and successfully resisted by the fur traders. The Canadian-born Jason Lee in 1834 established a Methodist mission in the Willamette valley, and another was begun near Walla Walla in 1836 by Dr. Marcus Whitman. The American Jesuit of Belgian descent, Pierre Jean De Smet, undertook a mission to the Flathead Indians in 1841 and his experiences on both sides of the border have been collected as Life, Letters, and Travels (1969). Another observer who recorded the twilight of the fur empire was the Canadian painter, Paul Kane, who travelled the Northwest between 1846 and 1848; his lively but unpretentious accounts in Wanderings of an Artist (1859) should be compared with George Catlin's rather more ornate Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841) .

There are several interesting accounts from those who first travelled the Oregon trail beyond Fort Laramie, the point reached by Francis Parkman as recorded in The Oregon Trail (1849). These include narratives by John B. Wyeth, John Townsend and Joel Palmer, included as volumes 21 and 30 of Reuben G. Thwaites's monumental thirty-two-volume collection of Early Western Travels 1748–1846 (1904–7), and the Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer (1880) by Peter H. Burnett, later the first governor of California, who went to Oregon in 1843. But these early accounts pale before the number of modern novels which together make the agricultural settlement of the Oregon country the most frequently used subject associated with the northern boundary. The political contention over the boundary which culminated in President Polk's assertion, in his inaugural address of 1845, that "our title to the country of Oregon is `clear and unquestionable,'" and in the subsequent U.S.-British conventions that made it so, is the subject of several more or less bellicose fictions, beginning with Emerson Hough's 54–40 or Fight (1909) and including June Wetherell's The Glorious Three (1951), Bill Gulick's The Land Beyond (1958) and Janice Giles's The Great Adventure (1966), which has Captain Bonneville assigned to spy on the British. More substantial fictional treatments of the movement of the agricultural frontier into the Northwest are prefigured by H. L. Davis's Pulitzer Prize novel, Honey in the Horn (1935). Set in 1906–1908, the novel portrays a community still in the period of "homesteading," but already mature in its traditions and diversities; the character of Uncle Preston Shiveley, in his dual roles as historian and romancer, underlines Davis's sense of complexity in recovering the local past. Davis's 1957 novel, The Distant Music, is a more conventional portrait of three generations of settlement in the region. A. B. Guthrie's The Way West (1949), Ernest Haycox's last book and one of his best, The Earthbreakers (1954), and Don Berry's Trask (1960), which shows the title character's transformation from mountain man to farmer, are all worth serious attention.

While the 49°ree; boundary was largely the result of the consolidation of the American agricultural frontier, it was further challenged by the discovery of new mineral wealth. The rush for free gold in California in 1848 launched the exploitation of the Cordillera range northward culminating in strikes in the Yukon and the Klondike in 1898. Americans followed the gold in such numbers that their presence did much to prompt the formal establishment of the colony of British Columbia in 1866 and then the confederation of the eastern colonies in 1867, the root of modern Canada as it labored to prevent American annexation. The literary exploitation of the mining frontier was international. The English-born, Scots-educated Robert Service is most famous for his ballads finally issued in 1907 as The Spell of the Yukon, but his novel The Trail of '98 (1910) was equally popular. Jack London's The God of His Fathers (1901) and Smoke Bellew (1912) are based on his experience in the gold rush. Hamlin Garland travelled the area, reporting it in The Trail of the Goldseekers (1899) and The Long Trail (1907). Canadians contributed works like Clive Phillips-Wolley's Snap: A Legend of Lone Mountain (1890) and Frederick Niven's The Lost Cabin Mine (1909). The most authentic treatment of the subject in Canadian fiction is William Henry Jarvis's The Great Gold Rush (1913). The Reverend Charles Gordon, who under the pseudonym "Ralph Connor" acquired an international reputation as a novelist, wrote about mining in the Selkirk Mountains in Black Rock (1898), and Mary Hallock Foote in Coeur d'Alene (1894) describes labor troubles among the miners of Idaho.

The growth of the lumber industry in the Northwest has also been a transborder subject for the novelist. Canadian works include Bertrand Sinclair's Big Timber (1916) and preeminently Martin Allerdale Grainger's Woodsmen of the West (1908); Grainger, a miner, logger, and eventually Chief Forester of British Columbia, has left one of the most effective pictures of west coast life. American novels include Ernest Haycox's The Adventurers (1954), which sketches the early exploitation of timber in Oregon, Archie Binns's The Timber Beast (1944) touching the industry's embroilments with the IWW, and Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), a vivid story of three generations of Oregon loggers. One of the so-called forgotten proletarian novels of the '30s is Robert Cantwell's The Land of Plenty (1934), which deals with unrest among the lumber mill workers in the Gray's Harbor area.

The white writer early discovered the particularly rich and exotic cultures of the coastal and intermountain Indians of the Northwest, and Canadian writers at least have exploited the subject in ways that give point to Edward McCourt's remark that in Canada, Alberta is the far west, British Columbia the near east. Franz Boas of Columbia University was the first ethnographer to record the coastal Indian cultures, and after 1902 his work, and that of his students, began appearing in publications by the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology. The French-Canadian anthropologist, Dr. Marius Barbeau, was also active in the field and his novel, Mountain Cloud (1944), is based on the folklore of the coastal tribes. Pauline Johnson, daughter of an hereditary chief of the Mohawks and an English mother, was popular on both sides of the border for public readings of her sentimental lyrics of Indian life, collected in 1912 as Flint and Feather; in 1911 she published Legends of Vancouver, short stories recounting tales and rituals of the Squamish Indians, collected with the aid of Chief Joseph Capilano.

The intermountain Indians became subjects for two Montana writers, James Willard Schultz, who married into a Blackfoot tribe and published several stories of their people, and Frank Bird Linderman, a prolific collector of folklore in such works as Indian Old-Man Stories (1920) and Kootenai Why Stories (1926). Schultz's memoirs appeared in 1907 as My Life as an Indian, and Linderman's "recollections" were edited in 1968 by H. G. Merriam as Montana Adventure. The Indian trickster figure known as Old Man or Coyote has been used to superb advantage by Sheila Watson in The Double Hook (1959), set in the Cariboo country and often celebrated as the most interesting of Canadian experimental novels. Howard O'Hagan in Tay John (1939) makes his novel's title character, a half-breed raised among the Shuswap Indians, something of a mythic hero, and Alan Fry in How a People Die (1970) gives an elegiac portrait of the deterioration of native culture among the coastal tribes. A.M. D. Fairbairn's Plays from the Pacific Coast (1935) dramatizes tensions between whites and the Haida Indians, and George Ryga has written several plays about the situation of the Indian in western Canada, most importantly The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, first performed in 1967.

More generally, the writing of British Columbia has retained much of the exotic in its tradition. Malcolm Lowry, author of the celebrated Under the Volcano (1947), lived in a beach shack near Vancouver between 1939 and 1954, did some of his most vigorous writing there, and left a work-in-progress set in the area, "October Ferry to Gabriola" (1970). Robert Harlow's Scann (1972) is an eccentric but ambitious effort by its title character to chronicle his intermountain town on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Jack Hodgins's collection of short stories, Spit Delaney's Island (1976), and his novel, The Invention of the World (1977), are wonderfully comic tales of some remote settlements on Vancouver Island. This coastal willingness to experiment with subject and technique is present even in the quieter work of the late Ethel Wilson, whose novels, Hetty Dorval (1947) and Swamp Angel (1954), and two novellas published as Equations of Love (1952) effectively combine sympathetic observation with a cutting satiric edge. Two American expatriates now resident and writing in British Columbia are Jane Rule who, from her first novel, The Desert of the Heart (1964), has contributed several sensitive studies of unconventional love, and Audrey Thomas. Thomas's well-crafted collection of short stories, Ten Green Bottles (1967), reveals the kind of quirky yet engrossing intelligence which may well characterize much of contemporary writing in British Columbia; certainly this judgment can be tested against the anthology of "Writings of the Canadian Northwest," edited by Gary Geddes as Skookum Wawa (1977).

Recent poetry in the Northwest reveals intermittent transborder activity. A visit by Robert Duncan to Vancouver in 1961 sparked considerable interest in the Black Mountain group (especially Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson) among younger Canadian poets like George Bowering, Frank Davey, Lionel Kearns, Fred Wah, and Daphne Marlatt; such interest prompted dark murmurs of American neocolonialism, but generated the lively magazine Tish, which published until 1969. In 1964 Robin Skelton of Victoria, later founding editor of The Malahat Review (1967–), edited Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest comprising work by the Americans Kenneth Hanson, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, William Stafford, and David Wagoner, and dedicated to Theodore Roethke, a fitting tribute to a poet who has been a principal influence along the boundary. In 1975 Stafford reciprocated by including Skelton and Earle Birney, the dean of western Canadian poets, in Modern Poetry of Western America, an anthology Stafford edited with Clinton Larson. The ranks of British Columbia poets have included American expatriates like Stanley Cooperman, Robin Blaser, and J. Michael Yates, who in 1970 edited an anthology of the work of some fiftyfive poets as Contemporary Poetry of British Columbia.

Modern poetry in western Canada might be dated from the establishment in 1941 by Alan Crawley of Contemporary Verse: A Canadian Quarterly, which published until 1953. Crawley's associates included Dorothy Livesay (the remarkable doyenne of Canadian poetry whose first book appeared in 1928 and most recent, The Woman I Am, in 1977), Anne Marriott (whose first book, The Wind Our Enemy, 1939, evoked the hard conditions on the prairies during the '30s), Doris Ferne, and Floris Clarke McLaren, whose Frozen Fire (1937) is notable for its impressions of the coastal landscape. The title poem of Earle Birney's first book, David and Other Poems (1942), a narrative of the tragic dilemma faced by a climber in the Rockies, has come to be regarded as a Canadian classic. Roy Daniells knows both the prairies and the coast, and his Deeper into the Forest (1948) reflects both regions. Wilfred Watson's Friday's Child appeared in 1955, and he has remained with the avantgarde ever since. Among younger British Columbia poets of interest are Red Lane, Patrick Lane, Tom Wayman, and the resolute and irrepressible experimentalist, Bill Bissett. Finally, mention should be made of the quarterly Canadian Literature, edited since 1959 at the University of British Columbia with the distinguished man-of-letters George Woodcock as its first editor; it is an indispensable tool for the student of Canadian letters, east and west.

The agricultural settlement of the high plains, the last frontier common to experience on both sides of the border, began in 1812 with the Red River Settlement on the 116,000 square miles lying athwart the 49th parallel and granted by the Bay Company as a proprietary colony to Lord Selkirk. Selkirk's efforts to populate the colony with a mixture that included Scots crofters, Irish laborers, and eventually Swiss mercenaries alienated the NorthWest Company and the English and French half-breeds (called Métis), who saw the settlement as destructive of both the fur trade and the buffalo hunt. Alexander Ross's last book, The Red River Settlement (1856), details the hardships of the early settlers and foreshadows the violent subsequent history of the area. The historian Alvin C. Gluek has studied the complex interaction between the two nations in the region in Minnesota and the Manifest Destiny of the Canadian Northwest (1965). Selkirk's "estate" reverted to the Bay Company in 1836, and in 1869, when the Company sold its vast territories to Canada, the Métis, led by the charismatic Louis Riel, violently resisted what they saw as the final threat to their rights. The events leading to the Red River Rebellion, including the role played by Americans pressing for annexation of the region, prompted the first serious novel of the prairies, Alexander Begg's "Dot It Down": A Story of Life in the NorthWest (1871), which contains some satiric portraits of those involved; Begg recounted the same story more soberly in his history, The Creation of Manitoba (1871).

The Rebellion failed and Riel's subsequent adventures included a sixyear period of exile in the United States, where he became a citizen in 1883. He returned to Canada in 1884 to lead the final efforts of the Indians and Métis to seek redress of their grievances, efforts which erupted in the armed North West Rebellion of 1885. Riel, despite his U.S. citizenship, was tried and hanged for treason in 1885. The standard biography of Riel is G. F. G. Stanley's Louis Riel (1963), but his career is also becoming the stuff of legend. John Coulter's play The Trial of Louis Riel (1967) is now performed annually in Regina with the jury drawn from the audience. Rudy Wiebe's The Scorched-Wood People (1977), a novel centering on Riel's career, examines the interplay between history and myth-in-the-making, a work prepared for by Wiebe's earlier novel, The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), which sensitively recreates the consciousness of a Cree leader reluctantly drawn into the North West Rebellion. '

Riel was executed in the year which saw the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This long-anticipated transcontinental link, its expectation celebrated in George Grant's exuberant chronicle, Ocean to Ocean (1873), was finally memorialized in a long narrative poem, Toward the Last Spike (1952), by one of eastern Canada's principal poets, E. J. Pratt. With the railroad and improvements in the new technology of dry farming came the final waves of agricultural immigration. Soon Canadian novelists were recording the process of civilizing the raw prairies in ways to compare with their American counterparts described by Roy Meyer in The Middle Western Farm Novel (1965). Nellie McClung brought her enthusiasm for Christian reform, especially for women's rights and temperance, to bear in Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908), novels like Painted Fires (1925), about the introduction of a Finnish girl into the Anglo West, and two autobiographical works, Clearing in the West (1935) and The Stream Runs Fast (1945). Laura Goodman Salverson's The Viking Heart (1923) recounts the movement of Icelandic settlers to Gimli, Manitoba, and When Sparrows Fall (1925) the hardships of Icelandic and Norwegian pioneers on the U.S. shore of Lake Superior. Martha Ostenso, born in Norway, raised in the States, wrote Wild Geese (1926) from experience during six years' residence in Manitoba. More general studies of the human costs exacted in subduing the prairies are Robert J. C. Stead's trio of novels, Neighbours (1922), The Smoking Flax (1924) and Grain (1926), and Frederick Philip Grove's five prairie novels, of which A Search for America (1927) and Fruits of the Earth (1933) are the most impressive. Grove's autobiography, In Search of Myself (1946), together with D. O. Spettigue's scholarly detection of the past deliberately concealed by Grove, published as FPG: The European Years (1973), form an authentic case study of the crisis of personal identity often the subject of Canadian prairie fiction. Winnipeg was the first substantial urban center of the prairies and its rich ethnic mix is reflected in such novels as Ralph Con-nor's The Foreigner (1909) about the Slavic community of north Winnipeg and Adele Wiseman's The Sacrifice (1956) about the Jewish community. Ann Henry's play, Lulu Street (1967), concerns the dramatic Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. A major talent associated with Manitoba has recently emerged in the work of Margaret Laurence; her novels The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966) and The Diviners (1974) are set in the imaginary prairie community of Manawaka, and are the most impressive of the studies of female independence which have marked recent Canadian fiction.

In 1925, Sinclair Lewis wrote that he intended to set the novel which became Mantrap (1926) in Saskatchewan, but that "I'm going to invent a whole new region up there."Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House (1941) is comparable with Lewis's Main Street (1920) in its dramatization of the repressive effects of western small town life on sensitive people, but it is considerably more convincing in its depiction of Canadian rural life than Lewis's 1926 invention. Ross's novel should also be compared with Wallace Stegner's On a Darkling Plain (1940); while Ross's protagonists are virtually destroyed by village life, Stegner's central figure, a Canadian World War I veteran seeking therapeutic isolation as a Saskatchewan homesteader, finally discovers his need for community. W. O. Mitchell's portrait of a prairie boy in Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) has been compared with Twain's Huck, and the comparison is strengthened by Mitchell's gifts as a raconteur and humorist, evident in his radio series which was popular on both sides of the border, published as Jake and the Kid (1961); Mitchell's Vanishing Point (1973) is the more sombre story of a difficult love affair on an Alberta Stony Indian reserve. Paul Hiebert's Sarah Binks (1947), a mock-biography of "the Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan," is a marvelous send-up of both the literary pioneer and academic criticism. The full range of contemporary poetry from the prairie provinces is reflected in Twelve Prairie Poets, edited by Laurence Ricou in 1976, and in Draft: An Anthology of Prairie Poetry, edited by Dennis Cooley; among those included, three show a particularly intense feeling for regional experience: John Newlove, one of the finest lyric poets in Canada, whose recent books include Moving in Alone (1965) and Lies (1972); Robert Kroetsch, whose The Stone Hammer Poems (1975) contains some tart comic versions of the Old Man legends; and Eli Mandel, whose several volumes beginning with Fuseli Poems (1961) often take unexpected mythological turns. Prairie drama is well represented in Prairie Performance, edited by Diane Bessai in 1980, an anthology of short plays by eight regional playwrights including Gwen Pharis Ringwood, who has written impressively for the theatre since the '30s, the versatile W. O. Mitchell, and Ken Mitchell, whose Cruel Tears (1975) is a prairie folk-opera version of the Othello story written in collaboration with the country and western group, Humphrey and the Dumptrucks.

If Canada has a wild West, it might be found in Alberta, but, as Dick Harrison has argued in Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction (1977), the literary record raises doubts. The central figure in Alberta fiction is more likely to be the clergyman than the cowboy (as in Ralph Connor's The Sky Pilot, 1899), the mountie rather than the gunfighter, as in Connor's Corporal Cameron (1912). The North West Mounted Police arrived in Alberta in 1874, before the main waves of immigration and late enough to profit from American mistakes, particularly in Indian policy; the NWMP maintained order largely by eradicating the whiskytrading forts which dotted the famous Whoop-Up trail between Fort Benton on the Missouri and Fort Macleod on the Oldman River, a story told in Paul Sharp's lively history Whoop-Up Country (1955). The mounties' real achievements were soon magnified in the popular fictions of both nations; Dick Harrison has culled twenty-two of these in Best Mounted Police Stories (1978), one by James Oliver Curwood, who deserves special mention as the writer perhaps most responsible for Americans' popular images of Canada. Curwood was born in Michigan in 1878 and wrote some twenty-six novels, most of them about Canada, before his death in 1927; no fewer than 122 Hollywood films have been based on Curwood's novels or short stories. The search for a West, real or imagined, is a major theme in a trio of novels by Robert Kroetsch: The Words of My Roaring (1966), The Studhorse Man (1968), and Gone Indian (1973), in part the story of Jeremy Sadness, born in Manhattan and now trying to track in Alberta the western myths of his boyhood.

It is appropriate, finally, to return to the work of Wallace Stegner, for in a way analogous to the wanderings of the Mason family chronicled in The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), this sketch has crossed and recrossed the international boundary in order to trace the literary fabric of its life. As Stegner reports in Wolf Willow (1962), his boyhood summers were spent on a farm astride the boundary–"I trapped Saskatchewan and Montana flickertails indiscriminately, and spread strychnine-soaked wheat without prejudice over two nations." But, as Stegner also reminds us, "Undistinguishable and ignored as it was, artificially as it split a country that was topographically and climatically one, the international boundary marked a divide in our affiliations, expectations, loyalties." And he continues: "It exerted uncomprehended pressures upon affiliation and belief, custom and costume. It offered us subtle choices even in language (we stooked our wheat; across the Line they shocked it), and it lay among our loyalties as disturbing as a hair in butter." Again Stegner is right, but the very differences in these two literatures of the west, adjacent and closely interwoven as they are, seem even more reasons to study them together.

MORTON L. ROSS, University of Alberta

Selected Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. An argument by an important contemporary poet and novelist that Canadian letters are characterized by such "patterns" as survival and victimization.
Brebner, John Bartlet. North Atlantic Triangle: The Interplay of Canada, the United States and Great Britain. New York, 1945; rpt. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966. A comprehensive, but convenient and readable history of international relations.
Davey, Frank. From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature Since 1960. Erin, Ontario: Press Porcepic, 1974. Particularly useful on western writers.
Harrison, Dick. "Across the Medicine Line: Problems in Comparing Canadian and American Western Fiction." In The Westering Experience in American Literature, edited by Merrill Lewis and L. L. Lee, pp. 48–56. Bellingham: Western Washington University, 1977. Describes differences in the treatment of such topics as justice and the individual's sense of community.
. ed. Crossing Frontiers: Papers in American and Canadian Western Literature. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1979. Papers read at a conference in Banff, April 1978, of historians, literary scholars, and writers from both sides of the border, a seminal occasion for transborder study of the two Wests.
. Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1977. A study of the difficulties in treating prairie experience by means of conventions and techniques imported from elsewhere.
Klinck, Carl, ed. Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Remarkably comprehensive survey with sections including philosophical literature and scientific writing.
McCourt, Edward. The Canadian West in Fiction. Rev. ed. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1970. The pioneer study, largely descriptive, which first appeared in 1949.
Mandel, Eli, ed. Contexts of Canadian Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Essays on Canadian culture by such authors as West, McDougall, Frye, and McLuhan.
Morton, Arthur S. A History of the Canadian West to 1870–71. 2nd ed., edited by Lewis G. Thomas. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1973. The standard history.
New, W. H. Articulating West: Essays on Purpose and Form in Modern Canadian Literature. Toronto: New Press, 1972. Includes searching essays on western poets and novelists.
Ricou, Laurence. Vertical Man/Horizontal World. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1973. A study of the complex relationship between man and land in western Canadian fiction.
Stephens, Donald G., ed. Writers of the Prairies. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1973. Nineteen essays on western Canadian novelists by various hands. Smith, Dwight L., ed. The American and Canadian West: A Bibliography. Santa Barbara, California: A.B.C.-Clio, 1979. Detailed annotations and a very comprehensive subject index makes this very useful. Story, Norah. The Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. An encyclopedia particularly useful for the details of Canadian history.
Wiebe, Rudy. "Western Canada Fiction: Past and Future." Western American Literature 6 (1971): 21–30. A spirited answer to an essay by Donald Green in WAL (Winter 1968); Wiebe argues for the range and vigor of contemporary western Canadian fiction.

[Contents] [Index]