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In the spirit of American Thanksgiving, we thought we’d feature Kerry Alcorn’s Border Crossings: U.S. Culture and Education in Saskatchewan, 1905-1937 to explore the shared history of settlement practices in both the U.S. and Canada.
Here is an excerpt is from Border Crossings:
The “Last Best West”
One can think of Canada’s west in at least two distinct ways. The first, the physiographical west, encapsulates the practice of farming and the living of rural life on the frontier or Great Plains. The second includes the constructed west, or the manner in which the federal government represented and advertised the west and the meaning it contained for the settlers. Although most Canadian historians distinguish American and Canadian wests, particularly along political lines, for many settlers the Canadian west was an extension of the American west, both physiographically and in its meaning.
For many Europeans, Canada, like the United States, came to symbolize the existence of free land – 160 acres of it. Canada at the turn of the twentieth century offered immigrants the same amount of land as the US Homestead Act of 1862. American historians of the frontier, including Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb, make virtually no distinction between the American and Canadian wests, whether one views each as a frontier or as part of the continental Great Plains. For Turner, the frontier is the frontier, whether in the Canadian, Australian, or American context. The existence of inexpensive, expansive tracts of land marks the edge of the frontier. The only difference between the American frontier and its Canadian equivalent is the timing of settlement, with Canada’s following the end of its southern counterpart’s by some twenty years, if we follow Turner’s reported “end” to the American frontier. For the American historian Richard Slotkin, Turner simply substituted a geographical entity (the west) for a class-based entity (agrarian/industrialist) as the dividing discipline in American history.
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At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a range of factors can explain how and why Canadians may differ from Americans. At the turn of the twentieth, however, my reading of a variety of texts leads me to conclude that the people who settled Saskatchewan did not worry much about cultural differences between settling in Saskatchewan or, for example, North Dakota, if such differences existed at all. For a large portion of newcomers to the west, it was irrelevant whether they lived under the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack. The west, either on the American or Canadian prairies, meant largely the same thing: a progression away from more traditional modes of life in the east; opportunities for family prosperity through ownership of land; and in the case of European settlers, a chance to re-create a fragment of Old World society through the collective benefits of homogeneous group settlement and combining that precious heritage with New World freedoms and prosperity.
American writers, particularly historians within the pastoral literary tradition, suggest that western migration has always enticed humankind from the advent of civilization, beginning in the classical age with Virgil’s Aeneid about the Trojan going to Italy. Henry Nash Smith attributes this same approach to American authors such as William Gilpin, who suggests that each westward thrust of American society produced development superior to its easterly predecessor.76 What Smith describes as this general law of progress, “so flattering to the West, becomes a guiding command to the American people in moments of decision.” As the United States spread westward, so too would the conception of the west as ideal simplicity, virtue, and contentment.
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John Gast’s famous 1872 painting American Progress crystallizes the essence of progress through western settlement. Art historian Brian W. Dippie comments that its tranquil procession of Civilization leaves behind a bustling city in the east, while before it lies the panic of the old order, shrouded in darkness. The image of Civilization, a female form of great beauty, virginlike, floating above the plains, is a moving and memorable image of progress. Railways move from east to west to the right of the painting. Not surprising, these same images reappear on the Canadian prairies some three decades later.
Knowingly or not, the Canadian government adopted American symbols of the west: progress, the railway, and prosperity – for its own program of settlement there.
To learn more about Border Crossings, or to order online, click here.
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