Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890-1915: Pioneer Adaptation and Community Building. An Anthropological History.

It was during the last decade of the nineteenth century - just as historian Frederick Jackson Turner was declaring the close of the frontier - that agricultural pioneers first broke the tough prairie sod of the Canadian-American border region of northern Montana and southern Saskatchewan and Alberta. Although frequently neglected in the narrative history of North American settlement, the movement into this huge area (some 120,000 square miles, bigger than New England and New York state combined) was "the most deliberately promoted and organized of all western North American settlement areas." (p. 30) This study seeks to illuminate the sequence of pioneer adaptation and community formation in the harsh environment of the northern Great Plains. According to John Bennett and Seena Kohl, anthropologists at Washington University in the United States and Webster University in Canada, it completes a series - under the rubric of the Saskatchewan Cultural Ecology Research Program - that includes Bennett's classic Northern Plainsmen: Adaptive Strategy and Agrarian Life (1969), and Kohl's valuable Working Together: Women and Family in Southwestern Saskatchewan (1976).(1) In those earlier works the authors utilized social survey methods and interview techniques to generate data for social scientific analysis. Here they turn their attention to the use of historical materials.

Bennett and Kohl are concerned with a number of interrelated topics: the motives of emigrants, the factors that made for success or failure at homesteading, the stress and strain on families, particularly women and children, the process of community formation, and the "post-frontier" development of organizations and institutions, interconnecting markets, social and cultural networks. They offer valuable historical material on each of these subjects, illustrating with detailed stories the manner in which settlers made decisions, for example, or (in a particularly strong section) addressing the perennial controversy over the status and power of rural women. There are important comparisons between the experience on the two sides of the border, and western historians will want to carefully consider the authors' argument that Americans and Canadians ended up more alike than different.

The importance of these findings, however, is undercut by difficulties with the epistemological assumptions of this study. Bennett and Kohl conducted their research in more than a hundred substantial local histories of counties, towns, and rural districts in the region, most of them published within the past quarter-century. From these sources, the authors tell us, they culled factual details of the region's settlement history as well as "what the writers emphasized, repeated, rationalized, glossed over, or obsessively dwelt upon." (p. 2) The great promise here is their intention to treat this "fugitive literature" as "remembered experience," helping us to understand not only what happened, but how pioneers and their descendants remembered and reproduced what they thought happened.

This is a complicated assignment, one that would involve comparing these modern histories with a full spectrum of primary historical materials - letters, diaries, legal papers, contemporary newspaper accounts - written by the pioneers themselves. Unfortunately it is an assignment Bennett and Kohl perform fitfully and without adequate attention to the documentation of their procedures. The bibliography includes only a small number of truly primary sources, and while the authors are careful to cite their use of the local histories, they provide no references for their use of primary materials, something I found increasingly irritating as I tried to locate the sources for quotations and judgments. In one instance, for example, they argue that claims of "pioneer hardship" in the local histories should be verified against the record in contemporary weekly newspapers that included abundant notations of neighborhood happenings and "doings." Not only are these newspapers uncited, they do not appear in the bibliography at all.

Two examples may illustrate how this leads to problems in accepting the author's conclusions. In a fascinating analysis of "stayers" and "leavers," Bennett and Kohl argue that success at homesteading was not the result of hard work and persistence alone, but the combination of those traits with modest expectations and the ability to laugh at one's mistakes. It is easy to forget that this analysis is based on sources written exclusively by the descendants of "stayers," and it is fair to wonder how reliably it reflects the mentality of "leavers." In another instance of the same thing, the authors argue that "the repeated anecdotes [in the local histories] make a prima facie case for women's increased autonomy on the homestead frontier." This may well be the case, but it cannot be concluded from the material they use which is not primary evidence from the frontier period, but the writings and selections of local historians in the 1970s and 1980s, with modern ideas and expectations about gender.

This caution is underlined by the fact that, as Bennett and Kohl point out, the books making up their database are the artifacts of an upsurge of interest in local history and genealogy in the second half of the twentieth century. Quite a number of them were produced by publishers who provide "how to" manuals and "get started" seminars for local groups. There are in other words, cultural "templates" for the manufacture of these works. This is a fascinating subject that calls for further attention to the patterned aspects of historical production. By the same token, these works cannot substitute for genuine historical research in the rich primary records of the past.

John Mack Faragher Yale University

ENDNOTE 

1. For a description of the project and a complete bibliography of publications see John W. Bennett and Seena B. Kohl, "Longitudinal Research in Rural North America: The Saskatchewan Cultural Ecology Research Program," in D. A. Messerschmidt, ed., Anthropologists at Home in North America (New York, 1981).