The Frontier

The Frontier and Images of the Canadian West in the Settlement Era

（フロンティアと移住期カナダ西部のイメージ）

R. Douglas Francis*

SUMMARY IN JAPANESE：本論文は、「フロンティア理論」の観点からカナダとアメリカの西部を「国境を越えた」比較をしようとする試みである。フレデリック・ジャクソン・ターナーの「フロンティア理論」を利用しつつ、アメリカ史のフロンティア理論の中に描かれる西部のイメージが、定住期のカナダ・プレィリー西部での移民に対する宣伝や大衆文学に同様に現れているかどうかが検証される。

まず、ターナーのフロンティア理論に見られるフロンティア精神の神話、及びそれに内在する、アメリカ西部とそこへの早期の移住者の本質に関する仮説が紹介される。次に、定住期（およそ1870年代から1914年まで）のカナダ政府、カナディアン・パシフィック鉄道会社、不動産会社が打ち出した移民に対する宣伝の中に見られるカナダ西部のイメージを検証し、カナダ西部に同様のフロンティア・イメージが現れている度合いを見る。その結果、同様のフロンティア・イメージがカナダ西部、アメリカ西部両方に相当程度存在していたことが証明されたが、同時に顕著な例外も少なからず観察できた。このような差異は、アメリカ西部との比較においてカナダ西部が特異な性質を有していたことの反映であると考えられる。

The image of a frontier—“an area of free land on the western edges of the advancing settlements”—has been a pervasive influence in the settlement of the American West.[1] It has conjured up visions of cowboys, Indians, free-spirited individuals, and happy and prosperous farmers. To what extent this image matched reality is another question, and one that has over the years, since Frederick Jackson Turner first enunciated the frontier thesis in his famous address to the American Historical Association in 1893, generated much debate in American historiography.[2] But the myth of the frontier has continued to be strong in American thought.

For a brief period in the 1920s and early 1930s, the frontier thesis, as it has been called, was popular in Canadian historiography also as a means of explaining the development of the Canadian West.[3] Canada too had its vast area of free land on the western edge of settlement, its Indian population to be tamed, its westward movement of civilization, its happy and prosperous farmers who subdued the land, even its own cowboys. So it was natural to see parallels between the two North American “wests” and to conclude that both were frontier settlements to which the frontier thesis applied. It is worth noting that such analogies coincided with a time in Canadian historiography when historians were anxious to stress the North American nature of Canadian historical development to offset the emphasis of Canada’s British nature that had dominated the previous generation of historiographical writings.[4]

Very quickly, however, historians of the Canadian West began to see more differences than similarities in the historical developments of the two Wests.[5] In the Canadian West, it was pointed out, civilization, in the form of land surveyors, law and order, Indian treaties, and railways, preceded settlement, thus insuring a more peaceful West. Confrontations between Indians and whites were few, and the problems of sodbusters and illegal squatters minor in comparison. Canadian cowboys were more British than American in origin and more conservative than free-spirited in character.[6] As well, it was noted, settlement of the Canadian West did not spread westward in a steady east-to-west fashion with each new wave creating a new frontier where civilization and the wilderness met. Instead, settlements in the Canadian West as elsewhere in Canada were isolated “pockets” in the midst of a vast wilderness, beleaguered settlements with “garrison mentalities” feeling threatened by nature and by hostile Indians.[7]

Such an emphasis on the unique and unfrontier-like features of the history of the Canadian West coincided with an era of nationalism in the 1930s aimed at asserting Canada’s independence vis-à-vis Britain and the United States. Harold Innis, the renowned Canadian economic historian, formulated the Laurentian thesis and its corollary, the metropolitan-hinterland paradigm, to explain Canada’s development.[8] This theory was the opposite of the frontier thesis. The creative centre of Canada’s development was the metropolitan centres of central Canada—the Laurentian Shield country, not the open prairie land of the West. The dominant Canadian was the businessman not the cowboy or the farmer, and the prevailing attitude conservative not liberal. The frontier thesis fell into disrepute among Canadian historians.

Comparative studies of the Canadian and American wests seem to prove convincingly that these two regions of North America, although similar in many geographical features, have had different histories. While the frontier thesis may have validity in explaining the history of the American West, it does not apply to the Canadian West. It may be, however, that in their haste to enunciate a unique Canadian historiographical theory that would distinguish Canada from the United States, Canadian historians have dwelt only on the differences in the historical developments of the two North American wests at the expense of the similarities. Whether this is true or not is itself an hypothesis that needs to be tested.

One area where such an hypothesis can be tested is in examining the image projected of the Canadian West in the early settlement era. Did immigrants come to the Canadian West believing that this was a frontier settlement and that they were “frontiersmen” or “pioneers”? It is difficult to know precisely what image immigrants did have in mind, since so few reflected on their preconceived views of the region and even fewer wrote down their impressions. But it is possible to examine the image of the West that was projected in the immigration propaganda and in the formative literature and art of the region to see to what extent the early image makers ofthe Canadian West were creating a mythology of frontierism not unlike the “frontier image” as outlined by Turner. This paper will examine the image of the Canadian West in the settlement era, roughly defined as the period from 1870 to 1914, in terms of the frontier thesis to see to what extent the two images were similar and in what ways they differed.[9]

What were the images of the frontier that were expressed in the American frontier thesis? The thesis itself was set out by Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous address to the American Historical Association in 1893. Turner argued that the decisive factor in shaping the American character was the existence of a continuous frontier. He defined the frontier as “an area of free land” that existed to the west and was open to settlement. Turner wrote: “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.”[10] The frontier was that point where “civilization met the wilderness.” It was an advancing line, for as settlement moved westward a new point of contact between “civilization” and the “wilderness” occurred. Thus the frontier was a physical place where few people lived, where nature abounded, and where European civilization had not penetrated.

The frontier was, however, for Turner much more than a physical place. It was a process by which Europeans were transformed into Americans. The frontier was a mythical place where Europeans physically stripped themselves of their European garments and donned buckskin clothes and mocassins, and where they mentally replaced their high-brow European culture and values for homespun American ones. The frontier created a new person—an American—different in appearance and in outlook and attitude.

This “new American” on the frontier displayed certain characteristics that distinguished him from his European counterpart, Turner argued. For one thing, he was highly individualistic, a self-made man. He rebelled against external controls and laws, became anti-social and rejected societal norms, and instead lived by his own moral standards and physical strength. Thus he had a strong faith in democratic government. “... [T]he most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe,”[11] Turner wrote.

As well, the frontier created certain intellectual traits. Turner enunciated them: “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great things; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes from—freedom these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.”[12]

Turner also talked about the optimism of people living on the frontier, because of the many opportunities to succeed. “Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them.”[13] Finally, Turner stressed the nationalistic feeling of being American, as the frontier fused these immigrants into “one composite people.” Turner highlighted the frontier influence in the conclusion of his 1893 paper:

For a moment at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.[14]

What are some of the underlying assumptions of Turner’s frontier thesis? One assumption was that the West was a superior region to the East because here was new virgin land—a garden—where each individual pioneer could begin anew, could be free from the restraints of society, and had unlimited opportunity to succeed on his own initiative. The frontier thesis rested on the assumption that the West was a natural wilderness waiting for the farmer to turn it into productivity. American Intellectual historian Henry Nash Smith notes the link between Turner’s frontier thesis and the “myth of the garden” which in turn, he points out, was part of a tradition in American thought of agrarian utopianism that dated back to the beginning of the Republic and indeed to its earlier European roots.

Its [the frontier hypothesis] insistence on the importance of the West, its affirmation of democracy, and its doctrine of geographical determinism derive from a still broader tradition of Western thought that would include [Thomas Hart] Benton and [William] Gilpin as well, but its emphasis on agricultural settlement places it clearly within the stream of agrarian theory that flows from eighteenth-century England and France through Jefferson to the men who elaborated the ideal of a society of yeoman farmers in the Northwest from which Turner sprang.[15]

So an image underlying Turner’s frontier thesis was of an agricultural West with the honest yeoman farmer using the bounties of Nature to create a good life of material prosperity and spiritual satisfaction.

The yeoman farmer, like other frontiersmen, was close to Nature—man in the state of Nature. He was hardy and strong physically and coarse in manners. But what he lacked in social graces he made up for in honesty, simplicity and sincerity. He was genuine and not contrived. Turner believed that these qualities came from the land itself, for it was the frontier wilderness that transformed eastern man into a superior westerner. Turner was an environmental determinist, and as such believed that the physical environment shaped certain mental traits. The American West with its open plains, its hardy temperatures, and its rich but rugged terrain created manly qualities that were admired and respected as American characteristics. As Turner explained in one of his essays: “Into this vase shaggy continent of ours poured the first feeble tide of European settlement. European men, institutions, and ideas were lodged in the American wilderness, and the great American West took them to her bosom, taught them a new way of looking upon the destiny of the common man, trained them in adaptation to the conditions of the New World, to the creation of new institutions to meet new needs.”[16] Thus Turner simply assumed that western man was superior and western society better than any that existed elsewhere, and especially in Europe.

Indeed, the qualities that the frontier created were not for Turner so much western characteristics as national traits. Turner was an American nationalist to the core. The frontier did not divide America into different regions; it united the country and set it apart from European countries. “The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier,”[17] Turner wrote. And in another place in his essay he notes: “The economic and social characteristics of the frontier worked against sectionalism.”[18] Since each area of the country—from the east coast to the west coast—was at one time a frontier, all Americans displayed these “frontier qualities”, and it was these unique qualities that set Americans apart from Europeans. As Turner wrote: “Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American.... [T]he advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.”[19]

Turner’s frontier thesis was of immediate popularity because it both shaped and reflected the American consciousness of the time. Turner put into words what so many Americans, particularly those of the American West, were feeling and thinking about their country. Turner’s theory of American development was popular because it projected an image that was already familiar. Recent research on American immigration propaganda and early western American popular literature indicates that the image projected of the region was not unlike that of Turner’s frontier mythology.[20] Americans were already “sold” on the frontier thesis because the mythology upon which it was based was already a part of the American psyche, and its ideas part of the American popular mind by the time Turner had expressed it in 1893.

To what extent did this myth of the frontier become part of the imagery of the Canadian West in the settlement era? How many immigrants came to western Canada imagining that they were going to be part of a frontier society? And to what extent did early literary and song writers project an image of the Canadian West as a frontier region in their works? Few image makers talked about the Canadian West as a frontier per se as Turner talked about the American frontier west. But if one thinks of the term “frontier” in its generic sense as referring to any new region that was unsettled by the white man, primitive in its social composition, and largely wilderness territory, or as a term to capture a mythology of the region as a whole akin to Turner’s depiction of the American West, then there is ample evidence to suggest that the image of the Canadian West in the settlement era in the immigration propaganda and literature was in keeping with that of the frontier thesis, but with a few significant differences as will be noted later.

Certainly immigration propagandists for the Canadian government or the Canadian Pacific Railway Company or land companies projected an image ofthe prairie West as a virgin territory, vast in size, bountiful in nature, and unlimited in opportunity. The region was depicted as a promised land, where the honest homesteader had unlimited possibilities to succeed in this “land of opportunity.” Nicholas Flood Davin, editor and owner of the Regina Leader, the first (1883) newspaper issued in Assiniboia, and a pamphleteer for the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, began his pamphlet Homes for Millions (1891) with the following observation:

The following pages are addressed to the farmers and farm labours of Europe. They show them where they can have fruitful land for nothing; happy homes; independence; where careers are free; where there is no landlord to grind the tiller of the soil; no military conscription; no gilded idleness to cast a spur on labour; no aristocracy; where the phrases ‘lower classes’ ‘humbler classes’ are unknown.[21]

Here was Turner’s image of the “frontiersman” as an independent, self-reliant, carefree and contended individual who was unaccountable to anyone but himself and who had every opportunity to succeed and thus to rise in social status through honest labour. Another pamphlet issued by the Department of the Interior in 1883 talked about the vastness and potential of this unsettled region of the Canadian West for prospective European immigrants: “I must confess, that though I have travelled very extensively in this great country, I have never yet been enabled to realize its vastness. Millions and millions of acres of the finest grain-growing land in the world; in fact, an ocean of land, if such an expression is allowable.... As I remarked to a friend with whom I was conversing on the subject, ‘here is a home for the surplus population of Europe for the next fifty years.’”[22]

In another pamphlet written by Thomas Spence, who might be called the “father of western immigration pamphlets” since he created so many of them, the link between human potential and regional opportunity in this “frontier” area of western Canada is made explicit:

All intending emigrants should remember that a new country like this is not the idler’s paradise, that all its mines of wealth are surrounded by bustling difficulties. Its great superiority is that it is a land of opportunities.

Here as in no other portions of this continent are openings to-day that yield their wealth to brains, energy: pluck, whether with or without capital, more than is actually necessary to start with fairly; and if a man wants to work honestly for what he has, he can do it as well here as in any land beneath the sun. In a few short years, our yet undeveloped wealth will astonish the world, when our coal and iron mines are laid bare, when our vast plains and hills are covered with flocks and herds, when our valleys supply grain to Europe and the East, and the great Canadian Pacific Railway links England, Canada, Japan, and China, in one great belt of commerce and mutual prosperity.[23]

Thus just as Turner projected an image of the American West as the land of opportunity for new immigrants, an area of unlimited possibility, so western Canadian image makers did the same. The immigration literature emphasized the regions vast territory, its present state of wildness, and its future potential for growth for any aspiring new settler ready to take advantage of its natural wealth. The Canadian West was depicted as an agrarian utopia where the settler would live a happy, independent, contented and prosperous life—an image not unlike that which Henry Nash Smith pointed out to be part of Turner’s frontier myth.

One point of difference, however, between Turner’s image of the American western frontier and the western Canadian image makers’ view of the Canadian West was in the purpose for such a projection. Turner was lamenting the end of the frontier with its wide open spaces and its potential. He saw the frontier in positive terms so long as it remained virgin territory or at least as long as virgin territory remained, whereas western Canadian image makers saw the “frontier” in positive terms only when it was settled and civilized, that is to say only when it ceased to have its “frontier” qualities. They stressed its vastness and its potential in hopes that these qualities would attract potential immigrants who would in turn “tame” this frontier region and “civilize” it. Turner, by contrast, looked upon the settlement of the frontier in negative terms as destroying the qualities that the frontier had to offer.

Western Canadian image makers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century also believed, as Turner did, in the ability of the land to transform an individual into a superior being. Just as the frontier, according to Turner, took European man and stripped him of his European garments and his European intellectual baggage to make him a new (and better) man, so too the frontier west of Canada transformed the European serf into a free man and the eastern Canadian into a superior western Canadian, according to western Canadian image makers. In one of his pamphlets Nicholas Flood Davin notes:

All the fabled mutations of wand and enchantment sink into insignificance before the change which this free world works in the serf of Europe. Toil, combined with freedom and equality—and you have a more marvellous as well as nobler force than the fabled secret of the philosopher’s stone. What they are weaving here [in the Canadian West] for humanity Time will show; ‘there’s magic in the web of it’; something better anyway than the tear-drenched, blood-stained tapestry of the old world’s past.[24]

In another pamphlet, he presents a similar theory:

All the charms that belong to youth, hope, energy, are found in the North West, and the bracing influence of the new free land on mind and character is remarkable. The Ontario farmer is a fine specimen of the yeoman, but three years in the North West raises him higher on the scale of manhood—while a commensurate improvement is noted in all classes and races from Europe who have come amongst us, having the essential qualities of capacity for work, perseverance, sobriety and intelligence.[25]

One of the popular folk songs during the settlement era—“The Homesteader”—depicted a similar image of the Canadian West as a frontier era of open land where the independently-minded homesteader could build a new life, based on the “manly qualities” of virility, honest and independence.

On the distant lonely prairie,

In a little lonely shack,

New life the homesteader faces;

On the world he’s turned his back.

He’s fifteen miles from a neighbour

And a hundred miles from a town;

There are rolling plains between them;

It is there he’s settled down.

In the midst of God’s great freedom,

Under skies of fairest blue,

He is building broad foundations

And a manhood strong and true.

With age-old wisdom behind him,

And spurred by his own great need,

Thus he builds his broad foundations

Free from custom and from creed.[26]

Such a belief in the power of the environment to shape an individual environmental determinism—was equally popular among the early western Canadian writers and novelists as it was among the immigration propagandists. Western Canadian novelists did as much to shape the image of the Canadian West as a frontier as did the immigration propagandists. Believing that they were simply describing the West, these individuals actually created their own mythical West that was as utopian and frontier-like as that depicted in the immigration propaganda. By setting their romantic stories in the physical locale of western Canada, these writers made people believe that the frontier west they depicted was the “real” West. The ideal became real; the pastoral West was removed “from literature into history, from form into reality,”[27] from the imagination to the physical setting of the frontier West.

“How wonderful the power of this country of yours to transform men,”[28] proclaimed one of Ralph Connor’s [alias Charles Gordon] characters in Connor’s popular western Canadian novel, The Foreigner. In another novel, Sky Pilot, Connor described the impact of the environment on British immigrant cowboys in the Alberta foothills. “The young lads, freed from the restraints of custom and surroundings, soon shed all that was superficial in their make-up and stood forth in the naked simplicity of their native manhood. The West discovered and revealed the man in them.”[29] Novelist Emily Murphy described the virile westerner in her Janey Canuck in the West (1910): “The real Westerner is well proportioned. He is tall, deep-chested, and lean in the flank. His body betrays, in every poise and motion, a daily life of activity in the open air. His glances are full of wist and warmth. There is an air of business about his off-hand way of settling a matter that is very assuring. Every mother’s son is a compendium of worldly wisdom and a marvel of human experience. What more does any country want?”[30] Nellie McClung, writer and suffragist, described her heroine, Pearlie Watson, in her novel Sowing Seeds in Danny in terms of her prairie spirit coming out of the new land. Pearlie was “like the rugged little anemone, the wind flower that lifts its head from the cheerless prairie. No kind hand softens the heat or the cold, nor tempers the wind, and yet the very winds that blow upon it and the hot sun that beats upon it bring to it a grace, a hardiness, a fragrance of good cheer, that gladdens the heart of all who pass that way.”[31]

It was the climate in particular that environmental determinists believed turned effeminate easterners and Europeans into healthy “he-men of the West.” In an age of racial theories, it was believed that climate had a profound effect in moulding character.[32] In particular the belief prevailed in western Canada that a cold climate produced fecundity and virility, and that these traits were what made western Canadians superior. One pamphleteer proclaimed that “the climate of Western Canada does more than make wheat—it breeds a hardy race.”[33] Charles Mair, the effervescent poet of the West, was more imaginative in describing how climate affected character:

A peculiar feature of the climate [of the North West] is its lightness and sparkle. There is a dryness and a relish in its pure ether akin to those rare vintages which quicken the circulation without impairing the system. The atmosphere is highly purified, joyous and clear, and charged with ozone—that element which is mysteriously associated with soundness of mind and body and at war with their morbid phenomena.

Surrounded by this invisible influence, one lives a fuller and healthier life than in the denser atmosphere of the east. The cares of manhood press less heavily on the brain, and the severest toil of exposure finds increased capacity to endure it.[34]

Turner had delighted in contrasting the superior qualities of people on the raw frontier with those in the established societies of eastern America and in particular of Europe. Western Canadian image makers did the same. The West was consistently depicted as a superior society, one more egalitarian, democratic, and free-spirited than that which existed elsewhere—characteristics of the Canadian West that were very much in keeping with Turner’s depiction of the American frontier West.[35] Novelist Robert Stead, for example, wrote a love story about an eastern girl and a western boy in his novel, The Cowpuncher (1918), in which he played up the contrast of East and West:

The following morning found Dave early on the trail, leading a saddled horse by his side. The hours were laden for the girl all that day, and looking into the future she saw the spectre of her life shadowed down the years by an unutterable loneliness. How could she ever drop it all—all this wild freedom, this boundless health, this great outdoors, this life, how could she drop it all and go back into the little circle where convention fenced out the tiniest alien streamlet, although the circle itself might lie deep in mire.? And how would she give up this boy who had grown so imperceptibly but so intimately into the very soul of her being; give him up with all his strength, and virility, and—yes, and coarseness, if you will—but sincerity too; an essential man, as God made him, in exchange for a machine-made counterfeit with the stamp of Society?[36]

Stead’s mythical Westerner had qualities similar to Turner’s frontiersman—strength, virility and coarseness, but also sincerity, honest and simplicity. He was close to Nature and directed by an inner strength forged by years of independence and freedom. Pamphleteer Nicholas Flood Davin noted similar qualities in westerners: “Choose where you may to settle you cannot make a mistake; for the blessings of independence, and wealth and freedom, everywhere await the farmer or farm labourer who brings with him the virtues of honesty, thrift, sobriety, energy.”[37]

Western Canadians were also depicted as true optimists, a trait Turner claimed to be characteristic of American frontiersmen. Mrs. Walter Parlby, an English immigrant and reformer, observed in her pamphlet “Canada—the Hope of the World: An English Lady’s Opinion of the Opportunities of the West”:

We in Canada have been accused of being too optimistic, but that does not trouble us in the least; we glory in our optimism! We defy anyone to be other than an optimist, living in this glorious sunshine, breathing this crisp, exhilarating air. We set no limits to our imaginings, to our ambitions, of what this wonderful country is going to become, or to the magnificent futures awaiting the children that are growing up around us. All we want is for more of our old country kinsfolk to come and join us in our optimism, to take advantage of all the goodly things this Canada of ours is offering so freely, to listen to the call of the West, to leave their little island to its fogs, and its factions, and to throw in their lot with a mighty continent flooded from ocean to ocean with golden light of unbounded prosperity—with Canada, the hope of the world.[38]

When Turner discussed frontier qualities, he did so consistently in national, not regional, terms. While the frontier was always in the west, and while frontier qualities became more pronounced as Americans pushed westward, the qualities created were American qualities. Regional differences were downplayed and common national characteristics emphasized. What was significant about the Middle region of America, for example, was its ability, located where it was, to mediate among the other regions so as to unite the country. “It was least sectional,” Turner noted, “not only because it lay between North and South, but also because with no barriers to shut out its frontiers from its settled region, and with a system of connecting waterways, the Middle region mediated between East and West as well as between North and South. Thus it became the typically American region. Even the New Englander, who was shut out from the frontier by the Middle region, tarrying in New York or Pennsylvania on his westward march, lost the acuteness of his sectionalism on the way.”[39] Elsewhere he notes: “The economic and social characteristics of the frontier worked against sectionalism.”[40]

Western Canadian image makers differed in this respect in that they delighted in contrasting western Canada to eastern (or more accurately central) Canada rather than to Europe. Western Canadian traits were western more than they were Canadian, regional as opposed to national. Frontier qualities in western Canada were emphasized so as to set the West apart in Canada to make westerners feel superior to their eastern brethren. In this respect frontier characteristics were more “western” in Canada than in the United States; it was these frontier qualities, moulded in the crucible of western Canada, that distinguished the region and gave it its uniqueness. But they were unique regional qualities, not national ones.

Such a conclusion reinforces once again the pervasive nature of regionalism in Canada as a differentiating, as opposed to unifying, force in Canadian history. Maybe this accounts for the disappearance of these frontier qualities once the Canadian West was settled. Westerners wanted to be more integrated into Canada than separate, and to do so required that they abandon the western frontier qualities and become “established.” The frontier lost out to eastern respectability, and western uniqueness took the form of regional protest.[41]