Canadians in the Wild West, then and now

My new book contract and my explanation for writing about the Wild West while living in the Elbows Up North

First: an announcement. My novel Prodigies, set largely in Deadwood in 1877, will be republished this year in paperback and ebook by Arkansas-based Roan & Weatherford under the company’s Hat Creek imprint. Prodigies was originally published in hardcover in 2021 by Gale/Cengage’s Five Star Publishing imprint. In the fall of 2022, just a few months after Prodigies won the Margaret Laurence Prize for Fiction in the Manitoba Book Awards, I completed a sequel. Just after that, Gale/Cengage announced they were getting out of the new books business, leaving the new manuscript (working title The Ghost of Cheyenne) an orphan.

A few years of searching for a new publisher bore fruit this winter, when I signed a contract with Roan & Weatherford for the new edition of Prodigies, plus its sequels. That’s right, I said “sequels.” Plural.

Is this cabin in the mountains of New Mexico a hint about the setting of the sequel to Prodigies?

If you’ve already read Prodigies, as early as next year you may be able to follow Daniel, Lily, Lincoln and Segal on further adventures in the Old West. And a little further down the road, you can join them somewhere else, in locations not yet determined. (Montana? Saskatchewan? Guatemala?)

You may be asking, given certain, shall we say, complicating factors in the news right now, why a Canadian writer is so focused on a genre of fiction set in region of mostly red states. Does a Canadian have any business writing a western?

Welcome to the West, greenhorn.

My answer is: why not have some Canadian content in western fiction? There’s no shortage of Canadian content in western fact.

The border between the U.S. and British colonial possessions – and later Canada – was extremely porous in the 19^th century. There was plenty of cross-border action, as Canadians fled economic stagnation north of the border and people in both countries followed opportunities wherever they led. As a result, you can find a Canadian angle in just about every story about the American west in the 19th century.

Here are a few examples:

American development of the west began after the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-06) crossed the continent. Generations of American school children have learned that a young Shoshone woman named Sacajawea showed the Americans the way across the mountains and interpreted for them en route. She was the young wife (acquired through purchase or trade, not courtship) of a Quebec-born North West Company trader named Toussaint Charbonneau, who had previously traded in what’s now northwest Ontario and Manitoba before meeting up with the expedition along the Missouri River.

Dodge City, the Platonic form of the Wild West Cowtown, was policed at various times by Quebec-born buffalo-hunter-turned-lawman Bat Masterson and his brother Ed. Bat fought in the Battle of Adobe Wells against a force of Comanche and Kiowa angered by the destruction of the southern buffalo herds, then worked as a lawman in Dodge City for the better part of a decade, during which Ed was killed by a drunken cowboy, whom Bat subsequently shot and killed.

Deadwood, a classic Wild West mining town, was policed by Etobicoke-born Seth Bullock, who plays a small part in Prodigies (and was the hero of one of the greatest shows of the golden age of HBO, Deadwood).

Deadwood, viewed from near Wild Bill Hickok’s grave.

In the Lincoln County War in New Mexico, a young criminal/cowboy who went on to fame as Billy the Kid worked for a pair of businessmen at war with another group of businessmen. Billy’s employers were Alexander McSween (born in either Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island) and an Englishman named John Tunstall, who arrived in New Mexico after three years clerking in British Columbia. (In what is obviously a huge lacuna in my cultural development, I have never seen the Sam Peckinpah film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, though I have seen Brat Pack starring vehicle Young Guns.)

John Tunstall (left) and Alexander McSween (second from left) should have remained north of the border.

You may have heard of the Johnson County War in Wyoming, which took place a decade later in the late 1880s and early ‘90s. In that episode, the big landowners teamed up to drive out smaller ranchers, whom they accused of cattle rustling. The war was the inspiration for the novel and film Shane and for Michael Cimino’s career-ending box office disaster Heaven’s Gate. But did you know that one of the first people killed by the land barons was a woman from Grey County, Ontario, named Ellen Watson, lynched along with her common-law husband on almost-certainly-bogus cattle-rustling grounds?

You’ve certainly heard of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, at which George Armstrong Custer and some 270 of his men were killed. Custer craved attention and had political ambitions to build on his career as the great Indian fighter of the plains (based on his previous success attacking a camp full of sleeping Cheyenne). No doubt hoping for even greater acclaim during the campaign against the Lakota and Cheyenne in 1876, he brought along a reporter for the Bismarck Tribune and the Associated Press: Brighton, Ontario-born Mark Kellogg. Kellogg became the first reporter to die in the line of duty for the Associated Press, after Custer made his fatal mistake of dividing his forces and attacking a camp that turned out to be far larger than he expected (and wide awake).

Of course, the cross-border action went both ways.

Following the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Lakota leader Sitting Bull led his people north to Canada and remained there for four years, sometimes in conflict with local Indigenous people for the remaining bison. Alberta playwright Sharon Pollock wrote about this in her play Walsh, focusing on the North West Mounted Police officer who negotiated with Sitting Bull; Guy Vanderhaeghe also touches on it in his novel A Good Man.

Canada had formed the North West Mounted Police just a few years before in response to Montana-based whiskey traders setting up shop on the Canadian prairies and the massacre in the Cypress Hills of a band of Assiniboines, carried out by Montana wolf hunters. Guy Vanderhaeghe wrote about this in his novel The Englishman’s Boy.

While westerns are filled with outlaws seeking to escape justice by crossing to Mexico, Canada also attracted its share of fugitives. Bank and train robber Harry Longabaugh, better known as the Sundance Kid, spent time as a cowboy at one of the largest ranches in what were then Canada’s Northwest Territories (the Bar U ranch near present-day Longview, Alberta). Fred Stenson takes inspiration from this in his novel Lightning.

Just after the turn of the 20^th century, an already long-in-the-tooth Kentucky-born outlaw and ex-con named Billy Miner came north to British Columbia and carried out a pair of train robberies, was caught and sent to jail, and then escaped and returned to his native country. Miner was the subject of the movie The Grey Fox and also was the namesake for a bar that was popular with students when I was at the University of Calgary.

Americans also came north to sell dry goods, search for gold or find grazing land for cattle, just as Canadians had gone south as homesteaders and gold prospectors. Before that, the Hudson Bay Company sent traders into present-day Oregon, Washington and Idaho and Red River Metis bison hunters ranged south at least as far as the Missouri River in search of pemmican and hides, on at least one occasion fighting a large pitched battle with Dakota hunters.

In short, though there were significant differences in the way western Canada and the western United States were settled, and though the institutions that emerged in the two countries had different historical and cultural influences, Canadians helped to shape the American west and Americans helped to shape western Canada. And so my lifelong interest in the themes of the frontier (the establishment of law and order in a power vacuum; the human and environmental costs of settlement and modernity) is leading me back to the late 19^th century and to places like New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado, even if this seems like a strange time for a Canadian to be writing stories in what is commonly thought of as an American genre.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Come along for the ride, but wear your chaps.