The Passing of a frontier: ranching in the Canadian West, 1882-1912

Abstract

This study is concerned with the industry which dominated the land use pattern of the Canadian west for a thirty year period between the disappearance of the buffalo and the arrival of large numbers of homestead settlers during the first decade of the twentieth century. It seeks to describe and analyse the establishment, growth, and eventual demise, of the range cattle industry in western Canada. Geographical description concentrates on the location and extent of the area occupied, the intensity with which the land was utilized, and the relative importance of production units of various sizes. An attempt is made to identify some of the variables promoting change in land use on a nineteenth century frontier of settlement. Government attitudes and legislation, economic cycles, technological developments, and the physical environment, are envisaged as interacting to produce a complex "behavioural environment" which was subject to interpretation by a heterogenious group of entrepreneurs and ranchers with widely different goals. Little attention has been paid to the range cattle industry in Canada, in spite of the voluminous literature on the topic in the United States. This study suggests that a robust Canadian variation of the American "cattleman's frontier" was established in Alberta and Assiniboia, and this unique tradition was only partially swept aside by an influx of cattle companies and farmers from the United States during the first decade of the twentieth century.