In this book Warren Elofson argues that though they lived on different sides of the forty-ninth parallel, the first cattlemen on the western Canadian prairies and in the state of Montana shared a common history. They both forged societies composed of a considerable number of people drawn from eastern homelands by the visual media. They both started out with immense hope that was soon shattered by the natural and frontier environments. They both were dominated by wealthy cattlemen mainly from the East and a popular cowboy culture suited to the conditions of the frontier but designed in part by romance books, dime novels and Wild West shows disseminated in New York, Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, London and Edinburgh. They also went through a pattern of agricultural development that was eventually to establish the mixed or ranch-farm as the approach most suited to stock raising under northwestern conditions. And they helped to prepare the ground for the emergence of populist political approaches in which local women as well as men could demand and attain a prominent place. Elofson describes in vivid detail the power and influence of the so-called "cattle barons" as well as the lives of the ranch hands on the open range and in the saloons and brothels that dotted the streets of the frontier towns.

Warren M. Elofson is professor of history, University of Calgary. He has farmed and ranched in Alberta all his life and is the author of The Rockingham Connection and the Second Founding of the Whig Party.

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"An engaging and sprightly comparison of the Alberta/Assiniboia and Montana ranching experience from 1880 to 1920." Brian W. Dippie, Department of History, University of Victoria
"Elofson provides wonderful stories, which fascinate the reader ... the book is rich in details about individual settlers and their social dynamics, facts which bring the West and its people to life." University of Toronto Quarterly