In the spring of 1885, the biggest round-up that the Canadian West had ever seen got underway in the foothills of southern Alberta, gathering cattle from just south of Calgary all the way down to the Montana border. There were 15 mess wagons, each with 15 riders and a large remuda of saddle horses for the two months they would be out. Moving across the local range, they passed through miles and miles of native fescue grasslands, where the cattle had wandered over the winter. The buffalo were gone—not long gone, but nearly all gone—and ranching was about to take over the prairies.
It was the beginning of the beef bonanza of the 1880s, when cattle companies attracted the same kind of interest as high tech stocks did in the 1990s. In 1881, there were 9,000 cattle in the whole of the Northwest Territoriesz. By 1886, there were 100,000 in the grasslands of the foothills alone; and by the turn of the 20th century, a half million. Beef would do everything, it was said. It...
J. Edward Chamberlin has retired from the University of Toronto, where he was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. His books include If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories and Hore: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations, both published by Vintage in 2004 and 2007 respectively.
Advertisement
Advertisement