Wanted Dead or Alive

After Joel Deshaye moved to St. John’s, to take up a position at Memorial University, his partner found two Young Buffalo Bill pistols buried in the garden. Had the original owners of the toy guns ever seen the unbroken grasslands they were meant to evoke? “The boys probably had no memory of Buffalo Bill,” Deshaye writes. “They probably knew him instead as a generic cowboy, and I imagine that the nostalgia of their role-playing with his name was the nostalgia of their father remembering his youth, as if once upon a time he had been a Buffalo Bill in another country.” Such nostalgia for a past one has never experienced is the starting point for The American Western in Canadian Literature.

Deshaye looks at the Western through several lenses, including that of the American scholar Richard Slotkin, who has suggested that the lack of constraints on the frontier and the struggle to dispossess Indigenous people of land led many settlers to abandon...