Making Western Canada: Essays on European Colonization and Settlement ed. by Catherine Cavanaugh, Jeremy Mouat (review)

186 The Canadian Historical Review Making Western Canada: Essays on European Colonization and Settlement. Edited by CATHERINE CAVANAUGH and JEREMY MOUAT. Toronto: Garamond Press 1996. Pp. xix, 282, illus. $21.95 This excellent collection of nine essays incorporates some of the best examples of the 'new western history' in Canada. As American historian Elizabeth Jameson notes in her comparative introduction, the collection sets out to 'challenge uncritical histories of a peaceful, orderly, and Anglo-Centric Canadian West' through articles that reflect 'diversity , difference, inequality, and power' in recent historical writing about the region (ix, xii). The book begins with Lyle Dick's critical analysis of a century of historiography surrounding the 'Seven Oaks Incident' of 1816. Although early amateur accounts reflected pluralistic interpretations of the event, in the hands of professional historians, Dick argues, 'Seven Oaks' became part of a 'master-narrative' pitting white civilization against Metis savagery, an exercise in myth-making favourable to the 'claims to dominance' of Anglo-Canadians. Along similar lines, Sarah Carter revisits the narrative accounts of the captivity of Theresa Delaney and Theresa Gowanlock by Big Bear's band in 1885. Early versions of their capture depicting good treatment, Carter argues, were soon transformed into heroic tales of survival and innocence in the hands of backward 'savages' in order to fit into a dominant 'metanarrative' of white progress, development, and possession of territory. 'The wlnerability of white women,' she concludes, 'was essential to those who sought new prescriptions for securing white control in the West' (57). Tina Loo takes a new look at Native participation within law enforcement as constables, witnesses, interpreters, trackers, and guides in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Columbia. Native people were not 'simply victims of white law and authority. Instead, they actively participated within and made use of it for their own purposes. Although Native involvement in white law enforcement 'helped reproduce the system that contributed so much to their domination' (63), it could also serve their own strategic ends to rid communities oftroublemakers , as well as to confer 'status within their own communities' to Native people in a position to wield it (79-82). Aboriginal use of the law, Loo concludes, could be 'uncertain, surprising, and sometimes subversive' (91). Three essays in the collection provide new perspectives on class and the work experience in western Canada. Richard Rajala's examination of clear-cutting in BC forests between 1880 artd 1930 connects the de- Book Reviews 187 skilling of loggers' work, through the introduction of steam-driven overhead cable systems, to accelerated environmental degradation. As the forests became more like factories, both the work autonomy of loggers and the sustainability of silvaculture declined rapidly. Through a weak regulatory state, crown ownership of forests 'generated the appearance rather than the reality ofeffective resource stewardship' (125). Mark Leier applies class analysis to early practitioners of class analysis, tracing the 'statist' bias of turn-of-the-century BC socialist leaders to their middle-class roots. Although working-class west coast labourists 'usually wanted to shrink the state to reduce its expenditures ,' middle-class socialist intellectuals, Leier argues, wished instead to capture it in order 'to provide - employment at work that would make use of their particular - knowledge' (144-5). Cecilia Danysk explores the neglected world of bachelorhood by examining the transition from 'bachelor homesteaders' to 'bachelor hired hands' within prairie culture between 1880 to 1930. From being a normal condition of male life in the early years of prairie settlement, the status of bachelorhood declined alongside of shrinking opportunities for farm ownership by the 1920s. In response, single men reconstructed their identities around notions of manliness, which placed the immediate quest for high wages and 'job-jumping' above the older homesteader ethic of 'putt[ing] off present pleasures for future rewards' (174-5). In separate essays, Catherine Cavanaugh and Timothy Stanley explore two other dimensions of 'difference and inequality' in the West. Cavanaugh traces the campaign of Alberta farm women for a homestead dower before 1925. Although farm wives would not win an equal share in family property until 1979, their success in achieving more limited dower protection for married women in the 1920s 'expos[ed] the limitations ofthe pioneering partnership...