The Golden Age of the Canadian Cowboy: An Illustrated History by Hugh A. Dempsey (review)

Book Reviews 603 forward in time. Are we to see again the likes of E.E.A. DuVemet, lawyer, financier, and capitalist, whose ambition, foolhardiness, and personal bankruptcy compromised the partners who survived his death in 1915? Or of David Fasken, who, in a few years, transformed the firm he dominated into one that served a new set of corporate clients? It is likely, for the profession still offers scope to large egos and to risk takers. But now they are inclined to assume new roles as advisers, investors, and board members of business corporations, as deal makers, and as rainmakers within their own firms. Clearly, servicing corporate clients spells success. This volume has a particular emphasis. The successful firms it profiles are predominantly large ones serving corporate clients. Con· clusions that follow on the nature of recruitment, for example, may not be typical of the profession as a whole. Many smaller and regional firms are still dynastic, and class-and-race specific. Nor does the large urban corporate firm have a monopoly on specialization, another theme of these essays. The small boutique, comprising fewer than half a dozen partners and associates, sometimes even a sole practitioner, may offer specialized services in patent and copyright, labour or family law, mediation and conciliation, arbitration, and civil or criminal litigation. Such firms do not appear here. Perhaps the time has not yet come for their histories to be recorded. But when it does they may provide a sense of balance, if not a healthy antidote, to this sobering portrait of large, faceless, and intimidating corporate firms. This collection of essays, like its predecessor, offers a polished, scholarly, and readable model for the exploration of new and evolving forms of legal practice in a future volume. CHRISTOPHER ENGLISH Memorial University ofNewfoundland The Golden Age ofthe Canadian Cowboy: An Illustrated History. HUGH A. DEMPSEY. Saskatoon and Calgary: Fifth House 1995· Pp. 169, illus. $29.95 Hugh Dempsey sets out to retrieve the Canadian cowboy from the tangled imagery created by American writers, painters, and Hollywood moviemakers that, in the popular mind, has come to define the cat· tlemen's frontier on both sides of the .border. It is hard to imagine anyone better qualified for the task. Dempsey, former chief archivist at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, has an unparalleled knowledge of the local sources relating to his topic, as well as family connections that tie him to his subject matter. 604 The Canadian Historical Review Dempsey's history commences in the late 1870s with the arrival of cattlemen in the Canadian foothill country on the eastward edge of the Rocky Mountains,- and ends with the collapse of the traditional range cattle industry in the face of encroaching farm settlement and the brutal winter of 1906-7. The account of cowboy life through this period is organized thematically, and the content is suggested in such chapter titles as 'The Typical Cowboy,' 'Roundup,' 'Cattle Rustlers,' and 'The Early Rodeo Cowboy.' Dempsey has a good eye for colour, and the remarkable tale ofthe outlaw 'Cowboy Joe' Gallagher, whose frequently thwarted ambition was 'to rope the whole North-West Mounted Police Force' (109), is sure to capture the attention of those Canadian readers who do not have enough 'wild' in their west. Complementing the text are numerous contemporary images selected mainly from the Glenbow Museum's outstanding collection of historical photographs. Ranchers and photographers came west simultaneously, and no phase of European settlement and occupation of the North American continental interior has been more fully recorded than that of the cattlemen's frontier. The many visual artifacts that have found their way into the book in some instances speak more forcefully and perhaps more authentically than the text. Demsey's endeavour to step behind,'the media-driven cowboy image that has tumbled across the border into Canada' (2) to discover and separate the authentic Canadian cowboy from his American counterpart is not entirely successful. Part of the problem lies with Dempsey's American reference point. It is not clear if the Canadian cowboy's distinctive qualities are being measured against his real or mythical American counterpart. Cowboys ofthe Americas (1990), Richard Slatta's important comparative study of...