Never a “Wild West” in Canada
CANADA never knew a “Wild West.” We are forced to turn elsewhere for “penny thriller” and “dime novel” material, based on frontier lawlessness and bloodshed.
Three agencies have been mainly responsible for the peaceful and prosperous peopling of the West. Two of them, the R.N.W.M.P. and the Hudson’s Bay Company, have long ago received recognition for their part in this marvel of empire-building. But there is another whose achievement is but little known or lightly heralded.
It is WOMAN. Wives and daughters of the bearded pioneers who conquered Canada’s plains trekked west with them; lived in lowly sod-houses; shared all hardships; made instant Home wherever the oxen were unyoked. These women helped tame a wilderness, and wherever they went was law and order.
Elsewhere in Western America, the hotbloods, the blacksheep and fortune hunters sloughed off from a rising civilization went into the West without the good influence of womenfolks–and straight-way became “bad men,” “killers” and “road-agents.”
Because nearly every early Canadian in the West had found good women nearby, there was no “Wild West.” And the influence of Canadian women is still alive–on the farms, in the factories, the stores and in the modern civic life of this oldtime buffalo kingdom of the Northwest.