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Originally Posted by The Walrus
CALGARY WAS NEVER actually the Wild West, at least not in the gunslinging sense. For all the romantic nostalgia surrounding that first handful of pioneering ranchers, it was settled primarily by the North West Mounted Police and the Canadian Pacific Railway. Until the Mounties and the trains came, there was no town to speak of...
THE STAMPEDE as we now know it — and the Cowtown mono-myth it reiterates and reinforces each summer — codified itself only in the ’50s and ’60s, against the backdrop of a cartoonish Western revival on television and movie screens across North America. Hollywood cowboys became the preferred Stampede parade marshals in those years (Tonto, the Cisco Kid, and the Virginian all played the role), and the more varied traditions and symbols of earlier Stampedes were mostly buried under a kitschy flood of six-guns and spurs and frontier town facades. “Since the 1960s,” historian Max Foran writes, “the Stampede has focused primarily on the generic western myth…
The controversy over the renewal of the restaurant’s temporary tent licence hit the press, and former alderman Ric McIver used his Calgary Herald column to explain why my neighbourhood’s distaste for Stampede rowdiness was downright un-Calgarian. “Calgary’s history is marked strikingly by her pioneers,” he wrote. “They were the people who farmed, ranched and homesteaded during difficult times on the Prairies. They worked hard and they played hard. With no ballet to attend or white-table-cloth restaurant to while away the evening hours at, those pioneers made their own fun…Sometimes, the pioneers would compete to see who could stay on wild horses for the longest. Sometimes, they would see who could catch the calves and tie them down for branding in the least time. Sometimes, they would see who could pack up the wagons and get back home the fastest at the end of a long work day. Over time, these competitions developed standard rules, and as a group, were referred to as rodeo. The pleasures available included enjoying a drink of whiskey at the end of the day and listening to music played by whoever was available to sing and play the piano or guitar. These roots of our city are celebrated all year long, but particularly during the Calgary Stampede. The biggest and rowdiest of celebrations often take place in tents.”
This is a particularly fervent defence of Calgary’s mono-myth (a few sentences in, you can practically hear the loping notes of “Happy Trails” on some cowpuncher’s guitar), but it is far from historically accurate. Aside from a few enterprising homesteaders and land speculators, the first Calgarians were mounted police and railway workers. Samuel Shaw, one of the most prominent ranchers of Calgary’s founding era, was an English gentleman of means who arrived on the prairie with a prefab woollen mill ready to be assembled, and tethered his ranch house to the newborn municipality by telegraph wire so he could play chess with colleagues far afield. The chuckwagon races McIver alludes to were a whole-cloth creation of the nimble mind of Guy Weadick (reportedly inspired by then novel car races he’d seen), and the inaugural Stampede was the first rodeo ever staged in these parts. Yes, there were cowboys on those first Alberta ranches, but their lives bore only a passing resemblance to the Old West campfire scene McIver describes. Even noted Alberta storyteller Grant MacEwan, who loved a good yarn more than the dull, unvarnished truth, could say only that local cowboys “rode to the sprawling settlement built around Fort Calgary and spent their wages on supplies and such entertainment as a community under the watchful gaze of the Mounted Police would afford.”...
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