by Morris Mott
History Department, Brandon University
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Images of the West: Changing Perceptions of the Prairies, 1690-1960. R. Douglas Francis. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1989. xviii & 268 pp., ill. ISBN 0-88833-274-2.
Over the past three hundred years, white men have had various opinions about the Canadian prairie West. In this book R. Douglas Francis attempts to identify the “dominant or guiding image” (p. xvii) of the region in different time periods, and to outline the significance of that image for public policies. He supports his arguments by providing reproductions of illustrations and excerpts from written sources. His book is a pleasure to read, though the general thesis is unconvincing.
The pattern of images that Francis outlines can be summarized briefly. Before 1850, most of the Europeans who visited or inhabited the West were explorers, missionaries, or fur traders. They saw a region of North America that was “ill suited for settlement and agriculture: and they described it with words such as “‘Barren; ‘cold,’ ‘desolate,’ and ‘inhospitable’ (p. 1). But by the mid-nineteenth century the ideas and phrases of romantic artists and writers had fused with the hopes of Canadian nationalists and British imperialists to produce a much more positive image. This new view contained within itself a contradiction, however, because the West was perceived both as a “pristine wilderness” and as the breadbasket of “a great Canadian nation and a mighty British Empire” (p. 38). By the 1880s the West had become a promised land, a “garden of abundance in which all material wants would be provided and where moral and civic virtues would be perfected” (p. 107). This utopian image prevailed until World War I. In the interwar years, however, it gave way to a realistic view, a view which grew up with the utopian vision and was in part a reaction against that vision. The realistic view “depicted the Canadian prairies as a harsh land that restricted the creative power and freedom of its inhabitants” (p. xviii). Finally, after World War II the West became less an actual physical place than a “mental construct,” a “region of the mind” (p. 193) created partly by geography but mostly by the experiences, attitudes, and stories shared by those who lived there.
Many of Francis’s observations will be familiar to serious students of Western Canadian history and culture.
He has carried out extensive research in primary sources, but in large part he has synthesized and amalgamated work published over the past two decades by scholars such as Doug Owram, Gerald Friesen, John Warkentin, Dick Harrison, and Ronald Rees. Francis freely acknowledges this fact, and provides useful bibliographies of both his primary and secondary sources.
But the “specialist” is not the person for whom Francis prepared the book. He wrote it for the “general reader” (p. xvii). Will the general reader like it? Yes. Most of the time the writing is lucid. The illustrations, eleven of them in colour, are reproduced attractively. The excerpts are from authors who provide entertaining, informative, sometimes even moving descriptions of the West—David Thompson, William F. Butler, George W. Grant, Nellie McClung, Sinclair Ross, W. L. Morton, Wallace Stegner, to name a few. This is an engaging publication, and Western Producer Prairie Books deserves credit for making it available in hardback at less than ten cents a page.
It must be added, however, that the general reader, like the specialist, will finish the book wondering about the validity of Francis’s essential argument. His thesis is that in different chronological periods a particular image “predominated” or “prevailed” (p. xvii). Unlike Owram or other writers who use words like these in reference to an image of the West held by a particular group, Francis leads us to believe the image was dominant among nearly everyone who was thinking about the West in a given period. How does Francis decide that an image “held sway” (p. 231)? He doesn’t tell us, but in the final paragraph of his Introduction, a paragraph which unfortunately is written clumsily, Francis admits he has stretched his evidence to the ripping point. “I realize that in an effort to highlight a particular image,” he writes, “I have had to take material out of context and thus make the image appear more prominent than it was at the time” (p. xviii).
Nevertheless, this is a handsome book that will stimulate interest in the West among those who do not live there, and enhance self-knowledge among those who do.
Page revised: 11 April 2010
