The Zeitgeist of Western settlement and the Calgary Stampede.

Jones, David C.

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Canada's golden era of immigration from 1901 to 1914 welcomed 2.9 million newcomers as the population bounded from 5.4 million to 7.9 million. The prairies were the main destination.

The primary purpose of the settlement was agrarian, and changes wrought were immense. Alberta's population alone leapt from 73,000 in 1901 to 374,000 in 1911, and to 496,000 in 1916, multiplying by almost seven fold. (1) The latest expansion was in the southeast, in the Dry Belt, extending into southwestern Saskatchewan. From 1901 to 1916, the population in the latter mushroomed from 17,700 to 178,200; the number of farms from 2,400 to 38,000, and the area in crop from 124,000 acres to 4,500,000. In southeastern Alberta the population sprang from 4,400 to 102,000; the number of farms from 2,000 to 31,000; the area in crop from 80,700 acres to 2,700,000 in 1915. (2) Infusing this massive transformation was a virtual Zeitgeist, a powerful spirit identified with the land. Largely, it was this Zeitgeist or spirit, combined with the energy of related changes, that set the scene for the first Calgary Stampede in 1912, and it was this same Zeitgeist that prevented a recurrence of the stampede with the exhibition until 1923. The dissipation of the Zeitgeist and supporting energies in the early 1920s then greatly facilitated the reunion of the two events in 1923. (3)

The Zeitgeist of Western Settlement

The Zeitgeist of western settlement was North American in scope. In the United States President Roosevelt established a Country Life Commission in 1908. "If there is one lesson taught by history," he said, "it is that the permanent greatness of any state must ultimately depend more upon the character of its country population than anything else. No growth of cities, no growth of wealth can make up for a loss in either the number or the character of the farming population .... We cannot afford to lose that preeminently typical American, the farmer who owns his own farm." (4)

In Canada a Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education was launched in 1910 under the acclaimed agricultural teacher, J.W. Robertson. Concentrating mostly on industry, it helped create the Agricultural Instruction Act of 1914. "The conservation of a vigorous, intelligent and prosperous population in the Country," the Commission declared, "stands out amongst the foremost duties of the whole nation." (5)

When Federal Agriculture Minister Martin Burrell introduced the Agricultural Instruction Bill in 1913, he urgently proclaimed the desirability of a "rural civilization." "That solitary figure in the distant furrow, that stooped form tending the hearth of the isolated home," he said, was the symbol of "our national necessities, our national virtues, and our national strength." (6)

In Quebec, Jean de la Croix, Director of OKA Institute of Agriculture, felt "a reawakening of the love of the soil--a love innate to our race, it is the loud voice of the ancestors, beseeching their sons not to abandon the wealth of the land they had cleared and by which the race was to be maintained and ennobled. Atavism, generally a cause of disappointment, here becomes the strength of the future." "The twentieth century," M. Cummings, Principal of Nova Scotia Agricultural College, said, was witnessing "a movement in which farmers will take their place among the leaders in the seats of the mighty." (7)

A rush of affirmation flowed from powerful sources. There was a flurry of books from Liberty Hyde Bailey, chairman of the U.S. Country Life Commission, and several texts in Canada, including J.W. Robertson's The Satisfaction of Country Life (1913). Agricultural departments, agricultural schools, and agricultural colleges added their propaganda. The prairie farm press, including The Nor'-West Farmer (est. 1882), The Farmer's Advocate and Home Journal (western edition est. 1890), The Farm and Ranch Review (est. 1905) and The Grain Growers' Guide (est. 1908), from 1910 to 1920, discharged five to seven thousand pages a year extolling life on the land.

The gist of the message appeared in three pronouncements. First, "Agriculture is an employment most worthy of the application of man, the most ancient and most suitable to his nature," said Socrates on the front pages of Calgary's Farm and Ranch Review; "it is the common nurse of all persons in every age and condition of life; it is the source of health, strength, plenty and riches, and of a thousand sober delights and honest pleasures. It is the mistress and school of sobriety, temperance, justice, religion and, in short, of all virtues." (8)

Second, "Since all cannot live in the city those who must live in the country are organizing themselves ... and they are going to claim for the 'Children of the Fields' access to knowledge, beauty, pleasure, and power," said George W. Russell, a country life zealot in the federal Agricultural Gazette in 1914. "They are going to build up a civilization so pleasant, so kindly, so healthy, so prosperous, that the 'Children of the Fields' will not want to live with the 'Children of the House'; but will be content where they are, growing comely and sweet-blooded in the sunshine and pure air, growing wise at their own labours, and strong in their union. They will have rustic sports and festivals of their own, and because there will be more of them in the 'Fields' and less in the 'House,' and because they will be better educated and better equipped, they will produce more, and the 'Children in the House' will be better fed, and the balance will be struck. This is the work that, consciously or unconsciously, organized farmers over the world are putting their hands to." (9)

Third, Edwin Osgood Groves, another country-lifer, announced "The Country Boy's Creed" in The Nor'-West Farmer in 1914: "I believe that the country which God made is more beautiful than the city which man made; that life out-of-doors and in touch with the earth is the natural life of man. I believe that work is work wherever I find it, but that work with nature is more inspiring than work with the most intricate machinery ... that opportunity comes to a boy on the farm as often as to a boy in the city; that life is larger and freer and happier on the farm than in the town ...." (10)

Even the school was called to preach this message in the form of school agriculture, school gardening, and school fairs. In Alberta most of the federal grant from the Agricultural Instruction Act (1914) was devoted to establishing schools of agriculture, including Olds, and several that did not survive.

A flock of professors then legitimized the settlement of the dryland empire east of Calgary. Professor H.W. Campbell rushed in from the States preaching to all and sundry the new and ne'er fail techniques of dry farming. Professor Surface, another American, declared that "summer rain is not essential for the raising of good crops." And Professor J.W. Worst, yet another dryland expert, promised, "the bread of the future will come largely from the desert of the past." (11)

"Southern Alberta," effused a writer for the Canada West Magazine, was "a land blessed of the gods--a land over which bending nature ever smiles and into whose cradle she emptied her golden horn ...." (12) "Hard times will never again affect southern Alberta," pronounced Professor J. W. Robertson, Principal of Macdonald College in Quebec. "The interests of this district are now so diversified that there is no possibility of a pronounced depression." (13) Alberta had a population of only 200,000 in 1908, Canada West, a Department of the Interior pamphlet, noted, when "50 million could be easily located." (14)

Over-certain, the whole gang of professors, promoters, and economic soothsayers recalled George Meany's quip that economics was "The one profession where you can gain great eminence without ever being right." (15)

As in all fits of over-enthusiasm and over-insistence, naysayers were pariahs. In the age centred on 1912, year of the first Stampede, these outcasts were nicknamed "knockers"; their deadly sins were carping, caviling, and complaining. The Blairmore Enterprise depicted "The Creation of the 'Knocker'" in 1914: "After God had finished making the rattlesnake, the toad and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a knocker. A knocker is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water-sogged brain and a combination backbone made of jelly and glue. Where other men have their hearts, he carries a tumor of decayed principles. When the knocker comes down the street honest men turn their backs, the angels weep tears in Heaven, and the devil shuts the gates to Hell to keep him out." (16)

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David Elton, editor of The Magrath Pioneer, averred, "The knocker is the offspring of failure and envy. When you meet a knocker, hit him where his brains ought to be and kick him where they are." (17)

Thus the Zeitgeist of western settlement was formed with all its preachments and supporting layers of euphoria. And the incredible expansion of homesteads seemed to prove this agrarian myth. Everywhere one looked there was more and more agriculture, more and more land in crop, more and more wheat, more and more production. The cornucopia theme in the promotional literature, in this sense, was not wrong, or misleading; it was palpable truth. Everywhere one turned, by every measure, a rural civilization was rising.

In this pastoral wonderland, the agricultural fair had a particular countenance and purpose, as a parable from The Nor'-West Farmer confirmed. The heroes of the tale, in sequence of their enlightenment, were Lottie and Edwin. After many tries, farmer Edwin finally induces his timid and anxious wife, Lottie, to enter her domestic wares in the local fair. Instantly she wins, and instantly she is transformed--she steps with a firmer step, her anxiousness gone. Edwin tries his luck, but loses badly, and then Lottie, the light of encouragement, says they must take the criticism positively, learn from the winners, see and emulate the best, enter the provincial exhibition. There, of course, they succeed beyond their wildest dreams. Their lives improve, they have bigger and better crops, Lottie becomes a famous cook, Edwin, a wise farmer, and their home shines as an ornament for the district. "The fairs were the schools we could afford to attend," attests Lottie. "What the fairs have done for us they can do for anyone." (18)

On the prairies the educative function of fairs was greatly bolstered by the fact that as the new rural civilization got underway there were no schools of agriculture, no colleges of agriculture, no district representatives, no experimental stations, no demonstration farms, and no illustration stations, aside from a few dubious CPR plots. Fairs were thus expected to be a prime engine of rural uplift.

Their operating principle was simple--compare the exhibits, point to the best, and follow the leader. Discard defective seeds, inferior crops, runty stock, and shabby handiwork. See the best, become the best. It was a no nonsense educational ideal emphasizing improvement, production and progress. And it had Spirit--God was in the land, and farmers were doing God's work. Exhibits at fairs hence were beautiful offerings of purity--pure seed, pure intent.

Promoters of this kind of fair thus were dead-set against all forms of corruption, contamination, immorality, and indecency. So they attacked relentlessly the midways. Under the tenure of Frank S. Jacobs, 1909 to 1915, Calgary's Farm and Ranch Review hammered these unholy attractions. "One of the most repugnant experiences which can befall the average man or woman is afforded by a tour of the midway at any of our Western agricultural exhibitions," wrote the Review in 1915. "Raucous-voiced vendors megaphone the merits of their show. From weather-beaten tents emerge girls in misery, who, at a word from the official orator, force their faces into smiles and dance on a crazy platform under the tin flowers and gas sunlight. Visitors, under various influences, file in and balance themselves on a narrow plank, and endeavour, after the show has commenced, to look the part of one who is there, not to enjoy the program exactly, but to laugh at a crude attempt at entertaining."

Tents concealing amazing curiosities, from a three-legged calf to a fabulously priced opera cloak made of prairie chicken feathers, claim their toll from the gullible element. Swarthy and turbaned clairvoyants from Chicago southside, for a sum of money ranging from a dollar down, depending on the desire evinced by giggling girls and verdant young men to part company with their money, disclose by a more or less minute survey of the hand, information regarding the future which the victim never suspected would happen and which never does happen. Men and women, in any stage of deformity, are subjects for drawing a crowd at so much per. Crowds of happy, healthy people, with parted lips, hurriedly glance at some flaccid, faded abnormal fellow-being and wish instinctively that they were out in the sunlight.

Then the Review made a vital connection: "The matter of abolishing the unquestionably immoral effect of the midway should commend itself to our social reform leagues." (19)

This attack was repeated again and again by the rest of the agrarian press that uniformly promoted and expected a purely agricultural fair. Not surprisingly, that is what Calgary had, more or less, from 1886 to 1912, the Calgary Exhibition, an agricultural exhibition.

The Context Favouring a Stampede

The first stampede found itself in a setting of massive change and was in itself an example of that change. From 1900 to 1912 a steady parade of inventions greeted the "developed" world--escalators, radio telegrams, fluorescent lights, chemotherapy, colour photography, even colour movies. Automobile companies appeared from 1903 to 1908--Ford Motors and General Motors in the United States and Canada, Daimler and Mercedes in Germany, Rolls Royce in Britain, and by 1914, mass assembly lines, reducing the time it took to make a Ford car from 12 hours to 93 minutes. In Canada in 1903 there were just 178 motor vehicles, and by 1912, 36,429; in Alberta there were 41 in 1906, and 2,505 in 1912. By 1918 the respective numbers were 277,000 and 29,000. (20)

Probably nothing was as dramatic as air travel after thousands of years of certainty that it was impossible. From 1909 to 1911 came a string of aeronautic firsts--the first flight across the English Channel, the first successful parachutist, the first take-off from water, the first airmail, and the first flights in Edmonton and Calgary. (21) In health care, the end of disease seemed in sight, with germ theories, aseptic procedures, vaccination, and the marked reduction in scarlet fever, yellow fever, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and smallpox.

Newness was everywhere. Following the era's penchant for population clubs, Calgary with a citizenry of about 14,000 in 1906 considered a 50,000 club, but when a Seattle paper deemed 100,000 more appropriate in just 15 years, Calgarians opted for 100,000 in only 10 years! It was a trifle premature as that was exactly the city's population in 1946.

Nonetheless, Calgary and Edmonton literally exploded. In Edmonton between 1903 and 1914, 274 new subdivisions were created. In Calgary, at the height of the boom in June 1913, the population had been growing by a thousand a month for three years running. There were 96 manufactories, a new one arriving every six weeks. There were 86 miles of boulevards, 45 miles of pavement, 60 miles of street railway, 115 miles of cement sidewalks, and something ruralites did not have--156 miles of sewers. (22)

Thomas H. Mawson, world-class city designer, addressed Calgarians in April 1912 and seeded their minds with the thought that their city could easily rival in architectural beauty and wonder Periclean Athens. The Great West Land Company offered $75 in gold for the finest essay on the limitless advantages of the city. None other than E.L. Richardson, already an advertising master as manager of the Calgary Exhibition, was the winner. His pen work--Calgary, Alberta: Commercial Metropolis of Western Canada--was sped into print and into minds across the continent. (23)

Thus the cityscape transformation combined with the landscape transformation and the technological transformation, and these then joined with a massive social transformation embracing art, poetry, music, entertainment, and styles. In art, vorticism and cubism stretched old approaches; in poetry, free verse broke old forms; and in music about 1912, ragtime overturned the waltz and two-step. Traditional songs were "ragged," and irreverence stalked the land. The lovely "Mother Machree" slipped to "Mother Machree looked like a chicken to me," and the sacred hymn, "Nearer My God to Thee" became "Nero, my dog, has fleas." (24) In Alberta the turkey trot appeared, along with the bunny hug and the grizzly bear, and the space between dance partners disappeared. And smoking became the vogue. (25) Change, change, change, was the theme .... Nothing in this world is constant, and never before was that more apparent.

Purveyors of these changes, of course, appeared in number, and included the father of the Stampede, Guy Weadick. A trick roping ace with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West show at the Dominion Exhibition in Calgary in 1908, he was an agent for Will Picket, the Black cowpuncher who had invented bulldogging. He was a showman, a promoter of rodeos, a frontier days enthusiast, an extrovert, a drinker, a smoker, a reveller. (26)

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Thus the spirit of the times, of which Weadick's was a part, helped to explain how something as different and strangely alluring as a stampede invaded an agricultural exhibition. Mark Sullivan described this spirit in an event in New York State in 1912 in his masterful Our Times:

   At Millwood, N.Y., Miss Grace Williams,
   eighteen years old, was arraigned on
   complaint of former Justice of the Peace
   Ogden S. Bradley, who charged that she
   was guilty of disorderly conduct in
   frequently singing 'Everybody's Doin' It
   Now,' as she passed his house and danced
   the turkey trot. 'Squire' Bradley said that
   he and his wife thought that both the song
   and dance were highly improper and that
   they had been greatly annoyed. Lawyer
   Stuart Baker demanded a jury trial.
   Miss Williams said she sang the song
   because she liked it, and danced because
   she could not help it when she heard the
   catchy tune. Lawyer Baker volunteered to
   sing the song in court. The prosecuting
   attorney objected, stating this would make
   a farce of the trial. Judge Chadeayne
   overruled him and told Baker to go ahead.
   The lawyer, who had a good baritone
   voice, sang the ditty. When he reached the
   chorus, 'Everybody's doin' it, doin' it,
   doin' it,' spectators joined in. The jurors
   called for an encore. Again, taking out his
   tuning fork to pitch the key, the lawyer
   sang the second stanza with more feeling
   and expression, and as he sang he gave a
   mild imitation of the turkey trot.

   The jurymen clapped their hands in
   vigorous appreciation, and after five
   minutes' deliberation found Miss Williams
   not guilty. (27)

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That was the Zeitgeist of the era, its mood--exalt the new foundation-makers, the new frontier, then go with the present flow, do something novel, something different, something liberating, appealing, animated; enjoy it, embrace it, revel in it. Admittedly with reverence for the old foundation-makers and traditions, it was also the mood of the Calgary Stampede in 1912.

Forces Against the Renewal of the Stampede

Strange it may seem that the Stampede was not renewed in 1913, and stranger still that it did not return to join the exhibition until 1923. Part of the reason was that it was not run efficiently nor respectfully. One day the program was called because of darkness, and people were turned away without reimbursement, and throughout, the management was discourteous to patrons and the press. Some of the disrespect was the money-madness of the times, and some was the way the longhorns were bulldozed in the rodeo. Several had their horns torn out at the roots, and their gushing blood filled the infield. (28) When Charley Tipton, a bulldozer, snapped off a horn completely, the Calgary Herald scribe wrote, "This set the crowd in a perfect frenzy Of admiration, and he received prolonged cheer after cheer." (29)

Most others were not as apparently pleased. Significantly, the farm press was appalled by the whole idea of a stampede brutalizing and debasing an agricultural fair. When Weadick and company slipped over to the Winnipeg Exhibition the next year, intending to turn it into a stampede, J. Albert Hand of The Farmer's Advocate editorialized: "Such is the judgment of some city men in regard to exhibitions--they prefer some silly entertainment or blood-curdling stunt that should not be considered in a civilized country." (30) Later that year, The Grain Growers' Guide said the steer roping at the stampede was "rather rough on the steers. A certain amount of roughness is necessary in handling steers on the range but our civilization seems slightly out of joint when the chief attraction at our holiday celebration is the murdering or maiming of defenseless lower animals." (31) Likening the scene to a relic of bygone times or a Spanish bullfight, one correspondent urged the immediate elimination of both steer roping and bucking horse contests.

Disgusted by the lack of practical application and the irrelevance to the progress of the West, the writer snapped: "We have improved our horses out of those habits, and we should be ashamed of them." (32)

This criticism from the farm press in the unofficial prairie capital of Winnipeg, a metropolis of triple Calgary's population in 1911, carried weight. It emerged from the mood of the Zeitgeist and its associated policies that made it very clear that in 1912 and throughout the war the sodbuster was the prime focus of attention throughout the plains, and so in southern Alberta too, not the cattleman. The arresting poster of the Dominion Exhibition in Calgary in 1908 had announced that fact with the once-free cowboy halted by barbed wire protecting a stook of wheat. As one promotional pamphlet put it, there had been a battle royal between ten thousand steers and a seed of grain, and the seed had won. (33) There was no stampede with the Calgary Exhibition in 1913, nor for many years, because the Zeitgeist of western settlement did not favour it.

Abetting the Zeitgeist and its "purity" impulses were the reprehensible excesses of the city booms in Calgary and Edmonton and at a dozen other towns where the "wildcatting," misrepresentation, and outright fraud cried out for regulation. The real estate boom at Mirror, Alberta, said Bob Edwards, "was the rottenest ever pulled off in the West. If Mirror ever has a population of 2,000 it will be on a Fair day, and yet enough lots have been sold to accommodate 20,000 to 30,000 people." Then there was the "most disgusting orgy of wildcatting since the South Sea Bubble" at Edson with subdivisions stretching into the forests for miles. "Not one tenth of the lots bought in the neighborhood of Calgary, Edwards declared in May 1912, "will be built upon in twenty years." In Edmonton, between 1903 and 1914, of the 274 new subdivisions some were not fully occupied until the 1960s. In Calgary ten subdivisions were vacant for half a century. (34)

Also propelling the Zeitgeist were the moral reform leagues that stood for purity just as the idealized agricultural fair did. The prohibitionists were the most vocal and visible of the purity leaguers, and their rhetoric was a punishing form of Puritanism. Typical was that of Clinton N. Howard, visiting speaker to southern Alberta in 1915:

   In the high court of Heaven, I indict the
   liquor traffic as the curse of the cradle, the
   nightmare of the family altar, the vulture
   of human society and the populator of the
   cemetery. I indict it as the wild beast of
   our boasted Christian civilization,
   untamed and untamable, unwashed and
   unwashable, uncivilized and uncivilizable
   ... driving its poisonous fangs into the
   heart and brain and blood of our young
   men, stealing the roses from the cheeks
   and virtue from the hearts of our daughters,
   disappointing the hopes of our fathers,
   breaking the hearts of our mothers.

   In this campaign we propose to strip the
   liquor traffic as naked and bare as a
   skinned banana .... We are out for its
   scalp, its head, its horns, its hide, its
   hoofs, its tail. It should be slaughtered
   and tanned and sent to the national
   museum in Ottawa as an extinct beast. (35)

The Alberta Service League published The Searchlight, a purity probe of the times, and the virtue sought was broader than just alcoholic temperance. Supporting it were the likes of the Reverend W. F. Gold, chief secretary of the Alberta Temperance and Moral Reform League, a kind of provincial prefect, a social snoop, a reporter of infractions, indiscretions, and lapses of all kinds. A white knight he was, on the lookout for boozers, gamesters, gamblers, whores, and miscreants of every stripe, and his invigilations came with the blessings the Attorney General's ministry. That is, the temperance reformers were against more than just booze. Their hands were strengthened by every form of excess, every sin, every peccadillo, and together this welter of malfeasance encouraged the thought that there ought to be a law against wildcatting and irresponsible boosting, against lewd movies, against drunkenness, disrespectful music, depraved morality, and by extension against the crookedness and lasciviousness of the midways and the barbarity of a stampede.

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And then there was the Great War with its emphasis on the purity of cause, the spiritualizing of humanity, the themes of sacrifice and frugality, and the blessings of agricultural stewards and sustenance.

In this atmosphere that lasted for several years, a stampede, especially one tied to a pristine agricultural fair, was simply not countenanced.

The Dispelling of the Zeitgeist

There was, of course, the Victory Stampede of 1919, but it was neither part of the Exhibition nor financially successful. (36) The reunion of the two in 1923 was the direct result of the dissipation of the Zeitgeist of western settlement. From 1917 to 1926, the dry areas northeast, east and southeast of Calgary writhed in an endless destructive drought, compounded by agricultural depression, poor prices, and unprecedented depopulation. The entire promotion of the region to 1915 was falsified, the prophets of dryland farming were discredited, and agriculture was utterly deglamorized and desanctified.

Farm abandonment in Alberta reached an all-time high in 1926, greater even than during the Great Depression. That year there were 10,400 vacant or abandoned farms in the province, comprising 2,338,000 acres--the dry areas counting for over 62 per cent of the former and almost 70 per cent of the latter. (37)

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The Agricultural Instruction Act was discontinued in 1924 following chaotic administration, duplication of services, federal indebtedness, weighty taxation, and a new government. By the late 1920s, most farmers' political parties were in tatters. The federal Progressive Party, the British Columbia Provincial Party, the Manitoba United Farmers, the Ontario United Farmers--all had soared and plummeted. The United Farmers of Alberta was still alive, but really as Tories with a streak of red in their debt adjustment legislation that saved some farmers from bankruptcy but none from gloom. With disaster in the southeast, calamity in land settlement projects in British Columbia, and more farm abandonment in southwest Saskatchewan and Interlake Manitoba, the whole ethos of western settlement was strangled. The land, after all, was not seemly, nature was not amenable, science was not all-powerful, and progress was not at all. Nothing dispels a myth so completely as the lived truth.

In this darkened time, voices were quieted--agricultural boosters, settlement boosters, railway boosters, bank, mortgage company, and school garden boosters. The Agricultural Gazette disappeared and The Farmer's Advocate (western edition) succumbed. There seemed little point in lauding the virtues of the soil when the soil itself was aloft or in hallowing "the solitary figure in the distant furrow" when that figure had left the country. Being morally richer but economically poorer might be appealing to a priest, but rarely to a farmer.

Of the directors in the period when the Stampede returned, the vast majority had livestock interests, of course. There were certainly no mined farmers on the board. A.E. Cross was a pioneer rancher, Frank Collicutt, a pioneer Herford breeder, J.H Laycock, a dairyman. T.M. Carlyle and Peter Pallesen, dairymen, creamery operators. G.H. Hutton was a livestock judge. Fred Johnston had interests in thoroughbred breeding and racing, and Nat Christie bred racehorses. E.D. Adams was president of the Alberta Horsebreeders' Association. And E. L. Richardson was a hardcore promoter of what might work, and the agricultural exhibitions of 1920, 1921 and 1922 had been financial failures. (38)

At the same time as the purity of the land lost its luster, the "purity" of the reformers did too. After C.W. Peterson replaced the country-lifer Frank Jacobs and began his unbroken stint as editor of Calgary's Farm and Ranch Review in 1920, a different mentality came to the helm. Peterson suffered reformers neither gladly nor at all. "Every crack-brained aberration, every silly obsession, every impudent social adventure, provided it receives the sanction of the new idealism," he wrote, "is hawked abroad with insistent eloquence or senseless clamor. (39)

The farm movement lived in "The Age of Bunk." "A horde of wild-eyed reformers and enthusiastic nuts," including attendees of UFA Conventions, were more interested in social uplift than financial stability. (40) Emphasizing the idiocy of the message, Peterson quoted an American paper:

   To these reformers the practical is
   unworthy of attention. To ignore
   completely the fundamental traits of
   human nature is the cardinal point of their
   doctrine. Societies for the relief of
   distressed burglars, associations for the
   amelioration of the boredom of setting
   hens by hanging instructive pictures in the
   chicken house, inquiries into the
   possibility of intellectual development of
   fishes, devotion to the abstraction of
   speculation rather than to the actual
   problems of life--all of these are the
   symptoms of the mental shallowness and
   feebleness of mind which has come to be
   taken as a mark of intellectual distinction
   and superiority of the herd. (41)

Exasperated with the "rainbow chasing," Peterson exclaimed, "What in Sam Hill do all these issues have to do with agricultural business problems?" (42) For C.W., and for all farm editors, the central issue of the early twenties was practical and economic. Dismissing the reformist criticisms of the grandstand attractions and midway exhibits at the Exhibition, he concluded in 1921, "We must all endeavor not to take ourselves too seriously. A good laugh is frequently just as important as the garnering of useful knowledge. There are too many 'crepe hangers' in the world as it is." (43)

Peterson's mood was shared by others. In September 1918, A.G. MacDonald told the mayor of Lethbridge:

   Don't you know that we are living in an
   age of goodness, when every mutt with a
   weak spot in his head and a leaning
   towards 'uplift' can ride roughshod over
   the rest of humanity? Don't you know
   that a man is not supposed to have any
   human instincts at all these days, and that
   instead of having a man's feelings he is
   supposed to have the feelings of an old
   maid and the heart of a chicken? Don't
   you know that if a man desires a little
   snort he has to crawl to the rear of his
   darkened cellar and take it like a thief in
   the night, or that if he and his friend
   desire a game of cards they have to lock
   themselves up in a safety vault? Don't
   you know that we are ruled by the WCTU
   [Woman's Christian Temperance Union],
   the Moral Reform League, the Ministerial
   Association and the APP [Alberta
   Provincial Police]? From these and all
   other inflictions, Good Lord, deliver us! (44)

In Medicine Hat, The "Office Cat" column of the News regularly lampooned these "inflictions." "The wicked can console themselves with the thought that there are no reformers in hell," the Cat declared the very year the Stampede resumed. In 1924, perhaps the worst year of drought and depopulation in drybelt history, the feline waxed lyrically about the curse of reformers:

   I've often been told to dance is a sin;
   That I'd have to eschew it if heaven I'd
   win;
   That smoking is wicked and drinking is
   worse;
   That the devil himself owns the man who
   will curse;
   Now in view of these warnings I've led a
   good life;
   Only one girl I've kissed, and she is my
   wife.
   Things sinful and wicked I never have
   done;
   Let me warn you right now,
   I ain't had much fun. (45)

The renovators were grim people. "Those Ontario reformers, who swarm over the West like a plague of grasshoppers," said Bob Edwards, "would fain cut out cheerfulness altogether as being too frivolous and out of accord with the kingdom of heaven." (46) Anything new, it seemed, the reformers sought to censor, from dances like the grizzly bear, the bunny hug, and the crabstep, to short skirts and "vile" movies. "You can come home a new being after a funny show," asserted Edwards. "And yet our Ontario reformers denounce shows as immoral and ungodly! A funny movie is a jolly physician. An Ontario reformer is a blight. The less 'Toronto' is injected into our social economy in Calgary the better. Toronto is the city where they arrest folk during the winter for tobogganing down a hill on a Sunday." (47)

Whether most of the reformers had come from Ontario or not was debatable. What was not debatable was the fact that they had outworn their welcome. "There is no use trying to be funny about prohibition," said Edwards. "To the wets there is nothing funny about the dry situation, and the prohibitionists never see any humor in anything." (48) For Bob there were too many Methodist joykillers: "Had Moses been a Methodist he would undoubtedly have had five hundred 'Thou Shalt Nots' in his commandments instead of ten." (49)

Symbolically, the year the Stampede returned to the Exhibition, prohibition in Alberta died, and so did the purity police, endless restriction and regulation. Reformers were thrown out like a dated pack of blathering antiquarians. As C.W. Peterson commented after the return of the rodeo, "The management is entitled to great credit for the smoothness of the entertainment offered the public which differed in character from previous years, and evidently met with the enthusiastic approval of the patrons of the exhibition. The idea of putting on a 'stampede' was a happy one." (50)

The mood had changed. The new music, the new dances, the new abbreviated women's styles continued apace, and the new generation expressed itself as all new generations do. Moral imperatives in the country life movement, the temperance movement and the social reconstruction movement weakened, and a measure of freedom returned.

A London, England, story appeared in the Calgary Herald in January 1926 that captured the two spirits, the one repressed, the other free, the one departing, the other incoming--"A crusade against brides approaching the altar with heavily powdered faces and painted lips has been started by the Rev. Arthur Wells, dean of a fashionable church. Although other and equally fashionable churches of the metropolis contain special rooms where the bride may carry out cosmetic decorations, Dean Wells asserts that he will not marry any woman so 'disfigured.'

"The dean has not performed a marriage ceremony for several weeks." (51)

In a way, the cowboys and the Indians and the cattle and the horses were a reversion to an earlier myth of the day of the great ranches that somehow seemed grander and more romantic, more nostalgic, and after repetition, more and more the preferred soul of Calgary. It was not unlike setting the mind right, where one replaces a moribund and dark image with a lively and exciting one. Individuals sometimes heal themselves this way, and perhaps whole societies do as well. In time, the darkness departs, or in the case of the Dry Belt, those who had experienced the darkness depart, and the new image waxes in strength as the old wanes and recedes from memory.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When I began my studies decades ago of agricultural fairs, agricultural calamity, the country life movement, and human experience on the land, I had difficulty convincing fellow professional historians that an unprecedented agrarian disaster had even occurred in the 1920s. In the public mind half a century later, it was all but forgotten, and in the great celebration of the Calgary Stampede it was never reflected, nor was it meant to be.

NOTES

I thank Hugh Dempsey for his generous help, the referees for their suggestions, and all of my students for their inspiration.

(1) Census of Prairie Provinces 1936 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1938), p. 898.

(2) David C. Jones, Empire of Dust--Settling and Abandoning the Prairie Dry Belt (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002), p. 88.

(3) Regarding the Zeitgeist of Western Settlement, see, for example, Cole Harris, "The Myth of the Land in Canadian Nationalism," in Peter Russell, ed., Nationalism in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 27-36; David C. Jones, "The Zeitgeist of Western Settlement: Education and the Myth of the Land," in J. Donald Wilson and David C. Jones, eds. Schooling and Society in 20th Century British Columbia (Calgary: Detselig, 1980), pp. 71-89; Doug Owram, Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856-1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); R. Douglas Francis. Images of the West. Changing Perceptions of the Prairies, 1690-1960 (Saskatoon, Western Producer, 1989); Francis, "From Wasteland to Utopia: Changing Images of the Canadian West in the Nineteenth Century," Great Plains Quarterly, 7:3 (Summer 1987), pp. 178-194, "The Ideal and the Real: The Image of the Canadian West in the Settlement Period." in Richard C. Davis, ed., Rupert's Land A Cultural Tapestry (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press for the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, 1988), pp. 253-273.

(4) Theodore Roosevelt, "Greatness Depends on the Tiller of the Soil," in George McGovern, ed., Agricultural Thought in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1967), p. 28

(5) Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education, part 2 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1913), p. 286.

(6) David C Jones, '"The Little Mound of Earth'--The Fate of School Agriculture," CSSE Yearbook, 1979, p. 85.

(7) Ibid, p. 88

(8) David C. Jones, '"There is some power about the land'--the Western Agrarian Press and Country Life Ideology," in R. Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer, eds., The Prairie West, Historical Readings (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1992), p. 457.

(9) George W, Russell, "Life Finding Its Level," The Agricultural Gazette of Canada, May 1914, p. 337.

(10) Edwin Osgood Groves, "The Challenge of the Country," The Nor'-West Farmer, Jan. 5, 1914, p. 28.

(11) Jones, Empire of Dust, pp. 30-33.

(12) "The Warm Chinook in Sunny Alberta, Medicine Hat News, Mar. 19, 1908, p. 8, Richard A. Haste, reprinted from Canada West Magazine.

(13) "Hard Times Never to Visit South Again," Calgary Daily Herald, July 23, 1909, p. 1.

(14) N.a., Canada West (Ottawa: Department of the Interior, 1908), p.1.

(15) David C. Jones, ed., A Paradise of Cynical Sayings, unpublished ms., np.

(16) "The Creation of the 'Knocker' Explained," The Blairmore Enterprise, June 19, 1914, p.1.

(17) Quoted in High River Times, Nov. 21, 1907, p.1.

(18) David C. Jones, Midways, Judges and Smooth-tongued Fakirs The Illustrated Story of Country Fairs in the Prairie West (Saskatoon, Western Producer, 1983), pp. 135-36.

(19) N.a., "In the Name of Agriculture," Farm and Ranch Review, Sept. 6, 1915, p. 499. See also, "The Lethbridge Fair," Farm and Ranch Review, July 5, 1913, p. 636; Frank S. Jacobs, "Scum at Fairs," Farm and Ranch Review, Sept. 5, 1910, p. 1. For a recent chapter on midways and the Stampede, see Fiona Angus, "Midway to Respectability: Carnivals at the Calgary Stampede," in Max Foran, ed., Icon, Brand, Myth: The Calgary Stampede (Edmonton: University of Athabasca Press, 2008), pp. 111-145.

(20) Leacy, Historical Statistics of Canada, Series T147-194, Motor Vehicle Registration by Province, 1903 to 1975; David C. Jones, ed., A Funny Bone That Was. Humor Between the Wars (Calgary: Detselig, 1992), p, 14; Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917-1930 (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1990), p, 155.

(21) Mark Sullivan, Our Times 1900-1925, Vol. IV, The War Begins (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), pp. 574, 582.; Frank H. Ellis, Canada's Flying Heritage. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1954).

(22) N.a., "Women's Industrial Opportunities," The Western Standard, June 12, 1913, np.

(23) Hugh A. Dempsey, Calgary: Spirit of the West (Saskatoon: Glenbow and Fifth House, 1994), pp. 81-85.

(24) Sullivan, Our Times, The War Begins, p. 251.

(25) David C. Jones, "The Dance of the Grizzly Bear: Boom to Bust, 1912-13," in Michael Payne, et. al., Alberta Formed: Alberta Transformed, vol. 2 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press; Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), pp. 372-78.

(26) James Gray, A Brand of Its Own--The Hundred Year History of the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede (Saskatoon. Western Producer, 1985), p. 38. For a recent, multi-faceted history of the Calgary Stampede, see Max Foran, ed., Icon, Brand, Myth. The Calgary Stampede (Edmonton: University of Athabasca Press, 2008).

(27) Sullivan, Our Times, The War Begins, pp. 256-58.

(28) Gray, A Brand of Its Own, p. 40.

(29) Clipping, Calgary Herald, Sept. 3, 1912, p. 2. My thanks to Hugh Dempsey for this citation and Gardner's and Weadick's below.

(30) J. Albert Hand, editorial, "Exhibition versus Stampede," The Farmer's Advocate, Man 5, 1913, pp. 330-31. At the Winnipeg Stampede that year, Clem Gardner wrote, "some stock was injured or killed due to the cement-like conditions on the ground. This aroused public feeling ...." See Clem Gardner, "My Impressions as a Contestant in the Calgary Stampede of 1912," Canadian Cattleman, 8:1 (June 1945), pp. 11, 14, 38. See also, "Guy Weadick Comments on Clem Gardner's Impressions as a Contestant at the 1912 Stampede, Canadian Cattlemen, 8:2 (Sept. 1945), pp. 60-61, 100-101, 104-105.

(31) Editorial, no title. The Grain Growers' Guide, Aug. 20, 1913, p. 6.

(32) N.a, letter to the editor, Guide, Sept. 17, 1913, 10.

(33) David C. Jones, Empire of Dust, Radio docudrama, part 1, CBC, "Ideas," 1989.

(34) Jones, "The Dance of the Grizzly Bear," pp. 378-80.

(35) "Open Fight," Lethbridge Daily Herald, Jan. 18, 1915, pp, 1, 5.

(36) Donald G. Wetherell, "Making Tradition: The Calgary Stampede, 1912-1939," in Foran, Icon, Brand, Myth, p. 28,

(37) Jones, Empire of Dust, p. 220.

(38) Gray, A Brand of its Own, pp. 60, 84.

(39) C.W. Peterson, "The Age of Bunk," Farm and Ranch Review, Oct. 20, 1922, p. 5.

(40) C.W. Peterson, "Political Nobodies," Farm and Ranch Review, Feb. 20, 1920, p. 5.

(41) CW. Peterson, "The UFA Convention," Farm and Ranch Review, Feb 5, 1923, p 5; Peterson, "The Age of Bunk," p. 25.

(42) David C. Jones, ed., C.W Peterson, Wake Up, Canada! Reflections on Vital National Issues (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1989), p. xxiv.

(43) C.W. Peterson, "The Summer Fair," Farm and Ranch Review, June 20, 1921, p. 7.

(44) A.G. MacDonald, "Supports the Mayor," Lethbridge Daily Herald, Sept 25, 1918, p.3.

(45) "The Office Cat," Medicine Hat News, August 15, 1924, np.

(46) Bob Edwards, n.t., Calgary Eye Opener, Apr. 3, 1918, p. 4.

(47) Ibid., May 22, 1915, p. 1.

(48) Ibid., Nov. 1, 1919, p. 2.

(49) Grant MacEwan, Eye Opener Bob--The Story of Bob Edwards (Victoria: Brindle and Glass, 2004), p. 152.

(50) C.W. Peterson, "The Calgary Fair," Farm and Ranch Review, July 20, 1923, p. 5.

(51) "'Painted' Brides Scared by Dean," Calgary Herald, Jan. 5, 1926, p. 12

David C. Jones has written or edited 40 books, including Empire of Dust-Settling and Abandoning the Prairie Belt; Feasting on Misfortune--Journeys of the Human Spirit in Alberta's Past, and Meditations of Anselam--Letters from an Elder Teacher. He has received the President's Circle Award for Teaching Excellence at the University of Calgary. He and his wife Anita have three children.