Frontier Cattle Ranching in the Land and Times of Charlie Russell

Frontier Cattle Ranching in the Land and Times of Charlie Russell Warren Ni. Elofson University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2004. Illustrations, maps, notes, index, xv + 347 pp. $30.00 cloth.

This solid book, well written and carefully constructed, is part of the increasingly interesting and hefty body of work that examines differences in the North American ranching experience, contrasting practices across the Canadian-American border. Warren Elofson, who has to his credit several noteworthy contributions to the study of ranching, is somewhat the victim of his book's tide, even though he notes at the inception that the book "is only incidentally about the celebrated western artist Charles Marion Russell" (p. 3). While some regional historians and geographers may glower at the specter of Charlie Russell looming over the work, withal it is an engaging if standard treatment that looks at the continuity of ranch and range life on the eastern edge of the northern Rockies up through the early igoos. It's a worthy read, if perhaps more for specialists and the stalwart regionalist than for an excitable amateur.

A University of Calgary history professor and Alberta rancher, Elofson has taken a healthy look at a variety of ranch papers and public archives. But the book is, consciously, less a study of land titles and government policy than it is a promenade through favored themes in western ranch life. That is where the Cowboy Artist and documentary material comes in handy; nine Russell works and better than forty historic photographs amplify the everyday-life theme that is alluded to in the book's tide. Over and above the working life of the cowhand, which is treated with dignity, Elofson gives us discussions of rustling, prostitution, transfer of wealth from Old World to New, a section on leisure on the ranch, which he calls "rangeland entertainment," and ends with an examination of the rise of ranch-farming in the early 1900s. The maps and photographs and the inked Russell drawings are nicely reproduced, and there's nothing in the production that poses a problem.

So why is it difficult to reach a suitable and sustained level of enthusiasm about this book? I have, believe me, given much thought to the quandary. Perhaps the problem is simply that-despite Elofson's earnest efforts-this can't help but be, by and large, more of the same. It's at a small remove from the Frederick Jackson Turner treatment of the West; it's a minimal departure from the work of David Breen or Lewis Thomas or Simon Evans on ranching north of the border. Carefully footnoted and filled with rich quotations from the journals and stories of the two-country borderland, this is reputable history, but it ultimately lacks magic, that single lyrical attribute that the great regional study or cultural history bestows upon the reader. We as readers can't insist that it be there-but we do notice its absence.

Paul F. Stairs

University of Nevada, Reno

Copyright Montana Historical Society Autumn 2006
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved