and talking about Westerns....
Dates: 4/13/01,9:51 PM through 4/19/01,8:38 AM (9 postings)
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Fiction_L Archives
and talking about Westerns....
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FROM: anne clasper <[removed]@excite.com>
REC'D: 4/13/01, 9:51 PM
Anne Clasper
Larchmont, New York.
_______________________________________________________
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FROM: "Georgine Olson" <[removed]@fnsb.lib.ak.us>
REC'D: 4/14/01, 1:49 PM
As an Alaskan who has been working on a bibliography of "good reads" genre
fiction with an Alaskan setting, I've discovered that there are several
readable books in the Western genre that are set during the Klondike gold
rush, which would certainly include Canada. It's almost as though, when the
cowpokes got "as fur west as they could go", it was time to head to the
northern frontier!
Since my concern is setting, not nationality of author, I'm hoping this
answers your question - I have come across authors of popularly accepted
Westerns who are English and German, but, given that my interest is Alaska,
I've never looked into whether they wrote about the American West or the
Canadian West.
BTW, I've gleaned some of my info about Alaskan Westerns (which, of course,
take place before Alaska became a state in 1959) from the Western Writers of
America website and Dale Walker's Out West Books website.
Georgine N. Olson
Outreach Services Manager
Fairbanks North Star Borough Public Library & Regional Center
1215 Cowles Street
Fairbanks AK 99701
ph: (907) 459-1020 fax: (907) 459-1024
----- Original Message -----
From: anne clasper <[removed]@excite.com>
To: Fiction_L <[removed]@maillist.webrary.org>
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2001 6:45 PM
Subject: and talking about Westerns....
>
> I am a(Canadian)MSLIS student at Queens College in New York. During a
> discussion of the Western genre in my RA class, the question was raised
as
> to whether "Westerns" are an exclusively American phenomenon, or whether
> they exist in a Canadian context as well. I'm hoping that fans of CanLit
> will be able to answer this one for me. Is there such a thing as a
"Canadian
> Western"?
> Thanks for any help you might be able to give.
>
> Anne Clasper
> Larchmont, New York.
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________
> Send a cool gift with your E-Card
> http://www.bluemountain.com/giftcenter/
>
>
>
> ......................................................................
> Need to subscribe, unsubscribe, search the archives?
> Everything Fiction_L: http://www.webrary.org/rs/flmenu.html
FROM: Cindy McCormack <[removed]@mail.win.org>
REC'D: 4/15/01, 8:11 AM
Cindy McCormack
Circulation Supervisor
Corporate Parkway Branch
St. Charles City-County Library District
[removed]@mail.win.org
On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, anne clasper wrote:
>
> I am a(Canadian)MSLIS student at Queens College in New York. During a
> discussion of the Western genre in my RA class, the question was raised as
> to whether "Westerns" are an exclusively American phenomenon, or whether
> they exist in a Canadian context as well. I'm hoping that fans of CanLit
> will be able to answer this one for me. Is there such a thing as a "Canadian
> Western"?
> Thanks for any help you might be able to give.
>
> Anne Clasper
> Larchmont, New York.
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________
> Send a cool gift with your E-Card
> http://www.bluemountain.com/giftcenter/
>
>
>
> ......................................................................
> Need to subscribe, unsubscribe, search the archives?
> Everything Fiction_L: http://www.webrary.org/rs/flmenu.html
>
FROM: Dennis Lien <[removed]@tc.umn.edu>
REC'D: 4/17/01, 12:52 AM
Disclaimer: I'm not a western fan (though I was one for a few years
in my teens, four decades back). But my understanding from standpoint
of someone who is interested in older popular genre fiction of various
sorts is:
As others have pointed out, "westerns" are not an "exclusively American
phenomenon" in the sense that writers from other countries have produced
westerns, some of them long-running and popular serieses: Karl May in
Germany, J.T. Edson and others in the UK, others I know of in France
and Australia, and so on. I don't know of any Canadian authors who have
written much in the genre of (American) westerns, but there probably are
some: there were a number of Canadian writers for the pulp magazines of
the 20s/30s/40s/early 50s, and pulp writers tended to turn their hand to
whatever they could sell. By and large, western pulps were the biggest
sellers and the steadiest markets for most of this period, so must
pulp writers who could tried their hand at westerns at one time or
another.
The standard American western usually involves some combination of
cattle ranching (generally involving either conflicts with rustlers
and the like or with the encroachment of farmers and/or sheep herders),
cattle drives and cowboys, lawless towns and the people who made them
that way and the people who tamed them (bullies, gunmen, saloon
gamblers, lawmen, mysterious strangers who turned out to be fast gun
artists, etc.), and conflicts with Indians. There are also a cluster
of stories around railroads, gold miners, pioneers (wagon trains, settlers)
and another, set mostly in somewhat earlier times, around mountain men/
explorers/fur traders.
I don't think all of these themes "work" in a Canadian setting. (My
ignorance may be showing; if so, please tell me.) Certainly there were
mountain men/explorers/fur traders (probably more in proportion to the
population than there were in the US), but I don't think there were
large cattle ranches and thus large numbers of ranch hands/cowboys (let
alone trail drives and such)--weren't small farmers pretty much in the
vanguard of civilization as the Canadian frontier opened up, so that
some of the traditional western sources of conflict did not occur in
Canadian history? Again, the presence of the RCMP as a nation-wide
organization discouraged the whole "lawless boomtown on the edge of
the frontier" sort of thing (except in the case of the Yukon goldrush,
for a while). Also, while Canada had individual badmen responsible for
the odd robbery or murder or two, I don't know of any cases of gangs of
such on the model of the James-Younger gang or the Daltons. (I suppose
the Donnelley family comes closest, but they were purely local and
more thugs than outlaws.) And so on; you were just too (relatively)
civilized too early and too much of the time...
I don't want to imply, of course, that the vast majority of American
westerns *accurately* depicted the reality of life on the American
frontier (mostly the southwest in the 1870s and 1880s)--obviously the
bulk of them are sensationalized and exagerrated, but there's some
kernel of fact at the bottom of most of the legends. (There were
outlaw gangs, even if not as many or as large as in fiction; there
were ranch wars such as that in Johnson County (WY); there were
political/economic rivalries settled by large numbers of gunmen such
as the Lincoln County (NM) war or the Earp-Clanton rivalry in AZ.
There just weren't nearly as *many* of these as one would be led to
believe by the vast outpouting of western fiction and movies etc.)
As has been suggested already and as I've hinted at above, I think the
closest match is in romances of the northwest goldfields (sometimes
Alaska, sometimes the Canadian Yukon) and/or in stories of the Mounties.
Many of the (US-born and US-based) western novelists would set an
occasional novel in this milieu; many of the western pulp magazines
would use such short stories with a certain regularity, and there were
at least two pulp magazines devoted solely to such stories in the
30s and early 40s: COMPLETE NORTHWEST MAGAZINE and NORTH-WEST
ROMANCES. But most of the stories in these pulps again, were written
by US authors.
There's a list of about 250 "Mountie Novels" on pages 417-419 of:
---------------------------------------------------------------
Skene Melvin, David, 1936-
Canadian crime fiction : an annotated comprehensive
bibliography of Canadian crime writing from 1817 to 1996 and
biographical dictionary of Canadian crime writers, with an
introductory essay on the history and development of
Canadian crime writing / compiled by L. David St C. Skene-
Melvin ; assisted by Norbert Spehner.
Shelburne, Ont. : Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 1996.
and here's the contents of a recent reprint anthology of Mountie stories:
Scarlet Riders: Pulp Fiction Tales of the Mounties ed. Don Hutchison
(Mosaic Press 0-889-62647-2, Aug 98,
$12.95, 289pp, tp, cover by Neil Mechem);
xi Scarlet Fiction Don Hutchison in; text ends on page xxi;
xxiii through xxxvii depict RCMP-themed pulp covers,
in black and white.
1 Deadly Trek to Albertville Talmadge Powell ss Posse Magazine
Mar 57; revised.
17 The Frozen Phantom Lester Dent ss Western Trails Apr 33
41 Spoilers of the Lost World Roger Daniels ss North-West
Romances Fll 38
85 White Water Run Hugh B. Cave ss Western Story Magazine Feb 14
42
99 Red Snows Harold F. Cruikshank ss Thrilling Adventures Feb 38
117 The Driving Force Murray Leinster ss Complete Northwest
Magazine Jul 38
131 Snow Ghost [*The Silver Corporal] Lester Dent ss Western
Trails May-Jun 33
159 Phantom Fangs John Starr ss North-West Romances Spr 42
179 The Dangerous Dan McGrew Ryerson Johnson ss Ace-High
Magazine Mar 2 31
197 Death Cache [*The Silver Corporal] Lester Dent ss *
217 Doom Ice Dan ORourke ss North-West Romances Sum 42
235 The Valley of Wanted Men Frederick Nebel ss North-West
Romances Spr 40
If I correctly recall Hutchison's introduction (which I read some months
ago), only one of the authors in the above list was Canadian. (I don't
recall which one offhand; sorry.)
Some of the stories in David Skene-Melvin's Canadian crime fiction
anthologies CRIME WHERE THE NIGHTS ARE LONG and SECRET TALES OF THE
ARCTIC TRAILS and CRIME IN A COLD CLIMATE are Mountie stories and a
couple are "lawless frontier" tales, notably those of William
Alexander Fraser, whose 1919 linked collection BULLDOG CARNEY is
described in CANADIAN CRIME FICTION (page 79) as "Skillfully told
Western tales about a Robin-Hood-like smuggler in the Alberta
foothills."
I'd intended the above as short musings but they got rather out of hand.
Hope they help anyway...
Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // [removed]@tc.umn.edu
FROM: "christine jeffords" <[removed]@hotmail.com>
REC'D: 4/17/01, 11:05 AM
>From: anne clasper <[removed]@excite.com>
>Reply-To: "Fiction_L" <[removed]@maillist.webrary.org>
>To: Fiction_L <[removed]@maillist.webrary.org>
>Subject: and talking about Westerns....
>Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 19:45:13 -0700 (PDT)
>
>
>I am a(Canadian)MSLIS student at Queens College in New York. During a
>discussion of the Western genre in my RA class, the question was raised as
>to whether "Westerns" are an exclusively American phenomenon, or whether
>they exist in a Canadian context as well. I'm hoping that fans of CanLit
>will be able to answer this one for me. Is there such a thing as a
>"Canadian
>Western"?
>Thanks for any help you might be able to give.
>
>
I know of at least three in movie form, to wit, "Saskatchewan" (with Alan
Ladd), "Pony Soldier" (with Tyrone Power), and Gary Cooper's "North West
Mounted Police." Possibly the musical "Rose Marie" (the Keel/Blyth version)
and Shirley Temple's "Susannah of the Mounties" could also be counted, as
both feature horse-Indians.
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
FROM: Karna Jo <[removed]@yahoo.com>
REC'D: 4/17/01, 3:38 PM
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices
http://auctions.yahoo.com/
FROM: "solojw" <[removed]@home.com>
REC'D: 4/17/01, 6:09 PM
> At 07:45 PM 4/13/01 -0700, you wrote:
> >
> >I am a(Canadian)MSLIS student at Queens College in New York. During a
> >discussion of the Western genre in my RA class, the question was raised
as
> >to whether "Westerns" are an exclusively American phenomenon, or whether
> >they exist in a Canadian context as well. I'm hoping that fans of CanLit
> >will be able to answer this one for me. Is there such a thing as a
"Canadian
> >Western"?
> >Thanks for any help you might be able to give.
> >
> >Anne Clasper
> >Larchmont, New York.
>
>
> Disclaimer: I'm not a western fan (though I was one for a few years
> in my teens, four decades back). But my understanding from standpoint
> of someone who is interested in older popular genre fiction of various
> sorts is:
>
> As others have pointed out, "westerns" are not an "exclusively American
> phenomenon" in the sense that writers from other countries have produced
> westerns, some of them long-running and popular serieses: Karl May in
> Germany, J.T. Edson and others in the UK, others I know of in France
> and Australia, and so on. I don't know of any Canadian authors who have
> written much in the genre of (American) westerns, but there probably are
> some: there were a number of Canadian writers for the pulp magazines of
> the 20s/30s/40s/early 50s, and pulp writers tended to turn their hand to
> whatever they could sell. By and large, western pulps were the biggest
> sellers and the steadiest markets for most of this period, so must
> pulp writers who could tried their hand at westerns at one time or
> another.
>
> The standard American western usually involves some combination of
> cattle ranching (generally involving either conflicts with rustlers
> and the like or with the encroachment of farmers and/or sheep herders),
> cattle drives and cowboys, lawless towns and the people who made them
> that way and the people who tamed them (bullies, gunmen, saloon
> gamblers, lawmen, mysterious strangers who turned out to be fast gun
> artists, etc.), and conflicts with Indians. There are also a cluster
> of stories around railroads, gold miners, pioneers (wagon trains,
settlers)
> and another, set mostly in somewhat earlier times, around mountain men/
> explorers/fur traders.
>
> I don't think all of these themes "work" in a Canadian setting. (My
> ignorance may be showing; if so, please tell me.) Certainly there were
> mountain men/explorers/fur traders (probably more in proportion to the
> population than there were in the US), but I don't think there were
> large cattle ranches and thus large numbers of ranch hands/cowboys (let
> alone trail drives and such)--weren't small farmers pretty much in the
> vanguard of civilization as the Canadian frontier opened up, so that
> some of the traditional western sources of conflict did not occur in
> Canadian history? Again, the presence of the RCMP as a nation-wide
> organization discouraged the whole "lawless boomtown on the edge of
> the frontier" sort of thing (except in the case of the Yukon goldrush,
> for a while). Also, while Canada had individual badmen responsible for
> the odd robbery or murder or two, I don't know of any cases of gangs of
> such on the model of the James-Younger gang or the Daltons. (I suppose
> the Donnelley family comes closest, but they were purely local and
> more thugs than outlaws.) And so on; you were just too (relatively)
> civilized too early and too much of the time...
>
> I don't want to imply, of course, that the vast majority of American
> westerns *accurately* depicted the reality of life on the American
> frontier (mostly the southwest in the 1870s and 1880s)--obviously the
> bulk of them are sensationalized and exagerrated, but there's some
> kernel of fact at the bottom of most of the legends. (There were
> outlaw gangs, even if not as many or as large as in fiction; there
> were ranch wars such as that in Johnson County (WY); there were
> political/economic rivalries settled by large numbers of gunmen such
> as the Lincoln County (NM) war or the Earp-Clanton rivalry in AZ.
> There just weren't nearly as *many* of these as one would be led to
> believe by the vast outpouting of western fiction and movies etc.)
>
> As has been suggested already and as I've hinted at above, I think the
> closest match is in romances of the northwest goldfields (sometimes
> Alaska, sometimes the Canadian Yukon) and/or in stories of the Mounties.
> Many of the (US-born and US-based) western novelists would set an
> occasional novel in this milieu; many of the western pulp magazines
> would use such short stories with a certain regularity, and there were
> at least two pulp magazines devoted solely to such stories in the
> 30s and early 40s: COMPLETE NORTHWEST MAGAZINE and NORTH-WEST
> ROMANCES. But most of the stories in these pulps again, were written
> by US authors.
>
> There's a list of about 250 "Mountie Novels" on pages 417-419 of:
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> Skene Melvin, David, 1936-
>
> Canadian crime fiction : an annotated comprehensive
> bibliography of Canadian crime writing from 1817 to 1996 and
> biographical dictionary of Canadian crime writers, with an
> introductory essay on the history and development of
> Canadian crime writing / compiled by L. David St C. Skene-
> Melvin ; assisted by Norbert Spehner.
>
> Shelburne, Ont. : Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 1996.
>
>
> and here's the contents of a recent reprint anthology of Mountie stories:
>
> Scarlet Riders: Pulp Fiction Tales of the Mounties ed. Don Hutchison
> (Mosaic Press 0-889-62647-2, Aug '98,
> $12.95, 289pp, tp, cover by Neil Mechem);
> xi . Scarlet Fiction . Don Hutchison . in; text ends on page xxi;
> xxiii through xxxvii depict RCMP-themed pulp covers,
> in black and white.
> 1 . Deadly Trek to Albertville . Talmadge Powell . ss Posse Magazine
> Mar '57; revised.
> 17 . The Frozen Phantom . Lester Dent . ss Western Trails Apr '33
> 41 . Spoilers of the Lost World . Roger Daniels . ss North-West
> Romances Fll '38
> 85 . White Water Run . Hugh B. Cave . ss Western Story Magazine Feb
14
> '42
> 99 . Red Snows . Harold F. Cruikshank . ss Thrilling Adventures Feb
'38
> 117 . The Driving Force . Murray Leinster . ss Complete Northwest
> Magazine Jul '38
> 131 . Snow Ghost [*The Silver Corporal] . Lester Dent . ss Western
> Trails May-Jun '33
> 159 . Phantom Fangs . John Starr . ss North-West Romances Spr '42
> 179 . The Dangerous Dan McGrew . Ryerson Johnson . ss Ace-High
> Magazine Mar 2 '31
> 197 . Death Cache [*The Silver Corporal] . Lester Dent . ss *
> 217 . Doom Ice . Dan O'Rourke . ss North-West Romances Sum '42
> 235 . The Valley of Wanted Men . Frederick Nebel . ss North-West
> Romances Spr '40
>
> If I correctly recall Hutchison's introduction (which I read some months
> ago), only one of the authors in the above list was Canadian. (I don't
> recall which one offhand; sorry.)
>
> Some of the stories in David Skene-Melvin's Canadian crime fiction
> anthologies CRIME WHERE THE NIGHTS ARE LONG and SECRET TALES OF THE
> ARCTIC TRAILS and CRIME IN A COLD CLIMATE are Mountie stories and a
> couple are "lawless frontier" tales, notably those of William
> Alexander Fraser, whose 1919 linked collection BULLDOG CARNEY is
> described in CANADIAN CRIME FICTION (page 79) as "Skillfully told
> Western tales about a Robin-Hood-like smuggler in the Alberta
> foothills."
>
> I'd intended the above as short musings but they got rather out of hand.
> Hope they help anyway...
>
> Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // [removed]@tc.umn.edu
>
> ......................................................................
> Need to subscribe, unsubscribe, search the archives?
> Everything Fiction_L: http://www.webrary.org/rs/flmenu.html
FROM: Anne Marquis <[removed]@publib.edmonton.ab.ca>
REC'D: 4/18/01, 5:54 PM
"North West Mounted Police" was based on a history--"The Royal Canadian
Mounted Police"--by a Quebec historian, R.C. Fetherstonhaugh, who wrote
several histories of the RCMP.
Anne Marquis
Fiction Librarian
Information Services
Edmonton Public Library
7 Sir Winston Churchill Square
Edmonton, Alberta T5J 2V4
Canada
[removed]@publib.edmonton.ab.ca
-----Original Message-----
From: christine jeffords [[removed]@hotmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2001 9:55 AM
To: Fiction_L
Subject: Re: and talking about Westerns....
>From: anne clasper <[removed]@excite.com>
>Reply-To: "Fiction_L" <[removed]@maillist.webrary.org>
>To: Fiction_L <[removed]@maillist.webrary.org>
>Subject: and talking about Westerns....
>Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 19:45:13 -0700 (PDT)
>
>
>I am a(Canadian)MSLIS student at Queens College in New York. During a
>discussion of the Western genre in my RA class, the question was raised as
>to whether "Westerns" are an exclusively American phenomenon, or whether
>they exist in a Canadian context as well. I'm hoping that fans of CanLit
>will be able to answer this one for me. Is there such a thing as a
>"Canadian
>Western"?
>Thanks for any help you might be able to give.
>
>
I know of at least three in movie form, to wit, "Saskatchewan" (with Alan
Ladd), "Pony Soldier" (with Tyrone Power), and Gary Cooper's "North West
Mounted Police." Possibly the musical "Rose Marie" (the Keel/Blyth version)
and Shirley Temple's "Susannah of the Mounties" could also be counted, as
both feature horse-Indians.
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
FROM: "christine jeffords" <[removed]@hotmail.com>
REC'D: 4/19/01, 8:38 AM
>From: Anne Marquis <[removed]@publib.edmonton.ab.ca>
>Reply-To: "Fiction_L" <[removed]@maillist.webrary.org>
>To: Fiction_L <[removed]@maillist.webrary.org>
>Subject: RE: and talking about Westerns....
>Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 10:40:09 -0600
>
>Christine:
>It is interesting that all the movies you mentioned feature the
>Mounties--one of the few archetypes of the Canadian west--perhaps this
>might
>be a subset of the western genre, at least for Canada.
I suspect you're right. The Mounties are often interwoven into any Western
story that has a Canadian angle; see the short-lived Family Channel series
"Bordertown," for example. And I vaguely remember a segment of "The
Virginian" that featured a Cockney who'd joined the Scarlet Force and come
down to Medicine Bow searching for a fugitive.
Apropos of "Susannah
>of the Mounties," it was based on the first of a series of books about a
>little girl named Susannah Winston (renamed Sheldon in the movie)by
>Winnipeg
>author Muriel Denison. This girls' series included "Susannah: a Little
>Girl
>With the Mounties," "Susannah Of the Yukon," "Susannah At Boarding School,"
>and "Susannah Rides Again."
>
Yes, I've come across mention of those, although I've never read one, or
seen it on a library shelf. (Too old-fashioned?)
>"North West Mounted Police" was based on a history--"The Royal Canadian
>Mounted Police"--by a Quebec historian, R.C. Fetherstonhaugh, who wrote
>several histories of the RCMP.
>
>
>Anne Marquis
>Fiction Librarian
>Information Services
>Edmonton Public Library
>7 Sir Winston Churchill Square
>Edmonton, Alberta T5J 2V4
>Canada
>
[removed]@publib.edmonton.ab.ca
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: christine jeffords [[removed]@hotmail.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2001 9:55 AM
>To: Fiction_L
>Subject: Re: and talking about Westerns....
>
>
>
>
>
> >From: anne clasper <[removed]@excite.com>
> >Reply-To: "Fiction_L" <[removed]@maillist.webrary.org>
> >To: Fiction_L <[removed]@maillist.webrary.org>
> >Subject: and talking about Westerns....
> >Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 19:45:13 -0700 (PDT)
> >
> >
> >I am a(Canadian)MSLIS student at Queens College in New York. During a
> >discussion of the Western genre in my RA class, the question was raised
>as
> >to whether "Westerns" are an exclusively American phenomenon, or whether
> >they exist in a Canadian context as well. I'm hoping that fans of CanLit
> >will be able to answer this one for me. Is there such a thing as a
> >"Canadian
> >Western"?
> >Thanks for any help you might be able to give.
> >
> >
>
>I know of at least three in movie form, to wit, "Saskatchewan" (with Alan
>Ladd), "Pony Soldier" (with Tyrone Power), and Gary Cooper's "North West
>Mounted Police." Possibly the musical "Rose Marie" (the Keel/Blyth
>version)
>
>and Shirley Temple's "Susannah of the Mounties" could also be counted, as
>both feature horse-Indians.
>_________________________________________________________________
>Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
>
>
>......................................................................
>Need to subscribe, unsubscribe, search the archives?
>Everything Fiction_L: http://www.webrary.org/rs/flmenu.html
>
>......................................................................
>Need to subscribe, unsubscribe, search the archives?
>Everything Fiction_L: http://www.webrary.org/rs/flmenu.html
_________________________________________________________________
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