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Book Review
| Louis A. Knafla and Jonathan Swainger, Laws and Societies in the Canadian Prairie West, 1670–1940, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005. Pp. 344. $85.00CAN cloth (ISBN 0-774-81166-8); $34.95CAN paper (ISBN 0-774-81167-6).
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| This collection of well-researched essays on various legal aspects of the history of the Canadian Prairie can be thought of as the third in a series of similar volumes. The first, edited by Knafla and John McLaren, Law and Justice in a New Land: Essays in Western Canadian History, appeared in 1984. The second, organized by McLaren, appeared in 1991 as Law for the Elephant, Law for the Beaver: Essays in the History of the North American West. This volume addresses some of the same issues: There are four chapters on the interaction of Natives and Newcomers in the Hudson's Bay Company's domain, and four chapters on criminal law and policing, but neither these nor the others simply rehash what had already been written. |
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Louis Knafla's Introduction is worth the price of the book. It doesn't simply summarize the contributions within; it grounds them thoroughly in a comparative context. Knafla refers to both the two predecessor volumes on western Canadia's legal past, as well as to a host of more recent studies of the legal history of Canadian Prairie, but he also draws attention to a number of relevant U.S. studies of the Great Plains (those of Walter Prescott Webb, John Wunder, Donald Pisani, and Kermit Hall). Another nice feature of Knafla's Introduction is his identification in its final pages of several promising-sounding comparative research tasks for future scholars. |
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Knafla reminds us that Dominion legislation in 1869, 1876, 1884, and 1895 led to treaties that stripped vital resources from the native peoples of the Prairie and minimized their culture and law. The Dominion Lands Act of 1872, modeled after Congress's Homestead Act, distributed some Prairie land, but Parliament's creation of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1880 led inexorably to the passing of almost half of all the arable land of the Prairie into the coffers of a handful of Canadian railway companies. These corporations sold land to settlers, many of whom were attracted by railway colonization offices in Europe. The Hudson's Bay Company retained about 11 percent of the Prairie; another 19 percent was set aside for schools, towns, and woodlands. So only 23 percent was sold directly by the Dominion to homesteaders. "The purpose of the National Policy," Knafla writes, "was to develop the industrial economy of eastern Canada by exploiting the natural resources of the Prairies" (20). In this regard, Janice Erion's chapter is particularly relevant. |
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My only point of difference with Knafla is with his comparison of Alberta's and Chicago's experience with a public utility monopoly. Knafla describes the work of my Pitt colleague Werner Troesken, Why Regulate Utilities? as representing the "capture" of state regulatory policy by private monopolies (21). Troesken's point is that this Chicago School "capture" theory warrants modification: the shift of the fight over municipal utility regulation to the state level produced a forum characterized by greater objectivity and fair-handed dealing with both parties, something lacking, according to Erion's detailed account, in the Alberta experience. (She found a number of reasons that Max Aitken's Calgary Power Company effectively avoided the rigorous regulation that ensued in Ontario, where manufacturer-politician Adam Beck simultaneously lobbied successfully for a public electric utility, Ontario Hydro, to break the unpopular private monopoly, Toronto Electric Lighting Company.) |
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Of the ten fine essays that follow Knafla's Introduction, I want particularly to recommend five: Janice Erion's work (already alluded to); Sidney Harring's analysis of the effects of the Newcomer's legal and extra-legal measures on the Native people of the Prairie; Russell Smandych's making Hudson's Bay magistrate Adam Thom's behavior more comprehensible by placing it in a larger British colonial context; Greg Marquis's comparing/contrasting the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Northwest Mounted Police (with regard to personnel, missions, and morale); and Roderick Martin's study of 614 opinions of the Prairie's North-West Territories Supreme Court (uncovering evidence of that court's respect for "the customs of the country" and for relevant precedents set by jurists of the Great Plains states to the south). |
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Tristan Goodman's otherwise fine essay comparing water law on the Canadian Prairie with that of Australia and the western United States argues that there were significant differences between Canadian and U.S. law with regard to access to the regions' scare water supplies (266–67). He might have come to different conclusions had he taken into greater account the findings in Gordon Bakken's The Development of Law on the Rocky Mountain Frontier and John Weaver's chapter on the subject in The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World. But I nitpick. This is a fine collection that U.S. legal historians will find both enjoyable and useful, complete with three excellent indices (cases; ordinances/proclamations/statutes; subjects). |
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| Peter Karsten
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| University of Pittsburgh |
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