Frontier Cattle Ranching in the Land and Times of Charlie Russell : A Re-examination of the Free-range Cattle Ranching Era in Montana, Southern Alberta, and Southern Saskatchewan.

A re-examination of the free-range cattle ranching era in Montana, Southern Alberta, and Southern Saskatchewan. In Frontier Cattle Ranching in the Land and Times of Charlie Russell, Warren Elofson debunks the myth of the American "wild west" and the Canadian "mild west" by demonstrating that cattlemen on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel shared a common experience. Focusing on Montana, Southern Alberta, Southern Saskatchewan, and the well-known figure of Charlie Russell - an artist and storyteller from that era who spent time on both sides of the border - Elofson examines the lives of cowboys and ranch owners, looking closely at the prevalence of drunkenness, prostitution, gunplay, rustling, and vigilante justice in both Canada and the United States. In this book Warren Elofson argues that though they lived on different sides of the 49th parallel, the first cattlemen on the western Canadian prairies and in the state of Montana shared a common history. They both forged societies composed of a different considerable number of people drawn from eastern homelands by the visual media