NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
February 5, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1997 Plains Folk
Students these days are believers. "Question Authority" may have been the motto of a previous generation, but not this one. Teaching History at a land-grant university, I find one of my main tasks is to get across the idea that History is not a certain set of facts agreed upon by established authorities. Rather, History is something we put together to explain who we are and make us feel all right about it. From the infinity of stories out there, we pick certain ones to tell.
Here on the northern plains we have a good example of what I'm talking about. You may have noticed that things on the north side of the 49th Parallel look a lot like things on the south side. The people on the two sides of the line, though, select different stories to tell about the past. Americans, for instance, never tell the story of the Cypress Hills Massacre. Canadians do.
So if you're an American, you're wondering what I'm talking about. Here's the story as told in Canada. It has to do with a bunch of wolf hunters working out of Fort Benton, Montana, in 1873. Some Assiniboian Indians stole their horses and headed north with them. The wolfers pursued them to a place on the west side of the Cypress Hills, in present-day Alberta. The negotiations to get the horses back got confused, as were the parties involved, who were drinking heavily; shooting started; scores of Indians died.
The Cypress Hills Massacre, as it was dubbed, became an international incident. Canadians said it showed the dangers of having lawless Americans—whiskey traders and such—as neighbors. This led to the formation of the Northwest Mounted Police, to keep the Queen's good order and to keep American lawlessness from spilling across the border.
This is a pretty good piece of national mythology, the only problem being that six of the murdering wolfers—about half the party—were Canadians. If you want to read the story, the best account is in a book called "Whoop-Up Country" by Paul Sharp.
(Sharp, incidentally, is a man I am proud to call friend. A native of Crookston, Minnesota, he wrote fine books about the Canadian-American West before going on to a career in academic administration, retiring as president of the University of Oklahoma.)
Or, if you want to read a wonderful historical novel based on the events surrounding the Cypress Hills Massacre, then check out "The Englishman's Boy," by Guy Vanderhaeghe—another fellow I'm happy to call friend. A resident of Saskatoon, Guy won his second Governor General's Award for "Englishman's Boy" in 1996. (The Governor General's Award is the highest book award to be won in Canada.) The book has just come out in an American edition by Picador USA, and so it's available in bookstores around the region.
It's a wonderful, artful book. The plot turns on this character named Shorty MacAdoo, a young fellow who falls in with bad company—the wolfers—and thus rides into the middle of the Cypress Hills Massacre. A half-century later, then, an American director in Hollywood decides to make an epic movie about the incident. (This director seems to be patterned after D.W. Griffith, who made magnificently racist epic films, including "Birth of a Nation," which glorified the Ku Klux Klan.)
The director hires a Canadian researcher and writer to get the story from MacAdoo, who, he has learned, has been working as an extra in cowboy films. The Canadian, despite doubts about the enterprise, finally wins MacAdoo's confidence and gets the story, only to see it perverted into a travesty in film. I won't tell you just how all this ends, but you can see that the book has all sorts of potential for playing on the distinctions between Canadian and American values—all done subtly and thoughtfully by Vanderhaeghe.
Guy visited NDSU about a year ago and I had the pleasure of interviewing him for public radio. "The Englishman's Boy"—highly recommended.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866