I managed to sit down recently with a book that intrigued me when it was first published in 2004. It's even better than I anticipated.
It's The Bar U and Canadian Ranching History by Simon M. Evans, published by University of Calgary Press.
The Bar U ranch, west of High River, Alberta, was one of the first of the great foothills cattle ranches launched by eastern Canadian entrepreneurs and pioneer cowboys in the early 1880s. Today it is run by Parks Canada, a unique and imaginative historic site.
Evans's book is a good history not just of that one ranch but of an extraordinary moment in Canadian social and economic history, when cattle ranches newly founded on the far reaches of Canada's frontier were soon producing Canada's third largest export product -- cattle shipped from the Alberta foothills to London meat markets, ten days on the CPR to Levis, Quebec, ten days on the boat to Liverpool.
The Bar U is also a beautiful piece of publishing, lavishly and intelligently illustrated, building on the resources Parks Canada has been assembling as part of its Bar U research project. A nice example, in fact, of the kind of history only Parks Canada does, and which it occasionally does superbly.
PS (July 27): I see the publisher is announcing a paperback edition for this fall. It's a smaller format, convenient but may not have the wealth of illustration.
