Hands and fists across the border: Canadian and American cattlemen in the twentieth century.

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The American and Canadian cattle industries are very similar and through time they have developed close personal, commercial, and cultural bonds. They have fought common battles against animal disease; have integrated their breeding regimes: developed similar technologies, and adopted like scientific principles to range management. However, a reliance on inflexible cattlemen's associations as mouthpieces and on federal governments to set protective trade agendas, has led to periodic and sometimes acrimonious disputes. The Canadians through their associations want government to secure free access to lucrative markets in the United States while the American cattlemen utilize the same avenues to gain some protection or restraint of trade.

For the most part the two industries have developed in like fashion, following similar breeding, range management, and marketing practices, and along the way, each falling prey to wider national interests while profiting from the twentieth century fixation with beef as a status food. One has only to note how the industry promotes the mythology of beef in both countries. For instance, Omaha beef is eulogized south of the border in much the same way as Alberta beef is north of the 49th Parallel. To J. Patrick Boyle, president and CEO of the American Meat Institute, "the beef industries in the U.S. and its northern neighbor have become so alike in recent years that it's nearly impossible to differentiate between the two, outside of political jurisdictions. In fact, the cattle not only come from the same gene pool, but are raised under nearly identical conditions, fed virtually the same feed and handled under the same regimens. In fact, if Canadian cattle didn't occasionally utter 'eh' instead of the traditional 'moo,' they'd be completely indistinguishable from their American counterparts." (1)

A worthwhile prelude to this paper may be to consider the very different ways academics in both countries have depicted the two founding ranching traditions. In Canada, scholarly interest has not focussed on the historical evolution of the industry itself but rather on socio-cultural factors which distinguished Canada's ranching tradition from that in the United States. Canadian historians Lewis G. Thomas and Sheilagh Jameson, and later, David Breen in his seminal study of the early western Canadian ranching industry, have argued that the presence of powerful east-west metropolitan forces differentiated it from its American counterpart. (2)

In Canada this resulted in a law abiding and hierarchical frontier that contradicted the more egalitarian and lawless American ranching experience. This debate has received short thrift in the United States where historians have argued that there were never two ranching traditions separated by a national boundary but rather different regional manifestations. (3) As for the Canadian cattle frontier, Terry Jordan Bychkov simply places it as an extension of what he called the Midwestern ranching experience. (4) What is interesting is that Canadian scholars, ever seeking ways to isolate Canadian distinctiveness, have used the early cattle industry to exemplify significant cultural differences between the two countries. Not surprisingly, the Americans take a larger more continental view.