Clay Chattaway - Rocking P Ranch and the Second Cattle Frontier in Western Canada

Preface

This book is the product of collaboration between a well-known cattle rancher in the Porcupine Hills some ninety kilometres south of Calgary, Alberta, and an academic from the University of Calgary who has also had long experience farming and ranching in the province. The academic is Professor Warren Elofson. The rancher is Clay Chattaway, grandson of Roderick Riddle and Laura Marguerite Macleay, whose story is told here. Mr. Chattaway has donated his own vast knowledge of his familys history and the long-term development of the beef industry in western Canada, and he has granted access to the very valuable Macleay family papers. This collection provides opportunity for a deep analytical assessment of a single ranching operation. It also facilitates our central thesis: that during the twentieth century, the family unit has ultimately been more capable than any other business structure in achieving agricultural sustainability in the northern foothills region of the Great Plains.

Introduction

The Macleay Family and
the Rocking P Gazette

Following is the story of the Rocking P ranch, owned and operated by the family of Roderick and Laura Macleay in the foothills of southern Alberta in the early 1920s. The story is based primarily on the Rocking P Gazette newspaper, which was produced and edited by the Macleays two young daughters, Dorothy and Maxine. In conjunction with the rest of the Macleays personal and business papers, the newspaper provides a great array of insights into the practical, financial, and cultural attributes of this particular type of agricultural unit at a specific time and place in western Canadian history. This is all the more significant because scholars generally have very few really bountiful primary materials with which to chart rural family history. A number of huge company ranches that opened the first cattle frontier in the Canadian and American Wests in the 1880s had a hired manager who was required to report on a regular basis to a head office in the East or overseas and, most importantly, to preserve onion skin copies of his letters and other documents in prescribed letter books. Families did not have the same personnel or requirements, and they tended to be haphazard about what, if any, records they kept. Moreover, they seldom had a way to duplicate any written communications. When a primary source such as this is uncovered, it is a precious find.

It was, moreover, the family ranching operation, not the company outfit, that was destined to establish a sustainable form of agriculture on the northern Great Plains. Major company producers such as the Cochrane ranch, the Bar U, the Walrond, and the Oxley are credited with forming the first cattle frontier in the Canadian West because, starting in 1881, they brought in the initial great herds to graze the natural grasslands in Alberta and Assiniboia (now southern Saskatchewan). However, by the end of the killing winter of 1906/7 they, like their counterparts on the other side of the American border, all failed, largely because they used an open range system that left thousands of their cattle to fend for themselves year round on open range leases of up to 300,000 acres. This approach, known as the Texas system, had seemed to prove itself for a time in the more moderate environment of the southern United States, but it was patently inappropriate on the northern Great Plains, where it subjected the herds not only to the winter blizzards that regularly strike that region but also to bands of hungry wolves and cattle rustlers and diseases that spread among the animals as they mixed and mingled over countless acres.