Rachel Herbert - Ranching Women in Southern Alberta

IN SOUTHERN ALBERTA

Rachel Herbert

The West Series

ISSN 1922-6519 (Print) ISSN 1925-587X (Online)

On a frosty foothills morning in the early 1900s, shouts of Ride em, LaGrandeurs pierced the chill air.

This study was largely motivated by my attempts to reconcile what I knew about my familys lived experience, on the one hand, with the history of the Alberta frontier that I encountered in books and popular culture, on the other. My family has ranched in Alberta since the 1880s. Independent and capable women have played a role in maintaining and sustaining our family ranch as comfortable on a horse as they were in the kitchen and I know the same is true on neighbouring outfits. As the fourth generation to ranch and raise a family here, I am certain that although technology has changed and shaped important aspects of our lives, the rhythms and routines of ranch life remain unchanged for many women. What I knew of my great-grandmother and what I saw my grandmother and her sister accomplish led me to believe that everyone acknowledged that women were, and are, integral to the success of family ranches. What I encountered in books and in the history courses I took at university, however, told a different story. Ranching women were largely invisible. The early women who helped to settle the province had homesteaded and farmed, I read; they fed threshing crews, grew gardens, and raised large families. But what of my great-aunt Mary, who taught me to work a cow from horseback when I was eleven and she was eighty? What of the guest book (favourite reading at our summer ranch) that told of the girls riding to the hills in the 1920s to bring home the strays in the fall? What of the photographs my granny showed me in her kitchen, scented by rising bread dough, that depict her mother mounted and ready to start sorting the herd for branding? And Granny, age five, bundled on a pony and ready to ride to the one-room Sunset School, her tapaderos

While the curiosity that fuelled this research was driven by my personal family history and my own sense of place within a ranching community, the theoretical framework of this study is shaped by the influences of scholars working within the field of western womens history, and Thus, as men and women adapted to the conditions of the frontier and the patterns and expectations of their lives changed, their experience of gender and gender-specific roles evolved as well.

Within the field of ranching history, as historian Sarah Carter observes, some earlier works, including those by Sheilagh Jameson and Lewis Thomas, examined the lives of women, but few focused on the role of women in the cattle industry and ranching culture. The preponderance of young men on the ranching frontier explains why they have been the central figures in its history, but it does not justify why the women who were there have largely been ignored. Images of the romantic role of the capable cowboy and the notion of a frontier existence where only the rugged individualist thrived have subsumed the reality: that early ranchers worked ceaselessly to adapt their agricultural methodologies to the environment and that their success often depended on cooperation with women within a family unit.