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Abstract: This essay discusses the power of settler life writing to replace Indigenous conceptions of the prairies with colonial visions in southern Alberta. Pioneer memoirs promote myths of the prairie as a fertile utopian environment or a hostile frontier. Both myths are founded on the georgic mode, which Virgil established circa 34 BCE and which emerges in English literature that emphasizes land and labour. By accentuating their social status and the labour they have performed to improve their ranches and farms, pioneer life writers support their claims of entitlement to colonize land.
Keywords: prairie settlers, settler narratives, settlement myths, frontier, agrarian utopia
To mark the "golden, silver, and diamond jubilees" in Alberta, many pioneers celebrated the success of their homesteading projects by writing their personal histories (Dempsey, "Local" 171). These memoirs include Georgina Thomson's Crocus and Meadowlark Country: Recollections of a Happy Childhood and Youth on a Homestead in Southern Alberta; Joan Key's The Third Radfords: A Pioneer Adventure; Monica Hopkins' Letters From a Lady Rancher; and Herbert (Bert) Sheppard's Spitzee Days and Just About Nothing. These texts contribute to a body of work that supports settlers' claims of entitlement to colonized land. Along with these, I also explore a set of diaries composed during the settlement period: the account book diaries of Henry Norman Sheppard, Sr. and the farm logs of two of his sons, Henry Fleetwood Sheppard, Jr. and Bert Sheppard, which cumulatively provide unrevised accounts of the family's ranching experiences between 1907 and 1953. Finally, I examine the letters of Claude Gardiner, written between 1894 and 1896 and published as Letters From an English Rancher. Regardless of their form, these texts represent their authors' daily lives; however, the diaries and letters were written within hours or days of the authors' experiences and convey ideologies prevalent at the time, while the memoirs reflect ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, in recalling their settlement experiences several decades later, the memoirists imbue their accounts with aesthetic and literary dimensions and give meaning to their experiences. As a result, Key, Hopkins, and Thomson promote myths of the prairie as an agrarian utopia, while Bert Sheppard disseminates myths of the prairie as a frontier. Both utopian and frontier myths justify the authors' sense of entitlement...