Portraits of the Prairies in Western Canadian Literature

Abstract

If you are travelling west on the Transcanada Highway or the transcontinental railway, just after you leave the rocky, forested Precambrian Shield of Northern Ontario you suddenly find yourself on the edge of a vast, flat plain, extending it seems to infinity. That plain, the region with which this paper is concerned, actually rolls on for a thousand miles, from the edge of the province of Manitoba through Saskatchewan to the Rocky Mountains which divide the province of Alberta from British Columbia. This latter, most westerly province of rich interior fruit farms and temperate Pacific coasts is not included in ‘the West’ I shall be discussing. Natives of those great plains, the prairies, where temperatures descend to —40°F in the winter and rise to the high 90s in the summer, with very little that an Englishman would call spring or fall in between, view British Columbia as the ‘Near East’, a lotus land to which they aspire to retire once they have made their fortunes on the vast wheat farms which are still, despite the development of oil and gas in the post World War II period, the basis of the region’s economy.