Westward Bound ─ Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society

In the late nineteenth century, European expansionism found one of
its last homes in the North American West. While the settlement of the
American West was renowned for its lawlessness, the Canadian Prairies
enjoyed a tamer reputation symbolized by the Mountie and his legendary
triumph over chaos.

Westward Bound debunks the myth of Canada’s peaceful
West and the masculine conceptions of law and violence upon which it
rests by shifting the focus from Mounties and whisky traders to
criminal cases involving women between 1886 and 1940, where offences
ranged from rape and wife-beating to husband murder and prostitution.
In doing so, Erickson opens a window onto a world where judges’
and juries’ responses to the most intimate or violent acts were
coloured by a desire to shore up the liberal economic order by
maintaining boundaries between men and women, Native people and
newcomers, and capital and labour. Victims and accused could only hope
to harness entrenched ideas about masculinity, femininity, race, and
class in their favour. The results, Erickson shows, were predictable
but never certain.

This fascinating exploration of hegemony and resistance in key
contact zones not only complicates traditional narratives of prairie
exceptionalism, it also draws the region’s history into larger
debates about law, colonialism, and nation building. This book will be
welcomed by social and legal historians, those with an interest in
colonial and frontier history, as well as scholars and students of law
and gender.