There’s a new movie out called Gunless, starring Paul Gross. (He played the Mountie in Due South.) The notion is that Gross’s character, the Montana Kid, is on the run from the law, and he runs to Canada (or the territories that will ultimately become Canada). Of course, the law comes after him, but one of the things the movie explores is how different western Canada was from the American West, right from the get-go. The usual tropes found in westerns just don’t work – the culture was that different.
Once upon a time, I wanted to write a series of historical romances set in the Canadian West. I’d been out to Calgary and visited museums and historical sites, and was intrigued by the way that the Canadian West challenged my expectations. Our ideas about the settling of the west are shaped by the American experience – because that’s what we see in movies and read most often in books. But the Canadian west was quite different – the forebears of the RCMP (the Northwest Mounted Police) were a big part of the move west, as was the development of the railroad. So, the whole thing occurred much later, and settlers followed either the police/military or the railroad. This is in marked contrast to the American example, in which intrepid individuals headed west and the law, railroad and accoutrements of state followed them, arriving later. This perks through to attitudes – American settlers were markedly self-sufficient (because they had to be) while their Canadian counterparts tended not to be so independent. There were lots of other differences too, differences all the more interesting because we don’t necessarily expect them.
When I first learned all this in Calgary, I thought it would be a lot of fun to explore those differences in a romance novel. I thought, actually, that it might make for a western romance that was “fresh” in New York terms. My editor disagreed – she thought that those differences (and the fact that the anticipated western tropes would be absent) would make the series or book unmarketable. Ultimately all of those partials and proposals ended up in the shredder, but the contrast still interests me.
And so, I’m pretty intrigued by the concept of this movie. Has anyone seen it yet?
Deborah Cooke: Author 