Creating Order in the Wilderness: Transplanting the English Law to Rupert's Land, 1835–51

The legal history of the western Canadian frontier has received renewed attention in recent years. Much of the work readdresses the question of “law and order,” challenging older assumptions about Canada's orderly frontier culture—orderly particularly in contrast to the United States’ violent settlement of the west. At issue is not just a revision of whether violence occurred on the Canadian frontier but a fundamental reinterpretation of what the concepts of “law” and “order” had really meant. Indeed, conflict between legal cultures has become a major theme as historians attempt to rewrite the history of the Canadian west. They understand that this conflict—whether violent or not—shaped the formation of Canada's legal culture before 1870. Methodological prescriptions for writing this type of history have emphasized the need for historians to widen their base of sources, particularly to exploit “nonlegal” sources (such as diaries, journals, and letters), and to consider the workings of what Lawrence Friedman has called the “cultural” component of a legal system: what suits were brought to court, what notions came into play there, what expectations people brought with them. Important studies on the colonial settlement of British Columbia in the nineteenth century have focused on the relationships between the Hudson's Bay Company, colonists, and Natives to demonstrate that conflict over resources and competing definitions of liberalism and law often shaped legal discourse. These rich accounts have, among other things, called into question the idea of an orderly, peaceful Canadian frontier. They have also provided a much more complex picture of the interactions between Native and European, and the uses of law and the legal system by settlers, Company men, and Aboriginals.