I’ve only ever spent one night in Calgary, and that was involuntary. I had missed a connecting flight, and the airline put me up in a hotel. I was surprised by the number of cowboy hats I saw. The police wore them, but plenty of regular people too. The faces, often mustachioed, matched the hats.
The surprise, as is always the case, was founded in ignorance. I had assumed that cowboy culture was purely US-American. As Wallace Stegner writes in Wolf Willow, this was initially true, but by the end of the 19th century, it had been imported to Canada:
Many Canadian ranches […] were simply Canadian extensions of cattle empires below the border.
So was the culture, in an anthropological sense, that accompanied the cattle. It was an adaptation to the arid Plains that had begun along the Rio Grande and had spread north, like gas expanding to fill a vacuum, as the buffalo and Indians were destroyed or driven out in the years following the Civil War. Like the patterns of hunting and war that had been adopted by every Plains tribe as soon as it acquired the horse, the cowboy culture made itself at home all the way from the Rio Grande to the North Saskatchewan. The outfit, the costume, the practices, the terminology, the state of mind, came into Canada ready-made, and nothing they encountered on the northern Plains enforced any real modifications.
Nehaveigur 