by Winnifred Eaton, introduction by Lily Cho
INVISIBLE PUBLISHING
2023/$21.95/296 pp.
Montreal-born Chinese-Canadian novelist Winnifred Eaton (1875–1954) and her second husband, Frank Reeve, left New York in 1917 for Bow View Ranch, near Morley, and from there she frequently rented space in Calgary to write. By publishing two novels about ranching, Cattle (1923) and His Royal Nibs (1925), Eaton distanced herself from the problematic Japanese pseudonym “Onoto Watanna” under which she had previously published nine bestselling novels about Japan. Except for a brief period in the late ’20s, when she ran Universal Studios’ screenwriting department in Hollywood, Eaton made Calgary her home for over 30 years and helped found Calgary’s Little Theatre, served as branch president of the Canadian Authors Association and cultivated Alberta’s film industry. Her legacy continues in University of Calgary’s Reeve Theatre, built in her honour with donations from her family. In 2023 Invisible Publishing has reissued Cattle to mark the centenary of its publication and in celebration of this fascinating and prolific writer.
While publishers discouraged Eaton from writing on the unfeminine subject of ranching and its accompanying rawness, the risks she takes in this novel push the boundaries of her previous fiction writing and characterize her bold career. Without sentimentality, Cattle exposes the brutality and propaganda of settler colonialism. Fearsome Bar Q owner Bull Langdon embodies destruction with his desire to control land, cattle, women and Indigenous people—a desire that Eaton tropes as “branding.” The sinister mood on his ranch is intensified by cattle processing, descriptions of which foreshadow his attacks on human motherhood: “Bar Q branded, dehorned and weaned… two thousand calves;… incessant bawling” of their “outraged mothers, penned in separate fields” filled the air, “day and night.”
Eaton contrasts Bull’s violence with the women’s nurturing presence. Self-reliant farmwoman Angela shelters Bull’s servant Nettie after Bull rapes and impregnates her. The two women selflessly attend to one another, the victims of the Spanish flu, and the land despite “the elements, the soil, the parasites, the hail, the frost, the rust and the drought” that Angela describes as “cards stacked against us.” Farming rewards and the “sight [of] grain prick[ing] up sturdy and strong” are presented as minimally invasive. Cattle’s depiction of women homesteaders, independent of men, tackling risks inherent to rural living, celebrates their work to create a co-operative agricultural society rather than an exploitative one. Evocative descriptions of the landscape highlight the women’s pride in place: “[T]he miracle of the sunrise broke over the sleeping land…[O]n all sides stretched an incomparable sky, a shadowy, gilded loveliness, as if a misty veil were slowly being lifted, and there stepped into full bloom the marvellous sunglow of Alberta.”
The story Eaton depicts will speak to Alberta readers today—our own history intersecting with the present; past struggles bringing to mind the contemporary and growing local ambivalence towards oil and gas, a sector also both sustaining and threatening. Albertans now face many of the same concerns: personal financial instability, physical and mental ill health as a plague hovers, resource stewardship entangled with evolving relationships with Indigenous peoples, and novel scientific experimentation in managing natural resources. Through Langdon—a bully who despoils human and more-than-human life, ignores suffering and rapaciously extracts resources—Eaton delivers a warning about connection and respect.
Jennifer McDougall is a master’s student at the U of C and a research assistant at the Winnifred Eaton Archive.
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