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The Whoop-Up Trail was an important post-Civil War trade route between Fort Benton, Montana and Fort McLeod, Alberta, two early settlements on the northern Great Plains bisected by the American-Canadian border. Sharp demonstrates that despite the communities’ common natural environment and shared sense of regional identity, the boundary line served to demarcate and reinforce cultural differences in the two nations’ approaches to settlement.

Perhaps most significantly, Sharp notes the preeminence of law in British Canadian culture. In Canada, the establishment of law in the form of the federal Mounted Police preceded settlement, and indeed made it possible. Through patiently assertive diplomacy and the appearance of evenhanded law enforcement, the Mounties earned the respect of First Nations in the West that made colonization of the region possible. In the United States, on the other hand, law enforcement and other institutions emerged slowly from the settlements themselves, where hatred of Indians and a strong distrust of federal authority were endemic. Canadians despised lynch mob justice and the warlike propensity of American settlers; they preferred instead a more gradual and orderly form of expansion, just as they had opted for a more peaceful, gradualist path to independence.

An armed conflict in 1873 between a group of North Assiniboin Indians and a team of hunters and traders from Fort Benton created an international incident that further reinforced differences between Canadians and Americans. Canadians tended to view the American wolf hunters as criminal perpetrators of a wanton massacre that needlessly antagonized Indians, while many Americans viewed the accused men as national heroes and victims of Canadian justice. Sharp disputes both accounts as exaggerated, but he observes that the incident much impressed Natives in Canada, despite the ultimate failure of the prosecution.

Sharp thus demonstrates that Webb’s thesis is at best incomplete. Culture and historical experience indisputably shape or at least influence individual and collective strategies of adaptation to the natural environment.