The contrary optimist: James H. Gray painted the West in exuberant and contrasting colours.

The contrary optimist: James H. Gray painted the West in exuberant and contrasting colours. How the West Was Written: The Life and Times of James H. Gray James Henry Gray (August 31, 1906 – November 12, 1998) was a Canadian journalist, historian and author.Born in Whitemouth, Manitoba, he moved to Winnipeg with his parents in 1911. BrianBrennan Fifth House 226 pages, softcover soft��cov��er?adj.Not bound between hard covers: softcover books; a softcover edition.ISBN ISBNabbr.International Standard Book NumberISBNInternational Standard Book NumberISBNn abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m9781894856621 This is the only place in the world to which more than a millionimmigrants were herded in a single decade ... No provision of anyimportance was made by any government to house, feed, succour, clothe orsupport them ... Whether they lived in the cities, towns or onhomesteads, their survival required that they help one another ... Withsuch ancestors, it is no accident that Prairie people have long beenleaders of movements for social reform, because social reform is only ahigh-blown synonym synonym(sĭn`ənĭm)[Gr.,=having the same name], word having a meaning that is the same as or very similar to the meaning of another word of the same language. Some are alike in some meanings only, as live and dwell. for helping one another. --James Gray, 1974 James Gray James or Jim Gray may refer to: Sir James Gray (zoologist) (1891–1975), Fellow of the Royal Society, won Royal Medal in 1948, knighted in 1954 James Laird Gray, a Scottish turbine design engineer had just taken a break from research and writing totravel from his home in Calgary back to Winnipeg, where he had grown up.He was going to receive an honorary degree from the University ofManitoba LocationThe main Fort Garry campus is a complex on the Red River in south Winnipeg. It has an area of 2.74 square kilometres. More than 60 major buildings support the teaching and research programs of the university. , having published five books of western history in eight yearsand written himself into the hearts of readers right across the country.His sixth would come out within the year. This would be remarkable foranyone, at any age; but his first book (The Winter Years, about theDepression) had been published when he was 60. It was a labour of love, a memorial to those who had survived aswell as those who had not. But it was tough love, and it was hardlabour. He had written a first draft 20 years earlier, which wasrejected by several publishers. He tinkered with it for the next decadeor so (while he worked and raised a family), and then took it back toMacmillan (which had turned it down earlier). They asked him to expandit, which he did over the next couple of years; and then--any writercould predict this--they asked him to cut it back. Gray was principled, but he was also practical. "The onlything a writer should ever do, because it is the only thing he can everdo: write," he once remarked. After another year of working with aseries of editors to cut the manuscript from 130,000 to 90,000words--burning off the righteous indignation Righteous indignation is an emotion one feels when one becomes angry over perceived mistreatment, insult, or malice.In some Christian doctrines, righteous indignation is considered the only form of anger which is not sinful. , tempering thesentimentality SentimentalityCheckersdog given as gift to Nixon; used in his defense of political contributions during presidential campaign (1952). [Am. Hist.: Wallechinsky, 126]Dondicomic strip in which sentimentality is the main motif. and shaping the style so that his sardonic sar��don��ic?adj.Scornfully or cynically mocking. See Synonyms at sarcastic.[French sardonique, from Greek sardonios, alteration of sardanios. voice and slyintelligence came through--the book finally came out. Its title wastaken from the 18th-century English poet William Cowper Noun 1. William Cowper - English surgeon who discovered Cowper's gland (1666-1709)Cowper2. William Cowper - English poet who wrote hymns and poetry about nature (1731-1800)Cowper , who wrote thatwinter was "the ruler of the inverted invertedreverse in position, direction or order.inverted L blocka pattern of local filtration anesthesia commonly used in laparotomy in the ox. year." During the 1930s,Gray noted, "all values were turned upside down." Except the values of fortitude FortitudeSee also Bravery.Fratricide (See MURDER.)Asiadespite torture, refuses to deny Moses. [Islam: Walsh Classical, 35]Calanthafulfills wifely and queenly duties despite losses. [Br. Lit. and faith. The reading public lovedthe book, and to Gray's perennially insecure delight, mostprofessional historians did too. There were, of course, some complaints.Barry Broadfoot Barry Samuel Broadfoot (January 21 1926 – December 2003) was a Canadian interviewer and history writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba.His historical research consisted of interviewing various Canadians from all over the country about their memories of their lives during grumbled that "Gray has told his story as a cityman. Some day, some farmer will sit down and tell his story"--andthen Broadfoot made that happen, publishing a remarkable set of oralhistories (including Ten Lost Years and The Pioneer Years) over the nextcouple of decades. But Gray was a writer, and he wanted to tellstories--especially other people's stories--in his own way.Besides, he was already at work on a book about those very same farmers,and about the scientists and engineers of the Prairie FarmRehabilitation Administration The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration is a branch under Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, a department of the Federal Government of Canada.The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration or the PFRA as it is commonly referred was established by an Act of Parliament and the prairie universities who workedwith them to maintain farmland in the fertile belt called the PalliserTriangle. It was "the greatest Canadian success story since thecompletion of the Canadian Pacific Railway Canadian Pacific Railway,transcontinental transportation system in Canada and extending into the United States, privately owned and operated. The construction of a railroad crossing the continent in Canadian territory was one of the conditions on which British ," wrote Gray withcharacteristic understatement. We hear a lot these days about living in a knowledge-based society.No society in the history of the world has been without knowledge; andone of the reasons Gray has such appeal is that he understood this, andinsisted that respect was due to the men and women of the West not justfor their courage and caring, their determination and dignity, but fortheir knowledge of how to live and what to do. Men Against the Desertwas a tribute to the people of the prairie farmlands and to the way inwhich they used their knowledge of soil erosion and grain crops andgrasslands and grasshoppers Grasshoppers may refer to one of the following: Grasshoppers (Caelifera), a suborder of insects Grasshopper-Club Z��rich, a Swiss football club. to live with forces that were ultimatelybeyond their control. Religion shows us how to surrender to such forces;science shows us we do not always have to. That is why, from timeimmemorial time immemorialn. pl. times immemorial1. Time long past, beyond memory or record. Also called time out of mind.2. Law Time antedating legal records.Noun 1. , religion and science have gone hand in hand on the prairies. Macmillan was not sure about publishing another book on the Westright away, so Gray, always ready to turn a page, took it to thefarmer-owned Western Producer Prairie Books. He was not pleased with thelook of the book, nor by its initial sales; but within a few years itwas into its second printing, and Gray was into his fifth book, havingwritten two more in the meantime Adv. 1. in the meantime - during the intervening time; "meanwhile I will not think about the problem"; "meantime he was attentive to his other interests"; "in the meantime the police were notified"meantime, meanwhile . The first of them was A Boy from Winnipeg, in which he exorcisedsome demons DemonsSee also devil; evil; ghosts; hell; spirits and spiritualism.ademonistone who denies the existence of the devil or demons.bogyism, bogeyismrecognition of the existence of demons and goblins. and described his early life. Brian Brennan picks up theportrait in his very readable biography, How the West Was Written: TheLife and Times of James H. Gray, catching the complexity of a man whodescribed himself at the end of his life as "a little bit ofeveryone I have ever met." It is a good story, and Brennan--afellow traveller--recreates the illusion of transparency The illusion of transparency is a tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others.Another manifestation of the illusion of transparency (aka the observer’s illusion of transparency) is a tendency for people to thatdistinguishes Gray's style so well that it is sometimes hard totell who said what. Gray's next book, Red Lights on the Prairies, became a classicof western history. It was about what he called "the first majorindustry of the Prairies," prostitution, and the "realpioneers," the prostitutes. This was what Jamaicans call "thehalf that's never been told," and Gray's telling isalways filled with compassion and clear in its sympathies. Writing aboutthe 1930s federal government relief camp program, he described the 20cents a day paid to the workers as "just the right size to beinsulting"--"it affronted af��front?tr.v. af��front��ed, af��front��ing, af��fronts1. To insult intentionally, especially openly. See Synonyms at offend.2. a. To meet defiantly; confront.b. human dignity Human dignity is an expression that can be used as a moral concept or as a legal term. Sometimes it means no more than that human beings should not be treated as objects. Beyond this, it is meant to convey an idea of absolute and inherent worth that does not need to be acquired and as little else couldhave done." He might have agreed with Oscar Wilde: "to recommend thrift tothe poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man whois starving to eat less." Then again, he might not have agreed.Gray believed in the Victorian virtues of industry and thrift, and hardwork was an antidote to hard times. Furthermore, he embraced theideology of the frontier, a place of both peril and possibility, andfelt that its history of struggle was an inheritance to be cherished. Here we come to another side of James Gray. For all his enthusiasmfor people who did things, people who thought about them were even moreimportant to him. He left school at 16 to go to work, and his seriousengagement with ideas and books began ten years later when he was sent(in those ancient days before penicillin) to a tuberculosis sanatorium sanatorium/san��a��to��ri��um/ (san?ah-tor��e-um) an institution for treatment of sick persons, especially a private hospital for convalescents or patients with chronic diseases or mental disorders. .There he met a man named Johnny Timchuk, who told him that "peoplelike us, with tuberculosis or on relief, are living in Utopia ... Forthe first time in history, people like us can stop worrying about makingour own living, because society is keeping us. Think of that! It isgiving us a chance only the wealthy once enjoyed--to understand theworld in which we live." It was an inspiring attitude; and Graybecame very well read. He also became convinced that you had to be anoptimist to live on the prairies. He was not religious, but he was a manof deep faith. One of the things that tested Gray's faith in the future ofthe country was an attitude that had considerable currency in thecorridors of federal and financial power back east--that the West ofCanada was there to provide food, fuel and raw material to the East,which could then sell it back at a profit. It was embodied in theiniquitous Crow Rates, the freight tariff system that made it moreexpensive to ship supplies from Calgary to Edmonton than Calgary toToronto, and the ways in which the East underdeveloped the West were aregular grumble there when I was growing up--and Gray was gatheringsteam--during the 1940s and '50s. Transfer payments to provide aminimum level of social, medical and educational services across thecountry--recommended by the 1940 Rowell-Sirois Report--offered somehope, and so did the oil discovered at Leduc in 1947. But for Gray, theonly real solution was education: understanding the world in which welive. So at an age when many of us are contemplating retirement, hededicated himself to writing books that would explain the West both towesterners themselves and to the rest of the country: a dozen of themover 25 years, the Years, Thethe seven decades of Eleanor Pargiter’s life. [Br. Lit.: Benét, 1109]See : Time last--a major biography of R.B. Bennett--when he was85. They all reflected Gray's perennial optimism and his pride inbeing Canadian. In Brian Brennan's words, "when he talkedabout the impact of the Great Depression on the farmers of the Prairies,he portrayed it not as the conventional saga of unrelieved poverty,drought, and misery, but as a great opportunity that presented itselfwhen scientists and farmers got together to fight the destructive forcesof nature and develop new agricultural techniques. And when he talkedabout the aftermath of the Depression, instead of echoing the standardline of western provincial politicians who blamed the eastern banks fordestroying the western economy, he opted instead to look at the positiveand praise the federal government for introducing such beneficial socialprograms as family allowances, unemployment insurance, and improvedold-age pensions." And then Gray's legendary contrarinesswould kick in, as he described how people lived through the 1920s and'30s without help from "the esoteric hallucinations HallucinationsDefinitionHallucinations are false or distorted sensory experiences that appear to be real perceptions. These sensory impressions are generated by the mind rather than by any external stimuli, and may be seen, heard, felt, and even ofSocialism, Fascism or Social Credit." The contrary and the contradictory were at the heart of Gray'swork, and they make it continually fascinating. Professionallyresearched, his books parade their popular appeal; antagonistic to manyforms of government regulation and union control, they celebratecollective enterprise and progressive social policies, and consistentlycomplicate our notion of both progress and community. His book Booze,which followed Red Lights on the Prairies, chronicled the extravagancesthat went along with drinking in the West, but it also showed thatprohibition (which had wide popular support in its early years on theprairies) really worked: the crime rate was halved halve?tr.v. halved, halv��ing, halves1. To divide (something) into two equal portions or parts.2. To lessen or reduce by half: halved the recipe to serve two.3. , bank savingsdoubled, jails were closed and domestic violence sharply diminished.There is no doubt that Gray's own childhood as the son of analcoholic father influenced the passion he brought to bear on thissubject; but there is also no doubt, as Michael Bliss Professor Michael Bliss, CM, Ph.D, FRSC (born 1941) is a Canadian historian and public intellectual, considered by some to be "outspoken".Bliss entered the University of Toronto in 1958, and has been there ever since. He received his BA , MA, and Ph.D. noted when thebook came out, that this was "one of the most important insightsthat any historian ever had about prohibition." When he finally made some money, Gray bought a small farm nearCalgary. He called it Grasmere, after the village in the Lake Districtwhere Wordsworth made his home. There was romanticism there, to be sure.But there was also a fellow feeling with Wordsworth, who was not merelyan imperial icon but a man (like Gray) living on the margins of acountry divided into the haves and the have-nots, which in the Englishgeography of the time translated into north and south rather than westand east. And Wordsworth wrote about his northern people--including itsbeggars and gypsies and leech leech,predacious or parasitic annelid worm of the class Hirudinea, characterized by a cylindrical or slightly flattened body with suckers at either end for attaching to prey. gatherers and mad mothers and idiotboys--in ways that went beyond their poverty and deprivation to theirdignity and hard-won wisdom. Wordsworth was Gray's kind of writer. But there was another side to Gray, which some might callpostmodern. In fact it was older than the hills, and it confirmed him inthe company of tellers of tales around the world from time immemorial."It could have happened. It should have happened. A great manypeople believe it did happen," Gray wrote about one incident heincluded in Red Lights on the Prairies. And again, about The WinterYears, "more lies have probably been told about the weather of theDirty Thirties than any other subject except sex; yet most of the liescould have been true." He framed a letter he got from H.L. Menckenabout a piece of investigative reporting that he had written for theWinnipeg Free Press The Winnipeg Free Press is a daily broadsheet newspaper in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Founded in 1872, as the Manitoba Free Press, it is the oldest newspaper in western Canada. It is the newspaper with the largest readership in the province. . "Your story of the Winnipeg uproar ismagnificent. In fact, it seems almost too good to be true." Goodstories are always ceremonies of belief, often in the unbelievable. Like all good storytellers, and all good historians, James Gray wasa believer first and a skeptic afterward. He specialized in takinganecdotes and making them into parables, putting imagined events side byside with real ones in order to make a point. When the imagined eventsactually happened, that made it history. His subjects werepopular--whoring and boozing, the weather and politics--but his methodwas professional. And so was his apprenticeship; he wrote more than200,000 unpublished words before he ever sold a story. But his dedication to the written word came at a price. He does nottake up the oral traditions of the settlers, nor their music, andalthough he was sympathetic to their situation, aboriginal peoplesappear mostly in passing--which is just how they appeared to many of thesettlers. Their oral histories, which are just now coming to beappreciated for the disciplined and diverse historical record theyprovide, hardly figure at all in his account. And for someone who lovedhorses as much as he did--and as I do--he says surprisingly little aboutthem at a time when they still held a place in the hearts and on thehomesteads of the people of the prairies. But you can't expecteverything, not even from Jimmie Gray. Which brings us back to Johnny Timchuck in the TB sanatorium. Atthe end of the day, Gray will be remembered most of all for his abidingsense of hope and possibility. It is not a small thing, then or now.Instead of lamenting the nation, Gray sang a praise song to its prairiepeople and, instead of writing off its future, he talked about the"New Canada" and of the place of mavericks in its history. Inmany ways, he was one of them, and he inspired others: "a jaunty jaun��ty?adj. jaun��ti��er, jaun��ti��est1. Having a buoyant or self-confident air; brisk.2. Crisp and dapper in appearance; natty.3. Archaica. Stylish.b. Genteel. slender man who could write like hell and was afraid of no one,"recalled Scott Young For other uses, see Scott Young (disambiguation).Scott Young (April 14, 1918 – June 12, 2005) was a Canadian journalist, sportswriter, novelist and the father of musician Neil Young. , writing as a columnist for The Globe and Mail. (Hehad been an 18-year-old editorial assistant at the Winnipeg Free Presswhen Gray was in the newsroom there.) Young continued: James Gray"writes with wit and a feeling for anecdote; but he also seesevents against the big background of the nation. It is quite acombination." It is indeed. And it is a tribute to Brennan'sbook that he makes us want to go back and read Gray himself. J. Edward Chamberlin Edward H. Chamberlin (May 181899-1967) was an American economist. He was born in La Conner, Washington.Chamberlin studied first at the University of Iowa (where he was influenced by Frank H. is University Professor of English andComparative Literature at the University of Toronto Research at the University of Toronto has been responsible for the world's first electronic heart pacemaker, artificial larynx, single-lung transplant, nerve transplant, artificial pancreas, chemical laser, G-suit, the first practical electron microscope, the first cloning of T-cells, . His latest book,Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations, was published byBluebridge in 2006.