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. He closes the letter with yers trooly. See letter dated 11 May1951, City Commissioners Papers, series IV, box 48, file folder E-1, CCA.14.Peter Burgener, Mixing Stampede into Perception, Calgary Herald,3 July 2002.15.News Telegram (Calgary), 17 September 1912.16.Calgary Exhibition and Stampede, Annual Report, 1925.17.See editorial, The Spirit of the Stampede, Calgary Herald, 13 July 1954.18.Calgary Exhibition and Stampede, Annual Reports, 1954, 1973.19.Calgary Herald, 9 July 1946.20.Calgary Herald, 7 July 1967.21.E.L.Richardson to mayor, 28 February 1914, City Commissioners Papers,series I, box 50, file folder General Correspondence, January June 1914, CCA.22.For good discussion see Hockey and Horses, Calgary Herald Neighbors,13 19 July 1994.23.Calgary Exhibition and Stampede, Annual Report, 1942.24.Calgary Herald, 14 July 1996.25.Ibid. MAX FORAN 1926.Calgary Herald, 7 July 1967.27.Mapping Our Future: A Gathering Place for Calgary and the World (Calgary:Calgary Exhibition and Stampede, 2006).28. Brand Identity Built on Values, Saddle Bag 6, no.1 (Spring 2007).Thebrand no longer contains the word Exhibition. It consists of the words Calgary Stampede below a C and a lazy S, the latter in recognition ofthe organization s agricultural roots. CHAPTER 2Making Tradition: The Calgary Stampede, 1912 1939Donald G.WetherellThe Big Four seen in this group of ranching elite: (far left) Archie McLean, A.E.Cross;(centre) the Prince of Wales (wearing jodhpurs) with George Lane and Pat Burns beside him.21 22 MAKING TRADITION: THE CALGARY STAMPEDE, 1912 1939Between 1912 and 1939 the Calgary Stampede increasingly influencedhow Calgarians constructed their identity, and by the eve of Second WorldWar the Stampede had become a permanent feature of Calgary life.Althoughthe Stampede expanded and evolved after Second World War as part of thegeneral reshaping of North American life in the wake of the war and Alberta stransformation by the oil boom, it had by the late 1930s already assumedmany essential characteristics that have endured until the present.The Stampedes of 1912 and 1919 were organized in Calgary as one-timeevents that served local commemorative and social needs.In contrast, therodeo that was an entertainment feature of the Calgary Exhibition in 1923and subsequent years created a different historical trajectory.While the 1912and 1919 Stampedes provided historical legitimacy for those after 1923, thelater Stampedes were also framed by their general cultural, economic, and his-torical context and by changing patterns in communications, transportation,mass entertainment, and sports.These Stampedes were also shaped by theeconomic benefits they offered Calgary, especially from an emerging tourismindustry.Within this context, the annual Stampede gained popular accep-tance as an expression of authentic local traditions and values.Whatever themerit of this view, the intersecting forces that gave the Stampede legitimacyin Calgary and Alberta meant that rodeo and a particular take on western his-tory came to be accepted as a part of the city s self-definition.The Calgary Stampede is, in historian Eric Hobsbawm s terms, an exampleof an invented tradition.The concept of invented tradition arose fromHobsbawm s inquiry into the ways that European counties in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries had responded to the rapid changes demandedby the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of new states.WhenHobsbawm looked at these societies experiencing extraordinary change, herealized that many of the events identified as ancient traditions, festivals, and1rituals were, in fact, very recent.Invented traditions activities that are actually recent but are accepted bythe public as having a particularly long and resonant history and as represent-ing something essential about a nation s character, values, and identity arosefrom a widespread effort to justify the nation state, royal dynasties, andnational boundaries by linking them, often tenuously and sometimes evenfalsely, with the past.These invented traditions often emerged fairly quicklyand were accepted (or sometimes rejected) equally quickly by the populationat large.Hobsbawm observed that invented traditions could be counted on tooccur regularly because repetition implied continuity with the past. DONALD G.WETHERELL 23Even so, invented traditions could not logically serve as the basis for thecustoms of everyday life because the social and economic links with the pastthat they supposedly represented had been irreparably severed by social,technological, and economic change.Nonetheless, these traditions wereaccepted as genuine expressions of how people viewed themselves and theirplace in the world.The invention of a tradition was not random.While theprecise reasons why one tradition found public acceptance and another didnot is not always clear, it is evident that traditions gained social sanctionwithin certain parameters.Believability, for example, could only be securedby appealing to widely accepted interpretations accurate or not of his-tory.Also, an event that challenged accepted social mores and attitudes orlocal political and social power was unlikely to be adopted
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