Historiography of the American West
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Each f us, Canadians and United States people, living within a national myth borne f exceptionalism, seek to assert our country's historical narrative - especially the narrative f West: expansion - "Westward the Course f Empire Takes Its Way" or, in Canada, the Laurentian thesis propounded to the Canadian Pacific Railway (completed in 1885): Pierre Berton's "The National Dream" (or Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy) (Kaye).... looms, the narrative versions f Lewis and Clark have piled up (though they were slow to start - the first, by Biddle, did not appear until 1814), James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking series stands mythologizing them yet, especially in its third volume, The Prairie (1827)....