Herbert Has Lots for a Buck: How 12 Small Prairie Towns Reinvented Themselves for the 21st Century by Elizabeth McLachlan (review)

Reviewed by: Herbert Has Lots for a Buck: How 12 Small Prairie Towns Reinvented Themselves for the 21st Century by Elizabeth McLachlan Murray Knuttila Herbert Has Lots for a Buck: How 12 Small Prairie Towns Reinvented Themselves for the 21st Century. By Elizabeth McLachlan. Edmonton ab: NeWest Press, 2012. 227 pp. $19.95 paper. The small town seems to be a form of social organization endemic to the human condition, nowhere more so than on the North American Plains. Elizabeth McLachlan’s latest chronicle of life in western Canada addresses an important issue that many small towns face—survival in the face of a changing socioeconomic, political, and cultural global world. McLachlan narrates twelve stories of towns in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba that have avoided extinction because they, as the cover states, “reinvented themselves for the twenty-first century.” Virtually every chapter begins with some historical data about the community, followed by depressing portrayals of towns in decline before reinvention. She describes institutional closures and population loss, placing one town on the “verge of disintegration” (111), with “paint peeling or gone, their windows veiled with decades of grime” (23) or more graphically: “Empty storefronts pock the wide main street. A forsaken church has cracked and broken windows” (186). The theme of the book, however, is reinvention and how communities moved away from oblivion. The stories are as varied as the communities—their location, history, options and potentials, and their creativity and determination. Herschel (sk) discovered archeology and pre-Contact history, while Big Valley (ab) focused on the recent history of coal and railroads, making steam train rides and reenactments possible. Rosebud (ab) turned tragedy into hope and renewal with an arts school. The Mennonite traditions of Neubergthal (mb) kept the town alive. Craik and Meacham (sk) rely on environmental sustainability and arts/culture, respectively, in contrast with the picturesque town with the appropriate name of Plum Coulee (mb) plumbing its past for criminal activity and a connection with one of Canada’s most wealthy families. Forgive the plumbing pun; McLachlan herself enjoys a good pun as in her note that Vulcan (ab) faced an astronomical task in emerging as an international Star Trek center. The account of Lynn Lake (mb) adds the important element of one-industry nonagricultural towns devastated by external decisions but reinvented as a tourism center, a similar story to Elbow (sk) where a dam provided new options to its reliance of farming. Warner (ab) capitalized on a supposed Canadian obsession, hockey, but with a twist—girls’ and women’s hockey. Fittingly with one of her other books, McLachlan ends with Inglis (sk), where heritage and saving a grain elevator provided the spark. McLachlan writes in an easy flowing style, making the book a great read. The missing element that she sometimes tantalizes the reader with is the larger structural dynamics at work both in the initial creation of these communities and their subsequent fate. I speak, for example, of the deliberate settlement of the Canadian Plains as part of an industrialization strategy and then the deliberate radical transformation of that strategy fostering depopulation under the pressures of globalization. McLachlan hints at the dynamics of centralization and corporate growth (204), changing federal government policy such as abandoning the once-necessary infrastructure (203); however, these insights remain undeveloped. Additionally, I longed for some comment on the key actors or agents in the changes she describes, and how they organized the various interests in the community to undertake the actions that she describes. But these are the quibbles of a sociologist always wanting analysis of power and the detailed dynamics of social and community change. [End Page 212] This is a very readable and enjoyable book that will bring smiles to the faces and some joy to the hearts of everyone interested in the Great Plains of North America. Murray Knuttila Sociology Brock University St. Catharines, Ontario Copyright © 2014 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

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