To Be a Cowboy: Oliver Christensen’s Story

During a time of two world wars and a sluggish world economy, many Northern Europeans left their homelands to build the American and Canadian West with dreams of abundance and new life. Spanning a period from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. This book recounts the dreams and realities of a father and a son. Otto Christensen came to Alberta in the early 1900s as an indentured farm worker from Denmark with a dream of becoming a successful farmer and rancher in Alberta. His son, Oliver grew up on his father’s farm during the Dirty Thirties and soon realised his dream of becoming a cowboy in the mid-1940s. As a rider at the Bar U Ranch – at this time, the largest, most successful ranch in Canada – Oliver soon realised a life as a cowboy could not be his for long. Based on oral history interviews, unpublished diaries, and treasure trove of family papers, this is a compelling memoir that paints a portrait of a dying way of life.