All the great ranches of the prairies needed somewhere to send cattle to be killed and packaged, and for 80 years Packingtown was that somewhere. Meatpacking was the dirty, smelly, noisy, and unromantic underside of the romantic mythology of the cowboy, and it’s no coincidence that Packingtown was located on the outermost perimeter of Edmonton, near the railway but far away (and downwind) from the middle-class neighbourhoods …
Bio:
Amy Kaler is a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta. She has lived in Edmonton for 22 years. Her most recent book, Until Further Notice: A Year in Pandemic Time (2022), was published by the University of Alberta Press. She is also the author of academic monographs on Zimbabwean and Canadian social history and is currently working, with collaborator Dr Cory Willmott, on a group biography of Protestant missionaries in Sichuan in the first half of the twentieth century.