Thrashing Seasons: Sporting Culture in Manitoba and the Genesis of Prairie Wrestling

Horseback wrestling, catch-as-catch-can, glima—long before the advent of today’s WWE, forms of wrestling were practiced by virtually every cultural group. C. Nathan Hatton’s Thrashing Seasons: Sporting Culture in Manitoba and the Genesis of Prairie Wrestling tells the story of wrestling in Manitoba from the pre-Confederation period to the Great Depression.
Residents of Manitoba found meaning in wrestling beyond the simple act of two people struggling for physical advantage on a mat, in a ring, or on a grassy field. Frequently controversial and often divisive, wrestling was nevertheless a popular and resilient cultural practice that proved adaptable to the rapidly changing social conditions in western Canada during its early boom period.
In addition to chronicling the colorful exploits of the many athletes who shaped wrestling’s early years, Hatton explores wrestling as a social phenomenon intimately bound up with debates around respectability, ethnicity, race, class, and idealized conceptions of masculinity. In doing so, Thrashing Seasons illuminates wrestling as a complex and socially significant cultural activity that has been virtually unexamined by Canadian historians looking at the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.