The early journalist Frank Whiteside is remembered more for how he died than for how he lived. His demise in 1916 was spectacular. Felled by a shotgun blast from an aggrieved husband who happened to be an old friend, he clung to life for five days in Coronation Hospital, dictated a final dispatch, and then expired.

His life was less dramatic but it was nevertheless one of notable vision and accomplishment as central Alberta was opened to settlement. Whiteside was one of those early newsmen who forged a career that seamlessly combined journalism, business, and politics. In the twenty-two years he lived in Alberta, he excelled as a businessman whose businesses were newspapers and cattle, and as a promising Liberal member of the Alberta legislature whose career was on the rise when he was shot and killed.

Whiteside's Alberta career presents abundant examples of irony and paradox. While he saw newspapers as an engine of settlement and development, he was no mindless small-town booster of the kind so common in early Alberta. (1) In an era when many cattlemen still resented the influx of homesteaders with their ploughs and fences, he was a stock grower who proclaimed the merits of mixed farming. He hated the cattle rustlers who still plundered the open range east of Red Deer before 1910, but privately sought government help for the destitute wife and children of a stock thief he had helped incarcerate. Though a political neophyte, his sound judgment in the Alberta legislature earned him the respect of Premier Arthur Sifton, who rewarded him with chairmanship of the influential public accounts committee. Yet when it came to Eugenie Helmbolt, wife of a close associate and long-time family friend in Coronation, his judgment faltered, and the results were tragic.

Whiteside arrived in Alberta in 1894. Like many prairie newsmen, he came from eastern Canada, bringing a bit of education and a long-standing interest in journalism. He was born in Ottawa in 1873 but grew up in Sussex, New Brunswick, in an established, well-connected family. His mother was descended from United Empire Loyalists and his grandfather served for fifty years as director of customs in St. John.

He earned a commercial diploma and in 1892 moved west, first to British Columbia and then to the Innisfail area. (2) He homesteaded near Red Deer in 1894, and in 1899, he married Christina McGillivray, daughter of another homesteader. Frank and Christina had four children over the next few years, but she died in 1906. In 1911, Whiteside married Christina's sister, Daisy. They had no children together, but were raising Frank's four offspring at the time of Whiteside's death. (3)

Whiteside's journalistic, political, and business career began to take shape around 1906 when he became president of the Central Alberta Stock Growers Association (CASGA). Unlike the older Western Stock Growers Association, the CASGA was made up mainly of small farmers and ranchers with herds of fifty to 2,000 cattle, living mainly between the Red Deer and Battle rivers. In...