In his first issue following Halloween 1885, the editor of the Hope Pioneer recounted the doings of the holiday. He wrote,
All of Frank Hill’s buggies and vehicles were placed on the portico of the hotel, the grain cart belonging to the elevator was placed on the second floor of the Hope House, Carpenter’s hay rake was brought down in town, signs were changed around promiscuously, a fanning mill was taken from Luce and Merrill’s and placed on top of the building being fitted up for a photographic gallery, and many other articles changed around. Of course many of our citizens were disposed to be angry Sunday morning, but on second thought deemed it best to laugh over the matter, wisely concluding that boys will be boys, and sometimes very naughty boys at that.
I read this, and came to several conclusions, but one in particular. Rather than condemning the mischief of Halloween, the editor was confirming it. He cataloged the pranks committed like the box score of a ball game—not naming names, but he didn’t have to, for the boys unfolding the paper and searching its contents would find their pranks duly credited, and no doubt chortle over their recognition by the Fourth Estate. Here, in the formative time of a prairie town, the execution of Halloween pranks, a bragging list of them, was an enactment of community relationships.
Whereas in other, more urban parts of the country, Halloween pranks were coming to be called “the Halloween problem.” Mischievous observances of Halloween had evolved since the early nineteenth century, when, as a writer for Smithsonian magazine says, it was “a night for pranks, tricks, illusions, and anarchy.” Cathartic, perhaps, but not malicious. However, “As America modernized and urbanized, mischief turned to mayhem.”
It wasn’t any more just a matter of opening the gate of a pig sty or throwing a rocking chair onto a roof. It was setting off fire alarms, breaking windows, smashing stuff. Property damage, that was the trigger. There were frequent, and nationally reported, incidents of property owners resorting to shotguns to defend their stuff, with nasty court cases, and sometimes casualties, resulting. Police authorities cracked down on the miscreants.
Meanwhile, in an emergence dating mainly from the 1930s, communities were inflecting and defusing the situation. The first known appearance in print of the phrase “Trick or Treat” was in 1927 in Alberta. Trick or treating spread across the continent in the 1930s and continued into the war years, despite some grumbling that it ought to be suspended for the duration.
Following the war the custom was thoroughly domesticated, and also gender-integrated. Pranking was the sphere of boys, and sometimes overgrown boys, which contributed to its disfavor. Trick or treating brought out boys and girls alike, as did the parent- or community-sponsored Halloween parties intended to contain any potential generational warfare.
There began another war, however, as scholars tried to interpret what was happening. Sociologists concluded that trick or treating was some kind of conspiracy, as communities instituted it to stop pranking, and then the capitalist merchants of treats and costumes piled on. There was some truth in that, but as commonly happens, the scholarship calmed down. More current and well-researched historical studies credit children themselves as the originators of trick or treating, for their own fun and profit, and incidentally, community benefit. We need to look into how this played out on the prairies.
