On the surface we New Englanders are almost indistinguishable from our cousins next door. I have been asked -- Are you Canadian? -- by Canadians themselves on both coasts. While studying in Great Britain during the Viet Nam era, I quickly discovered it was easier to introduce myself as Canadian, than to endure the angry comments of citizens from the UK. Three decades later, a friend touring Europe during the Iraq War sewed a maple leaf flag on his backpack for the same reason. Nobody hates Canadians.

"Nobody in the world hates them," says a friend of mine who attended graduate school at McGill in Montreal, "because nobody fears them. But nobody listens to them either, because they can't make up their minds."

It's an odd thing to describe an entire nation, as many have described Canada, as orderly and tolerant to the point of dullness. Canada is the only country in the world that has a police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, for a national symbol. It was the Mounties, legend says, who protected the northern Indian tribes from rowdy, unscrupulous Americans during the Gold Rush. Mounties were so incorruptible and so full of British justice that the bad guys ran away rather than confront them. These cool, determined, square-jawed super heroes in red jackets remain so squeaky clean after more than a century, that the Disney Corporation owns the license to market their image.

But according to Canadian historian Daniel Francis, the myth of the RCMP owes as much to Hollywood as to fact. Many of the best Mountie adventure tales came from ex-Mounties and were fictionalized by moviemakers early in the Twentieth Century. In fact, Francis says, Mounties sometimes arrived too late and too short-handed to save the day. In the 1930s, during a national Canadian "red scare" similar to the American McCarthy Era, Mounties operated much like a secret police force -- routing out Bolshevik sympathizers and acting as judge and jury too.

Daniel Francis details six more fundamental legends in his book National Dreams: Myth, Memory and Canadian History. Many consider the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, for example, the first truly Canadian achievement that unified a huge nation. Yet the work was done, Francis points out, largely by Chinese workers backed by British investors on Indian lands. The myth that Canadians are all rugged folk of the far North who share a deep bond with their vast wilderness is apparently no more true than the modern myth that all Native Americans are supernaturally spiritual beings with a inborn wisdom about the workings of Nature.

Myths are not necessarily bad things, Francis theorizes, and not the same as lies. Good myths can bind together diverse types of people spread out over great expanses of land. Myths can build nations. But myths are different from history, and it can be dangerous to confuse the two, especially since human memory for detail fades so easily.