by A G Street
Just after we’d finished George’s crop, it snowed about six inches deep. Then it froze up. ‘What’ll happen now?’ I asked George. ‘I thought we had four more farms to thresh out of field.’
‘Well, we’ll just thresh ’em. Stick the racks on sleighs and carry on.’
We did, and I made the acquaintance of the Manitoba bobsleighs. It was harvesting extraordinary. The stooks were just mounds of snow to look at. As the sheaves were pitched up, frozen ice and snow whipped across the loader’s face. It was about zero weather, and the cold made the engine difficult to start. This was worse than the work, as the cold got right into you as you were waiting about. The pitchers soon chucked it, and went back East. This meant that we pitched our own loads. The output of grain was lessened but the toil was increased. It got dark about six o’clock, but the moonlight on the snow furnished enough light for us to carry on till eight as before. And when there was no moon we managed somehow. Henderson fixed up an electric headlight on the engine which shone on the self-feeder, and when you pulled out from the glare of it you were almost blind for a moment or two. Sometimes he’d light a small pile of straw some few yards away from the engine in order to warm himself. At one farm they hauled the grain straight to town, and the grain teams brought back some whisky one evening. I can remember driving in with a load, and seeing three of the teamsters and Henderson hand-in-hand dancing round the fire like devils in hell, while the forty horse-power engine drove the separator unceasingly and unattended.
The separator made quite a good job of the grain under these extraordinarily difficult conditions, but of course small pieces of ice the same size and weight as an oat or wheat corn, were mixed with it. ‘Sell it all quick,’ Henderson advised the owners. ‘When she thaws out in the spring, God knows what’ll happen.’ It was good advice. Grain is hauled loose by the railways in Canada in box cars holding up to eighty thousand pounds weight, and hundreds of these on the tracks at Port Arthur had to be emptied into the lake valueless the following April.
Threshing came to an end early in December, and we started to haul out our own grain, white oats. As it had all been threshed before the snow, it made a fair price, thirty-two cents a bushel. It had all been threshed into small box-like granaries, each holding a thousand bushels, which were dotted about over the farm. We used to shovel the grain out of these into a wagon box on sleighs, and haul it to the grain elevator at Barloe, six miles away, making two trips daily. I think I should explain that the tops of all vehicles were interchangeable. They were placed on wheels or sleighs, according to the season.
We were busy grain-hauling when Gordon returned. He had got in forty days tanking at three dollars a day. This accumulated wealth worried him. He paid George seventy-five dollars on the night of his arrival, and got him to write a cheque for that amount to a Correspondence College for a course in salesmanship. He would do the cooking for us in return for his board, he said, which would give him ample time for study. Privately, I don’t think he was any better cook than I, but he was good company, and we were glad to have him there. It was about forty degrees below zero then, and it was much nicer to come home to a warm shanty. We had fitted up another stove, a large box affair, which never went out, day or night, but it was too risky to leave the damper open at all when we were away all day, and forty below requires a roaring fire to make it livable.
I imagine that Gordon’s course was quite a good one as these things went, but, at the time, I often thought that had the authors heard one half of Gordon’s lurid comments on it as he studied, they would have learnt far more than he did. However, in due course he finished it, passed their examination, and received a beautiful first-class diploma with a large red seal. Moreover, they got him a job selling gramophones, and he departed to Winnipeg shortly after Christmas.
Before he went he took me to Beaver Lake in order to get our hair cut. Apparently this was an annual event; not the hair-cutting—there was a barber in Barloe—but the trip to Beaver Lake. Grain-hauling was over for the time, and the hired men of the settlement had a collective day off, ostensibly for tonsorial needs, but in reality to get drunk. Barloe was five miles away, and Beaver Lake was twelve—but the latter town was wet. I was rather pleased at being asked to join in this revel, I remember, but George grinned and stayed at home.
We went in a wagon box on sleighs, eleven of us. Haines drove a stallion, Bob, on the near side, and a mare, Ada, on the off. These he cursed fluently the whole way. Having arrived at the Lake, and put the team in the livery stable, we lined up at the long bar of the Jubilee Hotel. ‘We’ll hit her up once all round before grub,’ said Haines. ‘Right-hand man shouts first.’
This evidently meant eleven drinks. ‘I can’t drink eleven beers,’ I said to my neighbour in the line. ‘Keep ’em short then. Try port and brandy.’
It sounds incredible, but I did so, and towards the end of the round I collapsed. They carried me up to a bedroom, and laid me on a bed. There I spent the remainder of the day, in a semiconscious condition, save for periods of vomiting. Another of the party was brought up in the afternoon, also hors de combat. As I lay there I began to realize that I had got just about as low as it was possible. I thought of my people at home, especially of my mother. What would she think if she knew? Oh God! I was going to be sick again. I was, very sick. I wanted to die.
However, they got me home all right, and I was ill for three days. George undressed me, and got me to bed on our return, and told Gordon that he ought to have kept an eye on me. That worthy had consumed more than any one, but he was still, in his own opinion, quite sober. ‘Never got a—hic—chance,’ he gurgled. ‘Blighter was out before we got properly started. What did he want to come out here for, if he can’t look after his little self? ’Sides, I ain’t a bloody wet-nurse, I’m a firsht-clash shalesman, Georgy, and don’t you forget it.’
‘Oh, go to hell!’
‘Allri’, I’m goin’, but not to hell, Georgy. I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’——’
He subsided on to a pile of horse blankets. George looked at our two sleeping forms for a moment, grunted, put out the lamp, and hopped into bed.
Silence reigned in the shanty.
That trip to Beaver Lake did me a lot of good. It convinced me that getting drunk was an unpleasant business with nothing to recommend it, and I have managed to keep clear of it since that time.
After Gordon had gone away to his job in Winnipeg, I experienced loneliness and solitude. George got engaged to a farmer’s daughter who lived some twelve miles west of Barloe, and during that winter he used to go away to her home most week-ends. When he found that I could be trusted to look after the horses and myself alone, these week-ends developed into weeks, and once he was away for a whole fortnight.
My job in his absence was to tend the horses and cut firewood. I used to go out each day after dinner with the team, and hunt the bluffs for white poplar. The timber in them consisted chiefly of the black variety, but this is no good for firing. I’d get in to supper about six o’clock, and spend the evening reading. Mrs. Henderson would ring me up each evening but apart from this I rarely had any conversation with a soul during George’s absences from home. It was not till long after that first winter that I realized that the good lady rang up to make sure that I was all right. The temperature varied from zero down to sixty below, and if I had cut myself with an axe, or had been kicked by a horse, or come to physical harm in any way, it might have been serious. I can remember a small cut on my hand festering, and then my arm becoming painful and beginning to swell. I asked Mrs. Henderson one evening as to the best treatment for it, and received orders to get on a horse and go over to her at once. I did so, and she fomented and dressed my arm, and extracted a promise that I would come over each evening until it was well. I needed no coaxing, and was sorry when the cure put a stop to these visits.
We only kept the driving horse, Duke, and one pair of horses in the stable during the winter. The others lived out on the prairi
e, licked snow for water, and pawed through it to the stubble for food. The water-trough was now a block of ice, which had to be cut with an axe each time you watered your horses. I wore horsehide mittens on my hands for all outside work. These were lined with loose woollen mittens, which were placed in the oven each evening to dry out. It sounds rather horrible, I know, but our socks received the same treatment. Apparently, if you could put them on dry, your feet stood less chance of freezing.
I read voraciously everything I could get hold of during those lonely winter months. Each week I received from home six Daily Mirrors, Punch, and the local weekly paper. George got the Tatler weekly, and the Windsor and Strand magazines each month. When he was home, we would often invite two other bachelors, who lived in a similar shanty some four miles south, for supper and cards. I don’t mean supper proper—we all had that about six when we finished work for the day—but just a snack during the evening about ten o’clock. My mother had sent me a large pot of mincemeat, and I had learnt to make pastry of sorts. Any drawback in its lightness was overweighed by the mincemeat. Henderson came over one night and tried the mince pie, of which he was so enamoured that he went home and told his wife that I was not so niggardly with the mincemeat as some folk he had at home.
In March, the pile of poplar poles, of which I had cut some sixty loads, was sawn up. Henderson brought over an oil engine and circular saw on some sleighs, and we did the job in two days. When this was done, I had a go at boring, monotonous work, as while George went off courting again, I split the heap of logs with an old axe, and afterwards piled them into an orderly pile.
I don’t remember feeling at all unhappy that winter, in spite of the loneliness; but I was glad when spring came along in April. One gets a bit fed up with snow after five months of it. The whole scheme of things was so different to my old life. In that, one told somebody else to do a job, whereas in this there wasn’t anybody else to tell. Every little detail had to be done yourself or otherwise it wasn’t done. I noticed this most in domestic things. For instance, as a lad I had never realized that salt cellars had to be filled; there was always salt in them at home, but in the shanty it meant that I filled them. Cooking I did not mind, in fact I rather enjoyed it. There was a certain excitement in wondering how things would turn out. But washing clothes was a different pair of shoes entirely. I was a worse washerwoman than I was a hoer. Sunday was our usual washing day, and also the day for bread-baking as a general rule. We had a sort of spring cleaning just before the spring sowing began. It was quite successful for the most part, except when we tried to wash our blankets. George said that they hadn’t been washed for two years or so, and he thought it was about time. Accordingly we bubbled them up in a large pot for about a day and a half. Then we took them outside to wring them out. George caught hold one end, I took the other, and we twisted them until all we had left was a blanket rope. They had felted, and were useless, so we had to get some new ones. For good washerwomen I shall always have a great respect. The whole business is a sealed book to me.
But this rough bachelor existence did us no harm. We were always fit, and started on the spring work with eagerness.
CHAPTER X
George’s farm was a half-section, or in other words three hundred and twenty acres of land, one mile long by a half-mile wide. As the winter’s snow disappeared under the spring sunshine the stubble made its appearance once more. Owing to the late threshing the previous Fall, we had no ploughing done, and were faced with the task of ploughing and planting about one hundred and eighty acres. This acreage was the open land between the bluffs of willow scrub and poplar, which was dry enough to cultivate. As the soil was frozen down to about two feet, the snow water collected in the natural depressions in the landscape, forming small lakes or sloughs.
For a day or two after the snow had disappeared the soil was of the consistency of oatmeal porridge. We spent these days in preparations. The other four working horses, which had been running wild on the prairie all the winter, were caught up, stabled, clipped, and fed lavishly. They were as fat as butter, and this fat melted from them very quickly when they got to work. At the beginning you had a job to get their collars on to them, but in a short while you had to put a thick sweat pad inside the collars to make them fit. Ploughs were overhauled and the shares taken to the Barloe blacksmith to sharpen.
When we did start, I was surprised at the good cultivation, as I had always been under the impression that the Colonial farmer just scratched his corn in anyhow. Generally the ploughed land received three harrowings, and was then drilled and rolled. The soil was like cocoa, and contained scarcely any grit, although large boulders were rather plentiful. A turnfurrow, I was told, would last a man’s lifetime. George drove four horses abreast on a two-furrow plough, each furrow being twelve inches, and I had the other three horses on an eighteen-inch single-furrow plough, commonly called a ‘sulky’. Both ploughs had seats, for which I was truly thankful before we had been at it many days. There was also a trailing seat on two wheels behind the harrows, and the drill was fitted with a footboard for each wheel, so that we rode on every implement.
We left the stable at 7 a.m., and drove until 7 p.m. We averaged about seven acres of ploughing daily between the two teams, and one man harrowing with four horses hitched to six zigzag harrows was supposed to cover forty acres daily. There is not much more to tell about that year’s seeding, save that we began on April the sixteenth, and finished about June the first. However, I feel sure that most people will realize that this plain statement covers a considerable amount of real hard work.
The whole business is a bit hazy to me now. We woke at 4 a.m., we worked until 7 p.m., we supped, we saw to our horses, and we went to bed, repeating the process on the morrow, day after day. On Sundays we baked bread, replenished the loft with hay, washed our clothes, and thanked God for Sunday.
In my innocence I imagined that there would not be a great deal to do after seeding until haymaking, but one does not keep a hired man in Canada for his good looks. George had been corresponding with the owners of a quarter-section of prairie, which lay a half-mile north of our boundary. He finally purchased it for fifteen dollars an acre, and as soon as seeding was finished, we commenced to break it.
All the land in the district had been surveyed by the Government some years before, and divided into one-mile squares, leaving a road allowance of thirty-three yards on each side. The country was thus a chess-board of mile squares called sections. A township was six miles square. The road allowances came out of the acreage of each section. They were not all opened up as roads or trails, only those requisite to the district’s needs being so treated; but the others, some of which were ploughed by the owner of the section, were available for the community when desired.
This method of scheduling land seems to me to be an admirable one. Certainly it was very simple when it came to transfer of ownership. There were no complicated deeds. William Jones purchased, say, the north-east quarter of Section twelve in Township seven in Range two, previously owned by Tom Smith, and entered in his name in the Land Registry Office. Transfer the entry to William Jones for a small fee, and the thing was done. I am only giving the broad outline of this business. Possibly there may have been some legal complications and charges, but they were infinitesimal compared with English ones.
Our first job was to find the boundaries of our new land. The surveyors mark the corners of the sections by means of a stake driven into a mound of earth. These become almost, if not quite, obliterated after a few years, and in this particular case we could not find any of them. It was the more difficult as none of the land adjoining was cultivated or fenced. I find it difficult to explain this by writing, but perhaps the accompanying sketch will help matters.
First we ran a line west from Henderson’s north fence, which gave us our southern boundary. We then drove in a buggy some four miles west until we found some settled land with a fence in the same line, and traced it back to Henderson’s fence—and it
came near enough not to matter.
The same method was employed for all four sides, and in one case we had to go away from our boundary six miles before we found a fenced section in the proper line from which to work. This sounds very rough and ready, perhaps, but at one corner of our new estate our lines intersected within a yard or so of an indistinct mound. We dug into this and found the stumps of the surveyor’s stakes. This was good enough, and we put a stout post at each of the four corners.
George decided to break the new farm by ploughing north and south, beginning on the east boundary in line with Henderson’s west fence, thus ploughing up the road allowance. He got busy marking out the strike-outs with stakes, while I drove four horses abreast on the ‘sulky’ plough, which was fitted with a special breaking turn-furrow, a very long narrow one.
Virgin prairie is tough, very tough. It lies over behind a breaking plough like endless strips of linoleum, the long turn-furrow laying the furrows quite flat. These strips fitted into each other just as if you had turfed the land with the turfs upside down. It was so tough that in some places, when the furrow broke owing to the plough hitting a stone, I would look back and see fifty yards of my ploughing unwinding back to its original position. When this happened I had to turn the team, go back, and plough that strip once again. I soon found the meaning of the ploughman’s saying: ‘Run your plough on the near side.’ I’m afraid that is a bit too technical for non-ploughmen. It means that your forrow slice should be thicker on the side which flops over in the turn, so that its extra weight will prevent its unwinding on sidling land.
After a week George evidently decided that I could be safely trusted with this job, and he stayed on the home farm doing various odd jobs, and in addition, to my great joy, he took on the cooking. The difference between coming home after a day’s work of this character to a supper ready for you, and coming home and getting your own, is immeasurable; it has to be experienced to be appreciated. I used to leave the shanty at 7 a.m., with the four horses hitched abreast to the wagon, in which I would take their hay and oats and my own food. The same hours were worked as in seeding time, and I used to hitch off to return home at 7 p.m., spending most of the middle-day rest of two hours dozing while the horses fed.