by Merle Massie
FOREST PRAIRIE EDGE
PLACE HISTORY IN SASKATCHEWAN
Merle Massie
University of Manitoba Press
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada R3T 2M5
uofmpress.ca
© Merle Massie 2014
Printed in Canada
Text printed on chlorine-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper
18 17 16 15 141 2 3 4 5
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Cover design: Marvin Harder
Interior design: Jessica Koroscil
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Massie, Merle, 1971–, author
Forest prairie edge : place history in Saskatchewan / Merle Massie.
Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-88755-763-7 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-88755-452-0 (PDF e-book)
ISBN 978-0-88755-454-4 (epub e-book)
1. Human ecology—Saskatchewan—Prince Albert Region. 2. Ecotones—Saskatchewan—Prince Albert Region. 3. Prince Albert Region (Sask.)—History. 4. Prince Albert Region (Sask.)—Economic
conditions. I.Title.
GF512.S3M38 2014 304.2’30971242 C2013-908508-4 C2013-908509-2
The University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage, Tourism, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Manitoba Book Publishing Tax Credit.
For Sargent Ernest McGowan and David Sargent McGowan, always in my thoughts.
And for Dave De Brou, because I promised.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Figures
Maps
Introduction
Edge, Place, and History
Chapter One
Ecotones and Ecology
Chapter Two
The Good Wintering Place
Chapter Three
Wood Is Scarce
Chapter Four
A Pleasant and Plentyful Country
Chapter Five
Quality of Permanency
Chapter Six
Poor Man’s Paradise
Chapter Seven
Accessible Wilderness
Chapter Eight
Even the Turnips Were Edible
Conclusion
South of the North, North of the South
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Special thanks, first and foremost, to my grandparents, who made the move to the forest fringe many years ago and set the stage for the story that follows. Thanks and appreciation also to the men and women from the north Prince Albert region who spoke with me about my project, both formally (through interviews) and informally (at the coffee shop, Remembrance Day ceremonies, funerals, and auction sales). Their perspective and wisdom helped to shape my work.
Financial support came from the University of Saskatchewan, Dean’s Scholarship Fund, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship, and the Department of History through both a doctoral scholarship and travel funds to pursue archival and oral research. I thank Jean Wilson at University of Manitoba Press for her initial enthusiasm and David Carr and the editorial and marketing teams for their astute suggestions and sympathetic e-mails. Two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript gave excellent feedback and tremendous encouragement.
Erika Dyck, Maureen Reed, Geoff Cunfer, Jim Miller, and George Colpitts: academic reviewers, colleagues, critics (in the best sense), and mentors (depending on the day). My thanks to you all. Andrew Dunlop scanned several maps and photographs using the facilities provided by the Historical GIS lab at the University of Saskatchewan. I am grateful.
Bill Waiser, role model extraordinaire: he not only kept me organized but also continually pushed me to speak clearly, say what I mean, and mean what I say. His productivity, commitment to others, and public presence as a professional historian continue to set the bar high.
Aspects of this book were published as “When You’re Not from the Prairie: Place History in the Forest Fringe of Saskatchewan,” Journal of Canadian Studies 44, 2 (2010): 171–93. My thanks to the editors and peer review readers for their feedback and support. Public response to parts of this book, through radio, newspaper, and Canada’s History magazine, has been tremendous.
Family sustained the project from beginning to end. My in-laws—Ron and Joyce, Glenn and Lesley, Ryan and Jenn, and their families—cheered from the sidelines. My brothers and their families—Jamie and Jodie, Kerry and Melanie—offered a warm bed, hot meals, and babysitting services on innumerable research trips. My mother, Mary McGowan, accompanied me on research and conference trips, participated in oral history research, borrowed books for me, and kept me on track with stories from her childhood. My children, Bronwyn and Alric, have followed the family trend toward reading books, books, and more books. They are, as always, exceptional kids. My husband, Garth, is a star.
Figures
1 Saskatchewan flag
2 Lobstick tree
3 Steamboat on the Saskatchewan River
4 Sturgeon Lake Lumber Company, north of Prince Albert, c. 1906
5 Cookshack on the Red Deer River, c. 1908
6 Prince Albert Lumber Company
7 “Dinky” engine hauling logs on ice road
8 First year in the bush
9 Fifteen years in the Bush
10 Thirty years in the Bush
11 Settlers from Vanguard trekking north, 1919
12 Thirty million acres of fertile and idle land
13 Department of the Interior surveyors, c. 1920
14 Paddockwood Red Cross Outpost Hospital, 1948
15 M. Brodacki family, 1929
16 Freighting fish to Prince Albert
17 Crossing a northern lake with a freight swing
18 Freight swing with fish boxes
19 Paddockwood cordwood, 1926
20 Spoils of the hunt north of Prince Albert, 1917
21 Mandy Mine, 1917
22 Picnic at Round Lake
23 Two ladies fishing on unidentified lake, c. 1900
24 Montreal Lake Trail, 1919
25 Possibly Adolphus Bird with Christina Henry and Nan McKay, 1919
26 Saskatchewan unrolls northward
27 Paddockwood, mixed-farming paradise
28 Emma Lake Art Camp, c.1936
29 Tractor buried in drifting soil
30 Trekking north
31 Trekking north
32 When wheat prices crash
33 Cat train near Prince Albert, c. 1929
34 Trapping White Gull Creek, Walter Haydukewich, 1933
35 Remnant of Montreal Lake Trail
36 Charlie Elliott of Paddockwood at Montreal Lake Trail cairn
Maps
1 North Prince Albert Region
2 Cummins Map 258
3 The forks of the Saskatchewan River
4 Pegogamaw lands
5 Trading posts in the north Prince Albert region
6 Treaty map of Saskatchewan
7 Sturgeon River Forest Reserve, c. 1925
8 Canada, main types of farming
9 Surveyor’s map, plan of Twp. 54 R25 W2, 1918
10 Trails near Prince Albert, c. late 1800s
11 New Saskatchewan prospecting route, 1928
12 Road from Prince Albert to Montreal Lake, c. 1925
13 Sturgeon River Forest Reserve roads, c. 1928–29
14 Prince Albert National Park, 1935
15 Great Trek destinations in Saskatchewan
16 Rural population change in Saskatchewan, 1931–41
17 Cummins Map 258, Moose Lake and Hell’s Gate
18 Farm Relief, Saskatchewan, 1929–38
19 Origin of relocation settlers
20 Destination of relocation settlers
FOREST PRAIRIE EDGE
Introduction
Edge, Place, and History
I am from Saskatchewan, but I am not from the prairie.
How can that be? Saskatchewan is the “prairie” province. The description travels hand in hand with the provincial name. A Saskatchewan girl carries the prairie in her blood. She is weighted down by the sky, blown by its winds. Books declare it so.
It is not so.
I grew up on the edge, where the open plains surrender to the dark uprightness of the forest. When I look out from between the trunks of aspen and pine, I see where the dappled forest floor, the damp moss, and the willow-rimmed muskeg pools open out to a dry and tilled sunny field, soil nurturing wheat, barley, canola. I twist direction, now north and now south, viewing across the divide that separates and connects. I hardly move at all; I shatter sightlines and shadows.
The place where I stand is the transitional landscape between the Canadian south and the Canadian north. It is the divide between the two solitudes of Saskatchewan. The Saskatchewan flag bears colourful witness: the green stripe over the yellow is the heraldry symbolism of the two main Saskatchewan ecosystems. The lower half is burnished yellow, where classic fields of wheat wave across the prairie; the upper half is forest green, a boreal expanse reaching across the nation, “draped like a green scarf across the shoulders of North America.”1 The boreal scarf settles and shifts, cloaking the prairie from above.
I began to know Canada from the viewpoint of our “stumpranch” farm, as my parents called it, which sits at this ecological divide. The farm was cut tree by tree by tree and pulled painstakingly root by root, created through the sweat and muscle of post–Great War soldier Arthur Bridge and his brother, Cyril. They left lots of trees behind, and through the years the stumpranch that will always be my home defined my perspective of Saskatchewan. But my dad put it best: “I love Canada so much, especially the transfer area, where we leave field and farm and enter the forest area. I was born on the ‘fringe’ and just loved it—to be able to make hay one day and go blueberry picking the next is right up my alley. Drop the manure fork and in minutes … have a fishing rod in your hand, is my idea of heaven.”2
Figure 1. Saskatchewan flag.
At the nexus between farm and forest, my family blended agriculture with forest-based activities. From a practical, child’s eye view, my brothers and I built our “treehouses” on the ground. What was the use of going ten feet up? We would have a great view of … yet more poplar trees. So what? And the treehouses would break apart in the next big wind. On the ground, we could build larger treehouses, big enough to camp out in, while hoping that the skunks and raccoons would not invade. Our family house was heated with wood; we learned how to chop and haul trees, cut, split, and pile the firewood, and build and maintain fires from an early age. With the Garden River running through our farm and copious large sloughs within easy reach, my dad and brothers were prolific trappers of beaver and muskrat. I became adept at fleshing. Hunting was a regular activity, with forest stretching almost from our doorstep. Ducks and geese, jumpers (deer), moose, and elk regularly flew or wandered by, unwittingly to grace our supper table, along with homegrown beef, pork, and poultry. Fishing was an evening activity in the summer on any number of nearby lakes, canoe paddle dipping along. While we casted, Mom would toss a jig over the side and read—and she caught as many fish as the rest of us. It was nothing to take a daylong excursion on Christmas Day, or at the warm end of February or March, by snowmobile or truck, onto the frozen crust of Bittern or Montreal or Anglin Lake. A five-gallon pail can carry a dipper, a spoon lure tied to a spool of line, a sandwich and a couple of chocolate bars, and a book. It does triple duty as a seat while you fish and a carrier for your catch at the end of the day. Nothing tastes better than pickerel (walleye) fried over a campfire. Forgot your frying pan? My brother’s improvisational skills proved that hubcaps pried off the truck would substitute, and switching beer for the classic butter gave a lovely malty flavour.
I have great sympathy for those travellers who look out their windows on the Trans-Canada Highway and think This is Saskatchewan? That’s it? I read a Twitter description of that highway in 2012: “Give me a ladder, and I can see Manitoba.” The Corner Gas song plays on this stereotype: first you tell me that your dog ran away/then you tell me that it took three days. The Betty cartoon, written and illustrated by Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen, ran a series in March 2010 on the idea of taking a tourist trip to Saskatchewan. In an attempt to dissuade Betty from this plan, her husband suggested she take a ‘virtual’ trip to the province using Google’s Street View. On finding her asleep at the computer, the son asked, “So are we going to Saskatchewan?” “I doubt it.” The flat-equals-boring conception is common, but there is a physical aspect, a human reaction to immensity. As a child, I endured visits to relatives in Weyburn (not far from where Corner Gas was filmed) as a trial of the first magnitude: “all that sky, it’s so hot, grasshoppers are yucky, I would like some shade, I have a headache, can we go home?”
While I admit solidarity with those who, like me, have found the prairie at times too much, my purpose is to shift your thinking about what Saskatchewan is and what it looks like. While working on the research that became this book, my desk and digital files were populated with classic northern Saskatchewan logging images. An office mate looked over my shoulder and asked, “Why do you have pictures of BC?” When I replied that these were from Saskatchewan, she gasped in shock. “You don’t think of Saskatchewan as having trees.” It is precisely those stereotypical assumptions that, I believe, need to be challenged.
This book is, first and foremost, a local or “place” history. It tells the story of my hometown region north of the city of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, reaching back into the archaeological past and moving forward to 1940. As such, the first audience for this book is the neighbours and friends and relatives who populated my world when I was growing up and who continue to live in the area today. This place sits at the transition between the prairie and the boreal forest, which introduces a second important theme in this book: edge. Much can be learned by changing the point of view for writing history. In this book, I tell the story from the perspective of a community that sits on the edge between the two most iconic Canadian regions: Canada’s north and Canada’s south. The identity and history of my home community belong fully with neither one nor the other. I hope that this book will challenge conceptions of Saskatchewan, how people have lived here, and how those stereotypes have shaped the ways in which we tell our stories. So, as part of that challenge, my second audience is the historians and geographers who take on the task of telling Canada’s story. (My first audience, friends and neighbours, may wish to skip straight to Chapter 1.)
Regionalism
Most Canadians have a mental image of Saskatchewan that is serviceable if rather boring. Calendar pictures of classic “Canadian” landscapes include lighthouses, brightly coloured houses, covered bridges, and Pe
ggy’s Cove for the Maritimes and fields of wheat gleaming burnished yellow under a wide blue sky for Saskatchewan. Indeed, following this stereotype, the Saskatchewan flag should be yellow and blue, like the calendar pictures. There are accompanying background stories that create this typical vision of Saskatchewan: open plains filled with bison and First Nations on horseback, then the transition to wheat fields. Treaty making and rebellion, the railway, intense immigration, sod shacks and pioneers, political and social experiments leading to innovations such as medicare, and industrial extraction of uranium, potash, and oil. Stories of the fur trade fade away as soon as settlers hit the stage. Certain plots, such as the dust and despair of the Great Depression of the 1930s, have gained the aura of legend, scripted virtually in stone. Saskatchewan is the have-not province that everyone left, but now the people are once again returning, or arriving, in droves.
There is truth to these stories. But so much is missing.
The Canadian habit of dividing Canada into regions has left the Canadian story deeply divided along arbitrary and artificial divisions. It is usual, almost automatic, to assume that Canada as a country can and should be divided politically, ecologically, or culturally. Cultural shorthand has standardized these chunks: the Prairies or the west (with or without British Columbia), the Maritimes or the east, central Canada or Ontario and Quebec, the north or the Far North, and the south. These regions (however defined) remain the most common method of controlling and discovering, comparing and contrasting the Canadian story. Substituting direction for space can mean “somewhere else” or “not here” or even “here,” depending on your point of view or purpose. Historian Gerald Friesen suggests that the old “prairie” distinction was a political or social construct that was not necessarily natural and has lost most of its power. It has been replaced by the modern concept of “the West.”3 I agree. But the word prairie retains enormous strength when considering the environment or landscape. It is the cultural shorthand most synonymous with “Saskatchewan.”