Forest Prairie Edge

by Merle Massie

  University colleagues worried that my research area was too small. People who lived in my research region worried that the research region was far too large. How could I possibly tell the stories of all the small communities within the area? The local perception and commentary was based firmly on the way in which local history has been written in western Canada: a community-based voluntary project in which the outcome is a book that contains as many family biographies as possible.38 I remain fascinated by the power of these community history books to inform, entertain, and elicit feelings of belonging and pride. The discipline, drive, economics, and sheer determination involved in organizing and producing a community history book by a group of volunteers deserve applause. A visit to the Prairie History Room of the Regina Public Library is an eye-opening event. Thousands of history books, published by various communities across western Canada, weigh down the shelves. Several such books from the local study region were important sources for this book.

  At the same time, there is a subtle but important difference between cooperatively written community histories and what has been termed “local” history. Community histories sought family, corporate, church, and school histories and photographs defined by locale. Editing was minimal, contributions were voluntary, and results depended on the response and writing ability of each author. A local history, in contrast, is generally written by a single author with a more narrative style. Although also focussed by locale, local histories have only occasionally been written by academics. Historian Paul Voisey wrote a damning review of community history production and a manifesto to create better local history in his essay “Rural Local History and the Prairie West.” Voisey argued that the best local history, if compared with an international standard, has “limited and definite purposes, shuns events and individuals in favour of structures and groups, and is interdisciplinary in theme and method.” He also argued that “the best local histories tackle themes of property, agricultural production, demographic change, family structure, social class, class relations, social mobility, geographic mobility, social order, community conflict, community development and disintegration, and the impact of urban growth on nearby rural areas.”39 His list bears no relation to the issues of concern for community history groups trying to collect family stories. While Voisey’s style might indeed produce a fine local history, it is not the only way that it can or should be done.

  If there is a general rule that professional historians are better off not writing local histories, exceptions to this rule are “case studies.” Such studies, different from local histories, are interested in big picture themes and theories, which are “tested” against the local story to see which ideas work and which do not. Such a study would satisfy Voisey’s list of themes. An excellent example of the case study approach is historian Joy Parr’s groundbreaking The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880–1950.40 The book compares the industrialization of two towns in Ontario through the lens of gender. It shows that concepts of “women’s work” and “men’s work,” combined with traditional gender-related responsibilities of childrearing, cooking, cleaning, and shopping, shaped two industrial towns in terms of their social attitudes and merchant and other occupations. One town was clearly a women’s town, the other just as clearly a men’s industrial town. Case studies flip the lens: the research questions, not the place, become paramount.

  In general, local history has been dismissed by academic historians as too narrow in focus, narcissistic and limited, of little use to any audience beyond the local.41 But historian William Baker found this narrow-minded view of local history to be wrong: “local history is not the poor brother of Canadian history.” Local history, he argued, is about “vantage point,” and none is superior to or more significant than any other.42 His point rings true. Some academics struggled to justify their decisions to write local histories. This struggle was clear in the introduction of historian Kerry Abel’s award-winning Changing Places: History, Community, and Identity in Northeastern Ontario.43 Abel’s work provided an important precedent for place histories, both for its success and its layered approach to history. Abel met head-on the expected criticism: “Why look at a place that is completely unknown to many Canadians, a place with fewer residents than the city of Lethbridge, Alberta?” She answered that question in three ways. One, her chosen place (which she sometimes called a “subregion”) “deserves to be better known, for its history has always been directly connected to events that made Canada what it is today” (mining dynasties, newspaper magnates, and Shania Twain). Two, it “provides a sort of laboratory in which the big, abstract questions can be answered on a smaller, more manageable scale” (similar to a case study). Three, it was “a worthy object simply in its own terms. ‘National’ history, or ‘big’ history, or even ‘total’ history is not the only legitimate undertaking for our generation of historians.”44 According to Abel, small, local place histories are legitimate undertakings too. Flores noted that local history, as something more than a case study, is gaining ground in historical circles. Indeed, he reported with cautious optimism that “histories of place have already made strides in eroding [the] sniffing condescension [of academic historians].”45 I hope that this book will not only shatter perceptions of Saskatchewan, but will stand as an example of what place history can be, for both academic and public audiences.

  Finally, this book is rooted in the personal. I grew up in the north Prince Albert region, as did my mother and my father. All of my grandparents fled to the forest fringe: my dad’s parents in 1934, abandoning the dust and despair of the east Weyburn area during the dirty thirties; my mom’s parents in 1939, running from the Poland-Ukraine border to the forested spaces of Canada, with four sons and a daughter in tow, to save the boys from the horror of the war about to descend on Europe. Place researcher Cliff Hague notes that, though place identities are ultimately personal, they are formed in relation to other people, other places, and other identities and so are filtered, fostered, and formulated through socialization. The concept of the forest fringe, and the place identity of the north Prince Albert region as presented, are ultimately mine but have been shaped by my association with others, particularly my parents and grandparents and their experiences and choices. I was born and raised at Paddockwood, and to a certain extent what follows is an investigation of my own past. As an “insider” to the region, I have an insider’s knowledge of its stories; its roads, rivers, lakes, and trees; its sights, sounds, and smells; its people and identity. This book, through place history, explains how a person can be from Saskatchewan but decidedly not from the prairie.

  Despite the limited physical map of the north Prince Albert region, writing a place history from the forest fringe has proven to be an immense project. Chapter 1 presents a physical description of the landscape, drawing on botany, climatology, topography, and soil patterns. Following and overlaying the physical description is an analysis in Chapter 2 of First Nations perceptions and uses of the forest edge. I move beyond accepted models of First Nations use of the forest edge as a winter refuge to suggest that both boreal and plains bands used and modified the edge landscape in all seasons. From the edge, I show the intensification of plains bison hunting and processing (the pemmican trade) as the economic alignment of south-north with the northern boreal fur trade. Resource extraction, in turn, forced the dominion government to respond to repeated demands of the Montreal Lake and Lac La Ronge Woods Cree Nations for adhesion to Treaty 6. From the perspective of the dominion, treaty adhesion was unnecessary at first since the land was not considered fit for agriculture. But as resource interest grew and industrial exploitation spread north from Prince Albert, a treaty for resource purposes became imperative. From the perspective of the First Nations, however, a treaty simply reinforced long-held practices of local bands accustomed to living within and traversing across the ecotone. The subsequent creation of Little Red River Reserve for farming in the north Prince Albert
region marked legal physical ownership of a landscape that was an important part of traditional cultural usage. Moving through the late nineteenth century, I add new layers of occupation, including the permanent founding of a community at Prince Albert. From that point on, resource exploitation flipped the south/north ecological duality. Chapter 3 describes how the dominion government and local entrepreneurs articulated a narrative of trees and lumber to contrast and supply a treeless but growing prairie society. Whereas in the pemmican trade the south supplied the north, codification of the north Prince Albert region as a place of timber wealth created a supply of northern goods for the south. The absence of trees in the prairie landscape, combined with a steady stream of prairie settlement, created a ready market.

  In practice, the north Prince Albert region remained the stronghold of foresters until the devastating winter of 1906–07. The subsequent fuel crisis forced the dominion government to survey large tracts of forested land for homesteading purposes, a new departure in dominion policy. The north Prince Albert region became a popular homestead destination. Chapter 4 outlines the quest for long-term resilience tied to the mixed-farming movement, an idea deeply rooted in landscape. An ideal mixed farm contained both arable farmland and scrub land for hay or fuel. As such, a mixed farm was situated within, and deliberately became, an ecological edge landscape. Mixed farms offered agricultural diversity and resilience since a farmer’s assets and liabilities were spread over several marketable crops, livestock, and farm products. Prince Albert promoters (particularly the Board of Trade) along with dominion land surveyors and newspaper editors declared the forest edge landscape as ideal for the development of a successful mixed farm. In considering the role of mixed farming, Chapter 4 breaks open the classic prairie wheat narrative.

  Chapter 5 discusses the deep cultural shift in dominion homestead policies after the Great War, which radically changed to include extensive hands-on guidance for settlers. The mixed-farm concept appealed strongly to returned Great War soldiers and influenced those who developed Soldier Settlement Board policies. A devastating regional drought on the prairie worsened in 1919 just as the soldiers were returning home. That led to an environmentally driven south-to-north migration of both soldiers and others looking to escape drought-prone regions. Soldier settlement and later land settlement schemes encouraged and supported south-to-north migration.

  In practice, the concept of mixed farming changed within the forest edge environment. Not only were the farms a mix of grain and livestock—the typical description of a mixed farm—but forest edge farmers also actively participated in the non-farm economy available at the ecotone, such as the lumber and cordwood industries, fishing, freighting, and trapping. The forest edge as a landscape of economic resilience took mixed farming to a different level: the informal rural economy was built on occupational pluralism that deliberately combined a mixed farm with off-farm opportunities. Unlike J. David Wood, who measured boreal farming against an unrealistic southern farming model, I argue that the forest edge environment offered economic diversification beyond the mixed-farm model. Chapter 6 looks into those off-farm opportunities in the forest edge landscape.

  The north/south duality, and its imprint on the cultural landscape of Saskatchewan, is discussed again in Chapter 7. The north Prince Albert area was rebranded as a place of recreation, a landscape of lakes known as “Lakeland” or “vacationland,” anchored by Emma, Christopher, Anglin, and Candle Lakes as well as Prince Albert National Park. Much of the cultural push behind the creation of the national park can be found in the contrast between the treeless, arid prairie south and the green, forested, and well-watered landscape of the north. Improved roads, camping facilities, and the relative simplicity and inexpensive demands of car tourism brought the north Prince Albert region within reach of prairie residents. It became the “Playground of the Prairies,” and the Prince Albert Board of Trade, in conjunction with the dominion government, began a marketing campaign about duality and contrast. Two figures stand out in the historical record as part of the edge-ness of this place. Archie Belaney, or Grey Owl, lived in Prince Albert National Park. His books extolled wilderness preservation and reinforced the divide between the civilized prairies and the last vestiges of wilderness in the forest. Painter Augustus Kenderdine used the contrast between the dried-out prairies and the northern woods to reinforce, dramatize, and advertise his Emma Lake Artist Camp, which began in 1936. In addition, a visit to the green forest and cool lake region was portrayed as a healthful interlude, an oasis, a refuge from the demands of daily life, not so much from the cities (the usual cultural model) as from hot, dusty, prairie farms.

  All eyes converged on the forest fringe during the Great Depression, when tens of thousands of refugees from the dual prongs of drought and economic devastation retreated from the prairie to take refuge under the forest canopy. Chapter 8 details this Great Trek, one of the most important movements of people in Canadian history. The Great Trek story has generally been told from the perspective of the “pioneer fringe,” where frantic settlers relocated to marginal boreal forest farms as a “place of last resort.” Consistently, the Depression migration has been evaluated primarily in terms of agricultural success and thus has been found wanting. I argue that the economic and cultural landscape of the forest fringe prior to the Depression—Woods and Plains Cree ecotone exploitation, the rise of the resource industry, the mixed-farming movement, occupational pluralism derived from the non-farm economy, previous in-migration from the prairie, the growth of tourism—played a significant part in the Great Trek. The forest fringe was a landscape of hope and resilience, drawing trekkers to the forest edge ecotone as much as they were moving away from the devastation of the prairie. For the trekkers, hope and resilience re-created the forest fringe as a refuge, and they were the refugees. The economy at the forest edge boomed during the Great Depression in astonishing contrast to the iconoclastic stories of dust and despair that Canadians recognize from the classic prairie narrative. Northern resources—cordwood, fish, furs—were in demand despite the general economic depression, and forest fringe residents participated in a booming off-farm economy that mitigated many of the worst effects of that dismal decade.

  Storytelling is at the heart of what historians do. As pointed out so eloquently and simply by environmental historian William Cronon, how a historian chooses to tell a story matters.46 The story of the forest fringe, as seen through events and cultures in the north Prince Albert region, is more than just “marginal” farming carried too far past the forest edge. When viewed a little differently, taking into account deep-time history, a new narrative of cultural and ecological edges, resilience, refuge, and nexus offers a broader and deeper perspective. Significant historical events are viewed from a fresh perspective. New methodological ideas such as edge theory and place history offer a critical approach to bridge the artificial and culturally constructed gap between isolated regions that plagues the Canadian historical record. The Canadian habit of reducing this country into regions has shaped conceptions of nature and region, promoted inertia, and skewed analysis. It is time to break open stereotypical narratives to find new ways of telling the Canadian story. Reinterpreting the Saskatchewan story will, I hope, offer a new narrative arc. The edge is important: I challenge you not to ignore the edges between Canadian regions but to actively look into them as sites of new meaning in Canadian history. Instead of writing history from the centre, write it from the edge, looking out in all directions. As William Baker said, it’s all about vantage point.

  Chapter One

  Ecotones and Ecology

  The connection between the land and the society that develops on that land is complex and crucial, giving new meaning to the old saying “history from the ground up” or “history from below.” To understand the human history of the north Prince Albert region, it is first necessary to understand the land itself: land is “at the root of human existence.”1 Soil, topography, ecology, and fo
ods and other commodities (from a human perspective) that can be coaxed or harvested from the land differ greatly from one area to another, and as a consequence the communities that develop also differ. Communities, in turn, are influenced by population, methods of resource extraction, agriculture, political regimes, economic drivers, and cultural and religious thought. Yet the human-ecological dance must stand on something. What does the ecological edge between the prairie and the boreal forest look like at and near the forks of the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers? How has that landscape changed over time?