by Merle Massie
Hades Is Loose
Almost thirty years of active logging in the north Prince Albert region had changed the aspect of the countryside dramatically. Extensive logging, with its rotting slash, change in forest canopy, and new rank growth of leaf-producing aspen, set the stage for a disaster of near-epic proportions in the spring of 1919. The Prince Albert Daily Herald reported that the spring arrived warm and soon became hot. By the end of April, all of Saskatchewan and eastern Alberta north of the North Saskatchewan River was tinder dry. Bush fires were breaking out.81 By May, the region was devastated by wildfires. The Daily Herald observed that, “once the blaze develops into a conflagration, Hades is loose and little can be done to check it.”82 Serious blazes extended all across the forest edge, burning farms, killing livestock, and devastating local homesteads. “The Great Fire” raged from Lac la Biche in Alberta, Green Lake, and Île-à-la-Crosse east across much of the boreal plain, far beyond either agricultural settlements or timber berths. In all, 2.8 million hectares burned, and 300 people were left homeless. Fires endangered settlements at Lac la Biche, Big River, and Montreal Lake.83
Bishop J.A. Newnham of Prince Albert made a special trip north to check on the inhabitants of Montreal Lake and gave the Daily Herald the following harrowing report:
For about a week thirty of the Indians were working practically day and night fighting fire under the guidance of the forest rangers. At one point on the trail, in the midst of a spruce bluff the bishop and his travelling companion, Mr. Barker of the Hudson’s Bay Company had to swing their team around and rush back, for the flames came leaping over the treetops, twenty to thirty feet high and sweeping onward in a rush of flame. Three hundred yards back the team was halted for there was the edge of the fire zone and the bishop and Mr. Barker turned and watched the conflagration surge and crackle past. Five minutes later, the green bluff just a blackened patch with charred stumps, was recrossed and the journey resumed.84
The bishop had motored by car to Little Red River Reserve. From there, he and Barker went by team and wagon, following the overland cart trail through “ruined forests.” Bishop Newnham was aghast at the ecological devastation: “On the way up the whole country seemed to have been burned over by the recent fires, and only blackened tree trunks, which had fallen or will fall within a year or so, remain in the once well-timbered area. The soil also has been deeply burned and even the muskeg had been on fire. The game suffered heavily, young birds and eggs being destroyed.” The roads suffered as well, he added. “In general all bridges over the Little Red and Sturgeon rivers have been burned and a number of the Prince Albert Lumber Company’s dams. The forest rangers are now [making] temporary repairs to the bridges and clearing the trails of fallen trees.”85 The devastation seemed complete.
Scientists and historians have pinned these fires to increasing agricultural expansion into the forest edge, where homesteaders and settlers, eager to clear land for farming, employed extensive brush burning.86 The Daily Herald, however, suggested that the 1919 fires had started in the forest reserves.87 Regardless of the origins, the devastation of the massive fire, aided and abetted by years of accumulated debris from logging and combined with a severe drought in 1919, put an effective end to the large-scale lumber industry at Prince Albert. The large companies abandoned their timber berths. The Prince Albert Lumber Company reorganized and became the Ladder Lake Lumber Company, moving its operations to eastern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, near Hudson Bay and The Pas. Local residents north of Prince Albert culled the fire-killed trees for firewood, posts, and telephone poles, and small logging permits continued to be issued for those areas untouched by the blazes, but on a large scale Prince Albert’s early commercial timber industry was finished.88
Conclusion
The importance of the lumber industry to the early development of Prince Albert cannot be overstated. Not only was it the major commercial industry in the region, but also its exponential growth—supported by the policies of the dominion government through its Dominion Lands Act and forest reserves—went hand-in-hand with the population explosion on the open prairie. As settlers poured into the prairie south to build an agricultural utopia, they required lumber in tremendous quantities to build houses, barns, schools, churches, businesses, and bridges. Although mills in British Columbia could provide longer and larger pieces of lumber and continued to ship products into the prairie region, local mills at the forest edge found a strong niche market. Saskatchewan’s Department of Agriculture noted in 1909 that “the lumbermen of Northern Saskatchewan are conveniently situated; as they have right at their door a market capable of consuming all that they can produce.”89 The edge provided the advantage: at the edge of the prairie, they were nearest to their largest market; at the edge of the forest, they could cheaply exploit the accessible timber. Yet, as Allan Kennedy’s remarks proved, that there was a lumber industry in Saskatchewan was not well known. Despite the size, scope, and success of the commercial lumber industry, its existence was and remains overshadowed by the power and presence of the prairie agricultural story. There have not been, to date, sufficient publications that tell the story of Saskatchewan’s colourful, dynamic, and dramatic early forest industry.
The lumber industry provided both small- and large-scale entrepreneurs with investment opportunities and profits. At the ecotone, several levels of edge use were clear: it was the commercial point at which the resources of the forest were funnelled to serve the prairie market, the hinge between boreal north and prairie South—the pemmican empire flipped. Yet those who lived at the ecotone built an economic and cultural landscape pulling from both forest and farm, a landscape of resilience and flexibility. Local First Nations combined forest edge pursuits of hunting and fishing with farming, logging, and providing goods and services. They were active participants in a diverse economic cycle that continued traditional seasonal exploitation. The surge of homesteaders on the heels of—and in contention with—the lumber industry brought the prairie/boreal cultural divide into question. Homesteaders moving north from Prince Albert looked to develop the cut-over forests into agricultural farms. But the assumption that these farms were developed on a “prairie” model is wrong. Northern homesteaders merged farming practices with contract work as freighters, lumberjacks, or fishers, as local suppliers of these industries, and as small-scale forest entrepreneurs. As dominion field naturalist John Macoun originally prophesied, the north Prince Albert region could encompass both the “field for investment” (the commercial timber industry) and “the home of the emigrant.” Homesteaders, like their First Nations counterparts, recreated the north Prince Albert landscape as home, bringing resilience through mixed farming and forest exploitation to create a unique forest edge culture.
Chapter Four
A Pleasant and Plentyful Country
Hudson’s Bay Company explorer Anthony Henday travelled into the western interior of North America on a scouting and reconnaissance trip in 1754. When he arrived west of the forks of the Saskatchewan River, he described “fine level land and tall woods. … I am now in a pleasant and plentyful country.”1 Henday’s description combined both an aesthetic comment (“pleasant”) and a practical one (“plentyful”). Both scenery and sustenance made their marks. Wood and good soil—“fine level land and tall woods”—filled the requirements of human occupation.
Henday’s description in some ways predicted an agricultural ideal built on a landscape prized for both its park-like beauty and its ability to support diversified agriculture. That ideal was mixed farming.2 A specific term, “mixed farming” referred to a farm that both grew grain and raised stock—dairy cattle, beef cattle, sheep, chickens, and pigs, for example—both for domestic consumption and, when possible, the off-farm market. By operating a mixed farm, rather than a monoculture (wheat) farm, a farmer could diversify the farm’s holdings and spread assets over a broad base. Diversification as a risk management strategy offered better resilience over time than othe
r farming operations, particularly the classic boom-and-bust cycle of wheat farming. A mixed farm was situated within (and became in and of itself) an ecologically mixed landscape that contained crop land, hay land, water, and timber. Continuing First Nations traditional cultural practices within an agricultural context, mixed farms—built at rich ecological/forest edge landscapes—were promoted as places of diversity and resilience.
The vast majority of studies on western Canadian agriculture focus on the wheat economy that became synonymous with the open plains.3 The economic, social, and cultural importance of the wheat boom—which drew thousands of immigrants to the prairie west—deserves much of the analytical attention that it has received. Its importance, though, has been overplayed. The monolithic wheat narrative has marginalized and distorted the role of mixed farming in developing the western interior of Canada and the relationship between farming practices and landscapes. The mixed farm versus wheat farm debate was central to the agricultural history of the western interior. Mixed farming was swiftly tied to landscape in Saskatchewan: while wheat farming typified prairie agriculture, mixed farming was pursued in parkland and forest edge environments. The ideological debate symbolized the contrast between opening the Palliser Triangle in southwestern Saskatchewan for agricultural settlement with the opening of the “new north” of the forest edge. Mixed farming also became entrenched in soldier and other forms of assisted settlement in the post–Great War period.
Migration to the western interior might have been drawn by the wheat boom, but Prince Albert promoters advertised the northern edge landscape as a resilient, prosperous, healthy, fertile, and beautiful alternative to the bleak, dry, open plains. When the two Districts of Saskatchewan and Assiniboia were (essentially) amalgamated to form one province, the concept of “Saskatchewan” came to include, and soon to be taken over by, the prairie/wheat identity typical of Assiniboia. Until that point (particularly in the promotional material of the Prince Albert Board of Trade and local newspapers), the District of Saskatchewan was routinely cast as a rich, lush river valley in contrast to the dry, open plains landscape of the District of Assiniboia. The words prairie and plain were not interchangeable prior to 1900. In a pamphlet issued by the Lorne Agricultural Society of Prince Albert in 1890, the prairie was defined as the “fertile belt” and described as “probably at one time a dense forest. It naturally inclines to produce timber; and where a prairie escapes the yearly fires for any length of time it speedily becomes overgrown with vigorous young aspens and willows.” This description became, sometime after 1900, the definition of parkland. The plain, on the other hand, “has doubtless been destitute of timber from the first,” and its meaning was tied directly to terms such as “desert” or the classic flat, treeless landscape of the south.4
As drought and other natural calamities hit the drier regions, migration within the Canadian west was based on two points: moving from treeless and dry land to forested and humid regions, and the difference between monoculture (wheat) and mixed farming. Dominion land surveyors and other government explorers characterized the north Prince Albert landscape as a mixed-farming region. Prince Albert promoters capitalized on the grain versus mixed-farming debate to exploit an identity that was decidedly not the prairie. Internal migration from one biome to another changed the face of farming in the western interior.
Wheat Farming Versus Mixed Farming in Historical Perspective
Agricultural historians have understood, in general, that prairie farms operated differently from farms at the parkland/forest edge. Land classification correlated directly to the type of agriculture that surveyors believed could be successful there. Sociologist R.W. Murchie, who wrote Agricultural Progress on the Prairie Frontier, explained that “it has been customary … to speak as though only two types of land existed … ‘good wheat land’ or ‘excellent grain land,’ while all other land which was available for settlement was characterized as ‘good mixed farming land.’”5 The Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture followed this general classification. A promotional booklet on Saskatchewan issued in 1909 divided the province into four distinct “zones”: the open rolling prairie, the mixed prairie and forest, the great northern forest, and the Far North. The prairie, in this delineation, was “the Domain of King Wheat,” but the mixed prairie and forest region (also called the park belt) was “splendidly adapted for mixed farming and for stock raising.”6 The pamphlet explained that “here the land is less easily broken up and the temptation to risk all in a wheat crop is thereby somewhat reduced.”7 The agricultural difference between prairie/wheat farming and parkland/mixed farming was reinforced in the Atlas of Canada map of 1950 (see Map 8), reflecting a continued cultural understanding of the connection between landscape and farm pursuits. The black soil of the parkland and the grey soil of the forest edge were known for their mixed farms. These landscapes usually contained water, hay land, and shelter in addition to crop land.8
The ability to grow wheat successfully, however, remained the primary criterion for agricultural land.9 As a result, economists and historians have been drawn to the wheat story, and agricultural success or failure has been defined by the landscape’s ability to support the wheat economy. Was wheat still important on a mixed farm? Of course, and even the most ardent mixed-farming literature or the boosterism of the Prince Albert promoters acknowledged that fact. The most common method of proving the worth of the local soil was to point to local farmers who had won regional, national, and international prizes for wheat. The Board of Trade averred that “the Prince Albert district is noted for the quality of wheat it produces and has not only gained the sweepstakes at the Columbus, Ohio exhibition this year and the first prize at Brandon from all the rest of Western Canada, but more recently an exhibit from this district won the $1000 prize offered by Sir Thos. Shaughnessy at the land show in New York.”10 This was a reference, of course, to Seager Wheeler of the Rosthern area south of Prince Albert. The Minneapolis newspaper the Northwestern Miner extolled Prince Albert’s wheat-growing potential in 1908. A front-page story gave a glowing account of the quality of the local grain for the Minneapolis flour mills, where the hardness of the wheat made for better-quality flour.11
Map 8. Canada, main types of farming.
Souce: Canada Year Book, 1950.
Hard red spring wheat, particularly new strains that had a shorter growing season, opened up new wheat lands in the western Canadian interior. Historian S.D. Clark, writing in 1931, examined the growth of the wheat boom. He argued that the scientific investigation of dryland farming techniques, including the development of earlier-maturing varieties of wheat, railway expansion, and the discovery of agricultural techniques and tools—such as summerfallow cultivation and the self-binding reaper—encouraged prairie wheat farms.12 Prince Albert boosters were quick to reassure their audiences that the northern regions could indeed successfully grow this key crop. Their messianic message, though, was that farmers at Prince Albert—with all the local advantages of water, shelter, and fodder—were capable of producing so much more than just wheat. Mixed-farming boosters were fighting an uphill battle, though: the astounding ability of the open plains to grow hard red spring wheat not only drew thousands of immigrants but also has been the central narrative for analysts of prairie history.
Agricultural historians John Herd Thompson and Ian MacPherson lamented the “over-generalizations many of us [historians] have indulged in in depicting an almost-monolithic prairie agriculture,” one that emphasized wheat, wheat, and more wheat on the open plains. “Future local studies, it is to be hoped, will look beyond our obsession with grain growing to the mixed farms of the park belt.”13 Historian Peter Russell agreed. By investigating the differences between farming practices on the semi-arid plains and those in parkland/forest edge environments, Russell, like Thompson and MacPherson, challenged historians and economists who categorized Saskatchewan’s agriculture as a wheat monoculture. He argued that “some farmers did rely heav
ily on their cash [wheat] crop to supply their subsistence needs, but that turns out to depend much more on where their farm was located.”14
Analyzing the agricultural census between 1911 and 1926, Russell showed that, “while wheat was the most commonly grown cash crop in most parts of the province in most periods, it alone did not determine ‘the standard of living of the great majority of Saskatchewan farmers.’”15 He provided an in-depth economic investigation of the connection between mixed farming and the more northern, parkland and forest edge, areas. Farms that contained forest land were more likely to have secondary field crops, particularly oats and barley (sometimes that acreage would be more than the wheat acreage), more stock, and more garden produce. Farms in the semi-arid regions were unable to diversify; in many cases, they were unable to grow even gardens, fodder, hay, or other subsistence crops because of low rainfall and poor soil. The landscape, devoid of wood for building or heating fuel, meant that plains farmers had to devote a much greater portion of available cash to buy it.16 Economist G.E. Britnell showed that open plains farmers spent between 10 and 15 percent of their cash on heating and lighting; in the parkland and forest edge, the number dropped to 3 percent. The ecological advantages (and limitations) of the forest edge environment encouraged the development of mixed farming.17