Forest Prairie Edge

by Merle Massie

  At the turn of the twentieth century, the prairie south witnessed intensive immigration and the rise of the wheat boom—a different kind of yellow gold. A cute story appeared in the Prince Albert Times regarding the astounding growth of prairie towns:

  Apropos of the mushroom growth of new towns in the West, a locomotive engineer relates the following: “One day I was driving my engine across the prairie when suddenly a considerable town loomed up ahead where nothing had showed up the day before. ‘What town is this?’ says I to my fireman. ‘Blames if I know,’ says Bill. ‘It wasn’t here when we went over the road yesterday.’ Well, I slowed down, and directly we pulled into the station, where over five hundred people were waiting on the platform to see the first train come in. The conductor came along up front and says to me, ‘Jim, first we know we’ll be running by some important place. Get this town down on your list and I’ll put a brakeman on the rear platform to watch for towns that spring up after the trains get by!’”48

  As agricultural development took off on the prairie, Prince Albert developed a two-pronged approach: exploit prairie popularity by marketing its timber, and develop the local agricultural landscape.

  Agricultural settlement at Prince Albert, prior to 1904, was restricted to the land between the two branches of the Saskatchewan River. The exception was a pocket of settlement on the black soil found at Shellbrook, thirty miles west of Prince Albert on the north side of the river.49 As surveyors moved through the north country, lining timber berths and Little Red River Reserve in 1897, land was surveyed for homestead development in what became the Shellbrook country. Although the land was forested, the soil in the area was exceptionally rich. Dominion lands regulations regarding farming in forested landscapes were overruled. In time, the success of the Shellbrook settlement proved that the forested land north of the river could eventually become good farmland.

  None of the land directly north of the city had been opened for homesteading at the turn of the century. Except for the three First Nations land reserves (Sturgeon Lake Reserve No. 101, established in 1876; Wahpeton Dakota First Nation, set aside in 1894; and Little Red River Reserve, co-owned by the Montreal Lake and Lac La Ronge bands, set aside in 1897),50 north Prince Albert was designated as dominion forest land, carved into extensive timber berths surveyed primarily by township and range. In response to the explosion of prairie settlement, Prince Albert’s economic elite (along with the dominion government) had focussed their attention on lumber exploitation to serve the prairie market. Vying for the valuable wood basket around the Sturgeon and Little Red valleys, the lumber interests were intent on ensuring that potential timber regions were cruised, surveyed, and leased as timber berths—not homesteads. Land that had already been logged, however, could be opened for homestead settlement.

  As the timber berths retreated ever farther north and away from the immediate environs of the city, agricultural settlers, eager to try their hand at mixed farming in the aspen scrub, began agitating for homesteads in the north Prince Albert district. In 1904, the Prince Albert Board of Trade, in response to an increasing number of requests at the Land Office and to the board, began a determined campaign to open land north of the river for settlement.

  A letter from local MP T.O. Davis to Clifford Sifton, minister of the interior, suggested that railway lands north of the city should be opened up for Galician and Hungarian settlement. The arrival of Galician settlers sparked ethnic controversy in Prince Albert and district newspapers, evoking the ire of those who promoted British settlement. Eventually, the group chose land along the Garden River, between ten and twenty miles north of the city. Upon hearing news of the colony, the Melfort Moon wrote that, “if this is the same class that figures so prominently in the Winnipeg court records lately, we extend Prince Albert our heartfelt sympathy. We would advise our friends there to petition to government to increase the force of Mounted Police at that point, and see to it that a detail is on duty both day and night. Forewarned is forearmed.”51 Despite the ethnic controversy, the Board of Trade continued to push the dominion government to survey the land north of the river into quarter sections in preparation for homestead applications.

  Surrender of Little Red River Reserve

  The Prince Albert Board of Trade turned its land request and attention to what seemed like the easiest target: securing a surrender of the already-surveyed agricultural land of Little Red River Reserve No. 106A. The board asked MP Davis to “press the government to have this reserve thrown open for homesteading.”52 Political pressure led Minister of the Interior Frank Oliver (Sifton’s replacement) to order an investigation in 1906. Biased observers claimed that “the reserve is nearly all good land and that there is only one Indian living on it.” If there was virtually no one there, the Board of Trade declared, then perhaps the Indian Department could negotiate a surrender and open the land for settlement.53 In the meantime, the Dominion Lands Office and the Department of Indian Affairs were inundated with requests for information on the possible opening of the reserve.54

  The Department of Indian Affairs investigated the claims but was blindsided by a shocking revelation of greed and misrepresentation. Acting Indian Agent T. Eastwood Jackson sent an indignant four-page letter to the Secretary of Indian Affairs outlining a scene of gross misconduct. The farming instructor at the reserve, J.G. Sanderson, had been approached by a local real estate company that had offered him $100 cash if he would obtain a signed land surrender document from those living on Little Red Reserve. When he refused, a previous farming instructor, Patrick Anderson, was approached, and he accepted the bribe. He, along with T. Parker from the real estate company, proceeded to dupe 106A residents into signing a land surrender. When questioned individually by Jackson, Little Red residents replied that they had been told that the government was going to take back the land and that their signatures were little more than a formality. The men claimed that Anderson had also told them that they would be forced to go back to Montreal Lake to live. Little Red River resident Joseph Hunt noted with alarm, “I visited Montreal Lake twice during the winter, but I found that they were nearly starving: that fish were scarce, and game was scarce; that the people did not have enough to eat, and I do not want to go there.” Another resident, Samuel Charles, noted that Anderson told him that the northern bands did not need to see or sign the document; only the people on the New Reserve had to sign it.

  Jackson was horrified by these underhanded proceedings. He said, “I admit that it is annoying to see good land locked up from settlement within 35 miles from Prince Albert and that I have felt disgusted myself with the families residing on the reserve for not making better use of it.” On the other hand, “the utmost consideration is due to these aboriginal owners of this country. The influx of white settlers is bound to cause increasing scarcity. … In my opinion they should not be allowed to give up their reserve.” Jackson went on to defend both the rights of the northern bands and their astute ownership of Little Red:

  The search for timber and minerals and the needs of the fishing companies will cause the invasion of the North by railways which will take from the Indian his employment in the transport of goods and furs, and I would respectfully submit that our Northern Bands should not be robbed of the only chance their descendants will ever have when darker days come upon them of exchanging their precarious existence for the more certain and equally healthy livelihood of the farm. The greed for gain of a Real Estate concern should not be permitted to deprive them of the fruits of [their] forethought.55

  Jackson’s strong stand was supported by Archdeacon John Mackay. He pointed out that those arguing that the Indians were not making proper use of the land were totally wrong. Not only were there farming and subsistence activities on the reserve, but also, when the reserve was set aside, it was never intended for the current generation but for future generations.56 The question of current land use, Mackay declared, was moot.

  Unfortunately, Indian Affairs
had already asked Thomas Borthwick, who later became Treaty 10 commissioner, to inquire into getting a surrender. He approached the reserve’s owners, the Montreal Lake and Lac La Ronge bands, and succeeded. A handwritten surrender signed by the chiefs and councillors of both Lac La Ronge and Montreal Lake bands was sent to Ottawa. Borthwick, thinking ahead, also visited the band members actually living at Little Red and told Indian Affairs that he had promised that “the Indians residing on that reserve … should be allowed to retain the homes they had erected and the land they had begun to cultivate should they desire to do so,” under homestead quarter section surveys. He solicited “the distinct understanding that in the event of their subsequent abandonment of their location, the amount realized from the sale of their land should go to the credit of the band and only the value of their improvements to themselves.”57 Borthwick’s clarifications and negotiations proved that there was agricultural development on the reserve, more than enough to warrant special attention. A formal deed of surrender—not just the handwritten deed—was drawn up, but in light of the stated objections of Archdeacon Mackay and Agent Jackson, and the obvious controversy surrounding the actions of the real estate company, the surrender was cancelled.58

  Renewed interest from the younger members of the Montreal Lake and Lac La Ronge bands and a local scarcity of furs and game around Montreal Lake led to a planned exodus, particularly from the Montreal Lake region to the New Reserve. Those most interested in moving to Little Red Reserve had taken job contracts as freighters.59 Used to moving back and forth between the shield and the agricultural regions on the road that ran through the New Reserve, these men typified long-standing First Nations practice across the ecological edge. With limited agricultural help from Indian Affairs, some families from both Montreal Lake and La Ronge began to trickle in to join the families already established. The wishes of the Board of Trade for agricultural settlers in the north Prince Albert region were met, if not in the way that the board had wished.

  The Dominion Land Survey

  The second part of the campaign to open the north Prince Albert region to agriculture was to initiate a dominion land township survey. Homesteads could not be legally filed and registered until the land had been surveyed and marked by the quarter section. The process was expensive and time consuming, and the dominion was careful to initiate it only when there was strong interest.60 In addition, the region had been designated as Crown timber land, held apart from homestead settlement. To allow both kinds of landscape use (farming and timber harvesting) in the same area at the same time required a change in dominion intentions. The Board of Trade sent a telegram to Ottawa in 1906: “Delegates here representing five hundred families. Would settle north of river. Not sufficient land available.”61 The turn-of-the-century surge in homestead entries at the Prince Albert Land Office no doubt supported the Board of Trade’s demands. In 1900, only 300 homesteads were filed at the Prince Albert Land Office, for land between the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers and at Shellbrook. By 1903, almost 3,000 homestead entries had been filed, and further homestead land was scarce.62 The surveyor general approved the survey. But he added wryly, “a radical change must have taken place in the conditions around Prince Albert if fifteen townships are required for settlement north of the Saskatchewan River.”63

  Since the area opened for survey had already been extensively logged, neither the dominion lands agent nor the lumber interests registered any particular concerns about the policy change from forest to farmland. Extensive logging did not preclude farming. In fact, the logging industry was inextricably tied to the local homestead culture and probably would not have survived so successfully without it. Nearby farms provided both much-needed supplies and seasonal labour. The north Prince Albert region was beginning to be modernized and divided by the state according to principles of best use of the landscape: kept as forest reserves or berths or opened for farming.

  The timing was exquisite. A perfect storm of converging interests would play out in the north Prince Albert region after 1904. Prince Albert had shed its poor missionary post and frontier town image and was declared a city in 1904. The Board of Trade, looking to capitalize on the agricultural campaign (and continued resource development) north of the river, signalled its ambitions by hiring a full-time secretary to send the Prince Albert message to the world.64 Economic development from the railways and lumber mills, natural disasters on the open plains, and increased interest from the federal government soon had all eyes looking at the north Prince Albert region.

  The Killing Winter

  In the midst of the push to open homesteads across the river came the brutal winter of 1906–07. 65 A mid-November, three-day howler exploded across the northern Great Plains in 1906, stretching from the Great Lakes to the mountains. Blizzard followed blizzard, with only minor reprieves, wreaking havoc on both human and animal life.66 The terrible winter came after a long summer of strike and protest in the southern Alberta coal mines, initiating a coal shortage that complicated the chilly weather.67 With no chinook to soften the storms, the fuel situation escalated from a coal shortage to a coal famine. Freight trains were immobilized by the snow and extreme cold; the engines, already stressed by the cold, which cut their output by half, could not produce enough steam to power the locomotives through drifts, where they became hopelessly stuck.68 As the winter dragged on, the paralyzed railways left towns, villages, and cities across the Prairies stranded with sometimes extreme shortages.

  Although the impact of the coal shortage was noted with alarm by prairie newspapers as early as November,69 the situation was not as clear in Prince Albert, where costly coal was a secondary fuel source. Cordwood, cut from small timber limits, was more popular. By January, the city newspaper complained of minor shortages as freight trains were continually delayed. The Prince Albert Times reported on 17 January 1907 that “there is plenty of flour, meat, potatoes, and other staple articles of food, but luxuries, such as sugar, tea, and pepper and such are getting scarce.”70 Not long after this account, more information poured out of the prairie declaring the extent of the fuel famine and its repercussions. In early February, the Prince Albert Times expressed concern:

  The more we hear about the suffering from lack of fuel to the south of us, the more we feel constrained to offer our assistance. But how can we do it? Here we have plenty of fuel to supply all our needy neighbours to the south but we are powerless to lend aid. When we find even the railroads running out of coal, then we begin to realize in some degree the extent of the disaster that has overtaken some parts of the West. … There is talk of starting the old freighting system that antedated the railways. The freighters could take down fuel to the plains and bring back freight that is long overdue here. Meantime the CNR would do well perhaps to start burning wood in their engines on the Prince Albert branch.71

  The paper offered specific information, telegraphed from the town of Craik: “The fuel situation is horrible. J. Cole, a farmer, cried today when he found no coal here to take home to keep the family from freezing. C.C. Phillips, a farmer, has been burning manure. [The village of] Shipman has burned wheat for over a month. Mr. Brunt, in town, tore down his barn and outhouses for fuel. Three families at Long Lake have bunched together and are burning the other two houses. Some have been in bed for three days.”72 Newspapers across the country picked up the stories, both true and untrue. One family near Weyburn became a local legend. The Mountie who pushed through four-foot-high drifts to their remote homestead shack was surprised to find them alive: rumours had circulated for weeks that they were frozen in their beds.

  The consequences of that brutal winter played out in many directions. For the Prince Albert region, they invigorated advocates who believed that settlers would be better off taking homestead lands in an area where they could at least have access to fuel.73 Homestead registrations continued to be strong. The fuel shortage reignited Archbishop Taché’s cautionary warnings regarding extensive settlement on the
open plains. Taché, a resident of the western interior during its formative years, wrote Sketch of the North-West of North America in 1870. In it, he recounted some rather frightening experiences crossing the open plains in winter. In contrast to those who supported extensive prairie settlement, Taché offered a stinging indictment of such a scheme. No one could build a successful farm on the open plains, he argued, unless the farm or settlement was built where “the prairie touches on wooded country.”74 The scarcity of fuel, not the agricultural potential of the land, would be the limiting factor determining settlement potential. Dominion and provincial governments, shocked by the conditions of that brutal winter, seem to have reached a similar conclusion. The dominion government acted with uncommon alacrity to temporarily release prairie homesteaders from key homestead duties that winter, particularly the restriction of living for six months on the homestead. The fuel shortage led a shocked government to allow homesteaders to abandon their holdings and seek other shelter. Within certain sub-agencies on the prairie, where there were reserves of forested Crown land, the government temporarily rescinded the need to apply or pay for permits to cut fuelwood, opening the forests to desperate prairie homesteaders.75 Fuel, both levels of government agreed, was indeed a primary concern.