by Merle Massie
At railway points such as Big River or Prince Albert, the noise was deafening in the early winter. John Brooks, who homesteaded in the Meath Park area of the north Prince Albert region, recalled the scene: “Every train into Big River was now swelling the population of this distributing centre to the north. It was the third week in November, 1928 and the town was a hive of activity.” Everyone from commercial fishermen to freighters to “tie hackers,” who cut railway ties, “were everywhere getting lined up for a job, getting their winter gear or just waiting for enough ice to travel. Blacksmiths were a busy lot, their anvils’ ringing could be heard at all the major Companies’ barns where horses were being shod all round in readiness for the freight road.”24 This description underscored the economic impacts of northern freighting on forest edge communities. As an example of the scale of the industry, on 15 January 1919, sixteen teams left Prince Albert in one day.25 The Daily Herald reported each winter on the departure and arrival of freight swings, conditions along the trails and across the lakes, and news from the northern communities. The freight trails became a critical point of connection and exchange between the prairie south and the boreal north.
Individual freighters had two choices: they could hire their services to a freighting company as a teamster (driver) for a base pay of twenty to forty dollars per month, or sometimes one dollar per day, or they could become private contractors and use their own team and sleigh, negotiating with a supplier for rates based on load weight and distance. Professional freighting companies negotiated contracts with large businesses, then hired teamsters to take to the trail. The R.D. Brooks Company of Prince Albert, for example, held contracts with the HBC.26 Livery barns also took contracts, then hired freighters. A 1919 advertisement from Prince Albert read thus: “Wanted immediately: 20 or 25 teams for freighting to Montreal Lake, Lac La Ronge and Stanley. Apply W.C. McKay or Star Livery.”27 A private contractor with his own team and sleigh could expect to earn about $300 to $400 per trip. Most hoped to make two to three trips a season, each lasting from two to four weeks, depending on distance, ice pack, and weather.28 Private freighters looked to haul payloads in both directions to earn the most pay. Boxes were constructed to be “knocked down” to conserve space so that freighters could include them in their loads going north. After dropping off supplies, teams would visit local fish camps to load these boxes. Frozen fish, usually whitefish or lake trout, were hauled back and shipped to both Canadian and American cities. Each sleigh could carry about seventy boxes of fish, each weighing 150 pounds.29 Freighters sold the fish for between one and five cents per pound.
A high proportion of income for a private freighter went into horse feed, warm clothing, food, and other supplies for the trip. Farmers who already had feed, horses, and a good sleigh could earn more than those who had to purchase such goods. But the risks were higher too. The trail was a harsh way to make a living. Broken equipment, and dead or weakened horses, had to be replaced by the contract freighter out of his pocket. Men who took up freighting as a winter occupation took paying loads up the Montreal Lake Trail to La Ronge, Green Lake, or other points along northern routes. Soldier settler David Dunn was a typical example. He would take one to three loads north every winter as a way to earn cash to build his farm.30 Despite its risks and drawbacks, freighting fit well with northern homestead operations since the men were away on a freight haul for a shorter period of time than a winter commitment to a cordwood, tie, or commercial fishing camp. Wives and children left on the farms could manage with the help of neighbours.
Commercial Fishing
Overland freighting tied in with burgeoning commercial fisheries. In fact, the growth of fishing as a commercial enterprise led to an intriguing shift in freighting contracts. Hauling fish back for the large commercial fisheries or as private enterprise came to be viewed as the primary freight, offering the best profit. Other supplies going north were of secondary consideration.31 Commercial fishing began on lakes close to Prince Albert as early as the 1890s, when Candle Lake, Big Trout (Crean) Lake, and Montreal Lake were fished. As with the lumber industry, commercial fishing was a winter occupation. Before mechanized cold storage, fish were transported frozen. The Prince Albert Advocate reported in November 1894 that one William Spencer, “whose seventy-odd years of age seem to have made but slight impression in either his appearance, spirits, or powers of endurance,” recently returned from inspecting fisheries in the northern part of the district on foot. “He reports the fish very plentiful and the catch a profitable one,” the paper noted, with a combination of glee and awe. The paper also reported an interesting story that connected boreal water landscapes and the new inroads into farming:
A good fish story comes from the north. It seems fish are very plentiful in Montreal and surrounding lakes, and when the settlers there run short of hay, as they frequently do, the cattle are induced to eat fish by sprinkling salt over them, which the cattle lick, and in this way eat the fish for the sake of the salt. That is only to get the appetite for fish cultivated, however. After that the cattle become addicted to the “fish” habit and in this particular instance a sagacious old ox is said to have frequently gone down to the lake, broken open a hole through three feet of ice, and feasted to satisfaction on the fish which swam into the hole thus made.32
The growth of commercial fishing—for whitefish, trout, pickerel, and northern pike—led to the posting of a fisheries overseer at Prince Albert in 1893 to issue permits and ensure compliance with fishing regulations.33 Commercial fishing ebbed and flowed according to profits and environmental constraints. As early as 1909 there were complaints of overexploitation. A 1909 commission investigated the industry and made recommendations regarding season dates, net dimensions, licences, and other technical concerns. Cleaning and packing procedures, the demand created by the First World War, and improvements in cold storage and transportation led to higher prices and general expansion of the industry.34
During the First World War, northern inland commercial fishing grew. Prices for fish rose, allowing better profits and improvements, such as fish boxes and cold storage, that ensured a better end product. Between 1920 and 1940, the annual commercial production of northern Saskatchewan almost doubled.35 A newspaper article dated c. 1926 on the Prince Albert region trumpeted that “fishing in the northern lakes and streams is important and last year more than 5,673,650 pounds of northern pike, pickerel, trout and whitefish, valued at about $450,000, were shipped to the eastern markets. The output from this area comprises annually about ninety percent of the fishing activity of the province.”36 Fishing camps, strung out along large lakes such as Doré, La Plonge, Churchill, and Peter Pond, were operated by large commercial interests such as Big River Consolidated or Waite Fisheries. Local lakes, such as Candle, Montreal, Waskesiu, Crean, and Kingsmere, were also fished but less extensively. In 1919, there were 684 commercial licences and 842 domestic licences sold to fishermen. By 1929, those numbers had more than doubled.37 Like work in lumber camps, jobs in commercial fishing camps lasted for the winter months and suited primarily single men without extensive stock on their homesteads. The value of commercial fishing to the northern Saskatchewan economy was enormous: landed value of the fish regularly exceeded $250,000 per year throughout the 1920s.38 Commercial fishing was a major driver in the forest edge economy, providing employment both at fishing camps and through contract freighting work as well as economic wealth to Prince Albert.
Commercial fishing, however, was a “white” and southern industry, even as it exploited northern resources. After 1890, as nearby commercial fishing grew, through to the explosion of the industry between 1920 and 1940, commercial fishing undercut—even actively worked against—Aboriginal subsistence or small-scale commercial practices. Although commercial fishing could be measured against an economic standard of price per pound or as a percentage of the provincial gross domestic output, its measurement within northern Aboriginal communities was elusive at best. Fish was primar
ily a food source for both humans and, perhaps even more importantly, dog teams. As Lac La Ronge chief Lorne Roberts indicated during the Treaty 6 adhesion negotiations in 1889, dog teams were integral to northern transport—he requested new dog harness instead of horse harness. It was cheap, practical, and easy to feed fish to sled dogs, which thrived on the diet. Fisheries inspectors found this practice rather horrifying, a waste of potentially commercially valuable fish flesh. Cultural and economic practices differed, as did legal rights. Although subsistence practices were protected through treaty, government workers chose to code First Nations fishing practices as non-commercial and even detrimental to commercial industry. First Nations, for all intents and purposes, were excluded from commercial fishing, both as large-scale contractors and as hired labour, except in a supply role through freighting.39
The Forest-Farm Nexus
Between 1890 and 1919, the lumber industry was a major player in the regional economy at the forest edge. Rooted in the nearby, accessible, boreal landscape within transportation distance to Prince Albert, the lumber industry contributed to the growth of a labour class in Prince Albert as well as regional farming. Wage labour was an important, but too often underestimated, part of the homestead process.40 When a sawmill owner leased a timber berth, he required equipment and men to operate the berth and cut the logs. Depending on the size of the mill, the corresponding bush camps might be small or large. Men were hired in the late fall for the camps. Homesteaders from both the prairie and the local area would congregate in Prince Albert after harvest to sign on with lumber camps. There is no way to know the proportion of logging camp men who were from the prairie as opposed to those who took nearby homesteads once the land north of the river began to be opened up for settlement.41
Homesteading, or creating a viable farm, was a capital-intensive activity. Until a farm had enough land cleared and enough equipment available to farm the land intensively, it turned little profit. In the meantime, homesteaders required ready cash to make up the shortfalls from their operations, purchase groceries and supplies, or expand. Working in lumber camps throughout the winter was an acceptable option since wages were good and board was provided. A.R.M. Lower completed studies of the forest frontier of eastern Canada that provide a good overview of how the Canadian lumber industry operated.42 Two of his works offered his analysis of the peculiar interrelation between lumbering and farming. There remain limitations. The first book dealt only with eastern Canada, the second added the Maritimes and British Columbia, but neither offered an analysis of forestry in the western interior.
Land in Ontario was clearly defined as either forest or farmland, and the lumber barons of Ottawa, for example, were held by Lower to be of a higher sort. There the relationship between farming and lumbering mirrored what happened in the north Prince Albert region, where land was actively managed as either commercial forest or opened for homesteading. Small farms were eventually established in the cut-over areas of forest, supplying labour and goods to the camps. The farmer-lumberjack relationship in New Brunswick in the 1800s Lower described quite differently. There a farm contained a belt or copse of merchantable timber, and the ideal was for a farmer to farm in the summer and work his timber for profit in the winter, marrying the two on a small scale. This ideal was seldom reached, according to Lower, who scoffed at small-scale efforts and dismissed the whole enterprise as bringing “much harm to the province as a whole.” In some ways, though, the farmer-lumberjack, working his own land, bears some relation to the homestead-cordwood connection that grew in the north Prince Albert region after 1920.43
A few men, technically “squatters” on Crown Land, lived in the north Prince Albert region prior to homestead settlement in 1906, making their living as suppliers for large lumber camps. Two men, Pat Anderson and Mr. Vangilder, lived in what became the Alingly district between Sturgeon Lake and Little Red River Reserves. Anderson ran a stopping place on the trail to the Prince Albert Lumber Company camps at Shoal Creek (now the south end of Prince Albert National Park), providing hot food, beds, and a stable for the teams freighting to and from the lumber camps. He became the first postmaster. Vangilder also kept a stopping place, for the ice road from the Sturgeon Lake Lumber Company ran through his yard. He made extra money cutting hay in the area and selling it to the lumber camps, but he had to give up this practice when the land was surveyed and opened up to homesteaders.44
In 1907, the short-lived Edmonton-based magazine the Wheat Belt Review published an in-depth story on the lumber interests operating in Prince Albert. It gave a moral overtone to the connection between farming and lumbering: “The farm hand or rancher that has nothing to do in the winter months may, if he will, shoulder his axe and find steady employment in the logging camps until spring. There is no reason why any laboring man should be idle in winter. If he is idle it is because he does not care to work. There is no other town that can be called to mind that has the logging and the farming industry so closely allied.”45 Working in a lumber camp, in part to earn cash to build up a homestead, provided an important connection between farming and labour in the north Prince Albert region.
Homesteaders in the newly formed Alingly district east of the Sturgeon Lake Reserve and south of the Little Red River Reserve became intimately tied to lumber camps, providing stopping places, hay, and produce, working in the camps and on the spring river drives, and purchasing finished lumber.46 A high proportion of the food for the camps was supplied by local homesteaders, especially after 1906. Richard Dice, who recorded Alingly’s early history in an unpublished manuscript kept by the Prince Albert Historical Society, noted that “the Sturgeon Lake Lumber Company at what is now Deer Ridge and the Prince Albert Lumber Company at Shoal Creek and the Soup Kitchen was a splendid market for baled hay, oats, dressed beef, and potatoes in the settlement’s early days.” Men with supplies were welcomed at the camps and treated like kings: “We would unload, put our horses or bulls into their huge barns, feed them the company’s oats and hay, free of charge; eat at the company’s well-filled table, put up with the men in the bunk house and leave the next morning with a good fat check in our pockets.” The practice brought a measure of early investment: “Many thousands of dollars found their way into this settlement in the early days which was its real start financially.” Hay and oats for horses, milk and cream, eggs, poultry, pork, and beef were traded directly to the camps, providing a local cash market.47 The road to Alingly went east from the Sturgeon Lake lumber and freight road, instead of straight north from the city, further bolstering the connection between new farms and local lumber interests.
Other homesteaders travelled north and slightly east from Prince Albert up what became known as the “Sand Hill” road, ending at or near the large, shallow body of water known locally as Egg Lake. Homesteaders would break off these primitive roads to slash trails through the bush to their own homesteads. As more homesteaders arrived, the need for roads, bridges, and other municipal requirements (such as fence laws and herd laws as well as taxes and school boards) became more important. The district directly north of Prince Albert formed a Local Improvement District in 1910 but quickly became the Rural Municipality of Buckland No. 491 in 1911.48 The post office at Alingly was soon joined by post offices at Spruce Home in 1908, Henribourg in 1911, and Albertville in 1914.49 Farther north, the homesteaders in what became known as Paddockwood opened their post office in 1913. As homesteaders moved onto their quarter sections, post offices became the nucleus of small commercial centres, with livery barns, general stores, churches, schools, barber shops, and later mechanic shops and other commercial enterprises emerging. Not all of those who lived in the region farmed for a living.
The Cordwood Economy
Although the lumber camps and lumber businesses in Prince Albert provided excellent local employment, barter, or cash opportunities, extensive fires during the dry spring of 1919 effectively shut these businesses down, leaving settlers (along with their First Nations cou
nterparts) searching for other options. Possibly the most popular option was to cut and haul cordwood (firewood).
Paddockwood, and other forest fringe towns, capitalized on a continuously growing prairie fuel demand. It was, in many ways, a double-win situation for forest edge farmers: the land had to be cleared of trees in order to farm and gain patent, and cash could be made from selling the logs and timber. Settlers pursued this industry either on their own, cutting from their own homesteads, or working for a cordwood contractor who leased and operated a cordwood berth, similar to the old timber berths. Such jobs were paid by the month or as piecework.50 The cordwood industry was more profitable closer to the city. Heavy hauling over long distances—Prince Albert was at least twenty miles away—meant that profits were low. The private cordwood industry did not explode in the new settlements until the coming of the railway to Henribourg and Paddockwood in 1924.
In 1926, Prince Albert commercial photographer William James travelled to the “end of the steel” at Paddockwood. The little village, with its four false-front frame buildings and assortment of log shacks, was the last village on the new CNR line, but that was not its claim to fame.51 What brought James to Paddockwood that cold winter day was cordwood, stacks of firewood for sale and barter, piled along the tracks and down the main street in every direction. To capture the sight, James climbed onto the railway car to snap a panoramic view of Main Street, cordwood, and a countryside fast becoming denuded of its trees.52