Forest Prairie Edge

by Merle Massie

  Figure 19. Paddockwood cordwood, 1926.

  Source: William James, from copy in the author’s collection.

  Cordwood was the basis of the ecotone’s local commercial success after 1924. It became the main local commodity, a bulky substitute for cash. Settlers brought the wood to town and piled it all along Main Street. Each pile was owned by a different resident. It could be traded to local stores for supplies, to each other in exchange for labour or services, and even to the local hospital, in payment of fees. Continued bartering eventually placed it with local merchants. A merchant’s pile would be sold to a cordwood dealer in Prince Albert or elsewhere and transported by rail.

  Cordwood exemplified the Paddockwood identity—and the north Prince Albert region more generally—as a hybrid place, at the juncture between prairie/farming and forest/resources. A barter item similar to the eggs, butter, and cream common to mixed farms, cordwood in some ways replaced the cash wheat crop of the prairie south. The difference was that cordwood was a local currency geared to subsistence needs and local barter situations, but could not be mortgaged. Banks and implement dealers were willing to offer loans based on future wheat production but not on cordwood production. Although cordwood drove the local subsistence economy and, in some cases, brought cash investment in farms, it was not conducive to long-term economic development.

  Prospecting and the Potential of Mining

  Prospecting for potential minerals and mines was a profitable activity in Canada throughout the late nineteenth century. Major finds in British Columbia and the Yukon, northern Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, and Manitoba spurred further reconnaissance trips into northern boreal and Canadian Shield landscapes. Gold fever in particular gripped the entire nation in the late 1890s. As the lure of the Yukon took hold and prospectors from all over the world were searching for the best route to Dawson City and the gold fields, Prince Albert merchants capitalized on the town’s “northern” identity, situating the town as a logical jumping-off point to more northern destinations. An 1897 pamphlet from the local Board of Trade advertised “Yukon Via Prince Albert: How to Get to the Klondike. The Safest, Best, and Cheapest Route to the Yukon Gold Fields.”53 The route was “unanimously recommended” by the Legislative Assembly of the North-West Territories in 1897. The pamphlet charted a route through Prince Albert, Green Lake, and Fort McMurray using the old fur-trade water highways. Each week Prince Albert newspapers reported Klondikers passing through.54

  Saskatchewan prospectors not aiming for elusive Klondike gold had much to keep them busy. Local reports of amber, silica, coal, and other commodities excited interest. Gold dredging in the North Saskatchewan River was pursued around the turn of the twentieth century, though it soon became clear that the placer gold recovered during the process barely covered expenses.55 Prince Albert newspapers reported prospecting activity, claim staking, and rumours of big finds with breathless excitement, always hoping for the next lucky strike. Mineral claims had to be registered at Prince Albert, an added advantage to entice this clientele.56 Local advertisers pursued the prospector dollar with zeal.

  Figure 20. Mandy Mine, 1917.

  Source: SAB, R-B3553-1.

  Prospecting was clearly related to tourism and local businessmen geared advertisements to this clientele while expecting future development. The Prince Albert Advocate reported in 1897 that “Capt. Bell and Mr. White were in town a few days ago last week, on their way through on a prospecting tour for gold in the limitless and untrodden country to the north. They are proceeding on their journey overland and by canoe with Indian servants and guides, expecting ultimately to arrive at Norway House, from there proceeding by boat to Winnipeg. ... The tourists expect to make some valuable finds of mineral in the country they are to traverse.”57 This story raised several key points. First, it showcased the growing self-identity of Prince Albert as the Gateway to the North, a natural point of departure for anyone heading into the forested wilderness north of the prairie region. Second, it reiterated the old fur-trade narrative of First Nations as guides, as experts in wilderness and forest navigation by canoe or trail. This role remained a complex combination of guide and servant, navigator and employee, but though the article explained the backgrounds of the potential prospectors the Indian men were not named. Such narrow-minded reporting, focussed only on the Anglo participants, was a common product of colonial thinking. First Nations were the labouring class, worthy of work but unworthy of name and respect. In many ways, early prospectors such as Bell and White viewed First Nations labourers as part of the “wilderness” scenery, akin more to trees and animals than to Anglo humans. It is also interesting that the newspaper could call the north “untrodden” yet acknowledge that the First Nations employees were “guides”—presumably, they had been there before. Third, the story presented a specific link between prospecting for potentially precious finds of ore and tourism. A tourist was someone who travelled to wild places to appreciate their scenic beauty; a prospector looked for sites of future potential wealth. Putting the two needs together shows the combination of sublime beauty and future economic potential.

  Map 11. New Saskatchewan prospecting route, 1928.

  Source: Regina Daily Post, 17 September 1928.

  While northern development may have slowed while the prairies filled with homesteaders, prospecting activity continued, particularly around Amisk Lake and Flin Flon on the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border. Caught up by a renewed northern fever in the 1920s, both federal and provincial governments initiated extensive reconnaissance surveys. To help northern prospecting options, the government blasted several large boulders out of the Montreal River to open it for heavier traffic loads and shorten portages. A well-publicized canoe trip by provincial attorney general T.C. Davis (originally a Prince Albert MLA) in 1928 showcased the new river route. Davis and several colleagues, along with their wives and four Indian guides, made the trip. Travelling overland from Prince Albert to Montreal Lake, the group canoed up the Montreal River to La Ronge, then down the Churchill River system to Amisk Lake, Cumberland House, and The Pas.58 Their trip capitalized on the growing resource development of the provincial north, such as the Rottenstone mine near La Ronge and the mineral development at Flin Flon/Creighton on the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border.

  Conclusion

  The northern surge showed Saskatchewan people flexing their muscles, broadening their resource base, and settling into the whole province rather than just the southern half of it. The resource potential of the northern boreal and Canadian Shield regions drew extensive interest from across the country. Freighters and commercial fishermen visited far northern points such as Reindeer Lake and Lake Athabasca on a more regular basis, and prospectors, trappers, and government survey teams could be found. By August 1929, the north was touted as the province’s—and the country’s—place of future wealth and growth.59 Fish, furs, and minerals in particular drew interest and investment.

  If the potential of the north lay wrapped in the dreams of investors and stripped from the Aboriginal inhabitants, internal colonization along the forest edge, or “colonization within Canada,” advanced the northern push. Space became place as people gained knowledge and flexed differential power. For those at the forest edge, such as the city of Prince Albert, the Gateway to the North led to increased development, community growth, and a close connection between on-farm and off-farm opportunities, all of which accelerated and energized the northern surge. The chance to draw on a mixed economic environment and its resulting combination of opportunities drew increased attention, not only from individuals, but also from government and business leaders.60 Although neither government nor industry could have predicted the importance of internal recolonization and development schemes at the boreal edge and throughout the north, the northern surge of the early twentieth century helped both government and industry to be at least partially prepared for the onslaught of internal migration that arose during the Great Depr
ession.

  The northern push of settlement and development in the western interior fascinated the editorial staff of Saturday Night magazine. It consistently reported on the “trek northward” throughout the 1920s. Not only was the northern surge an agrarian movement, according to Saturday Night, it also reflected a growing interest in minerals, timber, furs, and fisheries.61 For northern settlers, economic prospects included not only potential mixed-farm products but also other products drawn from the local forest edge landscape. Occupational pluralism combined farm income with wage, contract, or piecemeal work. There were extensive connections between the lumber industry (from winter work in the camps to spring lumber drives, work in the mills, food supply, or contract freighting) and local homesteaders. After the decline of the commercial lumber industry, completing the spur rail line through the north Prince Albert region in 1924 opened the cordwood economy, which allowed homesteaders to reap non-agricultural profits from their lands. Growth of the commercial fishing industry, as well as trapping and prospecting, led to a rise in overland freighting opportunities. Although many researchers have characterized the pursuit of off-farm income as an indication of the marginal nature of forest edge farms, those who recorded their stories in local history books viewed such income as a significant aspect, and part of the draw, of forest fringe life. Off-farm economic prospects melded with on-farm work to produce a local, occupationally pluralistic society. The concept of mixed farming at the forest edge adapted to include both on-farm and off-farm income—McOwan’s list of farm and forest products suitable for “poor man’s land.” The opportunity to earn a cash wage or its equivalent through the barter economy gave forest edge residents an added measure of resilience. The ecotone landscape supported a “mixed” farm that was much more than just a farm.

  By the late 1920s, provincial and national commentators boasted that the future of the province would be found in the north. In 1927, writer F.C. Pickwell quoted Member of Parliament (and former Saskatchewan premier) C.A. Dunning, whose new slogan was “Go North, Young Man,” which Saturday Night claimed was “more truth than poetry.”62 Yet there was poetry too. Striking scenery, green trees, freshwater lakes, camping, and fishing awaited travellers to the north. The north stood ready to turn tired and dusty prairie residents into intrepid and healthy tourists. Building on the contrast between the agricultural prairie south and the boreal forested north, tourism enticed travellers to northern Saskatchewan. Even if farms were full of trees and difficult to develop, or potential northern resources such as mines a distant dream, the northern forest still had something to offer: it was culturally remade as Saskatchewan’s own place of beauty.

  Chapter Seven

  Accessible Wilderness

  It was “the most interesting, the most unusual, and most beautiful holiday I ever had,” declared Christina Henry. In 1919, Henry (later Bateman), a clerk at the University of Saskatchewan registrar’s office in Saskatoon, went on a holiday. Not east to Ontario, nor west to Banff, nor south to the United States; instead, she went north, through the boreal forest and Canadian Shield to Lac La Ronge and Stanley Mission. Travelling with her friend, Nan McKay, whose father was the HBC factor at La Ronge, Henry gaily recorded a travel diary and took numerous photographs. They took a train from Saskatoon to Prince Albert, then bounced through a three-day trip via horse-drawn wagon up the freight trail from Prince Albert to the south end of Montreal Lake. Billy Bear, a Cree farmer, freighter, and businessman from the Little Red River Reserve, drove his wagon and provided the escort. From Montreal Lake, two more Cree men, Adolphus Ross and William Bird, canoed the women across the lake and up the Montreal River to La Ronge, a further four-day trip.1 Henry’s trip bridged modern and traditional transportation, from train to canoe to get to their destination. The core of the trip, though, flipped northern seasonality and use. McKay and Bateman saw the winter landscape of lumbering and freighting between Prince Albert and La Ronge through a new, summer tourist gaze.2

  Although western Canada was well known as a tourism destination for British sportsmen throughout the nineteenth century, sustained tourism development in the north Prince Albert region began after the introduction of northern trails, improved roads, and eventually motor cars. Henry’s 1919 trip offers a vivid snapshot of an exceptional transitional point in Canadian tourism history. At the time, local promoters were at a crossroads, in conflict with themselves, urging opposite uses at the same time: cut down the trees for lumber/cordwood and to make farms, or keep the trees as majestic examples of vigorous northern health and beauty, a landscape of relaxation and refuge. Balancing opposing development ideas meant judging each piece of land at the local level. Who owned the land, did it have good transportation, were the trees merchantable, was the soil good for farming, did the lake have fish? These questions became the guide. Setting aside swaths of territory for forestry reserves, parks, or farmland drew lines on a map that, in turn, had an effect on how the landscape looked and what it was used for.

  The north Prince Albert region is known today as Lakeland, a tourism destination with resort communities at Round, Sturgeon, Christopher, Emma, Anglin, and Candle Lakes and Waskesiu in Prince Albert National Park. In 2013, Saskatchewan set aside a further 11,000 hectares as a provincial park in the area.3 Modern tourism began in the north Prince Albert region at the turn of the twentieth century, when tourism literature across North America enticed urban residents to flee the concrete jungle to find a restful holiday in idyllic, green, rural surroundings. In a predominantly rural province such as Saskatchewan, this call had limited scope. North Prince Albert tourist promoters found their strongest voice exploiting Saskatchewan’s forest/prairie divide: treeless, dry, open plains versus watered, lush, boreal forest. Part of the reason was practical. Promoters wanted to keep precious tourist dollars at home, urging prairie residents to be patriotic, to “See Saskatchewan First.” The boreal forest became vacationland, “accessible wilderness” on the prairie doorstep. Recreational opportunities such as fishing, hiking, canoeing, and camping expressed domestic enjoyment, a nearby interlude from everyday life. Saskatchewan’s north was the original “staycation.” But the north/south contrast provided more than a mere marketing tool. It struck a chord of surprise and intrigue in tourists who did not know that Saskatchewan had anything to offer other than prairie. The opening of Prince Albert National Park in particular stamped Saskatchewan’s national identity in the boreal forest. Tourism painted a vision of Saskatchewan beauty, accessible and wild at the same time, a story to contrast and counteract its practical image of hard-working prairie wheat farms.

  Picturesque Prince Albert

  Future Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery came to visit her father in Prince Albert as a sixteen-year-old girl in the fall of 1890. Already a fledgling writer, Montgomery kept a diary to record her experiences. Prince Albert, she penned, was a “straggly” town, strung out along the south side of the North Saskatchewan riverbank for several miles. “Across the river,” she wrote, “are great pine forests, and the views upstream are very beautiful.”4 Her description of Prince Albert’s pine forest and river landscape as “beautiful” mirrored the thoughts of the Lorne Agricultural Society of Prince Albert. In the same year as Montgomery’s sojourn, the society published its advertising pamphlet Prince Albert and the North Saskatchewan. It confidently boasted that one of the most significant selling features of the region was its beauty: “The country is beautiful in its general appearance,” full of lakes, trees, and hills, notably different from the “plain country to the south.”5 Settlers in the north country were assured that their properties would enjoy added value in the “charm [of] the beautiful groves of aspen ... and in the abundance of small but refreshing ponds or lakelets, one of which is almost certain to be found in every settler’s ‘park.’”6 The society pamphlet presented a vision of a landscape remodelled and controlled, identified as “park” rather than “wilderness.” It also suggested that the beautiful and the picturesque
held an unknown but tangible economic worth.

  An Edenic garden or a park landscape built on British ideals has been well studied.7 Concepts such as picturesque and beautiful, as specific aesthetic comments on landscape, carried multiple meanings. Within the British context, owning a park, or land kept for enjoyment rather than economic benefit, marked the upper classes of society. Only the rich could own land whose sole purpose was beauty. In the colonial context, picturesque idealism was often combined with a sense of economic end-use or potential exploitative possibilities, such as farming. The picturesque ideal identified riches in good soil, water, trees, and game—beautiful but also necessary for colonization.8 Suggesting that the North Saskatchewan area was picturesque and park-like would have been immediately understood as representing its potential value for both beauty and future riches. The dual ideal of use and beauty would reverberate through both the mixed-farming literature and the development of tourism.

  A Sporting Paradise

  Although Montgomery and the Lorne Agricultural Society promoted Prince Albert’s beauty, the region had much else to offer. Lumber industrialist Captain Moore, who opened the first steam-powered mill in the district in 1879, found his way to the fledgling settlement first as a sportsman. On a hunting expedition across the west, Moore and his group stopped at Prince Albert to purchase supplies.9 He was just one of many British men of class, enticed by newspaper articles and brochures, visiting the Canadian west to hunt.10 Sportsmen-tourists created an imperialistic image of the old North-West as idyllic and Edenic, overflowing with game.11 Western Canada developed a reputation as a sportsman’s paradise, a tourist destination for the idle rich.12 In its 1890 brochure, the Lorne Agricultural Society promoted natural abundance, which meant both scenery and game: “The sportsman and the tourist will find within our borders all the keenest could desire. Game of all kind in abundance, and scenery which has already excited the admiration of the English and Canadian explorer.”13 Primed with such advertising, sportsmen and tourists arrived at Prince Albert with preconceived notions of a landscape both full of game and inherently beautiful.