Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

CHAPTER 3

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  SASKATCHEWAN PIONEERS

  Pioneers in the Family … Bookstore Tales … David Carpenter, Author and Teacher … Saskatchewan’s Adopted Son … Near the Bessborough Hotel … Just a Regular Guy Vanderhaeghe … Mordecai and Guy … Leaving Saskatoon and Finding George Bain’s Lilac … Spreading Time for Sarah Binks … The Festival of Words in Moose Jaw … The Mae Wilson Theatre … Birding with Trevor Herriot … Finding W.O. Mitchell’s Home

  * * *

  “Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.”

  John Diefenbaker used to tell the story of two bewildered tourists crossing Canada by train who peered out of the window at a night stop and asked a man on the platform where they were. When they received that two-word answer they commented, “Well, they obviously don’t speak English here!”

  It’s true that the names came from the Cree language. But it’s also true that they’ve been speaking English in the area for quite some time now. Certainly, members of my family were speaking a Scottish-accented version when they arrived in Saskatoon on Hallowe’en night in 1901. Jean Young, of Stewarton, Ayrshire, was my grandmother’s sister, and when she married Archibald Wallace Robertson they set out at once for the Canadian West, to live and work in Saskatoon for three years.

  In 1904, a year before Saskatchewan became a province, they “filed” on a homestead near Arelee, northwest of Saskatoon, roughly where Eagle Creek runs into the mighty North Saskatchewan. There was a little money (from Scotland) in the family, so they were able to hire help from the nearby “Russian” settlement. But they faced the usual harsh pioneer problems. The family history, written by their son Archie (the man who sponsored my 1967 entry into Canada), reads in part: “In 1906 the folks had a bit of a set-back when the horse disease, Glanders, went through the district. A veterinarian and a policeman rode through testing all horses. Any that failed the test were shot on the spot. Dad was left with one foal.”

  This, please note, was in a world where horses were needed for everything from ploughing to harvesting the wheat, and even for getting off the farm. In the words of Archie’s brother, Tom (Thomas Young were his first names, just like my own father), to get to the Raspberry Creek School, “We walked the four miles to school, and in the winter we didn’t attend until we were old enough to drive a horse ourselves.”

  They had other prairie pioneer problems. “With a sod roof,” Archie recalled, “a heavy rain would come through a couple of days later.” On one occasion, a prairie fire got out of hand. An ember blew across the fire guard line, and burned down the barn.

  Most dramatic of all was the time father Wallace took a horse-drawn load of grain in the sleigh across the frozen North Saskatchewan to Radisson. He almost made it. Then the ice broke, and the team and the sleigh went through. Fast work allowed him to get the pin out, and the horses and he were able to scramble ashore. But all the grain was lost. As he waded through the chunks of ice, I assume he didn’t have time to reflect on the irony that he and his father-in-law, Thomas Young, who had been a very prosperous Scottish grain merchant, were at opposite ends of the same business. The shards of ice cutting his shins would have shown him who was at the sharp end.

  In Scotland we grew up with these tales of our Saskatchewan cousins, and welcomed the family when they came back. My father’s cousin Ian, for example, spent his RCAF leaves with my parents in Dunlop, until he failed to return from a bombing raid in 1943. That was the year of my birth. He was twenty years old.

  We followed with interest as the family spread to the other Western provinces, but Saskatchewan was the home base, and I’ve always felt at home there. One notable moment for me was joining my cousin Bill on the tractor when we combined oat straw at the farm, until we were interrupted by an October snowstorm. Ah, Saskatchewan.

  My Stories About Storytellers show in Saskatoon was hosted by the kindly folks at McNally Robinson, at their store on the southeast side of town. As you step inside the store you know at once that Paul and Holly and their people have succeeded in what all good independent booksellers strive to achieve — the sort of clubhouse feel that makes the place a hangout for intelligent folk in the local community, a place full of interesting events, from children’s book readings to guitar concerts — or even former publishers chatting about their authors.

  Paul and Holly are so good at this that I once said grandly that what Canadian publishing needed was more McNally Robinson bookstores. But bookselling seems to require many local variations on a formula successful elsewhere. The great success of the stores in Winnipeg and in Saskatoon is balanced by the closure of their store in downtown Calgary and in far-from-downtown-Toronto Don Mills.

  Time for a digression in praise of booksellers. It’s a tricky business, running a bookstore. Let me tell you a story, from my early days of authorship. Being a first-time author is a humbling experience. You are pathetically grateful for any praise from readers. Sentences like “I love you and want to bear your children” or “Congratulations, this is the Lotto Corporation calling to tell you that you have just won a million dollars!” pale in significance compared with the magic words “Hey, Doug, I’m really enjoying your book!”

  That was the greeting I received from Ron Graham (the well-known author and, obviously, highly intelligent and discerning reader) as I entered Toronto’s Massey College. He could have followed up with a request for a loan, certain of success, and I would happily have stooped to shine his shoes. In fact, I was so thrilled that I went on to confide to him my shy first steps as an author, doing things like trying my hand at autographing books in a store.

  He told me of his first visit to a bookstore to see a pile of his just-published first book, lying there, throbbing. He hung around, sensing that something was bound to happen. Sure enough, a young man, browsing through the store, came to his book and picked it up. He leafed through it, read a couple of passages, and then, to Ron’s almost audible horror, put the book down and walked away. A minute later he came back, and started to leaf through it again. Ron, quivering with excitement and unable to stand the suspense, was at the point of going up to him and offering to buy the book for him. Before he could do that, however, the young man looked around, slipped the book into his bag, and walked briskly out of the store.

  Ron, left standing there with his mouth open, is still not sure what he should have done. Being an author is hard. And being a bookseller is very hard.

  Another story: I once dropped in on Book City’s Danforth Avenue store, fresh from buying Tofurkey for the vegetarian troublemakers around our Christmas table. The elder statesman of the Toronto chain, the eminent Frans Donker, happened to be in the store, and greeted me warmly. He urged me to sign the two copies of my book on hand, then went looking for a third copy out on the shelves. He returned, shaking his head over that copy. The flap had been carefully folded over to mark a place two-thirds of the way through the book. Some anonymous browser had apparently been working his or her way through the book, and was nearing the end — without any messy expenditure of dollars or the risk of overdue fines at the local library.

  Or this next story. In March 2014, the Book City branch on Bloor Street closed down. This was a source of sorrow for Toronto book-lovers, but especially my family, because my daughter Katie had enjoyed her summer job there. But now for the drama. In the words of the Toronto Star: “Lightning hit a metal newspaper box outside the front door about fifteen years ago, shot down the store’s centre aisle to the raised desk at the back where it fried the printer and crashed the computer system. No one was hurt. Customers still talk about ‘the orange ball of fire.’”

  The life of a Canadian bookseller. It goes with being part of “The Perilous Trade.”

  Among the people who risked their lives, stepping into a bookstore, to see my show that night in Saskatoon was the locally based author David Carpenter. I’ve never had the pleasure of editing any of Dave’s more than a dozen books (novels, s
hort story collections, essays, memoirs, even a poetry book, and most notably God’s Bedfellows, Writing Home, and Courting Saskatchewan) but I’ve admired “Carp’s” role as a central figure in the province’s writing life, and we’ve known each other so long that I can’t remember when we met, although I know that he had hair then. He taught for many years at the University of Saskatchewan, and on that famous weekend at Old Fort William in Thunder Bay, I even saw him in action.

  Like Jack Hodgins (whose class I’ve also visited, and who once taught Dave), he’s a natural teacher. It was humbling for me to see the difference between someone like me, who gets up and talks (interestingly, I hope) about writing, and a true writing instructor who works from a carefully designed plan, the product of years of hard thought and practice.

  Dave’s a very genial fellow, always good company, and he chuckled happily at my show that night, along with a select crowd of friends, including Dr. Stuart Houston (who has banded more than 140,00 birds over the years, and knew Bob Symons well), and relations like Peg Robertson, whose email includes the handle “cowdoctor.” But it came later, in fact, in his role as the editor of The Literary History of Saskatchewan (2013) that David paid me a more serious compliment: he invited me to contribute to this important Saskatchewan book. His written dedication in my copy says, “Thanks for joining us.” It was a great pleasure for me to write the entry about my very first author, R.D. (Bob) Symons, of Silton, Saskatchewan. The honour of being appointed as a sort of adopted son of the province was even greater.

  Now, this “adopted son” stuff may sound like sentimental nonsense coming from a hopeless romantic who took his kids to lie in the Métis rifle pits at Batoche; or to stand beside the buffalo rock near Eagle Creek, to feel the waxy surface of a rock rubbed smooth by thousands of bison down through the centuries; or to climb down from the level prairie near Prince Albert to the deep trench where the North and the South Saskatchewan rivers join at The Forks, in order to watch the swirling river flow silently in one wide stream all the way to Hudson’s Bay. But the province that featured in so many letters to our house in Scotland has always felt like a home to me, and has welcomed me.

  For example, the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild once invited me to come in and address their Annual Meeting. (That year it was held at the Hotel Saskatchewan in Regina.) In the past I’ve been welcomed as a visitor to Robert Kroetsch’s writing class at “Fort San” (you’ll meet this gentle, soft-spoken, bearded teacher and writer later, when he roars into action to tackle a wild elk in Banff), and to the Sage Hill writing group farther up the Qu’Appelle Valley (where I lent my enthusiastic voice to support Philip Adams when he drilled into the writers there the vital lesson that every reading they’re invited to give is a performance, and must be polished till it becomes a professional one). I’ve served as a jury member for a Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild award. I’ve even been received informally in the premier’s office by Roy Romanow, thanks to our mutual friend, the excellent Gail Bowen. But all of this pales beside being honoured by Dave, and Nik Burton at Coteau, when they invited me to take part in helping to write the comprehensive literary history of Saskatchewan, which triumphantly came out in 2014 with a proud assist from me.

  Between downtown Saskatoon and the river stands the grand old Bessborough Hotel, full of literary memories. I and McClelland & Stewart’s gifted designer, Kong Njo, set up shop there in 1998, after W.O. Mitchell’s death. The other members of our team were Orm and Barb Mitchell, there to select the text from W.O.’s work that would enrich a large book entitled W.O. Mitchell Country, based around landscape photos taken over the years by the remarkable Courtney Milne.

  Courtney was there, in from nearby Grandora, with his partner, Sherrill Miller (“researcher, writer, and fellow-traveller extraordinaire”). Much more important, though, was the fact that this famous photographer, the man behind successful books like Prairie Light (1985) and The Sacred Earth (1991), was there with many fine photographs — more than 18,000 of them!

  Day after day, with me in the role of Solomon, we went through a screening of all of Courtney’s slides, choosing the 200 that would appear in the coffee table book, with Orm and Barb choosing the selections from W.O’s writings that would blend best with these fine, never-before-published photographs. It was as hard as you can imagine, but when Kong and I flew back we knew that we had an exceptional book to publish, which we did, in 1999. It was very popular and very beautiful, and is still. This “magical blend of text and pictures that is greater than the sum of its parts,” is a fitting memorial to two great artists, Mitchell and Milne, both sons of Saskatchewan.

  Just south of the Bessborough stands the courthouse where on Tuesday, November 6, 1984, Colin Thatcher (powerful rancher, ex-cabinet minister in the Saskatchewan government, and son of premier Ross Thatcher) was found guilty of arranging the murder of his wife, JoAnn. It was an amazing story, and it took up months of my life. Maggie Siggins was the Regina-based author with the courage to take on the book, when many other writers in the province were nervous about dealing with Colin Thatcher’s story. (Thatcher, you may recall, later lost his appeal for early parole when his RCMP escort informed the court hearing that he had just threatened her.) In recognition of the scale of the case we gave the 1985 book the title: A Canadian Tragedy (with the subtitle: JoAnn and Colin Thatcher — A Story of Love and Hate). It was, and remains, a remarkable story of a justice system unable to deal with one of its own (“Surely he would never . . .”), a man who would go on breaking rules, until a woman was dead. A superb book.

  Later, when Maggie came across another murder on a Saskatchewan farm, the murder itself seemed a little too uneventful to make a whole book. Maybe, Maggie and I decided over Chinese food, the setting — the farm itself, down through the years — would be worth researching as the basis of an interesting book. Maggie set to work and struck gold, finding that successive waves of Canadian history had washed over this one, typical farm. Revenge of the Land: A Century of Greed, Tragedy, and Murder on a Saskatchewan Farm won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction in 1992. There is more than one way to shape a good story.

  Just north of the Bessborough (and before you reach the Mendel Gallery, and the colony of White Pelicans on the river) is a fine park, with one of the most surprising First World War memorials I have ever seen. It shows a young man, in his team uniform, standing with his foot on a soccer ball.

  It commemorates the young sportsmen — in this case, soccer players — who rushed to join up in 1914. I’m proud that Daniel Dancocks wrote for me a fine, bitterly titled book about the early days of that war: Welcome to Flanders Fields (1988). Young Canadians were so excited by this great contest in Europe that many were rushing, as one of them wrote, “to get in on the fun.”

  That soccer statue hits me hard, because soccer, or “football,” played a large role in Gibson family history. My great-grandfather, Robert Gibson, must have been an amazing man. A fatherless boy, born out of wedlock, he somehow rose in Victorian Scotland to become a factory owner in the town of Kilmarnock. “Hannah and Gibson” made tweed (a fine Scottish tradition) and were so successful that one of Robert’s sons was stationed in Denver, selling to the American market. (I later found his grave there.)

  Another son, Robert (my grandfather), was his sales manager. But this factory owner’s son was not only a recognizable rich kid in town, with a factory’s name attached to him. He was also a gifted soccer player. So gifted, in fact, that he played at the top level in Scottish professional soccer, turning out for the Kilmarnock team against the big football teams like Rangers and Celtic.

  This displeased his father, who knew that there were no sales managers in the tough world of Scottish football, peopled by former miners and steelworkers. In that world, his father knew, his son would be a marked man. Some day, he warned, they would get him: he really should give up playing the game, be sensible, and settle down. But young Robert, who still lived at home,
defied his father, and kept on playing for Kilmarnock, in the world of roaring crowds, flying boots, and crunching tackles.

  One day his father’s warnings came true. In the course of a big Saturday game, “they” got him, and a flying tackle broke his leg.

  In those days before emergency wards and plaster casts, he persuaded his pals to take him to a bone-setter. When the leg had been set, he then persuaded them to carry him home, and set him up on the couch in the living room. His plan was to conceal his injury from his father, and to crawl about secretly, as required, until his leg healed.

  The fierce old man (a town councillor and a Justice of the Peace, and such a power in the Liberal Party that when Prime Minister Gladstone’s nephew came to Kilmarnock to run in an election, he stayed at the Gibson house) arrived home from his workaholic day, armed with the evening paper. How did the game go? My grandfather, from the couch, shrugged a non-committal reply. His father unfolded the hot-off-the-press paper.

  Silence.

  Then an explosion.

  “It says here you broke your leg!” Not for the last time, a member of the Gibson family found that the power of the press can be very inconvenient.

  First, the way to pronounce Guy Vanderhaeghe’s name. It rhymes with “Buy Van Der Haig.” Some people are thrown by the Flemish “. . . aeghe” (especially when it’s pronounced Flemish-style, with lots of throaty phlegm involved) and give “Guy” the French sound. In reality, our man is just a regular Guy.

  But he is also a superb writer, one of Canada’s finest.

  I don’t have a chapter on Guy in my Stories About Storytellers book. That’s because I restricted that sort of lengthy treatment to authors whose work I actually edited. Guy worked with Anne Holloway and then Ellen Seligman as his editors, never with me. But I’ve been involved with publishing him, right from the start. And during that time he’s always been based in Saskatoon.