by Joan Soggie
Prairie Grass
By Joan Soggie
Digital ISBNs
EPUB 9780228610281
Kindle 9780228610298
WEB 9780228610304
Print ISBNs
BWL Print 9780228610311
Amazon Print 9780228610328
Copyright 2020 by Joan Soggie
Cover art by Michelle Lee
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book
Dedication
To all the generations of prairie people, past, present and future, Indigenous and Newcomer, who know and guard the grasslands.
Acknowledgments
My gratitude and thanks:
To Sharon Macfarlane and Dorothy Bird for their insightful comments on an early draft, and to Nancy Bell, my BWL editor, who pushed me to make it better.
To my grandmother Alpha Estelle Dahlby Bothner who, more than hundred years ago, wrote the meadowlark song for her children.
To granddaughters Ella Crowhurst, for advice on millennials, and Saskia VanWalsum, whose illustrations grace chapters 17, 23, 24 & 26-29.
And to my parents and grandparents for their love and their stories.
BWL Publishing Inc. acknowledges the Province of Alberta for their Provincial Operating Grant for Publishers, for its financial support,
Chapter One
Gabby (2012)
The old man spoke softly. I leaned forward in my chair, straining to catch his words.
“There is one thing you have to understand, before any of this can make sense to you,” he said. “Your generation thinks it all began with the towns, the railroads. Or with the homesteaders. The Pioneers.”
When he spoke that last word, his mouth twitched as though he wanted to grin. Or belch.
He took another rasping breath and his words took on a stronger emphasis. “But you gotta remember this. Before anything else, there was the land.”
He droned on, almost in a monotone. If there was anything worth listening to, I could catch up on it later, when I reviewed the recording. I tuned out and let my mind drift as I studied the wrinkled old man sitting in the wheelchair before me. His back was bent, his arms ropy with hardened sinews under the age spots. The land had certainly left its mark on him, on those still-calloused hands and arthritic joints and etched wrinkles. Just as he, and others like him, had marked the land with their fields and fences and roads.
Mr. Tollerud agreed to this interview willingly. He said to me, the stories he wanted to tell were history, not just his personal story. Any private doubts I had about the importance of this project were not held by Eric Tollerud. For me, it was a job that gave me freedom to write, maybe to nudge my career path in a new direction. Anyway, it would look good on a resume. For him, it obviously meant a lot more. My problem would not be, as some of my associates had complained of their subjects, in getting him to talk. I guessed my biggest difficulty would be in getting him to talk about what the Centenarian Project wanted to hear.
The mandate was clear. After Diane verified the dozen centenarians whose names we had been given were all in fact a century old, and that they and their families were willing and able to participate, she gave each of us the names of two or three with whom we were to conduct interviews over the next weeks. Mr. Tollerud’s was the first name she provided me with. This was now the second interview. And it seemed the old fellow had decided to take control of the process himself. Without waiting for me to begin asking our list of carefully prepared questions — How would you describe the ethnicity of your family? When did they come to Canada? — he had launched into his own narrative.
“You want to hear about the old days, the pioneer days. Well, my folks were pioneers, and since I came to this country with them, I guess that makes me a pioneer in a way, too. And let me tell you, anyone who thinks that this land was just given away to us doesn’t know a thing. The government didn’t give anything away, except maybe to the railway. Homesteaders could be dried out or hailed out, lose all their cattle to a killing storm or all their children to bad water. It didn’t matter a whit to the government of the day. The law said that after filing on your quarter section you only had a certain amount of time to break eighty acres of prairie, plant a crop, build your house and barn. To the value of five-hundred dollars, mind you, no small sum a hundred years ago. And they had to live on that land for at least six months of every year for three years. Then, and only then, would they get clear title to it. Lots of people tried and failed. Another family tried to homestead our land in aught-three or four. They lost their oxen to a prairie fire; their time ran out before they got the land broke. So, they moved on. When my parents came from Minnesota, that section was open. After my Dad saw what it was like, he walked all the way to Sask Landing and hitched a ride to the land office in Swift Current to file on it. Before someone else could beat him to it. One man’s luck, another man’s sorrow.”
He stopped talking for so long I reached for the pause button.
“Maybe that was the government’s biggest mistake, making that rule. Forcing homesteaders to break up the land. When you think about it, it just doesn’t make sense. That grassland fed herds of bison for thousands of years. It could have fed cattle just as well.”
I waited as he collected his thoughts.
“Anyway, one good thing, some people know good grazing land when they see it. I guess it was when the railroad reached the land further south of here, late 1800’s. Wolf hunters or drifters came through, talked to the half-breeds and Indians. Word got out there was good grass here in the western prairies. Some ranchers from the States came north looking for grazing land. Just a few years before my folks and other homesteaders began trickling in, some Texans got a big fat grazing lease from the government.”
“Texans?” I asked, sounding skeptical even to my own ears.
He grinned at me.
“That’s right, Texans. They’d asked for the moon, and almost got it. A hundred and fifty thousand acres of prime land right alongside the South Saskatchewan River.”
“That does sound like a lot of land!” I interrupted. “Can you tell me what that is in square kilometers? Or hectares?”
Mr. Tollerud snorted, and said, “Well, you do know what a section is, don’t you? That Pradera Ranch out of Texas got over two hundred and thirty sections. More than two hundred and thirty square miles.”
My iPad gave me the same answer and converted that number to square kilometers. That Pradera Ranch got a big chunk of land, alright.
I recalled Diane’s advice in yesterday’s email. “As you talk to the old timers, you may be surprised at how events outside their own experience explain their history. You’ll begin to see gaps in the story. Watch for opportunities to guide the conversation to fill in the information you need.”
I certainly did want more information. Besides, this seemed to be a topic the old fellow was happy to pursue.
“This Pradera Ranch — why did they choose this particular place? Miles away from any settlement, as you said, and on the opposite side of the river from the railroad. So, no bridge?”
He shook his head.
“It couldn’t have been easy for them to get there.”
The old man launched into a story that rolled off his tongue so easily, I thought to myself, he’s told this before. Often.
“In the years after the last buffalo were killed, the hills along the river were pretty much empty. Oh, the Jackson horse outfit had their headquarters in a dug
out along the river and ran a bunch of horses north of the Landing, but other than those horses and a few cowboys sent in to round them up once or twice a year, no one lived here. The antelope and coyotes had these hills all to themselves.”
“It was the spring of the year, nineteen-aught-three. Lucas Scott came north scouting for grazing land for the Pradera Ranch in Texas. Anyway, when Scott saw this country, the Coteau Hills and the river breaks, he wrote back to his bosses, ‘Grass grows right to the top of the mountains, and you’re never out of sight of water.’”
Tollerud grinned. “Course, being a Texan, he had to exaggerate a little, turn those hills into mountains.”
Later that afternoon, after saying goodbye to Mr. Tollerud and pushing his wheelchair back into the activity room, where the only activity was a game show on the TV, I headed back on my hour-long drive to the city. I’d driven the same route this morning, barely noticing the blur of green fields and brown hills. This time I tried to imagine how it would have looked when the old boy was my age. Not quite a century ago, but a good eighty years in the past.
I mentally reviewed what I’d learned about the region. As a transplanted Easterner, I was aware of serious gaps in my understanding. The prairies had been, to me, just a tedious two-day drive of flat fields and huge sky sandwiched between the pretty lake-country of Manitoba and the gorgeous foothills of the Rocky Mountains, peopled by characters straight out of a TV sitcom. This past year had opened my eyes to local sensitivities. I had begun to limit terms like “boring” or “monotonous” in reference to the landscape. Or the people. And to even occasionally find a strange beauty here.
Driving across ranch country these past few weeks, I felt myself drawn to these vast open spaces of sky and land. That may have something to do with Andy, the current leading man in my life. Andy, the farm boy cum archaeologist. Andy of the broad shoulders and ready laugh. Andy, the avid hiker. His face glowed as he described boulder-strewn hills and steep valleys and strange sandstone formations. I liked his enthusiasm as much as I liked his mischievous grin, his lanky, athletic frame, and his willingness to argue with me about anything under the sun. I wanted to get out and explore those hills with him.
But it wasn’t just the scenery that had brought the original settlers here. It was grass that had fed the herds of bison, and it was grass that lured the ranchers, prairie grass made up of … how many different species? At least 150? I could only recall a few of the names I’d read. Needle and Thread grass, wheatgrass, blue grama.
I parked my Aveo in my designated spot and walked up a flight of stairs to my scantily furnished apartment. Not much of a place to call home, but good enough for the months I planned to spend in this small western city. I opened the door to my balcony, got myself a cold drink, then settled gratefully into my deckchair and Googled “blue grama.”
Grama — the Spanish word for grass.
I picked up my new sketch pad/journal and wrote its title on the cover. Another one to add to the trunk stored at my parents’ house, half full of notebooks accumulated since childhood, each labelled with a title reflecting my consuming interest of that year or week. Using the illustration shown in the online guide to Common Range Plants of Southern Saskatchewan, I made my own sketch and filled the first page of my new notebook, Gabriella’s Prairie Notes.
Blue Grama. Blades thin, curly blue-green. Upper surface rough or hairy. One to three bluish-purple spikes per stem. Bunch grass with fibrous roots. Common on Great Plains from Mexico to Saskatchewan. Dry prairie. Good forage. Increases with grazing.
But what the hell am I doing writing about grass? My job is to record the memories of old people!
I switched my iPad from Google to the audio recording of today and poured myself another glass of wine.
Eric (1915)
The sod house perches on the brow of a low hill, its earthen walls a natural extension of the land. No tree shades it, no fence protects it. It stands alone in the sun and wind.
A strange twosome appears beside it and pauses in dark silhouette against the sunlit sky. The small boy is dwarfed by the horse he is riding. The mare moves slowly down the hillside, placing each hoof with care. The child shifts his puny weight from side to side, his skinny legs gripping, but scarcely able to span the animal’s broad back.
Half-hidden in the shadow of the doorway, the child’s mother watches. A slim, erect figure, she stands with shoulders squared and chin high, hands folded in her apron. A baby cries. The woman disappears indoors.
Horse and boy reach the bottom of the grassy slope. His path will skirt a field of oats waving green in the summer breeze. Behind and before him, the land lies unbroken, a nearly intact sea of flowers and grass. Trails, begun by Indian travois and worn deep by Metis carts, now serve the settlers’ wagons. Bison bones and tipi rings lie hidden in the grass.
The boy struggles manfully to keep his large mount plodding in the right direction. His destination, a sod shack like his own home, appears as a small bump on the far side of the flat prairie spread before him. He keeps his eyes fixed on that bump, determined to take the most direct route to his destination.
Beside that route lies one of the ancient potholes that dot the land, still filled with spring runoff. Already the mare has quickened her pace in anticipation of a long and satisfying drink. Too late the child recognizes the hazard. How can he get his mount to go around instead of through that slough? He wrenches the reins and kicks his bare heels into the mare’s sides.
“Come on, Pet! This way, girl!” he coaxes, in his best imitation of the hearty, confident tone he has heard his father use. “You don’t need water right now.”
But he might as well be steering the wind. The mare ambles into the slough, squelching through mud-rooted reeds until, knee-deep, she bends her shaggy head to drink. Slowly, but inexorably, the boy slides down her neck. He struggles to hang on as the coarse hair of her mane scrapes through his fingers. With a despairing yelp, he slides over her head and into the water.
Slick clay sucks him down. Arms flailing, bare toes scrabbling for a foothold in the slime, he flounders to free himself. His head breaks through into the sunshine. Gagging and gasping, he staggers but again slips under. Through his panicked struggle he senses a shadow approaching.
Immensely tall the horse and rider seem to the boy’s blurred vision, towering above him, black against the afternoon sun. Leaning forward in his saddle, the man grasps one skinny arm and pulls the boy free of the muck. The child stumbles to solid ground with a hiccupping sob.
“Dat some big horse you got der, boy.”
The boy scrubs a muddy fist across his tear-streaked face and stares up at the stranger. Who is he? Where did he come from? The rider looks and sounds unlike anyone in the boy’s small world.
“So, dat horse, he want a drink. Dat’s alright. Next time, it bes’ dat you lead him to dat slough first ting. Den he not play dat trick again, eh?”
The child stands gazing up at the stranger. Muddled and frightened, he forgets his mother’s admonitions to “speak when spoken to,” and remains silent, staring up at the tall figure.
“Where you headin’ on dat big mare?”
The man pushes back his floppy-brimmed hat, a long lock of gray hair sliding over his forehead. He speaks with grave courtesy, yet his eyes twinkle with amusement.
“Mama told me to take this to Mrs. Bergen.”
From the pocket of his overalls, the boy pulls a folded, and now sodden, piece of notepaper.
“Den I help ya back on dat mare. Dat’s good, you do as ta mamere says.”
Remembering just in time to say, “Thank you,” and to wave a solemn good-bye to his rescuer, the boy continues his half-mile journey.
The note delivered, and a reply written by Mrs. Bergen while he devours the plate of cream and bread she sets before him, the small boy is boosted back onto his horse and returns home. He gives a full account of his misadventure to his mother, leaving out only one detail. He makes no mention of the stranger
who rescued him. This is with no intention of deceiving her, but rather, confusion in his own recollection. He does not know the man’s name, nor how he fits into their familiar community. Was he even real? What could he tell his mother, who was so quick to punish any story-telling as falsehood? The man’s horse did not look like their farm horses. The man did not look like anyone the boy knew. His hair, his speech, his clothes, all different. Rather than attempting to explain the unexplainable, the boy says nothing. His memory blurs, the stranger becomes a shadowy figure in a story half-remembered.
His mother, although alarmed by the incident, takes comfort in the fact that he was, after all, in no real danger. He fell from the horse and got wet. That was all. She is puzzled how the child managed to remount the horse without help but accepts with secret pride this evidence of her son’s growing independence.
The mishap passes into the realm of family folklore, a story to be told with laughter that softens the unspoken boast, “See how brave and resourceful he is, this boy of ours!”
Chapter Two
Needle and Thread Grass. Light green, leathery blades, ridged and rough on upper surface. Most common species on dry prairie. Saskatchewan’s provincial grass. Good forage. Dense fibrous roots. Gabriella’s Prairie Notes
Gabby (2012)
When the Tolleruds arrived here a hundred years ago, the land seemed empty.
The first time I listened to my recording of the Eric Tollerud interview and came to the part where I’d kind of zoned out for a bit, that was about all I got.
Then I listened to it again. The old man’s voice was so soft at times I had trouble making out the words, and it seemed, from his muttered words and unfinished sentences, that he must sometimes have almost forgotten I was there. I began jotting down whatever I could make out and then did what I always do when trying to understand something unfamiliar to me; I restated it in my own words, expanding on whatever was suggested but not actually stated. Blame the storyteller in me. This is what I came up with.
