by Denis Smith
Life there was hard and contentious, and after another winter more than one hundred settlers, including the Bannermans, travelled east by canoe brigade to Upper Canada. They took land in the present Elgin County, then at the Scotch Settlement near Holland Landing, and finally in Bruce County, where John’s mother was born in 1872. Family stories suggested that the Bannermans had grown prosperous; in his memoirs Diefenbaker records that “when they began their move to Bruce, Great-grandfather had five thousand dollars in gold. This they carried in the feed bag under the wagon, a place thieves were not likely to search.” There is no evidence, however, that Mary Bannerman brought any significant dowry to her marriage. John Diefenbaker had no memory of his maternal grandparents, who died in his early childhood.17
In the first years of their married life, William and Mary Diefenbaker lived on the small and uncertain salary of a local schoolmaster – a few hundred dollars a year, some of it delivered in kind if the trustees could not muster cash. Sometimes William moonlighted for extra funds by teaching bookkeeping; but young John carried a memory of family debt into adulthood. “Father had bought things on credit and owed some three hundred dollars. The debt was not easily cleared away. As a direct result of this experience, it became a fixed rule in our family that never again would we buy anything on credit. This self-imposed ban was temporarily lifted when we moved onto the homestead, but was renewed when we moved into the city of Saskatoon in February 1910.”18
Three hundred dollars amounted to almost a full year’s salary for William, and thus was a substantial burden. In addition to that anxiety, perhaps abetted by a sense of Highland grievance passed on by his mother, the boy was beginning to feel the disparities of wealth and poverty in turn-of-the-century Ontario. The family next door in Todmorden enjoyed Quaker Oats in boxes, while the Diefenbakers bought their oatmeal in bulk; down the road the Davies family, with their racing stables, “had everything that money could buy. They had Shetland ponies and two-wheel carts in which the poor were not allowed even the shortest ride.” The “consciousness of injustice which has never left me” already seemed to be developing a sharp edge.19
In the spring of 1903 the struggling family reached a point of crisis. William’s health broke down. “The doctors,” say the memoirs, “considered that he was on the verge of developing what was then described as galloping consumption. Their advice was that he leave Toronto and seek the benefits of a prairie climate.” The newly settled lands of the North-West Territories were reputed to be dry, bracing, and sunny, offering just the change of air recommended for consumptive patients of the time. William applied through an Ottawa teaching agency for a prairie job, and by early summer had received and accepted an offer at Tiefengrund, near Fort Carlton, on the old cart route between Winnipeg and Edmonton.20
As the move west approached that summer, William came to doubt the decision. Relatives on both sides of the family recommended against it. The northwest was unknown and, so they believed, uncivilized. Mary Diefenbaker later remembered – in spirit, at least – the warning of her brother Duncan: “Well, what’s the matter with you? Going to that awful country where there’s nothing but bears and Indians – they’ll kill you!”21 But Mary insisted: the choice had been made, and there would be no turning back. Household furnishings were dispatched ahead, and on August 15 the Diefenbakers prepared to board the Canadian Pacific transcontinental train in Toronto despite William’s reluctance.
Of course, we did not have the money to travel in style, to sleep in elegant, comfortable carriages, or to eat in luxurious dining cars with damask curtains and gleaming silverware. We were to travel colonist class, a very basic third-class accommodation used mainly for transporting immigrants to the Prairies. Realizing that there would be no sleeping accommodation and no meals served, Mother prepared and carefully packed lunches to carry us through to Winnipeg, and put together two rolls of quilts, blankets, and pillows … The train was to leave Toronto in the late afternoon. Father went down early to put our supplies on board. Misdirected by a railway official, he placed our food and bedding on a car whose destination was not Winnipeg. We arrived shortly before departure time to find, too late, what had taken place. Thus, we began our journey. Could there have been a more inauspicious launching into a new country?22
The other passengers were immigrants of many nationalities and itinerant harvest workers, all of them accustomed to hardship. They shared blankets and food with the Diefenbaker boys, but the discomforts of crowding, heat, and hard wooden seats were real. John Diefenbaker recalled that his first substantial meal came more than twenty-four hours after leaving Toronto, when the train reached the lakehead at Fort William. There, his father suggested retreat. Mary once again insisted that the journey would go on – without William, if necessary. In his seventies, John remembered his mother’s taunt: if William turned back, “the rest of us will carry on and you’ll come out sooner or later.” The hapless father stayed with the family, despite further protests in Winnipeg.23
Young John had fleeting memories of Winnipeg, Regina, and Saskatoon as the family passed through these successively smaller prairie outposts. Saskatoon was a tiny hamlet of five hundred residents on the treeless prairie, bolstered earlier that summer with the tents of the Barr colonists on their way to Lloydminster. At Rosthern station, where the family finally disembarked, a small crowd met the evening train “speaking languages we did not understand: Ukrainian, Hungarian, Polish. Many spoke in German and a few in French, both of which languages Father could speak very well.” In that, at least, he had the advantage over Mary, who knew only English.24 The family rested for two nights at the Queen’s Hotel before setting out on the seventeen-mile wagon journey to William’s school in a district settled by Mennonites, French Canadians, Indians, and Métis.25
For two winters the Tiefengrund school was the Diefenbaker home. The schoolroom and family quarters shared one building, and a separate summer kitchen stood behind. The one-storey family apartment had three modest rooms and a kitchen, and was heated by a wood stove. With new curtains, fresh wallpaper, and their Ontario furnishings, the Diefenbakers made the spare frame building comfortable enough. The schoolroom was plain, furnished with desks “made of rough two-inch lumber,” and decorated with wall charts warning graphically against the evils of tobacco and alcohol.26
The schoolhouse was a communal gathering point as well as a home. Members of the North-West Mounted Police, Indians, Métis, homesteaders, and travellers called by regularly, among them the legendary leader of the Métis military forces in the Saskatchewan rebellion of 1885, Gabriel Dumont. As newcomers, the Diefenbakers were overwhelmed with hospitality. “Everyone tried to make us know that we were under their constant care, and this was always true as the old-timers welcomed the newly arrived. We had food in abundance, wildfowl, jack rabbits, and tame chickens. Vegetables were brought to our door. The Mennonites in the district made pork sausages and cured hams for us. In that first fall, the ratepayers brought us loads of fire-wood and helped us cut it into stove lengths. Everyone shared in the business of everyone.”27
By late 1904 William Diefenbaker had decided to seek homestead land for himself near Borden, across the North Saskatchewan River to the north-west on virgin grasslands. The homestead had to be registered on payment of a fee of $10 at the Dominion Lands Office in Prince Albert, occupied within six months, and lived on for three years before the actual transfer of title. On December 15, 1904, after waiting outside the Lands Office all night, William managed to register his claim. But in the absence of capital he could not occupy it in 1905. Nevertheless, he broke ten acres of soil as a token of his good faith. He then successfully sought a year’s relief against cancellation by swearing a declaration before a justice of the peace: “I have not had the money to make further improvements upon the said homestead up to the present. I intend, all being well, to have more breaking done upon the said homestead during the coming Spring or early Summer, and also to build a small house into which we wish to
move … about July 15, 1906. I have not yet the means necessary to buy the necessary horses, implements, etc. to farm said homestead sufficiently to earn a livelihood for me and my family.”28
Meanwhile William searched for a better-paying job that would allow him cash to move onto the property in 1906. In August 1905 he found it, in the one-room school at Hague, thirty miles south of Carlton. Hague was a thriving village of a few hundred on the rail line, with four grain elevators and various farm service companies. To supplement his income, William was also hired as village secretary, and he was able to buy a small house on a $775 mortgage. John recalled his own paying jobs that summer, at the age of ten, as a farm labourer and a local newsboy for the Saskatoon Phoenix.29
The political status of the North-West Territories was about to change. On September 1, after long pressure on Ottawa, they were transformed into the two provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. This mark of progress was welcomed across the prairies, and in Hague the new teacher/secretary hung out the Union Jacks and chaired a village meeting of celebration. To the south in the capital, Regina, there were grander ceremonies in the presence of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Governor General Earl Grey. On September 5 the lieutenant governor appointed the new leader of the provincial Liberal Party, Walter Scott, as the province’s first premier; and his easy victory in the provincial election of December 1905 began forty years of Liberal hegemony in the province.30
In the summer of 1906 the Diefenbakers made a doubly convenient move onto the homestead. William received a teaching appointment (paying $600 per year) at the new school in Hoffnungsfeld, three miles northeast of his land; and William’s bachelor brother Edward was named teacher in the Halcyonia school, three miles to the southeast. He arrived from Ontario to claim homestead land adjoining that of the family, and began a long schoolteaching career in the new province. Like William, he was thin and hollow-cheeked, largely self-educated, and constantly curious. Diefenbaker wrote that he was “wrestling with the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer” in his eighties.31
John Diefenbaker’s memory of this busy summer was benign. In Hague the family rented out the house and loaded their possessions onto a haywagon for the forty-mile, two-day journey north to Borden at the Great Bend of the North Saskatchewan River. On top, the chickens were loaded in crates; behind, the family cow, Lily, followed on a tether.32 Once on the land, William, John, and Elmer began work as carpenters. “For our house, it was decided that there should be three rooms, the largest of which would be divided into a living room and a bedroom for our parents. Elmer would bunk in the kitchen, while the third room was for storage, and was often used by overnight visitors. (I was to sleep in Uncle Ed’s shack.) Father wanted Mother’s kitchen to be the most attractive room. In consequence, it was lined with ’V’-joint boards, which took varnish well. (This lumber cost one hundred and twenty-five dollars a thousand, compared with shiplap at less than fifty dollars.) ”33
The summer’s labour produced house, barn, Ed’s one-room shack, a vegetable garden, a flower garden, and ten more acres of broken land.34 The Diefenbakers were prepared for winter, with spartan shelter and an adequate food supply. Mary’s butter could sometimes be exchanged for groceries; otherwise there was plentiful home produce, bread, domestic chicken and turkey, prairie chicken, duck, goose, prunes, wild mushrooms, strawberries, raspberries, and saskatoons in season. The storeroom filled up with preserves. John and Elmer did the hand churning, and John acquired a lifelong addiction to buttermilk.35
These were the bumper years of prairie homesteading. The railway branch lines had snaked out across the province, and both the dominion government and the railways promoted settlement with glowing promise. In 1905–06 there were 30,819 homestead registrations in western Canada, two-thirds of them in Saskatchewan.36 The lands filled up. But if the colonization posters promised “the last best west,” life instead was grindingly hard. Homesteading was “a gigantic gamble,” wrote John Archer, “which the nation won but which broke many an individual player.”37 Winters were brutal, and that first season of 1906–07 was one of the hardest: John remembered that blizzards and cold kept the schools closed for five weeks after Christmas, while the family struggled to cut enough firewood to keep household temperatures above freezing. In the south of the province, many large ranches were driven out of business by the loss of cattle and sheep wintering in the fields without fodder.38 The winter of 1907–08 was equally cold and prolonged.
Sufficient supplies of firewood and water were essential. The Diefenbakers traded for firewood with Ukrainian settlers in the parklands to the north and piled their wood supply in pole-lengths, teepee-style, according to the fashion. The water supply, by contrast, was “our major problem.” Every well the family sank produced undrinkable alkaline water. For three and a half years on the land the Diefenbakers hauled barrelled water by stoneboat sled twice a week from the nearest neighbour’s farm – and treated it as a precious resource.39
In September 1906 John entered grade seven at his uncle’s school in Halcyonia, while Elmer attended his father’s school. John’s schoolmates “were mainly old-country English, from around Birmingham,” while Elmer’s were German-speaking Mennonites.40 Decades later a classmate recalled that John, “with his crop of yellow curls and his ‘suit’ clothes, found Halcyonia boys to be terrible teases” who made fun of him as a teacher’s pet.41
For the first year or two John and Uncle Ed walked to school in spring, summer, and fall, conversing all the way. “The walk to school was alright,” John remembered in his old age, “because we talked about things. Uncle Ed was quite a scholar in Shakespeare and he’d bring up some line in Shakespeare … and start to explain it and chat about it and then he’d get into this extrasensory perception … Ed always had ideas. He didn’t have any extraterrestrial communication, but he said as between people of similar views there is a transmission of viewpoints and we call it coincidence. He called it extrasensory perception.”42 In this belief Edward Diefenbaker followed a popular pseudo-scientific fashion of the period.
During the winter John and Uncle Ed rode a rough-hewn horse-drawn cutter to and from school; and on March 11, 1908, they almost perished in a blizzard. There was a district concert in the school that night, and young John decided to wear his best Sunday clothes – new leather shoes, cloth coat, and woollen cap – “because,” he said, “I wanted to be a sport.”43 Ed, more sensibly, wore his heavy winter garb. Blizzard snows coincided with the concert, and soon Ed decided they should leave for home to relieve John’s parents of worry. Midway home the horse foundered in a snowdrift. Uncle Ed wrapped John in horseblankets and struggled to keep the boy awake during the night. In the morning the storm broke. Ed, John, and the horse stumbled home across the snow, John’s legs “frozen to the knees.” He remembered three weeks of convalescence, his legs at first wrapped in snow-filled blankets, then swollen and discoloured, “I suppose … gangrenous.” That was an exaggeration, since he recovered without physical damage. But “for years thereafter I was afraid to go outside our house, even to the woodpile, when blizzards were blowing.”44 The next summer William’s brother Henry, a carriage-maker from Illinois, covered the cutters in canvas and equipped them with small stoves to prevent similar misfortunes. In family memory they became “Diefenbaker schooners.”45
The summers were warmer, but still precarious. “Rainfall was always uncertain. During one year there was frost in every month. In another, we were partially hailed out. One year we experienced a prairie fire … If Father had not acted when the danger became evident, we would have lost our buildings and some forty loads of hay. He got out the team, hitched them to the plough, and turned two furrows around the haystack and buildings; then he ploughed two concentric furrows fifty or so yards away and burnt the intervening area before the prairie fire reached us.”46
Each year a little more land was cleared and sown, but the crops of wheat, oats, and barley were small: John Diefenbaker estimated their cash value at
an average of $150 a year. Mary tried to raise turkeys for sale, but lost the flocks to disease or badgers in two of three years. For a few years John and Elmer ran a modestly successful trapline for ermine, and John earned a little cash on the annual harvest.47 Aside from the income from teaching, Mary’s butter sales, and rentals from the Hague cottage to offset the mortgage, that seemed to be all.
John remembered Sunday church services in Halcyonia school or sometimes at home; often there were visitors for the Sunday meal that followed. Occasionally the family played host to a community sing-song around the Thomas organ. John and Elmer kept busy with daily chores, bareback riding, hunting, and the normal exploring and mischief-making of country youth, but outside school they spent their days alone with the family. For John, that meant dependence on his father’s and uncle’s conversation and on the family library, which included the adventure novels of G.A. Henty, Ridpath’s History of the World, an encyclopedia, the Bible, Shakespeare, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II, Darwin’s Origin of Species, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, The Pickwick Papers, and Black Beauty. The family’s faith involved belief in the literal truth of the Bible, absolute standards of right and wrong, and the goodness of God’s universe. The world beyond the homestead was dominated by the power of God, the English language, and the British connection – not always in that order.48 Such ideals could offer a sustaining faith against the unforgiving frontier, and there was no disposition to question them in the Diefenbaker family.
