Forest Prairie Edge

by Merle Massie

  Several Métis families, such as the Lavallées, were forcibly displaced by the creation of Prince Albert National Park. Louis Lavallée had a cabin on the shores of what is now known as Lavallée Lake, at the north end of the park.118 He at first found a measure of fame at his home when journalists visiting the park arrived to take his picture. He was also featured in the Department of the Interior film Modern Voyageurs in 1931 as one of the more colourful personages living in the park. Sometime in the 1930s, though, Lavallée was pressured to leave. Other families, such as the Clares, also lived within what became the park boundaries, where they made their living fishing, trapping, and hunting. When trapping and hunting were prohibited, the Métis families found their livelihoods severely diminished. Banished from their homes, they were eventually offered land at the Green Lake Métis settlement north and west of Big River under the direction of the Northern Settlers Re-Establishment Branch.119 Several families eventually settled at Fish Lake, a Métis settlement that grew between Little Red River Reserve and Prince Albert National Park within the Emma Lake Provincial Forest.120

  The “road allowance” people, as many Métis were known, found themselves a people “in between.” They were not allowed to reside on Little Red since they were not status Indians of either the Montreal Lake or the La Ronge band, even though many had relations on the reserve. They were entitled to land consideration through their Métis heritage. The provincial government set aside otherwise unused Crown land for these small, family-oriented communities, such as Fish Lake or the Crescent Lake settlement south of Yorkton.121

  The nature of First Nations and Métis life at the forest edge reveals opposing and ironic twists in how the story of the forest fringe has been told. Agricultural analysts considered wheat monoculture the apex and norm of farming. As a result, occupational pluralism and off-farm income commonly found along the forest fringe—freighting, fishing, hunting, picking berries, harvesting lumber, and trapping—became indicators of a marginal environment. Within the agricultural paradigm, families were “forced” to use off-farm resources to supplement meagre farm returns. At the same time, First Nations and Métis inhabitants of the forest fringe routinely combined landscape resources with occupational pluralism. The culture embraced seasonal movement and flow. Through cultural racism, their lifestyle was often denigrated. Yet during the Depression, off-farm occupations and forest products provided the key to the northern boom and were an important drawing card for many southern refugees. Racist explanations separated Aboriginal pursuits from homesteader practices by emphasizing the role of time: white homesteaders would use the resources of the landscape only until their farms were large and profitable enough to sustain their families; First Nations bands had no intention of changing their pluralistic pursuits, in which farming provided only a portion of income or food.122 Although each family’s daily activities might be the same, racial profiling and slurs created difference.

  The struggle to turn bushland into farmland, hard enough for white settlers, was almost impossible for First Nations families without access to government loans for tools, supplies, horses, or machines. Land was owned by the band, and without some form of land collateral, loans to underwrite agricultural expansion were limited. Some reserve inhabitants, such as Billy Bear, succeeded in developing a prosperous mixed farm, but Bear combined farming with a successful freighting business and lumber interests, thereby accessing much-needed cash to allow for farm improvements.123 For the Little Red band, one way to capitalize on their land and realize income was to lease their farmland to neighbouring settlers. Non-Native neighbours cleared and broke reserve land for agricultural purposes, and the band used the rent to fund much-needed services.124

  Social Capital

  A key aspect of the Great Trek, and an important part of a trekker’s success or failure in the north, was derived from social capital. Social capital is the spirit of connection and exchange among humans or social groups that creates networks of neighbours and friends and can provide extensive benefits. Although social capital is difficult to track or evaluate, it can be seen in knowledge exchange, cooperation, trust, sharing, security, acts of charity, chain migration, friendship, and kinship.

  The experiences of the Wiberg and McGowan families of Paddockwood and the exchange of services and help offered by friends, neighbours, and relatives are excellent examples of the importance of social capital to northern resettlement success. Ernest Wiberg rode with a neighbour from Griffin, Saskatchewan (east of Weyburn), on his trek north in 1931. At Paddockwood, he worked with another Griffin emigrant, Axel Goplen, for the first year on the new northern homestead. As the Depression deepened, Ernest convinced his sister Muriel and her husband Sargent McGowan to try the north country.The Goplen family was there to offer a hot supper to Sargent in the spring of 1934, when he arrived by sleigh from Paddockwood with his settlers’ effects. The McGowans lived with Ernest on his homestead for the first six years, looking after his farm in the winter while he was away working at the fish camps. Ernest looked after chores when Sargent was away doing road work with his big teams in the summer, which he often did for the municipality instead of paying taxes.

  Sargent’s brother, Norman McGowan, and his wife, Mabel, came north soon after Sargent and Muriel settled. They stayed up north for three years, where Norman (a hulk of a man at six foot four inches and broad shouldered) worked in tie camps and at other jobs. Mabel never adjusted to northern life, even though she bore a son at the Red Cross Outpost Hospital. When an opportunity arose for Norman to run a Pool elevator, they moved back to the Weyburn district. For them, their northern sojourn provided a short refuge until an opportunity came along to ease their return south.

  Clarence Wiberg, brother to Ernest and Muriel, went north in 1934. He stayed with his siblings while taking local jobs. The three Wibergs were joined by their parents and other family members in 1940. Clarence and another brother, Allan, did some fire fighting in the Candle Lake area before joining the war effort. Muriel’s sister Dagmar went north in 1940 and soon started teaching at Elk Range School, where Sargent was a trustee and the McGowan children went to school. Dagmar’s husband, John Bentz, joined the army, and when the war was over John, Allan, and Clarence all took land in the Paddockwood area through the Veterans’ Land Act, an updated version of the original Soldier Settlement Act land scheme. Clarence later claimed that, “upon returning to this warm and friendly atmosphere amongst loving relatives and congenial neighbours, I decided this was a good place to make my home.”125

  His sentiments played out for hundreds of other families across the forest fringe. For the McGowans and Wibergs, the social capital offered by friends and neighbours, and especially relations, provided shelter and food, hospitality, exchange of services, and local influence to help each other adjust to northern life and build new homes in the north. Their story is just one of many that can be traced through the local history books of neighbours and friends, siblings, cousins, and hired help whose social capital wove the fabric of existence. Historian Dawn Bowen tracked urban Depression refugees in the communities of Little Saskatoon and Tamarack, both near Loon Lake. Her findings suggested that one of the reasons Tamarack was a far less successful community than Little Saskatoon (more abandonment, fewer homesteads achieving title, little sense of community over the long term, for example) was that “social ties among the settlers were poorly developed.” Migrants did not know each other prior to their arrival at Tamarack, nor did they develop strong bonds after taking homesteads. This lack of social capital, combined with poorer land, inadequate farming experience, lack of economic capital, and lack of support and infrastructure, “severely hampered their farming efforts.”126 Bowen found comparatively more social capital in Little Saskatoon, which developed a more prosperous community built in large part on cooperative effort, sharing, exchange, and cohesion. Her work suggested that social capital brought by Depression migrants—such as the social capital among the Goplens, Wiberg
s, and McGowans—helped to create an atmosphere that promoted success.

  The “Great Retreat”?

  Northern communities drew migrants because the forest edge, at least compared with the prairie, had moisture. In 1937, that distinction disappeared. The prairie, parkland, and southern edge of the forest fringe had “the most complete crop failure ever experienced.” It was, for Saskatchewan, “the worst year yet.” Provincial net farm income plummeted to minus $36,336,000, and wheat yields averaged an abysmal 2.7 bushels per acre.127 Although the Great Trek had been reduced in the latter half of the 1930s, some southern farmers still felt the call of the north.128 Others, however, saw the drought attacking even their northern refuge. For those who had fled dry conditions to go north in search of moisture, the 1937 drought signalled the end of hope. Starting in 1937, geographer Denis Patrick Fitzgerald noted, a “thin trickle” of people began to leave.129

  That population loss was minor to the end of the Great Depression. In census division 15, which covered the Prince Albert region, 2,000 people (just over 2 percent of the population) left between 1936 and 1941. In the Paddockwood region, however, the population continued to climb. Over 500 more people lived in the region in 1941 than in 1936, a gain of almost 13 percent.130 Fitzgerald commented that “the Great Retreat did not become apparent until after World War II.”131 The Prince Albert census district population sank by 8 percent between 1941 and 1951, dropping to just over 80,000 people.132 The North Battleford district shrank by 15 percent of its population between 1941 and 1951; the Nipawin region, however, dropped by a mere 5 percent in the same period.133

  These numbers cannot stand alone. Analysts have consistently—and incorrectly—attributed the “Great Retreat” to the abysmal farming conditions of the forest fringe. The Great Trek migrations, historian John McDonald asserted, overpopulated the northern forest fringe “relative to its true agricultural potential.”134 “Benighted settlers” left in droves, the narratives have consistently suggested, because they could not make a living.135 Pushing agriculture beyond the forest edge had led to starvation and want, leaving analysts to declare that giving up was the only option. Poverty and harsh agricultural conditions, combined with sharply declining cordwood and lumber income, were contributing factors, of course, to northern out-migration. Compared with other areas of the province, however, net out-migration during and after the Second World War was substantially less along the northern parkland and forest fringe than on the prairie. The Swift Current region lost 18 percent of its population between 1941 and 1951, the Rosetown-Biggar district 20 percent—figures significantly higher than those along the fringe. Of course, these numbers do not include depopulation statistics in those regions from the 1930s. Rosetown had lost 15 percent of its population during the Depression, while the north was burgeoning. Swift Current had lost 13 percent.136 In total, the Swift Current census district lost 29 percent of its population between 1931 and 1951, the Rosetown-Biggar district 31 percent.

  What, then, accounted for the population drop across all rural regions of the province after 1941? The war, of course, drew many thousands of people to serve in the Armed Forces and in war service industries. The general economy improved, and business was healthy and full of opportunity. As well, farming changed drastically. Farm consolidation, real estate values, the resurgence of prairie land after the dust, price controls during the war years, and other factors affected agriculture as a whole. Although mechanized methods of land clearing and farming were available, their use was limited until after the war effort. The postwar period saw intensive farm mechanization and a switch from horses to motorized machines. Farming changed both on the prairie and at the forest edge. It turned from a way of life or a way to support the family to a business. Farmers were encouraged, and expected, to track their farm incomes and net returns, identify areas of loss and gain, and view their farms as economic—rather than social or cultural—endeavours.137

  During the 1940s, agricultural progress in western Canada overcame its homestead origins. Although there remained a distinct difference between northern farms and prairie farms,138 many forest edge farms on black or transitional soil enjoyed a large measure of success.139 Fields continued to expand, year over year, as the forest acreage of each farm decreased. Paddockwood residents and local historians O’Hea and Endicott suggested that homesteaders of the 1930s, “having beaten the wilderness and being granted patent to their holdings, numbers of settlers, not farmers, sold their homesteads. Their places were taken over by ... farmers [who] got off to a good start.” Homesteading, in this explanation, was a business venture different from building a farm: it was a way to create capital relatively quickly. Those who wanted to farm, not homestead, bought their land. The new farmers cleared “all land suitable for the purpose [of] cultivation.” O’Hea and Endicott explained that the majority of these new farmers in their region were Ukrainian and Polish. The Kirychuk family of Paddockwood was one example. They came to Canada in 1939 on the wings of the European war and bought a farm northeast of Paddockwood.140

  Although out-migration was indeed a noticeable part of Paddockwood life after the Second World War, farms that had been settled and cleared between 1920 and 1940 remained in production.141 Population density maps of the province produced for the Saskatchewan Royal Commission on Agriculture and Rural Life in the 1950s showed a decided preference for parkland and forest fringe farms. Around Prince Albert and Nipawin, and north of Yorkton, the population density exceeded eight persons per square mile, while prairie regions rarely exceeded four.142

  By the 1960s, the Prince Albert Daily Herald noted with a measure of surprise, the landscape at Paddockwood was “like the prairies.”143 It had passed the early homestead and development stages, and the physical landscape of mixed, livestock, and cereal grain farms bore little resemblance to the original mixed boreal forest. Some farms, of course, were less “successful” than others. In the Moose Lake region east of Hell’s Gate and north of Forest Gate, the national Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Administration (along with shareholders from the north Paddockwood region) initiated a community pasture project.144 Farms in the region were sold to the government and transformed into pasture. Buildings were moved or burned, trees cleared, land seeded to grass, and farmsteads erased. Although productive, Moose Lake farms produced a smaller living with more work than the provincial average. Measured against prairie wheat farms, agricultural receipts were low at Moose Lake. The land was classed as sub-marginal, even though the farms were occupied and the majority were viable. Engaged primarily in a mixed-farm, occupationally pluralistic lifestyle geared to self-sufficiency, such farms were targeted for “improvement.” Farmers were bought out.145 As in the 1930s re-establishment movement, however, most of those who moved but continued farming stayed within the forest fringe, purchasing farms close by.146 The majority of Moose Lake residents were Depression refugees or the children of refugees. For them, the cultural force of the forest edge as a place of refuge and resilience—where self-sufficiency and social capital were proven—remained strong.

  Conclusion

  The Great Trek from the prairie to the forest at a time of economic and ecological disaster signified the last time that there was a broad cultural definition in Saskatchewan of landscape as the point of connection between humans and sustenance. Back-to-the-land ideals and subsistence trumped market-oriented agriculture, and both urban residents and farmers embraced the northern, forested landscape. Since the mid-1940s, the growth of agribusiness, large-scale farming, and mechanization, and increased urbanization, have moved Saskatchewan increasingly away from its farm roots and coloured the way in which the past has been viewed. The concept of subsistence farming has too often been denigrated—by historians, agricultural analysts, and governments—as less successful and less desirable than large economic farm units tied to an export market. Too often the Great Trek migration and forest edge agriculture have been measured against an agricultural ide
al built on market orientation and business rather than family self-sufficiency. Yet the Great Depression severed the connection between agriculture and the external market. Aspirations narrowed, and both farmers and urban residents saw farming through a practical lens that focussed on the products of the farm and the landscape: shelter, fuel, and food. The majority of northern farms—owned by Depression trekkers, earlier prairie migrants, or soldier settlers—were built within a culture drawn from self-sufficient mixed farming, the ecological edge, and occupational pluralism. They were not prairie farms.

  The Great Trek migration, in many ways, was the end-game of the battle between wheat farms of the prairie and mixed farms of the parkland and forest fringe. Northern migrants, a Regina Leader-Post journalist noted in 1931, knew that the northern country “cannot afford a rapid career to a prospective wheat grower, but it will at least afford a living to a family with pioneer instincts better than that promised at present in the districts they have been forced to abandon.”147 The northern forest fringe did not offer single-cash-crop agriculture, and the vast majority of southern refugees knew it. What they searched for, and what many found, was a way of life that offered some balance: wood and water, garden produce, game and fish, and hay to feed stock. At the forest edge, migrants learned that mixed farming was more than just a mix of crops and livestock; it was culturally and economically embedded in the forest edge landscape, engaged in resource harvesting and the cordwood and barter economy. Like their First Nations neighbours, there were two kinds of people who used the forest edge: those who accessed its resources as a refuge for a short period to relieve economic or environmental stress, and those who developed a broadly mixed lifestyle that combined forest and prairie pursuits to find a measure of resilience.