Forest Prairie Edge

by Merle Massie

  Analysts who have used the government records of the Land Settlement Branch or the Northern Settlers Re-Establishment Branch found the stories of those who most needed and accessed government help. Those sources do not record the experiences of those who went north without government assistance. Local history books, and the reminiscences of drought trekkers, offer a new perspective on life at the forest edge.148 Their stories of barter and exchange, a booming local economy, social capital and hope, short-term refuge, and long-term resilience in a mixed-farming and resource base tell a story at odds with traditional interpretations. Those who moved north considered a myriad of pull factors, primarily the contrast between the drought-ravaged open plains and the northern forested and wet landscape. They also wanted to access non-agricultural resources of fish, game, fur, and timber from the forest. The rise of tourism throughout the 1920s and 1930s culturally reinforced a divided Saskatchewan identity in which the south was flat and treeless while the north was lush, green, and forested. Weary drought refugees remembered, and celebrated, this contrast.

  Today, in the north Prince Albert region, the line between farmland and Northern Provincial Forest is stark and entirely human made. Fields and pastures cut a straight edge along the quarter line. One step divides farmland from forest. Within that forest, past the agricultural edge, there remains Crown land that has either never been surveyed or was surveyed but not homesteaded. Hidden in the forest, though, are remnants of the northern push. Old sawmill sites, trappers’ cabins, and Hell’s Gate–type abandoned homesteads, with rotting shacks sinking into the bush, can be found. Acreages once cleared by axe or fire and cultivated have grown lush with poplar and willow in the ensuing years, to be succeeded once again by spruce, tamarack, and fir. The boreal forest stands, as always, at the ready to take over any farmland temporarily or permanently abandoned along the forest edge. But the overgrown caragana hedges, lilac bushes, and patches of rhubarb, remnants of long-forgotten garden plots, recall the Great Trek migrants who “watched in amazement as late-seeded crops and gardens grew inches, it seemed, overnight. They were thankful for the flavourful, bountiful harvest from the small garden plot, enough to last until the next harvest, and even the turnips were edible.”149

  Conclusion

  South of the North, North of the South

  The north Prince Albert region is a transition zone between field and forest, an ecotone binding the two solitudes of Saskatchewan. That place, both edge and centre, point of convergence and point of contrast, has shifted over time. In a cultural battle between forest and prairie, forestry and agriculture, wilderness and civilization, north and south, the ecological and cultural edge moved. Trails and corridors of connection, exchange, resource extraction, and settlement crossed the ecotone on a north-south pattern, breaking the false east-west perception of Canada’s development. Government intervention, in the form of forest reserves, recreational areas, and homesteads, dictated land use, change, and development. The physical landscape now corresponds to human decisions, lines and boundaries drawn on maps: roads and road allowances, quarter section divisions between farms, recreational land, First Nations reserve land, and the edge between agriculture and forest.

  With human intervention, the local landscape shifted from boreal forest to the mixed fields of parkland/prairie or, in contemporary terms, from north to south. Yet the local identity fits neither the prairie nor the northern paradigm. How can it be prairie when there are trees, lakes, and a local economy built in part on resource exploitation? How can it be north when there are farms? Residents of the north Prince Albert region are keenly aware of their in-between position, embracing attributes of both cultures and ecologies. While interviewing forest fringe residents for this book, I ended interviews by asking “is this community part of the north or part of the south?” Participants looked me in the eye, then looked away, out the window or across the room, tilting their heads and pursing their lips before answering. Then they hedged their answers. Technically, it is south, I was told again and again, simply because it lies south of the mid-point of the province. The geographical (and therefore “legal”) centre of Saskatchewan is the middle of Montreal Lake—many miles toward the pole. Pointing through windows at fields, combines, and barns, they noted that is is a farming region. But without exception, all of the interviewees identified this place as north. They offered a local identity with distinctive characteristics and a history that proclaimed and upheld its defining attributes as a place that was decidedly not the prairie. The default iconography, since they could not accept the Saskatchewan prairie agricultural paradigm, was north.

  Canada, it is almost axiomatic to say, is a northern country. Its nordicity is a defining characteristic. Geographer Peter Usher wrote that “our national mythology suggests that our identity and purpose lie in the North, that a truly distinctive Canadian nationality will only be achieved through the development and settlement of our northern lands. ... To the North lie not only our economic destiny, but also our moral and spiritual renewal.”1 From Group of Seven artistry to the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, Canada is proud to “own the podium” of its northern distinctiveness.

  The national northern character, closely identified with specific places such as the Arctic or the Canadian Shield, is absent from Canadian public identification of Saskatchewan. The province is the anchor and epitome of the “Prairie” Provinces. The Canadian penchant for dividing this vast country into easily understood places called regions has reduced Saskatchewan identity to its southern denominator: prairie. Home of Tommy Douglas, medicare, the Roughriders, and endless fields of grain, Saskatchewan has become “the Land of Living Skies,” where open space is the defining characteristic. The reflexive nature of prairie identification belies the truth of the Saskatchewan landscape and has distorted cultural and historical interpretation to favour the prairie south. The north, as historians Ken Coates and William Morrison pointed out, has indeed been—all too often—forgotten.2

  The northern identity, in defiance of the national prairie iconography of Saskatchewan, resonated through two distinctive local history projects from the Paddockwood region. The first was the local history book Cordwood and Courage, published in 1982. Many of the people who worked on the book, such as Muriel McGowan, were Depression migrants who remembered and identified a northern and wooded landscape that was emphatically not the prairie. The new landscape was quickly transformed through axe and fire to amalgamate agricultural characteristics and create a hybrid local identity that pulled from both farm and forest. In essence, they created an edge identity that found resonance with its northern roots. It was not an easy life. Few writers who contributed to the community history book romanticized the work that it took to build a farm and a life out of the forest. After the Second World War, non-agricultural opportunities drew many people north, south, east, and west. Yet their memories and stories, returned to the community and stored in the community’s history book, reflected gratitude for the refuge found at the forest edge at a time of intense need.

  The edge identity surfaced again in 2005 when a group of local volunteers erected a stone commemorating the Montreal Lake Trail that ran through the region. The bronze marker, fixed to a huge glacial erratic, pinpointed the origin of the trail as a First Nations pathway, a route that led past the lobstick tree and took forest bands onto the plains and plains bands into the forest. Over time, it became a freight trail and a route into the north for natural resources, recreation, law enforcement, and fire control. The stone also commemorated the homesteaders who had pushed their way into rather unforgiving bush country to establish farms and homes and introduce mixed farming into the area. In its inspiration, it drew heavily on stories from Hell’s Gate settlers and their battle to create viable farms. The defeat at Hell’s Gate, and the erasure of much of the Moose Lake School District by the community pasture, revealed the harsh conditions and precarious lifestyle at the forest edge that too often skirted abject poverty.
The commemorative stone focussed on the trail itself, placing Paddockwood securely as a conduit between north and south, a place of transition and connection. The stone recognized the complexity of memory, and acknowledged success and failure, forest and farming, and adventure and despair, at a place of hybrid influence, fluidity, transference, and cultural interchange. It celebrated the connections, acknowledging First Nations, mixed farming, natural resources, and recreation, underscoring a hybrid understanding of the forest edge as an important and dynamic transitional zone that bound one way of life to another.

  Figure 35. Remnant of Montreal Lake Trail.

  Source: Merle Massie, 2009.

  Figure 36. Charlie Elliott of Paddockwood at Montreal Lake Trail cairn unveiling ceremony, 2005.

  Source: John Dinius, Paddockwood.

  This book has explored the story of Saskatchewan’s transitional zone, where the two halves of the province meet. Through deep-time place history, layering and comparing successive cultures in the same place, this book cuts through traditional interpretations of Saskatchewan’s prairie or northern past. Edge theory, where the forest fringe is viewed as both an ecological and a cultural edge where two distinct regions and peoples meet and exchange knowledge, offers a critical approach that bridges the constructed gap between Saskatchewan northern history and southern history. Regionally defined prairie and northern narratives, when combined and focused through a local viewpoint, give a fresh view of the provincial story.

  This fresh take on Saskatchewan history has unveiled nuances that alter the Canadian story and, perhaps, suggest some paths forward for future historical research. The story of First Nations history in the western interior shows a cultural use of the landscape that deliberately combined prairie and forest ecosystems—whether through meeting and trade/exchange or through short-term or extended stays in the “other” landscape. The forest edge was a place of refuge for plains bands, and it contributed significantly to the resilience of the smaller boreal bands throughout the western interior. In the summer, the forest edge was marked by a feminine, domestic lifestyle that drew on the aquatic landscape. First Nations history, both pre– and post–fur trade, would benefit from a critical gendered examination. This book has touched only the outer edge of the wealth of information that can be drawn from archaeological and historical sources.

  As non-Native settlement escalated in the western interior, traditional First Nations practices that combined boreal and plains landscapes were replaced by an exploitative model that developed the resources of one ecosystem to serve the needs of the other. The dominion government divided agriculture and forest. The absence of wood on the open plains meant that forest resources in the western interior were too valuable for private/farm enterprise, so they were kept within the public domain. The lumber industry codified the north Prince Albert region as a place of resource wealth. Commercial fishing, along with mining, trapping, and other economic pursuits, flourished at the edge. Freighters stitched the two halves of the province together, taking commercial goods north and bringing resources south. Ironically, older First Nations models that combined prairie and forest set the stage for future development. As investors looked to exploit northern resources, the dominion was forced to make treaty with the region’s boreal First Nations inhabitants. Boreal bands sought an adhesion to Treaty 6, thereby trading supplemental bison-hunting traditions for agricultural practices, entrenching farming in the forest. They folded farm produce into diversified forest edge resource extraction, reinforcing traditional subsistence and resilience strategies. To support the long-held practice of the forest edge as an important “home” territory for boreal bands, and to ensure the development of agriculture, the Montreal Lake and Lac La Ronge bands succeeded in winning a second, agricultural reserve in addition to their boreal territories. The Little Red River Reserve planted a firm foothold for the bands at the forest edge, not far from the lobstick tree that marked their world.

  The agricultural history of the Canadian western interior has been dominated by the wheat story. The prairie, it has been told repeatedly, was the domain of King Wheat. The agricultural history of the north Prince Albert region, however, followed a different path. The mixed-farming movement dominated the region. Dominion surveyors, Prince Albert promoters, and local farmers endorsed the forest edge landscape as an ideal place to create a mixed farm. Presented as morally and ecologically superior to a wheat farm, a mixed farm spread a farmer’s asset base over a range of crops, livestock, and farm products. Mixed farms required a diversified landscape with a good water source, scrub land for hay and shelter for stock, and good land for cereal grain production. Farming practices became tied to landscape, and debate raged over the advantages of mixed versus wheat farms. Those debates were central to the development of agriculture in the western interior. The opening of the New Northwest as the site of mixed farming contrasted with the development of half-section pre-emption wheat farms in the Palliser Triangle. What has been analyzed as essentially a wheat story becomes, through the lens of place history, a complicated ideological and cultural battle that played against the backdrop of landscape.

  When fire raged through the north Prince Albert region in 1919, its identification as a lumber basket collapsed. Remnants of the forest remained, along with a vigorous growth of aspen that helped to underwrite the future of the region as a cordwood capital. Soldier settlement, supplemented by internal migration from the open plains, recreated the north Prince Albert region as a haven for farmers eager to trade the open plains for the forest edge. Dominion focus shifted away from simply moving people into the western provinces and toward helping them to stay there and create viable farms. Tied to the mixed-farming movement, soldier settlement and other assisted land settlement schemes changed the relationship between government and agriculture, tying Crown land and agricultural development to dominion responsibility.

  Like their First Nations antecedents, soldier and prairie settlers developed an economically diversified society that drew on both farm and forest. Although the lumber industry was diminished, cordwood production combined with postwar growth in other northern resource industries to create an occupationally pluralistic society, combining mixed farming with regional wage opportunities. Soldier settlement in forested regions, in contrast to the usual examples, could experience exceptional success. As the decade drew to a close, the north was recast as a place of opportunity. Economic buoyancy, increased mechanization, and second homesteads brought a wave of new settlers to the forest fringe. Prospecting and potential mineral exploitation joined forest products and commercial fishing and contributed to the call to “go north.”

  With the rise of the car culture and increased municipal and provincial expenditures on roads and infrastructure, the north Prince Albert region developed a new identity. Tourism marketing reinforced the contrast between the prairie south and the forested north. Promotion based on the rural/urban divide found little traction in Saskatchewan. Instead, the leverage to create Prince Albert National Park and the Lakeland region marketed and exploited the cultural and ecological divide. The north was recast as a place of beauty and relaxation, lakes and rivers, health and fun, in contrast to a dry, treeless prairie south. It was wilderness, but it was accessible—you could get there in a car, and the trip was short. As the “Playground of the Prairies,” the northern vacationland drew widespread public interest, primarily within the province, that increased as the Depression deepened. As the prairie landscape became disfigured by drought, writer Grey Owl and painter Augustus Kenderdine worked to present the northern landscape as an oasis of beauty and the last frontier of wilderness and natural splendour.

  Given the cultural presence of Saskatchewan’s north at the end of the 1920s as a place of opportunity and natural beauty, it should come as no surprise that refugees flocked to the north in droves during the Great Depression. Instead, historians have consistently expressed a large measure of shock and confusion at t
he sheer number of prairie migrants who made the Great Trek north to develop farms at the forest edge, the so-called place of last resort. Through a deep-time history of the north Prince Albert region, it became clear that northern resettlement during the 1930s was an escalation of practices that had, in fact, been in place for a long time. Aboriginal landscape harvest practices, boreal resource extraction, mixed farming, and northern tourism were important cultural and economic precedents that drew migrants north by the thousands when the wheat economy failed. The story of dust and devastation, the archetypal prairie dust bowl narrative, broke open at the forest edge. While communities on the open plains hemorrhaged, the forest fringe—and the far north—boomed. I had a student from Flin Flon in one of my university classes studying western Canadian history. His perception of the 1930s, like that of Paddockwood, recalled a time of wealth and prosperity, not want. Families moved north toward a place of hope and opportunity. For some, it was a landscape of short-term refuge, for others of long-term resilience.

  After the dust had settled, prairie farms returned to pre-drought productive capacity. Nonetheless, the rural populations of both the open prairie and the forest edge fell after the Second World War. As mechanization and farm consolidation gained hold, farming began the long march toward the agribusiness and industrialization that we see today. Technological advances in crop varieties, fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides combined with crop insurance and large-scale water damming for power and irrigation schemes to give prairie grain farms more resilience. Farming as a way of life, to nurture a family and build a subsistence living over the long term, gave way. Logging, cutting cordwood, freighting, fishing, and other forest edge resource economies also surrendered to industrialization and mechanization, making a large-scale transition from independently owned small businesses to commercial enterprises.