Over the next twenty-five or so years a quarter of a million settlers came from the United States alone, and in total over two million from Europe, Britain, the United States, as well as Ontario and Quebec, and mostly under difficult conditions and suffering considerable hardship, they began to create farms out of the native prairie and into the parklands. Everywhere small towns and villages sprang up to support them, and with the railway crawling past (some but not all of) their towns, the prairie provinces went in a few years from being “empty” (rarely were the Indigenous people counted in such a declaration) to being occupied and “civilized.” The Dominion Lands Act was closed in 1930, but by then, just about all the free land of the prairie West was taken.
Government preparations to receive this flood of people from Europe and the British Isles were inadequate. People were allowed to come in the late summer or in the fall when no gardens could be planted and no food supply was otherwise available for them. Most of these people had no money to speak of except for the basic amount needed to pay the $10 fee to secure their homestead land, and to buy farming implements and an animal or two, no “fallback” position such as staying in the city until spring and then going out to find their land. Many of them did not speak English; many were from towns and cities and had never farmed. That anybody survived at all in those days is a wonder.
It was hard for everyone, the men who never stopped working, the children who were expected to work every minute they weren’t in school or asleep, but it was especially hard on the women. Peter’s mother, Alice Graham Butala, a highly intelligent woman who had been raised in a longer-established farming community in southern Manitoba (the Graham farm there was established in 1885), often said that the rules that applied to the original settlers in order for them to maintain ownership of their 160 acres made no sense. She was referring chiefly to the strict residency requirements which meant that, with the pre-emption (another 160 acres), all farm families were isolated. But, as she would point out, it was the women who were particularly isolated. They rarely went “to town,” unlike the men, who travelled there over rough roads to get parts for their machinery, or to have things fixed, or to pick up the mail, or to buy feed. She would know about this, having married her husband in the early thirties and lived with him and their growing family on the ranch that is still remote today, into the mid-sixties. When Peter’s father, George, became ill, Peter had to take him out to the hospital on his snowmobile to the truck that in winter he kept four miles south in the village of Divide, where the road was maintained in winter.
She told me that year after year of prolonged isolation caused an immense loneliness, a yearning just to see the face of another woman; no family could fully satisfy such deep-seated human needs. As well, the roads were poor to non-existent in the early years, which made for serious difficulty in delivering the services settlers needed: medical care, schooling for the children, supplies, and building materials. She declared that it would have been more reasonable if small villages were established, with the farm owner-workers driving out each day to the land to work as is done in Europe, the very Europe from which Peter’s father had fled.
I think of my mother, married in 1935, going into the bush to live around 1937. Eventually she had her own mother living a mile to the north, for a while, and two miles to the south, one of her sisters. But when she woke in the night (on two occasions) having a miscarriage, when our father was away and she had only toddlers at home, there was no one to run up or down the grassy trail through the forest in the night to either of her female relatives for help. To the day she died she was proud of how she handled the bleeding, which fortunately eventually stopped on its own, and always said with pride that, both times, in the morning she stuffed the sheet she had wrapped around herself, now blood-soaked, into the burning barrel and burned it. “And no one even knew.” Multiply that story by a thousand-fold, or perhaps even more.
If the promised prosperity really had come in the first few years, all of this would have been bearable, but it did not come. The homesteading failure rate was about 60 percent in the worst areas (overall it is estimated to be about 50 percent; in Saskatchewan it was set at about 57 percent), and to some extent it had been predicted long before the land was opened for settlers. For the Butalas had settled in the Palliser Triangle, an area of land of about 73,000 square miles of the Great Plains of North America, extending through southern Saskatchewan and into Alberta with its apex south of Edmonton, although if you look at early maps which vary somewhat, and read the first description of it, you would find that southwestern Manitoba was originally included. For the most part, the soil in the triangle is poor and light brown in colour, and is known for its aridity. When I lived there, the average annual precipitation was surprisingly only about twelve inches. Yet the climate is extreme.
The triangle takes its name from John Palliser, an Irishman sent by the British on expeditions between 1857 and 1860 — he was preceded by the Henry Youle Hind expedition — to evaluate the suitability of these western lands for farming. Palliser declared them to be mostly unfit for it because of the too-arid climate, the poor quality of the soil, and the lack of trees for fuel and building. This too had been the conclusion of the Hind report. A further expedition in 1872 by botanist John Macoun, a report that was most optimistic and enthusiastic (as apparently was the man himself), turned the tables by declaring most of the area to be fertile and good for farming, encouraging the federal government, which was looking for just such an excuse, to open this area to settlers. It is said that Macoun must have made his expedition during an unusually wet year so that the country was flourishing, instead of in its more usual state of near desert-like conditions. Whatever the reasons, it suited the government to populate an area so close to the American border with loyal new Canadians.
When I was only eighteen in 1958, I had a part-time job in the archives then at the University of Saskatchewan, where my work was to take the stacks of files of the original settlers and gather a certain few pertinent facts — land description, names of settlers, years of ownership, correspondence with the government — and reduce it to a single filing card. Every once in a while I would come across a handwritten letter, sometimes composed by a neighbour because the settler in question was illiterate in English, telling the most indelibly sad story of why the land hadn’t been “proved up” yet, according to the requirements of the Dominion Lands Act. Such stories: Over the winter my wife and all my children died of diphtheria. . . . I walked a hundred miles to [the nearest small town] to look for work and when I didn’t find any, I walked all the way back again. . . . A neighbour brought us food when we had only frozen potatoes to eat, and saved our lives. . . . My wife died in childbirth. . . . These were not nicely typed missives on thick vellum; they were written more often on scraps of paper, scrawled, often with errors in grammar and syntax. But they brought home to me in a way the government documents or the history books I was reading in class could never capture the reality of the despair and pain of far too many of those people. That I remember them so well nearly sixty years after I saw them is evidence of that.
Where did the women out on the land find nourishment for their female souls other than in their children, and indeed, how could they hope to raise truly educated children in such an environment? It isn’t just the simple loneliness, as it is the sense of bleakness of the life for those who couldn’t fully hide from themselves the need for “something more” that their hearts yearned for, the utter lack of opportunities beyond marriage and children that slowly kills the female soul. And if you happened to come from a non-English-speaking country, how complete the alienation must have been.
This is not the story the people of the area tell you, or, if they do, they tell it to you in dribs and drabs in an almost mythic way: a single tale of a young man going white-haired overnight after he had lost another crop; of the row of babies’ graves in the cemetery who died by fire (a constant worry in frame buildings) or disease; of the bo
y riding his horse every day in all weather, miles to school, and one day dragged to death by it; of the relative losing his way in a blizzard and found frozen in a field or on the trail; of the women rendered mad or nearly so by overwork, too many pregnancies and children, and unending loneliness. The primary story is the one of how hard the early settlers worked so that their descendants, today’s owners, might rest in the prosperity they claim today. But such a bitter beginning extracts a toll from the generations that follow. People don’t emerge optimistic from such a history; they are more likely to be proud, careful with their money, suspicious of outsiders. Kindness can be thin and rare. Generosity is too often seen as foolishness. That original promise of free land, of salvation, hangs there in the air still.
Of course, such inherited hardship also creates kind people. The all-night schoolhouse dances in the early days, the fowl suppers, the neighbourliness, the love among family members, the devotion of mothers and fathers, the respect of young women for old and of middle-aged men for the old men who gave their lives to their small enterprises.
I was starting to understand that from the extinction of the dinosaurs to the heart-rending history of the First Nations people and then of so many people who left Europe filled with hope for the future and who met only with failure and loss, hardship and suffering, the history of this land was in many ways a tragic one.
Peter, being human (and judged by me), had his shortcomings, but he knew one thing with every fibre of his being: how precious his land was. He knew too, though, that he was very fortunate in that he could afford to keep his grass in excellent condition because he hadn’t married — deliberately, he claimed — until he was forty-one and established financially. He told me many times that by marrying young, men guaranteed that the financial pressure involved in raising a family meant that they would not be able to take any of their land out of production in order to rest it for a year or several years as he sometimes did; that they would have to put too many head of cattle on their grass, which would result in damage to the grass, and as the roots weakened, invader plants such as crested wheatgrass, or forbs such as sage, would crowd out the nutritious and cattle-friendly native plants. As our years together passed, he cut back his herd more and more in order to preserve the quality of the prairie under his control.
I admired a good deal more about him than only his love and care of his land. He minded his own business, kept silent when others might have gossiped or spread cruel stories. He placed a high value on his father’s dictum that he should care for his mother and his sisters and tried his best to look out for them, and did his — admittedly, distant — best where Sean was concerned, wanting to take responsibility, yet careful not to overstep boundaries for a boy who was close to his father. He loved his old friends and was loyal to them too, the men he had cowboyed with when he was young, and whose rodeo adventures he followed and admired. He had struggled too hard to maintain what he had acquired to be wildly generous (despite what some of the neighbours apparently thought, he was never a rich man), but he helped a number of people, quietly, behind the scenes. He didn’t seem to have any ambition to become a prominent community member other than by being a successful, knowledgeable rancher, one who could be turned to for advice about cattle or horses; if asked, he willingly gave it.
The older he got, the more he cared for his animals and the harder it became for him to do some of the things that the ranching enterprise required. Castrating young bulls or horses was something he would have preferred never to do again, and he particularly loathed de-horning as very painful to the animal and needlessly cruel; he even commented with disgust on the large size of some brands on animals we saw in the sale ring or elsewhere as causing them unnecessary pain. He refused to try to produce bigger and bigger calves at birth because of the danger and suffering this caused his cows. For most of the years we were married and sold cattle, we didn’t plan for early calves in order to sell them in the same fall, but sold instead “big” steers, those a year or even two years old. Thus, having very large calves at birth wasn’t necessary as, by the time the animals were sold, they had had plenty of time to grow to a good size. If this attitude to ranching sounds unusual, I suspect that it is, but more than once coming home from helping work animals on another ranch he remarked that some of the older men agreed with him. Once he came home saying he would never help out on that ranch again because the family who owned it did not look after its animals well enough, didn’t keep them in clean bedding or get them the help of the veterinarian in time, especially did not recognize their right to be free of pain. Being “hard” on your animals is a quality in a rancher or farmer that is detested by rural people of quality, of which Peter was one.
All of these were things that I loved about him, was sometimes in awe over, because, taken together, in my experience they were rare. And of course, they culminated in his ultimate determination that his land would not be sold to farmers and broken into separate pieces when he died; that the land he so cherished and nurtured, gave even his potential prosperity to, would be kept in one block and never broken; that the native prairie would be kept, in perpetuity, in excellent condition. He dreamt, too, of the day when there would be native bison back living on it again. I was thirty-six when I married Peter, and it took me time to appreciate the quiet depth of his character. Though both of us might be embarrassed by declarations of undying love (I am sure he is looking over my shoulder as I write this, and can imagine his sheepish grin and his turning away if I had written anything like that), I never stopped thinking myself fortunate to have him as my husband.
Nobelist writer J. M. Coetzee remarked that every writer’s life in art goes through three stages and “in the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question.” In my early days in Saskatchewan, living on layers of history, this was my “great question”: What is a human life worth?
Of course, I’m not sure I knew that at the time, formulating it explicitly only in hindsight. The more I found out about prairie history and the history of the region where I’d gone to live with Peter, and also remembering my own family history, the more I pondered that question. One of the first and strongest of many things that struck me about the local culture was, delivered without fanfare or even the raising of a voice, the wisdom that came from the mouths of people with little or no formal education. Usually from old people, and I marvelled at how much suffering they must have seen, and how much thinking they must have done about it, and how humbly accepting of it they seemed to be. Coming from a university community as I had, I had grown to expect that you had to have at least a PhD and have written many books, and read many more, to be able to speak wisdom, and I was humbly disabused of such a notion.
Of the number of things I wanted to do in my books, one of the more important ones was to convey to the dubious urban reader the wisdom of rural people, this in order to show that to dismiss them out of hand, as was the habit of most urban people, was absolute foolishness. I wanted very much to show in my books that there are other ways to gain wisdom and understanding of the human condition than in the study of the writings of others, and that a rural life, seen as ignominious at the least, was worth every bit as much as an urban life lived in sophisticated surroundings, and with many more opportunities of the kind rural people could usually only dream of: wide travel, meetings with the famous and esteemed of the world, and familiarity with great discoveries and great music, with literature and the visual arts. I marvelled over how a life lived so close to the bone could teach so much about the human soul.
When I thought about this matter, I would lift my eyes and gaze out across the acres of grass empty of people and buildings all the way to the distant horizon, feeling the wind playing around me, it rarely stopping unless at sunset or at sunrise, when the world seemed to be catching its breath to pause in wonder, as I was, gazing at the luminescence of land and sky. Living in the bosom of nature all their lives, I thought, how could rural people not be fully aware, even in their
blood and bones, of the mystery of human existence? This was what I ached to write, although I did not know how to do it, and could only keep trying and trying again, and knowing with each publication that I had failed in my aim, had fallen short of it. I often thought of the old saw that says that every writer has only one book in him or her and just keeps writing it over and over again. That was me, I thought, and book after book, I dreamt of the day when I would finally get it right, knowing all the while that without Peter to guide and teach me, I couldn’t do it.
5
Home on the Range
By the time I came to live with him, Peter was alternating between living on the ranch and on the hay farm. He was at the hay farm not only when the cattle were there, but also in the spring and summer, as I’ve said, to irrigate (a twenty-four-hour-a-day job for two weeks usually twice each summer), and he had to be there for the weeks it took to hay. This seasonal migration Peter and I continued to do, moving back and forth between the hay farm with its log house built in 1912 and the ranch with its simple settler’s house. During the third year of our marriage, we built a much-needed house, a simple three-bedroom bungalow that looked to us like a palace after living in bathroom-less, central-heating-less, mouse-riddled homes for such a long time. We built it at the hay farm because Peter wouldn’t hear of building it at the ranch, saying that in the worst months of the winter the wind never stopped blowing there, that the roads were mostly closed — he had once been stuck there in winter for six full weeks all by himself — and that it was generally just too uncomfortable for cattle, horses, or, given the living accommodations, humans.
Where I Live Now Page 9
