by Ruth Glover
Free land! Would the world ever see the like again? The offer was a magnet that drew men and women sick of poverty, yearning for freedom, and actually fleeing from all parts of the old world with its custom of landed aristocracy worked by tenants.
Any man who was the head of a family or who had reached the age of twenty-one could apply for the coveted 160 acres—the filing fee was ten dollars—obtaining full title at the end of three years if he had cultivated part of the land and done some building. He filed on the free, quarter-section acreage, built his houses and barns, and cultivated according to the terms of the Dominion Land Act, and counted himself blessed. Never mind that first buildings, more times than not, were built from the turves—that upper stratum of soil bound by grass and plant roots into a thick mat—of his own land. Though unspeakably crude, these soddies, as they were called, offered immediate shelter to man and beast and, of great importance, qualified as buildings and satisfied the land office’s requirement.
Cattle did well on the nutritious prairie grass, as did sheep, the difficulty being to keep them and not lose them into the grass that swallowed them up, should they stray. As yet there were few if any barbed wire fences around property; there were more important things demanding immediate attention, such as getting ready for a prairie winter, and there were many other things of more importance on which to spend one’s small hoard of money. Still, cattle flourished, tethered securely, or guarded by a child of the family. And when it was discovered that the quick-maturing wheat, Marquis and Red Fife, could be grown with wonderful results on the grasslands, the area that came to be known as the Prairie Provinces was on its way to becoming the bread basket of the world.
It was this land, this stretching land, that unrolled endlessly before the emigrants as they entered it, went through it. The panorama was staggering in its scope and beyond expressing. Those who invaded it, to subdue it, seemed far too puny to make any impression on it.
Awed into silence by the magnificence and simplicity of the land, the girls could only shake their heads over the huddle of soddies—house and barn and chicken house—that were the only sign of man, the mighty conqueror, in the boundless, pathless sea of grass that stretched from horizon to horizon. One man was to write home: “I lined up my stakes to my quarter-section, hitched up my oxen, sunk the blade in that virgin ground, and got going. I went most of a half mile without a break, then stopped and looked back. There was my furrow, the first furrow ever, stretching away behind me for half a mile, straight as a gun barrel.”
“Oh, I do hope,” Anne said tightly, staring out at the loneliness and solitude, “I don’t have to live in sich as that,” and she pointed to a particularly sagging soddy, beside which a cow was tethered, its voracious appetite making no dent whatsoever in the bounty of fodder flourishing all around it.
“It could eat forever,” Anne continued, watching sourly as the munching cow faded from sight, “until it blew up and exploded, and you’d niver see that it had made even so much as a dent in all that grass.”
“I hardly think we’ll live in sich as that,” Tierney reassured her friend concerning life in a soddy. “Surely sich people couldn’t afford—or need—domestic help. Now see, away over there on the skyline, a square lookin’ blot on the landscape? That’s a hoose.”
Lonely it stood, with never a tree or a bush to soften its bold invasion of the land’s simplicity—grass, grass, and more grass. But its outline alone cheered the quaking hearts of the newcomers. Perhaps, in this infinity of grass, a small spot of normalcy would be found for them.
“I dinna ken,” Anne continued uneasily, “whither I can adjust to sich as all this.”
And indeed it was a far cry from the sea and hills and cozy crofts of home. In that place, small in comparison, land was hard to come by, and most of it was well populated, at least where the girls had lived. Such loneliness as this! Could they exist in it?
“Weel, whatever it is, and wherever, I’m ready to get there,” Tierney declared, dabbing futilely with her grimy handkerchief at yet another soot spot on her waist, a waist that had been pristinely white when they had boarded the train three days before. So much for arriving like “queens of the kitchen.”
“Though how I shall abide bein’ buried up to me chin in this wilderness o’ grass is beyond me,” she finished grimly. Tierney, for one, had come, seen, and now rather passionately rejected the prairie.
Perhaps Pearly came closest to saying something pertinent. With her small vivid face soot smudged, pressed against the window, she murmured, “If then God so clothe the grass, which is today in the field, and tomorrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?”
Rebellious at heart now that the great mystery of the west was being unravelled before her very eyes, still Tierney was respectful of God’s Word and said nothing. But her tightened lips, to anyone watching, spoke for her.
At one stop, a hamlet no more than a clearing in the prairie’s grass, with a few outbuildings and a small building serving as store, station, and post office for those fortunate enough to live within driving distance, the girls took the opportunity to leave the uncomfortable, sooty, smelly car, as they had numerous times before, to walk beside the train, stretch their cramped limbs, and enter, curiously, the town’s main building.
“Doctor?” the proprietor was repeating to one of the travelers with a small child in her arms. “No, ma’am. There’s no doctor here. Not much else, neither. But it’s comin’. It’s comin’! Folks are puttin’ in the plow almost as soon as they step foot on their homestead and gettin’ a crop the very first year. Ain’t that sumpin? Course it’s probably potatoes first thing, but it gives them sumpin to eat and even sumpin to sell. That’s why the railroad is so great, and it’s also why all the first settlers get as near the line as they can. Yes sir . . . ma’am that is . . . we expect that in a year or so you’ll see this place flourishin’ like the . . . the cedars of Lebanon! Wouldn’t that be sumpin? Not a tree in sight now! P’raps I mean like the rose o’ Sharon. We do have roses—wildroses—them little sturdy bushes bloom like crazy at a certain time of the year. Anyway, p’raps then we’ll have a doctor. Till then we are all mighty careful not to have any kind of accident. And, o’course,” he said with a wink, “we pray a lot.”
Even as he spoke, certain pieces of farm equipment were being unloaded from a boxcar and, with much effort, loaded onto a couple of wagons that had been drawn up close.
“That feller,” the loquacious storekeeper continued, nodding in the direction of the activity further along the line, “takin’ delivery of a plow, is still livin’ in a tent. For him, farmin’ comes first. Could be because our growin’ season is short and he wants to make hay while the sun shines. Ha! But, as you see, he’s gettin’ delivery of that precious Prairie Queen plow, prob’ly ordered it before he ever came, and here it is. That’s the train for you. P’raps the first sod he turns over will go into makin’ a soddy for his family. That’s his wife a’settin’ there in the wagon. No doubt she,” the man chuckled agreeably, “wanted to get out of the tent and come to town.”
Another woman approached the travelers and silently held out a tray of something that resembled small tea cakes. Her square face spoke of European beginnings, or perhaps it was the babushka wrapped around her head and tied under her chin. She smiled openly and said something that could be taken for “You buy.” A small sign, which someone had printed for her, read “3 for 10 cents.”
Face-to-face with the prairie entrepreneur, Pearly dug around in the knitted bag hanging over her arm, came up with three cents, and looked helplessly at Tierney and Anne. They hastily went in search of a few coins, and the smile on the broad face of the woman was as rewarding as the few bites of sweet concoction she placed in their hands.
“You . . . live . . . here?” Pearly asked loudly, as though the poor woman were deaf. Whether or not she understood the words, the homesteader caught the meaning, for she turned and swept her hand ove
r the panorama of sky, land, and the grass that moved silently and continually as though in response to some heavenly orchestration.
“Mine,” she said. “Mine blace, mine hoosban,” and she pointed to a man helping with the loading of the plow. The pride of ownership was in her eyes. Tierney turned away with her own eyes misting. Such dedication, such determination, such satisfaction. Was it possible to know it?
The difference, she said to herself, is that she’s doing it for herself and her man. My problem, our problem, is that we have no stake in this place nor in any place. We’re rootless.
Surrounded by the rooting and grounding of grass as countless as the sands of the sea, still the girls were without roots themselves.
It’s like home all over again, Tierney thought despairingly. We’re no better off than in Binkiebrae.
And yet—here they were. To go back was impossible; there was one way only, and that was ahead, embracing the future, whatever it was. She wished, now that she was here, that she could be as certain as Pearly was.
Tierney studied the prairie, letting her sight go as far as vision would take it. Was it possible that Robbie Dunbar was out there someplace? He could be ten feet beyond the town’s boundary and, if stooping or sitting, would be as lost to her as when he was on one side of the ocean, she the other. Could she, even for Robbie, settle for the prairie? She remembered her passionate avowal of faithfulness, that she would go with Robbie Dunbar at a moment’s notice “to Timbuktu.”
But surely Timbuktu, wherever it was, was not so starkly treeless! Letting her eyes sweep in a circle, Tierney found not so much as a sapling struggling for life. It was as though the grass had laid claim to the land. Man, that indefatigable, stubborn creature, would find himself challenged, almost to the breaking point, to reclaim what the grass had held forever and would give up stubbornly. And for some, it would mean the breaking point.
In spite of that, still they came—the emigrants. Even now the hopeful, the dreamers, were climbing back aboard the train that would take them rushing across the virgin ground—wherein plow had never sunk, seed never planted, animals never domesticated—eager to meet the challenge of the land.
“Think of it,” Pearly said as they made their way back to the train, catching up the last few crumbs of the homemade goodie, “we’ll be makin’ this our home, too. We can, and prob’ly will, marry an’ settle down here, on our own property, and then we’ll b’long. I mean b’long like we never b’longed back home.” Pearly giggled. “We’ll prob’ly raise the next generation of Canadians, and they’ll truly b’long. Ever think o’ that, girls?”
Yep, this’s Saskatoon.”
It was the conductor confirming their suspicions. Surely nothing this raw and rambunctious would be called Prince Albert or Regina—the other two burgeoning “cities” up this way, so named in honor of their dear respected queen and her consort.
Saskatoon, for sure and certain, was a frontier town. Among many fascinating sights, the tent city was perhaps the most striking. At one place the streets were lined with tents; like mushrooms they had sprung up as the settlers poured in. Arriving emigrants had left the discomfort of the train for the crudeness of a tent, seeking temporary shelter before scattering out across the prairie to their homesteads.
“It’s the end of the trip for you,” one man, a traveling companion of the girls, said, “and for me too, though the train goes on to Prince Albert—the true jumping off place. I’ll be jumping off here, myself.”
“An’ will y’ be settin’ up a tent, then?” Pearly asked.
“Not settin’ up a tent,” the cheerful emigrant said. “Rentin’ one. And I’ll not hesitate to do so, neither. Them tents is more or less permanent here, I been told. They got wood floors and, as you see, the walls, for a coupla feet up, are made of boards. Only the top part is canvas. Somebody with foresight built those things, rents them, and is probably pullin’ in a fortune, far more than the rest of us’ll make grubbin’ for a livin’ in the land. Yep, they may look ramshackle, but they sure fill the bill for those of us tired to death of this train contraption. They shoulda called it ‘strain’!” And the speaker—whiskery with several days’ growth and ripe from infrequent contact with bathtub facilities—roared at his own humor.
“It looks like a forest of stovepipes,” Anne commented, studying the tents as the train rolled slowly past.
“I’ll get one of ’em for my family,” the man continued. “The plan is to leave the wife and kids here, in comparative comfort, until I get my homestead located—I understand it’s about thirty miles out there,” and he waved a hand in the general direction of the west. “Thirty miles is a long and hard day’s journey with a horse and wagon loaded with everything to build a house—”
“Homestead shack, they call them,” a listening man chimed in.
“Then, when the shack is ready,” the first speaker continued, after fixing the interrupter with a frosty eye, “I’ll come back and get the family.”
“And all the rest of the things you’ll need,” the second speaker said dryly.
Everyone within hearing distance turned and looked at him dubiously. Leaning back comfortably, he hooked his thumbs in his vest and drew deeply on a great cigar that added odorously to the closeness of the car, bringing several women’s hankies delicately to their noses.
“I’m a real estate agent myself,” he said, “and doing big business, I can tell you. This is a country on the move. Land is so simple to get, if people don’t like their neighbor once they get settled, or see land they like better, they up, sell, and move. Yes, we’re a nation on the move. Even the dear Lord must have trouble keeping track of all of us. But it’s good business for us real estate agents, I can tell you. You really can’t,” he said shrewdly, fixing his eyes on several men listening intently, “make a go of it on 160 acres, you know; you’ll want more. So, people either move or get the land next to theirs—how else do you think every little town supports two or three real estate offices? And it all puts the old blunt in my pocket.” He puffed mightily, blowing cigar smoke toward the roof of the car, crossed his legs, put an arm across the back of the seat, and seemed a man pleased with himself and the moving world.
His listeners turned away with various degrees of distaste on their faces. It was the last thing they needed to hear right now: that they might ever move again! One and all turned their eyes on the town by which it, and a berry, were called—Saskatoon.
This sturdy settlement, growing rapidly, especially since the arrival of the train, had been founded by a group of promoters who called themselves the Temperance Colonists. The Northwest Territories were officially “dry,” so the temperance angle was superfluous. Still it drew settlers who thought there would be advantages to living in a community where high principles would be respected. But the Temperance Colony could not acquire land in a huge tract because, in every township, two sections had already been retained by the Crown for school districts, and another two belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company. It made for a checkered layout and frustrated and foiled the Temperance Colonists.
The firstcomers settled on the east bank of the Saskatchewan River’s south branch; eventually the train track reached them—a tremendous advantage that caused the east bank people of the little community, which was called Saskatoon, to rejoice over their rivals on the west bank, who were trainless—only a ferry accommodated their needs. Eventually the railway company moved the station to the west bank, a dismaying turn of events for the east-bank people. Now a bridge, being imperative, was built, and the people of both sides drew together in their objectives. A new name was suggested: Nutana.
Nutana, it was said by the Temperance Colony agent who suggested it, was an Indian word meaning “first born.” But none of the Cree and Sioux of the area ever knew or used the word. The man was suspected of having an overactive imagination; Nutana’s subsequent use became limited to a small area, and Saskatoon was officially chosen as the town’s name.
“Weel,
it’s no Aberdeen,” Anne said, staring out of the grimy train window, “but it’s better than what we’ve been seein’ across the prairies. Oh, that we could stay here!”
Missing the hills of home, Tierney responded with a shake of the head, “This is too flat for my likin’. Way too flat—”
“Not really,” someone corrected her. “It just seems that way. The prairie has folds and creases and the likes of that, but yes, it seems as flat as a table from our viewpoint.”
Tierney continued her remark for Anne alone: “Oh, that we would end up whaur there’s braes and trees!”
“Is it Binkiebrae, then, that ye’re longin’ for, Tierney?” Anne asked kindly.
“Na, na, it’s no’ that. I guess I’m jist jittery aboot everythin’ being sae new and strange. Nae, I’d no’ go back, e’en if I could. ’Tis jist . . .” In her depth of feeling, Tierney had slipped back into the old, unacceptable way of speech. Ishbel Mountjoy wouldn’t have approved.
Anne laid a comforting hand on her friend’s arm. “I’m the same, Tierney. But I think we’ll feel better when we’re in our new places, and workin’. We’re tired to death of this sittin’ around, wonderin’-like.”
What a relief it was, and had been all across an ocean and halfway across a continent, to have the British Women’s Emigration Society in charge. Here was a strange town called Saskatoon and/or Nutana, growing to lusty maturity; here was a river called “Kis-is-ski-tche-wan,” or “the river that flows rapidly,” which, despite its shallow depth—seldom more than twelve feet—ran its tawny waters treacherously across the territory in a giant Y, to empty eventually into Hudson Bay. Both town and river, and much, much more, were as removed from the old world as the moon from the earth, in the minds and thinking of three uneasy girls. They felt quite cast adrift, though they had contracts in their purses and assurances concerning the employers that had been alerted to meet them.
