order winter clothes. And once I remember standing in a lineup of farmers with Pah during an early autumn snowfall when he was handed a wooden box of red Nova Scotia apples—the end-label with beautiful, shining apples was right!—out of a boxcar beside the Fairholme Pool elevator.
Our family was fortunate to have two grown sons; they worked at everything from cutting cord-wood for groceries to hoeing sugar beets, workingon threshing or railroad building crews, to logging and cattle feeding. But clearing the CPR quarter for a crop was too hard, there was other land already cleared available, and in 1938 we moved all our Oam’seelijchtjeiten, our paltry possessions, and few cattle four miles from our CPR homestead north into Township 53, to the John Franka land half a mile east off the road between Speedwell and Jack Pine.
That main road itself could not follow the surveyed road allowance very often because of the rolling terrain: it was mostly wagon ruts worn wide and winding around hay sloughs and along ridges or hills to avoid muskeg, but in short sections it was cut as straight as the surveyors marked it; it was even ditched and graded, especially where it led down to plank culverts crossing two creeks that ran in spring or prolonged summer rain. The road’s surface was whatever the land offered: black topsoil, clay, sandy hillsides, swamp, gravel ridges and mudholes. Your horses simply had to be strong enough to haul your wagon through or around these mudholes that widened and deepened with the seasons, especially during spring thaw. In winter tracks could be hard, but breaking through drifts blown by heavy blizzards with a cutter or family caboose or sleigh-rack loaded high with hay was even harder.
My mother remembered the exact day that our family for the first time, drove north along this road. May 9, 1933, she told me when I was writing Pah’s obituary; in a small rented truck. They wanted to be farmers, but after three years in Canada they did not own a single animal, not a cow, not so much as a dog. They were coming from Kelstern in southern Saskatchewan where since May 1930 the family had worked on the large grain farm owned by Mam’s uncle Henry Knelsen, who had emigrated to Canada early in the century. Like all of southern Saskatchewan, the Knelsen farm was being buried in the blowing dust of the thirties.
Dan tells me—he was then thirteen—that around Kelstern it was so dry that if anyone dipped a pail of water out of a slough, a hole was left in the slough. “So we left, the whole family with our little stuff hardly filled a ton truck, and we drove down a street and Dad was standing in the back eating a chicken leg and he waved it at people on the sidewalk, ‘See!’ He was so happy in Canada we still had something to eat.” I presume Mam and baby Liz, born at Kelstern, were in the truck cab and did not hear this declaration, the only story that remains of the more than three-hundred-mile travel up the desert length of Depression Saskatchewan, and which ever after was told in our family as a bit oflaughter or chagrin. Apparently “See!” was our father’s one English word after three years in Canada; very useful, he said.
Pracha’oam, de tjenne nijch e’mol den Hund von hinj’rem Owe locke.
Beggar-poor, they can’t so much as lure a dog from behind the stove.
Since they moved from Kelstern, now a three-building spot well south of the Trans-Canada Highway, the street with the sidewalk must have been in Swift Current, and Highway 4, which then began at Orkney near the Montana border and was more or less cleared and laid out north to Meadow Lake in what was then called “Good Grade 2 Highway,” the road they travelled. On it they would have found a ferry to cross the South Saskatchewan River and at Battleford a steel bridge to drive over the Battle and the North Saskatchewan rivers.
When I ask Dan why, of all possible places, they hauled themselves to stony Speedwell, he replies,
Our family was fortunate to have two grown sons; they worked at everything from cutting cord-wood for groceries to hoeing sugar beets, workingon threshing or railroad building crews, to logging and cattle feeding. But clearing the CPR quarter for a crop was too hard, there was other land already cleared available, and in 1938 we moved all our Oam’seelijchtjeiten, our paltry possessions, and few cattle four miles from our CPR homestead north into Township 53, to the John Franka land half a mile east off the road between Speedwell and Jack Pine.
That main road itself could not follow the surveyed road allowance very often because of the rolling terrain: it was mostly wagon ruts worn wide and winding around hay sloughs and along ridges or hills to avoid muskeg, but in short sections it was cut as straight as the surveyors marked it; it was even ditched and graded, especially where it led down to plank culverts crossing two creeks that ran in spring or prolonged summer rain. The road’s surface was whatever the land offered: black topsoil, clay, sandy hillsides, swamp, gravel ridges and mudholes. Your horses simply had to be strong enough to haul your wagon through or around these mudholes that widened and deepened with the seasons, especially during spring thaw. In winter tracks could be hard, but breaking through drifts blown by heavy blizzards with a cutter or family caboose or sleigh-rack loaded high with hay was even harder.
My mother remembered the exact day that our family for the first time, drove north along this road. May 9, 1933, she told me when I was writing Pah’s obituary; in a small rented truck. They wanted to be farmers, but after three years in Canada they did not own a single animal, not a cow, not so much as a dog. They were coming from Kelstern in southern Saskatchewan where since May 1930 the family had worked on the large grain farm owned by Mam’s uncle Henry Knelsen, who had emigrated to Canada early in the century. Like all of southern Saskatchewan, the Knelsen farm was being buried in the blowing dust of the thirties.
Dan tells me—he was then thirteen—that around Kelstern it was so dry that if anyone dipped a pail of water out of a slough, a hole was left in the slough. “So we left, the whole family with our little stuff hardly filled a ton truck, and we drove down a street and Dad was standing in the back eating a chicken leg and he waved it at people on the sidewalk, ‘See!’ He was so happy in Canada we still had something to eat.” I presume Mam and baby Liz, born at Kelstern, were in the truck cab and did not hear this declaration, the only story that remains of the more than three-hundred-mile travel up the desert length of Depression Saskatchewan, and which ever after was told in our family as a bit oflaughter or chagrin. Apparently “See!” was our father’s one English word after three years in Canada; very useful, he said.
Pracha’oam, de tjenne nijch e’mol den Hund von hinj’rem Owe locke.
Beggar-poor, they can’t so much as lure a dog from behind the stove.
Since they moved from Kelstern, now a three-building spot well south of the Trans-Canada Highway, the street with the sidewalk must have been in Swift Current, and Highway 4, which then began at Orkney near the Montana border and was more or less cleared and laid out north to Meadow Lake in what was then called “Good Grade 2 Highway,” the road they travelled. On it they would have found a ferry to cross the South Saskatchewan River and at Battleford a steel bridge to drive over the Battle and the North Saskatchewan rivers.
When I ask Dan why, of all possible places, they hauled themselves to stony Speedwell, he replies,
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