“There was really no work in the south, and Mam and Pah wanted their own land to work. Things didn’t go so good working for Henry Knelsen anyway, and all that drought and grasshoppers and foreclosuresdown south. Then Pah heard the government had lots of homestead land up north, even new Mennonite immigrants from Russia were getting land to file on up there. And good rain and snow too, you just had to build a house, clear ten acres a year and break it. He heard through some connection with Fiedlers, they met somewheres.”
Dan’s eighty-four-year-old memory does not know if Pah somehow met Gust Fiedler, Tina’s future husband, or August, the thick and venerable Fiedler patriarch, but in May 1933 their groaning truck trundled off Highway 4 and when it reached Jack Pine School turned north, ground along past the clearing on the Enns hill where the cellar for the future Mennonite Brethren Church was being dug by men with shovels, on past Speedwell School where Annie Born had taught the first forty children in eight grades in the fall of 1931, half a mile farther to the August Fiedler homestead cut into the outermost northern edge of the community. Pauline and August had nine children—the oldest, Gustav, was twenty-six—a few acres of bush farm cleared and a steam sawmill.
“I still have my steam engineer papers,” Gust tells me in September 1995. “I ran our mill for twelve years.”
“He was an old bachelor then,” my sister Tina says slyly. Her face has grown into the folds I rememberof our mother. “I worked a bit for the Fiedlers, in the house, but I didn’t want anything to do with him!”
We laugh, drinking herbal tea around the table in their Lethbridge, Alberta, condo; by 1995 Tina and Gust have been married for sixty-two years.
“When we got to Speedwell on that miserable truck,” Tina says, “they let us live on his brother Ted’s homestead, half a mile through the bush from old Fiedlers. Dan, Mary and Helen started school in Speedwell.”
“Ted wasn’t married yet,” Gust says, “but he took over the quarter west of us when the Lemkeys moved away. There was a log cabin with a barn on the side so they saved building one wall.”
“Like the old Mennonite house-barn style, in Russia?”
“Sort of. We had no place, and they took us in, for a whole year, till we got the CPR quarter.”
“But you didn’t really like Gust?”
“Well, men, you know …” We all laugh again at her tone, and then she continues seriously, “We were always so poor in Canada, when we’d been a few months at Henry Knelsen’s I turned sixteen so Pah and Mam sent me to Manitoba to work for my keep. To Mam’s aunt, a Mrs. Siemens, and I was warned to watch myself, there was the old guy and four sons and their youngest daughter Nancy warned me ‘Youbetter watch my dad,’ and sure enough he came after me, the old goat, but Mrs. Siemens was suspicious of
me
. She opened my letters from the folks and read them when they came to the post office and it got too much, I left. But wherever I worked the men were always grabbing me so I wrote to Mam and I went back to Kelstern.
“But Mam wanted to get away from Kelstern too. They worked there three years and her uncles had been in Canada thirty years and had big farms but the Depression got worse and they said they couldn’t help us. Jake Knelsen was a preacher and couldn’t help anyway but Henry had this great big farm though he wouldn’t sponsor us to come to Canada—it was Mam’s aunt in Alberta that did that—there was something not very good there and Mam wanted to get away from them.”
Sad family stories that fade but never vanish, hard edges that remain irrefutable as fossils.
But Gust is full of Speedwell and sawmills. “There was lots of good pine and spruce there then,” he says. “In winter we had different guys cutting for us, Abe and your Pah too, skidding in the logs, and then we traded the sawed lumber in Fairholme for groceries—two-day
Dan’s eighty-four-year-old memory does not know if Pah somehow met Gust Fiedler, Tina’s future husband, or August, the thick and venerable Fiedler patriarch, but in May 1933 their groaning truck trundled off Highway 4 and when it reached Jack Pine School turned north, ground along past the clearing on the Enns hill where the cellar for the future Mennonite Brethren Church was being dug by men with shovels, on past Speedwell School where Annie Born had taught the first forty children in eight grades in the fall of 1931, half a mile farther to the August Fiedler homestead cut into the outermost northern edge of the community. Pauline and August had nine children—the oldest, Gustav, was twenty-six—a few acres of bush farm cleared and a steam sawmill.
“I still have my steam engineer papers,” Gust tells me in September 1995. “I ran our mill for twelve years.”
“He was an old bachelor then,” my sister Tina says slyly. Her face has grown into the folds I rememberof our mother. “I worked a bit for the Fiedlers, in the house, but I didn’t want anything to do with him!”
We laugh, drinking herbal tea around the table in their Lethbridge, Alberta, condo; by 1995 Tina and Gust have been married for sixty-two years.
“When we got to Speedwell on that miserable truck,” Tina says, “they let us live on his brother Ted’s homestead, half a mile through the bush from old Fiedlers. Dan, Mary and Helen started school in Speedwell.”
“Ted wasn’t married yet,” Gust says, “but he took over the quarter west of us when the Lemkeys moved away. There was a log cabin with a barn on the side so they saved building one wall.”
“Like the old Mennonite house-barn style, in Russia?”
“Sort of. We had no place, and they took us in, for a whole year, till we got the CPR quarter.”
“But you didn’t really like Gust?”
“Well, men, you know …” We all laugh again at her tone, and then she continues seriously, “We were always so poor in Canada, when we’d been a few months at Henry Knelsen’s I turned sixteen so Pah and Mam sent me to Manitoba to work for my keep. To Mam’s aunt, a Mrs. Siemens, and I was warned to watch myself, there was the old guy and four sons and their youngest daughter Nancy warned me ‘Youbetter watch my dad,’ and sure enough he came after me, the old goat, but Mrs. Siemens was suspicious of
me
. She opened my letters from the folks and read them when they came to the post office and it got too much, I left. But wherever I worked the men were always grabbing me so I wrote to Mam and I went back to Kelstern.
“But Mam wanted to get away from Kelstern too. They worked there three years and her uncles had been in Canada thirty years and had big farms but the Depression got worse and they said they couldn’t help us. Jake Knelsen was a preacher and couldn’t help anyway but Henry had this great big farm though he wouldn’t sponsor us to come to Canada—it was Mam’s aunt in Alberta that did that—there was something not very good there and Mam wanted to get away from them.”
Sad family stories that fade but never vanish, hard edges that remain irrefutable as fossils.
But Gust is full of Speedwell and sawmills. “There was lots of good pine and spruce there then,” he says. “In winter we had different guys cutting for us, Abe and your Pah too, skidding in the logs, and then we traded the sawed lumber in Fairholme for groceries—two-day
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