Place History

Place: A Methodology for Research

By Merle Massie, PhD.

Conference paper presented at World Congress in Environmental History. Guimaraes, Portugal, 2014. Edited for blog post August 2017.

In June of 2014, I was in my hometown of Paddockwood, Saskatchewan, Canada – population less than two hundred in the village, less than a thousand in the rural area. I was there to give a talk and show a slideshow of pictures from my most recent book, Forest Prairie Edge: Place History in Saskatchewan. It’s a place history of the region, which I spent four years researching and writing. As the lights darkened, a hush fell – with obedient silence – over the crowd. Kids squirmed, adults settled in, and my Great Aunt Clara folded her arms and leaned back. She listened with one eye half-closed as I moved from picture to picture, from story to story. She likes to make sure that I tell the stories right, that what I say agrees with her memories.

Locals can be a tough audience when you write a local history, but the slideshow and stories were a big hit. Clara got a chance to add to one or two of the stories, providing a few details on the local cheese factory, but I scored a home run: I told her some stories that she’s never heard before. She was introduced in a new way, to the place that she knows best.

And there’s that word: place.

Place is ubiquitous; it is everywhere at once. From ecology to history, place is a word that is used often in the English language: someplace, no place, every place, any place. First place. Second place. Last place. Place that over here. You’re sitting in my place. Let’s go to my place for a drink.

Place is a popular focal point for study. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan eloquently said that space plus culture equals place (1977). There are reams of literature studying sense of place, place attachment, place dependence, place remaking, non place (or, the internet, which is everywhere and nowhere). The omnipresence of the word ‘place’, has led to controversy and discussion, multiple theoretical threads and calls in both directions: use it more broadly; and don’t use it at all.

I do use place. I use it to describe what it is that I do, which I call ‘place history’. This blog post, which was first presented at the World Congress in Environmental History in Portugal in 2014, is a rough attempt to explain place not as theory, but as methodology. Warning: I’m rather allergic to theory, and decided this post is no place for a literature review, or even much in the way of references. If you’re looking for them, sorry. I’m posting this presentation because of these tweets:

Place based inquiry tweets

So, with apologies to Kaitlin Stack-Whitney who might be looking for a lit review or recommendations, this isn’t that. I’m going to describe what I do, when I set about to do a place-based inquiry.

I use ‘place’ as a method of organizing my research, of building a different kind of story. How many of you have read Dan Flores’ suggestion that we use a bioregion as the focal point for environmental studies? (I love that article. Go read it). My work follows on Flores’ in that I’m interested in the environment as a central defining part of place history.  This post will explain three short-ish points about how I do it, and what kinds of information place history can show. The examples are drawn from two different research projects I’ve created in the last few years (with images from the powerpoint presentation).

So: what is place history? Place history is a research strategy. It is a way of organizing and focusing your research. At its core, it studies a particular place through the lens of time. You start, like we all do, with a research question. For my hometown place history, my research question was: what has my hometown region looked like in the past, and how has it changed over time? For the second research project, the question was, how has this landscape, and its people, responded to floods? As you can see, the first question was a bit larger, while the second focused specifically on a particular kind of event (flood). Both had advantages and drawbacks.

I start a place history by first defining a soft border around a research region. Sometimes, there is a natural boundary line that I can follow, but sometimes not. My hometown story is not a bioregion, in that it doesn’t have specific biophysical markers. It sits, in fact, at the transition zone between two bioregions, and that’s part of what made it interesting for me. It sits where the North American interior plains hit the northern boreal forest in my home province of Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan in known as the ‘land of living skies’, a prairie space, flat and treeless.  I once heard my research summed up in three words: Saskatchewan has trees. I thought, good enough!

The second study involved a massive inland delta, a water landscape covering 10,000 square kilometers – about one-tenth the size of Portugal. The Saskatchewan River Delta is a primarily Indigenous landscape of enormous importance, ecologically, economically, and socially in the interior of Canada, straddling the border between Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Most of my work focused specifically on the upper delta, centering on the community of Cumberland House and the delta that surrounds it. The biophysical marker makes the research region easier to identify, but studying water means studying all the places the water was before it gets to the delta, so again, ‘soft’ boundaries are important.

So, the first thing that I do is define the soft borders around my research region, as a way to contain and focus my research question. What this does: it helps me focus my archival and library and oral interview work. I specifically search for books, theses, articles, and archival documents written about my research region and seek out a variety of specialists and knowledge-holders to read, study, and interview. I also visit, usually many times. The search is a large and usually an on-going process. It’s never finished; you can never find everything, see everything, know everything. A place historian must embrace a little bit of ambiguity, of vagueness at the edge of the laser focus.

TWO: the second part of my place history research methodology involves time. Place is about landscape; history is about time. As I find information about the place I am studying, I create a landscape timeline. I won’t show you one, because they tend to be messy, but do it however you want: on a whiteboard, using post-it notes on a poster board, using Excel or another program, or in a memo book. The point is to remember and celebrate that the landscape is not just the ecological backdrop for the human story. The environment is neither static nor inert. When you write a place history, you are telling the story of the land; people’s activities are a response to that land, and the land responds back. When I work on place history, the landscape becomes a key and active player in the story, an actor whose decisions have implications across the landscape and across its human inhabitants.

Let me give you an example: in the 1870s, less than 150 years ago, the Saskatchewan River – the river which creates the Saskatchewan River Delta – experienced an avulsion. An avulsion means the river jumped its track, leaping out of its riverbed to blow out a whole new river pattern, completely changing the way the delta works and how and when and where people could move through it. Steamboat traffic changed. Trapping patterns and fishing patterns changed. Silt rose, to the point where dredging was necessary to keep the boats running and people were predicting that Cumberland Lake in the centre of the delta would, in time, silt right up and become farmland. The effects of that avulsion are still working through the delta. But the avulsion had little to no imprint on the memories of the local Indigenous population, at least until scientists recovered it and started talking about it in the community. The avulsion can be traced through the historical record and scientific investigation, but little in the local memory. The avulsion’s fingerprints remain on the land, and it became my job to find out why those fingerprints were largely missing from the oral story.

The key part of writing a place history is to remember that neither the land nor the people are static. A landscape timeline gives me recreated snapshots or descriptions of what the landscape looked like at a particular time, and how humans used the landscape, and how and when and why things changed. With a landscape timeline, I can ‘layer’ both environmental change and human change to see what affected what, and with what consequences.

In the case of the delta, I soon found that the massive changes caused by the avulsion had disappeared from the local story because they’d been superceded by even more massive change in the twentieth century, much more recent in the memories of the local population. A dam, upstream from the delta, had dammed the water to create a large lake and hydropower supply. This dam, and the way it was run, disrupted natural rhythms to such an enormous extent that the local story started to sound black and white: before the dam, after the dam. The avulsion as an integral landscape story virtually disappeared. I only learned about it because, as a place historian, I was diligently collecting information across time, building my landscape timeline.

What I’ve discovered is that, by shifting the focus from a human-centered to a place-centered timeline, I have a clear perspective on what activities are possible, probable, or practical in a certain place in a certain time. It also helps serve as a predictor: what can make this landscape seem more desirable, or less desirable, as a place of human habitation? In the work I did on my hometown region, it became clear to me that the local landscape became desirable, and as a consequence became a major destination for climate refugees, during the global environmental and economic disaster of the 1930s. Whereas the nearby landscape, the Great Plains of North America, suffered severe ecological drought, the forest edge still had water in wells and coming down from the sky, trees for shelter and fuel and building materials, hay for starving animals chewing dust, gardens where “even the turnips were edible,” wild game and berries and fish. In short, there was a comparative natural abundance to feed animals and humans. It became desirable because it didn’t have endless black blizzards. As a result, almost 50,000 people relocated from the dust bowl to the forest fringe of my home province, a massive internal migration that changed the face of land settlement, agriculture, and population.

So, the second step in place history: create a landscape timeline. This timeline will help you draw clear connections between the landscape and the human activities you record as significant aspects of your research question. It can also help you choose more clearly which human decisions – politics, policy, or development – you need to understand in order to engage with your landscape. The answers to that can be unexpected.

The downside is that as your landscape changes over time, and as human activity changes over time, you as the researcher will need to become a jack of all trades. You’re not just an expert in one event or one theme or one theory; you’ve got to learn something about everything. This puts you at a disadvantage when speaking with an expert dedicated to one group, one policy, one moment, but remember that your perspective is built with light from many sources. And that can, and does, bring forth fresh new perspectives.

This multiplicity brings us to the third and last point: place history methodology draws knowledge from across a range of knowledge holders and creators. This range is substantive: science, social science, humanities, Indigenous knowledge, and the natural world. Data (I’m sorry – I hate the word ‘data’ but I use it because people understand it) data from natural and social science is deliberately blended with professional history, oral and community history, literature, and art to provide a broadly-based comparative framework. This is natural and physical science plus social science and humanities.

Why does a place historian need so many sources? Because each has a significant contribution, and each has the potential to carry a part of the story independent of other knowledge-holders. The story of the avulsion is a good example: its story is carried in the historical record and in the research projects of delta scientists. Yet it was virtually eclipsed from the Indigenous local memory. You cannot rely on one source to the exclusion of others. In a place history, you’re building a landscape timeline of a place, deliberately blending multiple viewpoints and information so that nothing is in isolation. A place history can show how a local lumber industry melded with local agriculture, First Nations, and the environment, with influence and impact in many directions.

Another example. The Saskatchewan River delta is historically a flood landscape, with thousands of years of flood adaptation and flood memory. Using place history methodology, I focused on my research region and looked for information across time, regarding flood events. In 1781, a major spring flood blew out the newcomer European traders, drenching their valued goods and creating a quagmire out of their fortified trading post. The Indigenous inhabitants simply moved to drier ground. The flood was a seasonal event; perhaps higher than other years, but not enough to shift anything in the Indigenous daily life, yet making a mockery of the newcomers.

Turn the clock forward to 1962, when the EB Campbell Dam was built, upriver from the delta. Floods changed. High water events came at different seasons. Rushing water came suddenly, at different times of the day, blowing out traplines and fishing nets, stranding people or leaving them high and dry, with useless boats far from home. Unpredictable. Human-made, not natural. The water would come or not come as a result of policy decisions regarding electrical requirements for people far away, not local needs. No one knew when or how to predict the water, and old knowledge was rendered almost useless. The dam was a disruption that caused untold ecological and cultural change.

One result of the ecological disruption was that the people changed. What had once been a water-adapted culture became increasingly land-adapted, tied to vehicles and roads, dependent on infrastructure such as roads and bridges. In 2005, the Saskatchewan River upstream was in flood, and the community of Cumberland House evacuated itself primarily because its road, winding through the delta, was compromised. There was fear of being cut off, of medical emergencies and isolation. The evacuation caused tremendous backlash in the community, particularly among the elders, who felt the evacuation was needless – and so it was. While it was a high water event, the community did not flood. After 2005 there was a resurgence in oral stories, a renaissance of flood memory from elders that drew from a time before the dam, when the water flow wasn’t restricted, when floods were a natural event and nothing to fear. In 2011, in part because of the elders’ clear response and oral stories, the community, when once again faced with historic high water, did not evacuate.[i]

In 2013, when flood once again threatened, the community was forcibly evacuated by the provincial government who clearly did not understand either the depth of flood memory, the elders’ knowledge, nor community resilience. It was, as in 2005 and 2011, a needless evacuation. The community did not flood. The provincial safety manager told me later, in confidence, that they would never again evacuate Cumberland House. Flood measures and protections, when used well, would be enough. Finally, the provincial emergency management leadership learned what local Indigenous elders drawing on a deep-time knowledge of water and the delta knew: the delta absorbs and spreads the water over a massive landscape; it floods, but it does not flood.

So to sum up, place history, as a basic methodology, does three things: one, defines a geographical soft boundary of place as a way to focus your research question; two, builds a landscape timeline that creates snapshots of that place over time; and three; draws from across a broad range of knowledge holders, from arts to science to Indigenous knowledge to the natural world.

Why is place history important? It is a methodology that allows us to ‘see’ and compare issues across time, through the eyes of a particular place. Place methodology offers a deep time perspective that transcends dramatic events to consider the broader implications of the intimate connection between humans and the environment: the delta as a water landscape, and how we’ve moved with, against, challenged and changed that; the forest edge as a rich ecotone between the prairie and the forest, and how we’ve moved that edge back and forth through axe and fire, agriculture, and tourism. What I find doing place history is often unexpected, and sometimes challenging to the status quo, because I’m starting from a different vantage point: the landscape, rather than the people.

And that’s how I can, when I’m really lucky, surprise my Great Aunt Clara, and tell her a few stories that even she didn’t know.

[i] For a deeper investigation of flood memory, the Saskatchewan River Delta, and the flood events of 2005 and 2011, see Merle Massie and M.G. Reed, Chapter 6: “Cumberland House in the Saskatchewan River Delta: flood memory and the municipal response, 2005 and 2011” in Climate Change and Flood Risk Management: Adaptation and Extreme Events at the Local Level Edited by E. Carina H. Keskitalo. https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781781006665.xml

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An 1889 Cree Syllabic Letter

One of the most fascinating archival finds of my PhD research was a wonderful letter (in four parts) written in Cree syllabic. I came across it while researching the Adhesion to Treaty Six, which was signed by the people of the Montreal Lake and Lac La Ronge regions of Saskatchewan on a brutally cold February day in 1889.

Such files are usually read by Canadian researchers on microfilm, under the short name of ‘RG 10.’ RG stands for Record Group, and RG 10 files are primarily from Indian Affairs. These are critical files for researchers, from a time when correspondence was letters (not email or social media). While the files are mostly written by, for, and back and forth between those employed by Indian Affairs, there is the occasional fascinating jewel of a letter written by a local person. Even more rarely, there is a wonderful letter written, in Cree syllabic, by local First Nations leaders.

I took scans of these letters immediately, although I can read neither syllabic nor Cree. They languished in my digital files while I worked my way through other research, which eventually became my book, Forest Prairie Edge. The following is an excerpt that explains the Treaty Six Adhesion:

“After years of agitation and repeated requests from the boreal bands in the north Prince Albert region, the Crown finally agreed to offer treaty. The difference between an internal adhesion and an external adhesion was crucial: an internal adhesion added people to existing treaty stipulations; an external adhesion added both new people and new lands to an existing treaty. In the latter, treaty terms were at least somewhat negotiable.

“The external adhesion attempted to sort out a dual problem. On the one hand, there were bands with homes in the north Prince Albert region, within the boundaries of Treaty 6, that had not been offered treaty. Securing an external adhesion, which acted essentially as a new treaty, clarified the uncertainty of who was, and who was not, in treaty relationship with the Crown. Although there is nothing in the official records to act as confirmation, an external adhesion could negate continuing calls for arrears in treaty annuity payments.” 

“The second problem came from the commercial interests of investors in Prince Albert. Surveyors, scouting and marking out timber berths, realized that the boundaries of Treaty 6 did not entirely cover the potential area of forest resources that the Prince Albert community believed was within their economic sphere. In short, the land ceded by Treaty 6 did not correspond to the boundaries of the Saskatchewan District of the North-West Territories[i] or Prince Albert’s intended commercial empire of northern boreal resources. Officials at Indian Affairs explained: “The object in getting the surrender just now is in order that the Govt might legally dispose of the lumber in that Section permits to cut which have in some cases already been issued.”[ii] It was a somewhat frantic and belated effort to legally rectify a serious error—the government was issuing timber permits on land that had possibly not yet been ceded by treaty.”

During the treaty negotiations, the Cree leaders from Montreal Lake had a somewhat different view than their Lac La Ronge counterparts in what should be included in the articles and terms of the treaty, and what should be included in the initial and subsequent treaty payments. The syllabic letters that I found were sent to Ottawa after the treaty negotiations were complete and the treaty signed, but before the first payment came in the fall of 1889. The letters came from the Montreal Lake leadership, outlining in further detail their thoughts on the treaty, and what would be most useful to them as part of their treaty payment. They had clearly had some time to think, and wanted to send a message on their expectations and needs. However, it is not known if anyone working for Indian Affairs at the time was able to translate these requests.

The letters are a mix of Cree syllabic and English handwriting, and are written by three different people: Chief William Charles, councilor Benjamin Bird (who wrote 2 of the four pages), and councilor Isaac Bird. In 2016, I met Dion Tootoosis at an event in support of Prince Albert National Park. I told him about the texts, and he Angela Custer at the Saskatchewan Indigenous Cultural Centre took the project in hand. With the help and advice of Arok Wolvengrey and Solomon Ratt, the Centre was able to translate the syllabic into today’s written Cree, and for my benefit, to English.

Page one, from Chief William Charles, who also requested (in English) matches, and a copy of the treaty document.

Cree Syllabic One (from Chief William Charles)

Line:

1. nimithwîthihtîn, ninanâskomâw kihci-okimâskwîw
   I am happy, I give thanks to the Queen
2. mîna otatoskîthâkana ôta ê-nakaskamâhk
   and also her workers, here where we meet
3. mâka nipakosîthimonân kita-kitimâkihtahk nipîkiskwîninân
   but I hope she listens with compassion for our talk
4. ôma kâ-wî-isi-kâkîsimototawâyahkik nîci-tipahamâtwânânak
   this where we are going to pray for our fellow treaty people
5. nistam kâ-tipahamâtohk pîhonânihk sônîyâwak nîstanân
   the first treaty payment here at (Ft. Carlton or F. La Corne) for us
6. kâ-ati-otayâniyâhk êkosi nitisi-kâkîsimonân
   to have clothing, this is what we pray for

It seems clear that the translation of Fort Carlton or Fort La Corne is a bit incorrect, as this document references the treaty terms signed at Molanosa. The expected fall treaty payment for the Montreal Lake band would take place at the south end of the lake, in what would become their home reserve. But otherwise, the Chief greets the Queen and asks for compassion for his people.

Page two, from Benjamin Bird.

The second page is from Benjamin Bird, who was an outspoken councilor both at the negotiations and as shown by his two syllabic pages.

Cree Syllabic Two (Benjamin Bird)

Line:

1. hâw êkwa nîsta nititwân ninanâskomânân

   me too I say we give thanks to

2. kihci-okimâskwîw êkwa ê-wâpahtamâhk okitimâkîyihcikêwin

   the Queen and we see her compassion

3. okiskinwahamâkîw (syllabic too faded to read) isinamâkîw??

   teacher __________the one who hands out

4. sôniyâwa kitakî-wî-mîthikoyâhk

   money, to give us back (Give us back the money)

5. mostoswak ê-ohci-pî-mîkicik mistikonâpêw

   cattle, we were supposed to be given, by James Smtih

6. amêwistoyân mâka itwêw ka-ohci-pamihikawîyâhk

   the bearded one said, this is where we will be well taken care of

7. êkotê kihci-ohci-pamihihcik, tâskipocikan

   from there we were supposed to be taken care of; rip saw

8. cîkahikana, pakwâyinîkana

   axes, canvas

9. mônahihcikêkâkana athapiy-asapâp

   hoes, twines for nets

10. pîminahkwâna, pâskisikana, akahamâtowin.

    ropes, gun, ration

11. ninohtêpathihikonân kâ-pî-pipohk mîna tânithikohk

    we are short this winter and how much

12. kâ-pî-asamikawîyâhk

    we were given to be fed

Page three, from Isaac Bird. Note: in English, Isaac added: requested also for cooking stoves and trowels

Cree Syllabic Three (Isaac Bird)

Line:

1. nimithwîthihtînân kâ-isi-pihtamâhk
   we are happy that we hear
2. î-kî-kitimâkîthimikoyâhk kihci-okimâskwîw
   that the Queen shows us compassion
3. ______ ikosi nîsta î-isi-tipâhtamân
   this is what I hear also
4. anihi nitâsotamâkowininâna
   those things we were promised
5. mîna kitakî-wî-tipahamâkawiyâhk
   we were supposed to be paid out
6. sôniyâwak
   money
7. ikwa mîna kotaka nipakosîthimonân
   and also we are hoping
8. î-wî-natotamâhk
   to ask for other things

Page four, from Benjamin Bird.

Cree Syllabic Four

Line:

• âhaw êkwa nîstanân niwî-nanâskomânân

yes, and we give thanks

• kihci-okimâskwîw mîna otatoskîthâkana êkwa

to the Queen and workers and

• kâ-sâsakwîthimot ayi-misiwî-askîhk ê-pê-tamâkoyâhk

Where her roles all over the land, she brings us

• otinamâtowina ninanâskomânân mîna

her care (responsibility), we give thanks and

• nimithwîthihtînân ê-pî-tipahamâkoyâhk

we are happy she came to pay us

• nitaskînâhk êyak-ohci okitimâkîthimowinihk

our land, we are calling on her

• kâ-wî-natomâyâhk mistiko-nâpêw ninatotamânân

compassion for us. James Smith we ask

• okanawînamâkîw kistêkiwiyiniw, tâskipocikan,

the Indian Agent for: rip saw,

• kâ-wâskâwîpiniht, kinipocikanisina,

wheels (Wagon), files for saw,

• kîskimana, napaki-cîkahikana, athahikîhikana,

files, flat axes, rakes,

• nanâtohk kiscikânisa, maskihkiya,

seeds, medicine,

• ayawinisa, pîkopicikânisa, ê-kâsisiki

clothing, ploughs, sharp (nails)

• sakahikana, wâpamoni-pîskowâsînamâna

nails, window panes

I was absolutely delighted to receive these wonderful translations. They speak to me in a clear voice, across the years, of local leadership working hard to put their people to the best advantage in the negotiations of the treaty. The requests show a wonderful mix of boreal forest tools, such as rip saws for forestry and net twine for fishing, with local agricultural needs such as rakes, hoes and seeds. Window panes and nails for building strong homes fitted well with calls for medicine and clothes. Isaac Bird spoke loudest about money payments, which should have (but did not) include back payment for all the years between the original signing of Treaty Six in 1876, and the new signing in 1889.

With the help and support of the Saskatchewan Indigenous Cultural Centre, these detailed syllabics and their modern translations can now be shared with you.

[i] Ray, Miller, and Tough, Bounty and Benevolence, 144.

[ii] LAC, RG 10 Vol. 3601, File 1754, Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Edgar Dewdney to Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed, 6 December 1888.

John Beames: Prince Albert’s lost author

[Hey everyone. I’ve been away from my blog for a long time (for good reasons, I do promise). But I have a lot of bite-sized pieces that I’ve published in various places, sitting on my computer. I’m going to start bringing them in here.]

*** NOTE: this piece was originally published in Rural Roots August 21st 2014 ****

John Beames is a western Canadian author “who does not deserve to be as completely forgotten as he has been,” wrote Dick Harrison in 1977, commenting on prairie writers.

But, even in Prince Albert, the town he worked so hard to make famous, Beames is all but forgotten.

Born in India in 1889, John Beames was the son of a British army officer, well-used to traveling and adventure. Taken to Britain, Beames entered public school until the family relocated to Canada, taking up a homestead farm north of Prince Albert when the land was opened for settlement, about 1906.

Prince Albert author John Beames. Courtesy SaskHistoryOnline

As was the case with most homesteaders, local jobs brought extra cash. Beames worked as a lumberjack, a millhand, and did some trapping. He also hauled freight on the winter trails north from Prince Albert, taking goods up the old Montreal Lake trail. Eventually, he became a bookkeeper and started writing stories for pulp magazines. By 1926, stories such as “Cuff Her, Riverhog” and “The Price of a Pelt” found their way into Short Stories and Ace-High Magazine.

The Ace-High Magazine had a tagline of “Western Adventure and Sport Stories,” and sold for 20 cents a copy. Its covers showed cowboys, in hats and chaps and guns and handkerchiefs, glorying in action. Beames published forty-four short stories in Ace-High, eighteen in West, as well as other pulp publications.

His work brought a distinctly northern flavour to the magazines. Lumberjacks, freighters, trappers and bears, gold mining and prospecting, trees and muskegs seasoned his stories.

Beames moved to Toronto in 1928, persuaded by his editor to write full-time. The Great Depression curbed his writing, as so many pulp magazines suffered in the economic crisis. But Beames, with the weight of practice, wrote three novels that put Prince Albert on the fictional map.

Army Without Banners was published in 1930. The main characters, Billy and Maggie Clovelly, are cast as pioneers homesteaders in the northern bush. “Real, wild, new country – that’s what I like. Fences give me a pain in the neck.” The nearest town is Riverton, a mask for Prince Albert, but the town features little in the story. Instead, Beames recreates what it was like to build a homestead, then a neighborhood, then a community, with each quarter slowly filling and the land changing from bush to farmland.

The characters face typical homestead stories, from digging a well to building a homestead shack, getting rooked by an implement dealer and taking freighting contracts in winter to make a little money. Church services and community parties, with a mix of cultures, brings the homestead world to life.

In the end, all that civilization was too much for Billy Clovelly, and he sells his farm to move even further north, to the Peace River country of Alberta, to start all over again in a place with no fences. “He was not made for civilization, but appointed by fate a scout, a spyer-out of the land.”

Two more novels followed in close succession, both with a clear focus on the city of Prince Albert: Gateway in 1932, and Duke in 1933. In both these novels, the city is renamed Gateway – a play on Prince Albert’s tagline, “Gateway to the North.” River Street is Water Street, “three miles long, with a sawmill at either end, and followed the wide windings of the Sweetwater River,” a fictional version of the Saskatchewan. Central Avenue became Maple Avenue, and the “train went no further, and from the banks of the Sweetwater to the Arctic there stretched the Northern wilderness.” Both were published in Britain by Ernest Benn Limited, no doubt to an audience still eager for rough-and-tumble stories from the far-flung colonies.

Gateway tells the story of Richard Black, a handsome ne’er-do-well bachelor who inherits a store on Water Street and struggles to both turn a profit and escort the prettiest girl in town, Molly McLay, in style. The rival for Molly’s fickle affection is Conquest Gates, owner of the local flour mill. Side characters abound, and Beames has a deft touch when it comes to writing local language. A rival store owner, Mr. Isenberg, described a customer: “I don’t give him no credit, it’s cash or trade mit dot deadbeat. He bring in some botter an’ some Seneca root just now an’ trade, I don’t give him no credit.”

In some ways, Duke, his final novel, is Beames’ best portrayal of Prince Albert. In it, he takes the theme of town boosterism, real estate booms and how they can be created. The central character, Marmaduke Ming, becomes the “Duke,” a real estate man complete with a vapish wife who strips him of money and pride.

But the heart of the story is the rush to build a power dam at Thunder Falls – which Prince Albert residents would recognize as La Colle Falls. “The river came foaming down a littered stairway of granite rock and leaped out in a bold and beautiful curve, to fall into a boiling basin forty feet below.” The novel follows the power-dam idea through politics, engineering, raising money, and ultimately the bust that stopped the project and sent Gateway/Prince Albert into a tailspin of debt. Duke Ming, in the end, goes off to fight in the Great War in 1914.

 La Colle Falls during the build. RA-1796-2 Courtesy of Saskatchewan Archives Board

While the old Western Producer book publishing series re-issued Army Without Banners in 1988, both Duke and Gateway are rare finds. Only the lucky will find one of the few copies. I bought mine through rare book hunts and treasure them. But I suspect, with Beames’ connection to Prince Albert and its fictionalization into Gateway, that there are still a few copies of these books hiding in P.A. family bookshelves.

Tammy Roberts

Recently, I started following Saskatchewan-based writer Tammy Roberts. While I don’t always agree with her stuff, she is doing some excellent research work and asking some hard-hitting questions about provincial politics. This is her latest:

Recently a SaskParty Cabinet Minister – a really, really lovely person who I truly like – said to me, “You know, you could write something nice once in a while.” I want to. I really do. But after the SaskParty’s absolutely absurd behavior this week – and outright attempts to mislead us, it won’t be happening today. […]

via The Saskatchewan Government: Making Kellyanne Conway Blush — OURSASK.CA

Three mistakes I made during my academic job interviews

Actually, that’s an arbitrary number. I’m pretty sure that I made more mistakes than that — and I have no doubt that the people who interviewed me saw more than I remember.

But my goal is to help others who might be chasing the academic dream to…reveal…to you what I know for sure that I did wrong during my short-lived time attempting to land an elusive position as a tenure-track faculty member somewhere in Canadian academia.

Swamp Fever

I’ve been working a little bit on a little side project, which I’ve known about for years but kept putting in the bottom drawer of my research life: swamp fever.

What, Merle, is swamp fever?

It’s equine infectious anemia, and let me say right from the outset, that it remains a terrible killer of horses. The Merck manual, that guide for all veterinarians, notes that it is a non-contagious virus. And it can kill a horse, either quickly or very slowly.

Others have likened EIA, or swamp fever, to a horse-form of AIDS. In fact, some researchers have pointed to the work done to find a vaccine for swamp fever as holding out some possibilities for AIDS researchers. 

So, it’s viral, and non-contagious. Except when spread by blood. In this case, EIA is spread by the bite of a fly. Any biting fly. So, EIA is found more readily in places where there may be a lot of biting flies.

Like a swamp. Or a low-lying swampy region, filled with luscious grass and abundant water. The bottom of a pasture. Or, the edge of a forest.

In western Canada, swamp fever rose to critical prominence as agriculture grew. First noted with alarm in the 1880s, it was a disease of the edge, of the new homesteads created in the bushy places, where water is abundant. It was not, nor is it now, a disease much found or noted on the open, dry plain.

Symptoms were distressing but distressingly difficult to pinpoint. A high fever. Or a small one. Or one that bounced around. Lethargy and extreme tiredness. Flesh wasting away while an animal gorged itself, eating itself to starvation. A change in personality. Depression, in an otherwise happy, playful, even spiteful animal.

How do you tell the vet: my horse is depressed? How do you tell an early 20th Century vet: my horse is depressed? It’s a symptom that hadn’t really been invented yet. It wasn’t an available condition.

Results could be quickly lethal, or distressingly chronic. A horse could seem to recover, but with any work, could relapse. Another horse could sicken and die within days, leaving a farm with limited horsepower. In a busy season, swamp fever was a disaster. For a small farm with few resources and little money, it could be the straw that breaks the farm’s back.

But here’s the real problem: another horse can look completely healthy, but be carrier. Those are, in fact, the most problematic. Because in order for an outbreak of swamp fever to occur, there must be a carrier present. There must be a sick horse nearby, for the biting flies to feast upon, to spread the disease. The obviously sick ones can be quarantined. The healthy carriers, with no obvious symptoms, are the deadliest.

There has been well over 100 years of research on EIA, across multiple continents, with no cure and no vaccine. It remains a world-wide scourge of horses, donkeys, and mules.

Horses — and farms — which catch swamp fever go under immediate quarantine, for life, or face euthanasia. It puts a huge burden on farms to keep an infected animal alive, for limited purpose. Yet, the human-animal bond can be strong, and some farmers are willing to isolate and keep their horse, using all necessary precaution, to help it live a decent life.

A rural farm 100 years ago usually didn’t have that luxury.

The Fort McMurray Fire and the Great Fire of 1919

Peeling Back the Bark

In just two short paragraphs, the Edmonton newspaper account captured the destruction and relief felt that all were safe after a wildfire overwhelmed the town:

Swept away in the maelstrom of a raging forest fire which descended upon the place like a furnace blast on Monday afternoon, the little village … is today a mere smouldering mass of ruin and desolation, and its entire population is homeless and bereft of all personal effects, save scant articles of clothing which could be worn through the nerve-wracking struggle the people were forced to make to preserve their lives.

The absence of a death toll in the catastrophe is due to the heroic measures taken by the citizens, who rushed into the waters of the lake and defied suffocating heat and smoke by means of wet blankets. Only such measures saved many of the women and little children, the intensity of the fire being shown by the burning of the very reeds along the shore and…

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