Tag Archives: wilderness

The Homestead, Part Three

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Faith

Mum and Dad both had a strong Christian faith. Through the tough years of their marriage and after, they each relied on Jesus’ love and support.

Dad had been raised in the Salvation Army tradition, Mum with the Anglican church. As a family, we seesawed back and forth, attending one or the other service throughout my childhood. Dad especially loved the music with the Army, the drums and violins.

When training as a lawyer, years later, I was impressed with the service the Salvation Army provides to street people and the homeless. Not only do they run shelters and kitchens to feed the needy, they have volunteers who will attend Provincial Court with them to provide someone to speak on their behalf for minor infractions such as shoplifting, dine and ash, or being drunk and disorderly.

Life was not easy for my parents. Their faith saw them through some very difficult times.

Fort St. John

Fort St. John was first established in 1794 as a fort or fur trading post for the North West Company. It has been moved to several different sites in the area, depending on whether the river was the main mode of transportation, or new roads had made a different site accessible.

It was September 1959 by the time we arrived, and we rented a basement suite for a month in someone’s house in town to see how things would unfold. At 11, I remember watching other kids heading off to school down the street in the morning, wondering what would happen with our chance at an education. My parents didn’t appear to be strategic planners.

Mum and Dad sought out the Land Title’s office in Pouce Coupe. There, the agent was able to show my parents a map detailing where quarter sections of land were available, and they chose one just west of the tiny village of Cecil Lake, some miles east of Fort St. John. Dad signed up, received approval and our destiny was decided. Homesteading 101.

Cecil Lake

Cecil Lake was a small community consisting of a tiny log-built Anglican church where a service was held every third Sunday of the month, a large community hall with a kitchen attached at the back and a baseball field cleared to the side, the two-room school, and a Co-op store with gas service station, where groceries were available and the post office was located. The area had been opened up for homesteading in the 1930s when many families originally moved there to farm the land.

The community hall was used for every local celebration. Weddings were conducted at the church, and the reception and dance were moved over to the community hall, where every family in the area contributed food and drink.

The first year we were there, Nell and I heard at school that there was a fall dance and potluck to be held at the hall, and ‘the folks’ were playing. I asked whose folks would those be. The answer seemed to be simply that ‘the folks’ would play. Our family attended of course, and ‘the folks’ turned out to be the Fauks, a father, son and daughter who played wonderful dance tunes.

When everyone arrived, coats were piled on the two bunk beds in the back room, and food laid out on long tables set up in the hall. As the evening wore on, the food was cleared away and younger children nestled down to sleep among the piles of coats and jackets on the lower bunk bed as the music ramped up and the dancing began. Little girls danced with their fathers, some of them standing on daddy’s toes to be escorted across the floor. Clusters of little boys tore around the hall, chasing each other and dodging between the dancers.

Most of the young men lingered outside in the dark, where quite a large amount of homemade liquor seemed to be consumed. Chairs were lined up down one side of the hall, and the girls sat in a row. When the boys were ready to dance, they walked down the line with their hand out, until a girl accepted the invitation to dance. Often they were pretty inebriated before they came in to take part in the celebration.

There was always a Christmas festival there, with performances on the stage. Mum would write up a skit and Nell and I would be volunteered to act it out at the festival. We also sang, depending on what the festival topic was.

Once word spread that a family had arrived with daughters, the young men began to gather round. Pamela was at home for the first year, doing correspondence before she went in to live in the dorms in Fort St John.

One afternoon, two young men arrived at our place to visit. Dad chatted with them outside for a while, then brought them into the house where Mum served them coffee. They sat and drank their coffee, smoking cigarettes and dropping the ash into the cuffs of their jeans. They didn’t say much, but Pamela had obviously already met them, because she hung in there in anticipation, listening.

Finally, one of them got to the point. There was a dance coming up at the community hall, and he formally asked Dad for permission to escort Pamela to the dance. Dad considered, then gave his consent. A time for pickup was arranged and they left. Mission accomplished.

(More to come)

The Homestead, chapter two

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Our Journey North

My parents met in Esquimalt when Dad was sent to Vancouver Island for training in the Canadian Navy. They married during the Second World War. After the war ended, they settled in Victoria, where my two older sisters, Pamela and Nell, were born. I was born there also. When I was five, our parents sold their small house situated near the Gorge, and bought a box truck. Dad loaded everything into the truck, positioning a couch in the front facing forward with a window cut out of the box allowing us to see through the windshield of the cab. This is where my sisters and I travelled, looking through the front window as we drove.

We ended up in Nipawin, northern Saskatchewan, Dad’s old hometown. However, we weren’t there long. Obviously things didn’t work out as Dad had thought they would, and about eight months after we arrived, we were riding in an old Ford car headed back to Vancouver Island. It was Christmas Eve when we stopped on our journey to overnight at a hotel in Regina. I remember running up and down the hallways on the second floor with my sisters, working off steam after a long day of travelling in the car. There was an elderly bachelor in one of the hotel rooms who invited us in for a sip of pop and some candies. We never got pop, and were thrilled to receive such a treat.

Once we arrived back on Vancouver Island, we stopped in Duncan, just north of Victoria, and bought a house there. This house had three rooms, and was about four-hundred and fifty square feet in size, with a front porch and a set of stairs at the back. After about a year, Dad had enclosed the front porch to create a bathroom, and dug a new well in the yard as the old one was too shallow and ran out of water in the summer. The fourth daughter, Cindy, was born there, as well as the first son, Derek.

Dad was a journeyman carpenter, able to perform just about any task. He raised our house on car jacks and built a foundation for it. But he didn’t fit the mold of a regular working man. He took several jobs while in Duncan, one of them working on the construction of the Chemainus mill, but none of them lasted very long. After six years, Duncan proved to be a poor fit for our family and our parents had become interested in the land grant program in the North Peace River area.

Dad found an old truck and cut the box off it. He welded a ball mount hitch onto the frame of our car, and a towing hitch onto the front frame of the truck bed. We loaded all our stuff into the truck bed, including a full-sized pump organ, beds and linens.

By now there were five children. Mum and Dad sat in the front seat of the car with our youngest sister, Cindy, positioned between them. We three older girls sat in the back, with our one-year-old brother, Derek. He crawled restlessly over our laps and legs during the entire journey.

It is a long drive from Vancouver Island to the North Peace River area, especially in those days with the type of vehicles we had. Today, it is eight hundred and fifty miles or thirteen hundred and sixty kilometres by road. We camped along the way, sometimes in someone’s field. We met some kind and interesting people that way.

Pamela, who at fifteen years of age had already started high school, was devastated by the decision to move. She cried pretty well the whole trip north, mourning her lost friends and life at school. Nell and I, at thirteen and eleven, were less concerned, likely because we didn’t have a good grasp of how our lives were about to change.

Once we reached the town of Taylor, situated on the Alaska Highway between Dawson Creek and Fort St John, we discovered that when the ice left the Peace River earlier in the spring it had taken the bridge out with it. The only way across the river was over the railway bridge. This is how the locals were getting back and forth until a new bridge could be built.

It was hair-raising. Dad maneuvered the car onto the railway, the truck/ trailer bumping up behind. Between the ties, we could see the river roiling below us. I remember holding my breath in the hope we would get safely across. So that is how we arrived in Fort St. John, after driving across on the narrow railway ties high above the Peace River.

(More to come )

“The Homestead”

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This is the story of my family’s adventure. We left the Canadian west coast, travelled to northern British Columbia, established our home there, and then left. It is the story of six children who managed to live this adventure and build a new life after the journey ended. Here is how it happened.

Homesteading

A homestead is defined as a home and land occupied by a family. But homesteading means something slightly different. In Canada, homesteading was a programme offered in the past in many provinces with the goal of settling the land. There was also a drive to increase the population, often from outside the country if necessary. In British Columbia, the government passed a new homesteading act which encouraged people to claim land in the 50s and 60s. The land was divided into sections, 640 acres each, and each section was divided into quarter sections of 160 acres each. A section is measured as one mile by one mile and a quarter section is a half mile by a half mile in size.

The Land Titles office in each area had maps and a list of the land that was available. Upon application, a person could claim a quarter section. There were no taxes payable on the property until title transferred. The goal was to move onto the land, build a home, and carry out developments or what were called improvements. These could include clearing the land and farming it, building barns and raising animals, whatever was needed to become self-sufficient. The goal was to improve the land over a period of 5 years from the first claim. If one succeeded in doing that, the settler could then make application with proof of the improvements, and the land title would be transferred into his or her name.

Free land! But wait a minute, not quite free. Developing the land could be quite a challenge and incur substantial expense, depending on where it was located and what it was like. Was it heavily forested or spread over steep hills? Was it a wetland, covered in sloughs and creeks which divide the area? Was there a road providing access to the property? Lots of things could change the focus of how easy it was to get and keep the free land.

My Parents

Dad’s father, George, was one of twelve children. He was born in Upper Canada and moved with his whole family to the Canadian Prairies when the land opened up for homesteading in the 1880’s and they all claimed land. Dad was born in Sintaluta, southern Saskatchewan. When he was one and a half years old, in February of 1919, his mother, Emily Annie, died of the Spanish flu. George’s mother, Hannah Ruth, my father’s grandmother, died of the flu the following day, and the two funeral services were held at the same time in the local village church.

According to one of my cousins who knew George, our grandfather was devastated by these losses, and more or less gave up. However, he continued to farm with his father and his brothers. Each one of them had claimed some land and they used their horses and equipment in a united effort to work the soil. A couple of years later, snow came early to the Prairies. The family had harvested their father’s crop and were working down the list of brothers from oldest to youngest. George was the last brother, and before they got to his land the snow had flattened his crop, demolishing his total income for the year. Unable to pay his taxes, he lost his land, and took his family of six motherless children by train, moving them to Nipawin, in northern Saskatchewan. He set up shop in the small town as a saw and knife sharpener.

Dad grew up motherless and more or less fatherless. He remembers sleeping with his sister on a mattress on the dirt floor in a small log cabin in Nipawin. One night he woke, terrified he was alone. But when he looked around, he saw an angel standing at the foot of the mattress, keeping guard over him. He was able to calm down and go back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that he was safe.

Dad was used to being without and used to being alone. At some point he discovered he had another brother, a baby who had been born just before his mother died, making him one of seven children, not six. The baby had been taken to be raised by his aunt and uncle in Sintaluta, and remained with them when the rest of the family moved. The boys met for the first time as teenagers, and came in contact again as young men, my Dad in a navy uniform, his lost brother in army gear at the start of the Second World War.

Dad’s approach to being sick included going outside and working it off. He told a story about feeling ill and having a fever as a young man. So he went out and chopped firewood for his father. A family friend who was a medical doctor had come to visit, and when he heard Dad didn’t feel well and had a fever, he went out to check on him, diagnosing diphtheria. The doctor instructed Dad to attend at his medical clinic to get the vaccine, as there had been a number of cases in the town.

Mum was raised in a family of seven children. Her parents were from England, her father, Sidney, from Southampton, her mother, Rosa, from Rye. The father’s family ran a grocery store, and he joined the English navy at age nineteen. A few years later, Sidney resigned to sign up for the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve and travel to Canada on the HMCS Rainbow, the first ship of the Canadian navy, which landed at Esquimalt, Vancouver Island, British Columbia in 1910. He settled there.

Rosa’s family ran a pub and bakery in England, and emigrated to Canada in about 1914, at the start of the First World War. Rosa and Sidney met in Esquimalt and married.

Mum was their third child, and when she was a young girl, she was devastated by the death of her brother, Arthur, two years younger than herself. He was run over in the street by a delivery truck. They had been close, sharing a bed. The loss had a lasting effect on her life. I remember she mourned the loss of her brother even as an adult.

She was raised to be polite, speak correctly, and always use her manners. She did needlework, could knit or sew anything, loved to paint pictures, and gardened for food and flowers. But especially her talent was with words, in both poetry and prose. (more to come 🙂