THE BARR COLONY. (con't)
Eagle Creek, there was a bridge, but the descent was precipitous. The
other was a ford. A somewhat frequent incident arose from the neglect
of the inexperienced in not watering their oxen regularly. The result was
that when the bovines caught sight of a pond they rushed into it and
nothing could stop them. The heavily laden wagon would be mired in the
slough, and have to be unloaded. It is to the credit of everybody con-
cerned that no fatal accident occurred; or any really serious mishap.
The old town of Battleford is about half way and some of the colonists
went no farther than this, the first capital of the Northwest Territories.
About 1,800 is a fair computation of the number who reached the goal,
and spent the first summer and winter there. There were Government
officials appointed expressly to aid the inexperienced colonists. Many
funny stories went through the press. A large number of homesteads
were allotted in England from the Government surveys. One man when
told "That is your line," looked earnestly at the ground and said he
couldn't see any line. Two men on a buckboard came to water and
thought to give the pony a drink. But the pony couldn't get his head
down. So they took him out of the vehicle. Still he couldn't drink.
Then they tried to tip the animal up from behind so that his nose could
reach the water. No good. At last they let down the check line. A
man was leaving Saskatoon with a big load of small and very young
oxen. "Them oxen ain't very big," remarked an on-looker. "No," re-
plied the proud owner, "but they are full of blood." A settler went to
an official and said, "I want to dig a well; how shall I begin." "Well,"
said the official, a Londoner, very gravely, "We generally begin at the
top." "Ah; I see, I see," replied the enquirer and went away as if he
had received some priceless information. "But," added my informant,
the said Londoner, "that man made good and turned out a good farmer."
Another man had a white hen. He wanted to know whether he should
set only white eggs under it as perhaps the white hen couldn't hatch
brown eggs. Two men were starting to dig up the prairie and were
advised to plough it. "Oh! no! Your agricultural machinery isn't any
good. We are getting out a potato digger." Now a proportion of these
stories and the like of them may be true, but the salt box should be
handy.
One of these settlers, a man of reliability, tells me that at least half
of these questions were put by competent people just for the fun of
seeing the officials take them seriously. For instance a story went through
the press about a man asking which end up one should plant the wheat.
My friend tells me he heard that question put and was one of a bunch
who were standing around enjoying the fun of hearing their countryman
"kidding" the Canadian by asking bogus questions. The man who asked
that question had started his career many years before by taking a
course at an agricultural college, but he was a good actor and was able
to hide a whole raft of agricultural knowledge under the mantle of an
assumed and colossal ignorance. The well-top story is probably
one of
Bibliography follows:
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