LIFE IN OLD COUNTRY SETTLEMENTS.
THE SUMNER COLONY.
(Mrs. Christina Willey, Bredenbury, Sask.)
The first thought that impressed this very inquiring and curious
minded immigrant was the foreignness, the strangeness, of little
things.
The great wood-burning locomotive (she called it a "railway engine")
was familiar enough from pictures and description-but the astonishing
shabbiness and rustiness of the monster, the fact that it bore a number
instead of a name-the engine driver, who was now an engineer, the
stoker who had become a fireman, the guard who was called a conductor,
these were the wonders of the first few days in Canada. The tall lad
whose love had brought her across the world had described the train and
the journey, but had not enlarged upon the picnic breakfasts, the strange
hasty meals taken at "twenty minute stops for dinner," the boiling of
water for tea on a stove at the end of the car, the usual, but,
to her, most
new way of travelling across Canada in the eighties.
The dreariness of burnt over land in west Ontario, the rocky desola-
tion of the north shore, the days of journeying through a country appar-
ently uninhabited, these led, at last to Winnipeg and the Leland Hotel,
then quite the best in the city.
This city of the last century, with many railway tracks, but such an
excuse for a station, with the dreadful shanties around that station, with
plank sidewalks and the mud, has it not been described so often?
The new Post Office this critic compared to candy in layers, even the
City Hall did not impress her-but the hotel itself was a source of wicked
joy. The sacred dining room in the basement, locked so carefully between
meals; the hungry crowd that waited for the bell. Even the table appoint-
ments were different; the spoons herded together in their own holder, or
festooned round the top-heavy cruet, the dry mustard in the mustard pot,
granulated sugar, dabs of a dozen things round each plate, and above all,
the fashion of ordering all the courses at once! As she protested, "How
can I know how much I am going to eat just. now?" The crowning joke,
to this irreverent young person was the printed notice on the gas-jet in
the bedroom, "Please turn out the gas~o not blow it out."
Why keep up the third person affectation? It was I who first saw
oxen lying down in harness in the Market square. I was tramping down
to the Hudson's Bay Store past a quarter of a mile of unbuilt on lots,
when I saw Portage Avenue in its naked state, and heard my first wild
geese at night. It shall be I in the future of these rambling notes.
Winnipeg treated us to heat and thunder; Whitewood, our railway
journey's end, gave us rain, and when, next day, we crossed the Qu'Appelle
Valley, we did it in a snowstorm.
Thirty miles from Whitewood brought us home, to that small English
settlement called Sumner. While our house was being finished we lived
with my husband's brother and his wife, and I served an apprenticeship
to prairie housekeeping in a splendid school. My sister-in-law, the kind-
est, most painstaking of teachers, a perfect manager, would despair at
the casualness of my mind to wander off and lie down to watch a gopher,
to discover unknown flowers and birds. This was all very well,
but why
not dust the speckless sitting room first? Why not clean out this already
clean cupboard, it was the regular day for it, and read the home mail
afterwards? Dear sister Lena, you have been gone for many a day, but
your wonderful housekeeping was a burden and a reproach to a heedless
he(lonist. Even the log walls were washed when necessary; a painted
floor was scrubbed down to the white boards again.
I remember once, after a visit, when we had sat with our feet upon
newspapers to keep the dust of the trail from the floor, ~ admired the
white strips of oil-cloth tacked upon the walls to keep careless heads from
the logs, that a profane friend, after leaving the house, picked up some
grains of earth from the yard, and said earnestly "Thank God for a
little honest dirt!"
There was one night, during this first six weeks, that in some wonder-
ful way, a joint of mutton appeared. Our diet of course, had been very
fat salt pork, and I, the poor Londoner, who had never in my life, pos-
sibly, gone twenty-four hours without fresh meat, actually sat up to cook
some of that delightful mutton, to the scandal of the older settlers, but
I was starved for variety. Pork had lost all appeal. Mutton I must have
before I slept! Did not the chosen people pine for the flesh pots of Egypt?
Of course, I knew all about log houses in theory-had I not seen the
real thing at the "Wild West Exhibition"-but my own log house was
a revelation. A large two-story place, ridiculous for two people of ordi-
nary size, with casement windows opening outwards; picturesque, but
the worst arrangement possible for such a climate; banging and strain-
ing in the winds of summer; impossible to screen; and always draughty
in the winter. I had great dormer windows in the roof upstairs, and
(irreverent passers-by on a distant trail said it looked like a terrace of
houses) ; an open stairway in the sitting room, which was great for
circulating the air in the winter; and no shadow of porch to break the
winds of winter. But beautiful for situation, on the bend of a creek
that swung around it to west and south. I would go to the upper windows
to worship the view, westward across the creek and over a stretch of open
prairie-southward up two deep' green ravines, winding, wooded, ex-quisite.
Here in our great house, we settled down. Here we opened our pack-
ing cases, to find most of the fragile wedding china smashed, and all the
solid granite ware perfect; but even thus with much left to adorn and
bring comfort. Here I, child of the cistern and tap, learned the meaning
of water bucket and dipper, learned to make bread, and make it well;
learned to wash clothes, and do it badly. That first wash-day! From
breakfast to dark I toiled, and the clothes were grey.
We had business transactions, even in those early moneyless days. An
old ox, who had about lived out his span, was butchered by my husband
and a young friend, but, alas, the whole colony scorned to eat him. Some
even declared that when the meat was being dressed the light showed
through his ribs as through a Japanese lantern. However, not discour-
aged, the two owners set out next day with a wagon and team of oxen
to peddle the meat in the Hungarian settlement of Esterhazy, a few miles
south. At sunset they returned-tired and hungry, but without any beef.
The tale was too good to keep-they had cajoled one foreigner into buying
a chunk for fifty cents; had driven all the rest of the day from house to
house without making a sale, and finally, had dumped the rest of the car-
cass at a hungarian's door and left the settlement as fast as the oxen
could be persuaded to travel.
Cash certainly was scarce, grain alone had any real value, and a fifty
acre field on any one farm was unusual, so that even a good crop did not
bring in a fortune. We made butter, which we traded if anyone was going
to town, for about ten cents a pound, and eggs were sometimes six dozen
for a quarter. A circular once arrived in the mail offering three cents a
pound for butter, to use as soap grease.
Our wants, however, were few-tea, coffee, sugar, yeast cakes, prunes,
dried apples, and tobacco, tobacco, tobacco-these were our chief neces-
sities. About twice a year a visit was made to Whitewood, a fourteen
hour journey each way with the oxen, along the prairie trails, up and
down the ungraded Qu'Appelle Hills, fording the river and for a week
or two before this marketing day there was generally quite an amount
of borrowing of tea and tobacco-other things could be done without-
these were necessities.
here I must give long delayed thanks to many a storekeeper of those
old days. How they were able to give the credit I don't know; how they
managed to have faith in so many far away and almost unknown cus-
tomers I cannot imagine, but it is a literal fact that many a settler would
have gone hungry--might have come very close to starvation, had it not
been for men like Knowler. Biggins and Marshallsay of Whitewood and
I suppose, as many merchants in as many other towns, who handed out
stores and waited for the cash, season after season, in the eighties and
nineties of the last century.
Bibliography follows:
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