Did you hear about the hen that laid the same egg six times? No? What about when it was so windy a fellow had to stand on his hat to keep it? Or the time some pranksters put a wagon up on a haystack and some others moved an outhouse into the middle of Main Street? Still no? I guess you had to be there.
“There” is the wholesome, anecdotal past of Sandra Rollings-Magnusson’s Folklife and Superstition, which brings into focus the daily life of homesteaders as they scratched out a new existence on the Canadian prairie. After the Dominion Lands Act was passed in 1872, any potential settler could request a free parcel of 160 acres, the only requirement being to clear, occupy, and farm it. This was uncharted territory, with little to forewarn and few to advise newcomers on what lay ahead. Many were unprepared, having never driven oxen or horses, never plowed the soil or butchered hogs, never chinked logs or forded rivers. It’s easy to guffaw at their naïveté and...
J. R. Patterson was born on a farm in Manitoba. His writing appears widely, including in The Atlantic and National Geographic.
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