Prairie Home Companions

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 missteps. There were the immigrants who, on the ship over from England, asked each other, “Which is warmest? Snowshoes or moccasins?” Or the pair of young men who hobbled the legs of their oxen on a downslope and consequently crashed their wagon. Or another young, raw Englishman (it’s almost always an Englishman) hired as a farmhand who appeared on his first morning in a robe, asking, “Will you please show me the way to the bawth room?” After his boss concluded that the Brit’s “brain was so strained with book learning and learning to cure hams, it was not capable of further development,” he put him on a westbound train, to become someone else’s problem.

While we can laugh at them for their vanilla jokes, for trusting their pigs to predict the weather, for being afraid to cut their hair on a Friday, for being scared of moonlight, or for keeping moose and badgers as pets, we could take a lesson in hope and humility from these greenhorns. Hope that one can careen blindly into a life change (it’s not enough to call homesteading a career change) and succeed; humility as we admire their persistent courage and gumption, which were just as necessary as money or know‑how. Stories like these make it clear that the idea of “common sense” being a thing of the past is rubbish: we’re as without a clue now as we’ve ever been.

To set out for the uncertainty of the prairie, to sleep in a sod house and suffer the cold, the mosquitoes, and the deprivation, they had to be dreamers, even if desperate or greedy ones. Within them lived a dream of a better future. It’s the same shrewd hustle you find in immigrant communities all over the world today: the desire, indistinguishable from need, to improve life.

Rollings-Magnusson, a sociology professor at MacEwan University, keeps things light. The closest she brings us to the disasters of those years — and there were many — is in detailing the stupefying effects of isolation. As countless diarists here recount, the loved ones, soft chairs, and warm beds all lay to the east. The prairie was unforgiving, and “prairie madness” was no joke. As one homesteader recounted, “Women have gone mad, slowly, hopelessly, incurably mad because it was stronger and bigger than they were.” As for the men, “the weak wilted, their moral and physical fiber not strong enough to struggle against loneliness, hardship, grasshoppers, early frost, hail, sawflies, rust, and drought. Slowly their bodies bent with the wind.”

Considering such ungodly conditions, the book’s black and white photographs are all the more interesting for the many smiles and white blouses they show. The importance of staying chipper can’t be overstated, but how these people mustered the grit to keep their shirts bleached defies belief (how they managed it at all is, regrettably, not discussed).

It is startling to realize how recent it all was. Many alive today need only go back one or two generations to be in the heyday of mail-order houses, threshing teams, quilting bees, and “Home on the Range.” And the speed with which those men and women transformed the prairie from a scrubland with no infrastructure to territory with roads, pianos, post offices, Shakespeare, grain elevators, and bawth tubs boggles the mind.

Of course, people are capable of extraordinary things when all thoughts of safety and basic human rights are thrown to the wind, but such hustle also requires a kind of mad conviction. As one homesteader explained, “Most of the pioneers were interested enough in developing a new country they didn’t have either time or desire to be lonely.” Another felt “we were here to build up and conquer the great open spaces.” What is jingoistic to our modern ears was Canada’s quiet, orderly version of manifest destiny.

The immense labour of collecting all these anecdotes, stories, and interesting tidbits is commendable. Yet even a volume this comprehensive cannot cover everything. The most glaring omission is of Indigenous communities, who receive only passing mention as creators of trails and leavers of arrowheads. Perhaps the topic felt too heavy for the book’s overall jolly tone, but it is an unfortunate oversight, because we get no sense of what newcomers thought — good, bad, sympathetic, or otherwise — of the region’s original inhabitants, whom they almost certainly encountered. Such observations would have been just as revealing of, say, settler superstitions and religious mores as the sections given over to those subjects.

Rolling-Magnusson’s approach is not moralistic, but it does paint a very patriotic picture: of a population that meets difficulty with resourcefulness and humour, that values entrepreneurial individualism and community alike, and that’s eccentric without being outright wacky. These are truths fitfully acknowledged, but they are also how many want to be remembered.

Because history is as much an assessment of values as it is of fact, any view of the past is only as cheery as one’s circumstances. From the comfort of a modern prairie home, the stories in Folklife and Superstition can be taken as proof of Canada’s upward progress: “Look how far we’ve come!” But the replay of troubles past can also lead to a more dismal perspective: “Good Lord, not again.” Our grasp of yesterday is dependent on the news cycle and just as changeable.

As Canada reels from political instability and the manoeuvres of stubborn premiers, fringe parties stir up racial tension. American politicians, hot with expansionist dynamism, flirt with annexing their northern neighbour. To buttress our sovereignty, the prime minister promotes military spending to secure the border. This isn’t now, mind you, but 1870, the year the New York Herald said of Canada that the “annexation of the country is but a question of time, and a few years will, in all probability, see the American flag waving over Winnipeg.” Good Lord, not again.

Back then, these familiar-sounding issues brought about serious and decisive action. The possibility of all that fruitful prairie falling into Yankee hands was a bridge too far for John A. Macdonald. Neither was he too keen on handing it over to the Métis, whose leader Louis Riel had established a provisional government at Fort Garry (modern-day Winnipeg). David W. Grebstad begins Citizen, Settler, Soldier, Scoundrel with Macdonald raising a militia in response — while a WASPish elite, “cloistered by the Precambrian Shield,” stood ready to occupy and possess the western territory, moulding it into a polite, disciplined Ontario-style society. To bring Riel’s forces to heel, the thousand-man Red River Expeditionary Force (also called the Wolseley Expedition, after its leader) set out for the Red River Colony in May 1870, arriving to find their would‑be adversaries largely dispersed, the gates of Fort Garry swinging open, Riel’s warm and uneaten breakfast on his table.

Despite the bloodless victory, the fact that a large contingent of the force had joined up to avenge Thomas Scott, a Protestant Irishman whose execution at Fort Garry had been a call to arms for Anglo-Saxon Orangemen across Ontario, meant things were off to an uneasy start. Tumult ensued. Drunk and powerful, the militiamen robbed, harassed, and murdered on a long “reign of terror.” Manitoba citizens, who considered themselves “beyond the ultima thule of civilization,” had little recourse but to acquiesce to these bullies who were emboldened with the swagger of command and the assurance of mutual protection. After a few thuggish years in Manitoba, the force would transmogrify into the North-West Mounted Police and, after moving further onto the wider prairie, would clear a path for the homesteaders by shooing away American bootleggers and driving First Nations onto reserves. Canada’s West was won by what the historian Ronald Atkin called “benevolent despotism” and the historian John Jennings dubbed “legal tyranny.”

The central question hovering above Citizen, Settler, Soldier, Scoundrel is about the founding principles of Canada. From out of the wilds of Manitoba appeared a self-actualizing body, men who even in their resistance were willing to acquiesce to a higher power. The Métis were not fighting the government so much as asking to join it, and their appeals were based on their rights as British citizens rather than as human beings. It was as good a time as any to practise the tenets of peace, inclusivity, cooperation that we believe constituted our nation’s nascent moral code. Yet the Métis made the fatal presumption of asking to join the empire; one could be allowed in only as a kind of favour. Their request demonstrated a blatant disregard for club rules, and they’d missed the sign out front: “No Catholics, No French.” Something had to be done — and what else could be expected of the type of imperial mindset that had already rebuffed similar moves in Ireland, Kenya, South Africa, and Australia? Met with force, the Métis pushed back. Like the locals of those other countries, they didn’t stand a chance and were finally toppled in 1885, in the trenches of Batoche, Saskatchewan.

Grebstad, a long-serving officer in the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery, challenges our national mythology of inclusion and cooperation by showing the rule of law to be Canada’s defining core belief. In his telling, we’re not peacekeepers but suppressors — of uprisings, of complaints, of protests. This verdict is hardly in line with how we typically see ourselves: state-sanctioned clobbering of dissent hews closer to our understanding of autocracy. Yet we find just that with the North-West Resistance, the Battle of the Hatpins, the Oka Crisis, even the Freedom Convoy. If the militia was Ottawa’s poisoned spear tip of a society still inventing itself, its lasting effect was to embed the hoity‑toity and imperious “keep calm and shut up” attitude of the British empire deep into us. Many Canadians still prefer a crowd of stoic stiff upper lips to any rebellious individual pointing out some injustice.

There is another, scarier implication of Grebstad’s martial origin story: that our modern, multicultural society may have arisen despite rather than because of our inherent (again, self-perceived) good nature. As current events and history seem more cyclical than ever, what are we to make of the headline in the National Post last December that declared, “Nearly half of Canadians favour mass deportations and 65% think there are too many immigrants”? Is it really different in tone from an 1873 issue of the Volunteer Review, which argued that “healthy accretion from the parent stocks of English and French” was far preferable to the “mongrel population of every nation and tongue on the continent of Europe”? If we do not wish to be remembered this way, we should take better care to ensure it is not how we still are.