The Promised Land

Related Collection: Remembering CFB Rivers

Excerpts from Porridge and Old Clothes, Eileen M. Scott, 1982

“Shake your sark-tail, Agnes, we’re gangin’ awa’ tae Canada,” so said my great grandfather to my great grandmother a-way back in June, 1882. Agnes sat there stunned for a moment, but she was never one to sit stunned for long. She packed their meagre belongings in a couple of stout, home-made trunks and some boxes, gathered together their nine remaining offspring, the two eldest already having emigrated to Canada, and set sail on the “S. S. Manitoban”. As the shores of Scotland grew fainter and dimmer, Agnes had some misgivings about the venture.   …

The trip was long but quite uneventful. Thankfully, the food was good and the ship was comfortable. When the whistle blew and the ship began to move, the three youngest children screamed in terror. Andrew Jr. pointed to the far end of the ship and said, “Is yon Manitoba, is yon Jock, is yon Willie?” all the time tears streaming down his face. Then the steward lined up everybody on deck and took the roll-call. “Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Rutherford, Agabella, George, James, Mary, Sandy, Tina, Robert, Archie, Andrew Jr.,” he bellowed. Aye, all present so far. All became seasick for a period of about four days and then they were up on deck again, all except my great grandmother. She just couldn’t get her head up, as she put it. The stewardess and the captain went down to her stateroom to see what was wrong and surmised that she was simply exhausted. At last, the stewardess and Agabella managed to get her on deck and she slowly revived. The immigrants landed at Point Levy and proceeded by train to Toronto. They couldn’t get over the fact that they could walk from one end of the train to the other instead of being locked into a compartment as they were in Scotland.

Andrew telegraphed to the Robertsons of chocolate fame and Gideon, the son, met them at the station. It was four o’clock in the morning and they had to walk a mile to the Robertson home. The children were crying because they were so tired. The streets were lined with beautiful trees and Agnes could hardly believe it when she saw the splendid stores with their goods displayed in the windows. They finally arrived at the Robertson home and were ushered into a handsome room. It was not long before Mrs. Robertson, Andrew’s eldest sister, appeared. They had not seen each other for thirty years and embraced affectionately. She was the eldest and he the youngest of a family of ten. As soon as all eleven of them had a bite to eat, they marched up to the bathroom and had a wash which helped to refresh them. After resting there for three days and two nights, Agnes, Andrew, and the children were given plenty of provisions by Mrs. Robertson and they set out by train for Sarnia.

On arrival at Sarnia, they had to take an old wreck of a boat up the Great Lakes. Incidentally, it sank on the next trip. Agnes mentioned that she could see the water down through the floor boards. The Great Lakes trip took five days and there were no beds on the boat. They landed at Duluth on a Saturday night and stayed, all night in the immigration shed, for to stay in a hotel would have been too expensive. On arising on the Sabbath, they were shocked to see men at work painting houses.

The train left Duluth on Sunday afternoon. Willie was at Winnipeg to meet them and the first thing he said was, “Where is ma mither?” In those days, the boat plied up and down the Assiniboine River and they took it to a point just beyond Brandon. Willle took them to a friend’s place where they stayed all night. In came a dreadful thunderstorm during the night and the rain came through the roof onto the bed. The mud ran down the walls for it was a log house plastered with mud. They had been on the road exactly one month to the day. The next morning, they had just eaten their breakfast when the Indian missionary arrived to tell them that Jock was waiting on the other side of the river with the wagon and oxen. They had to wade through long grass to the river, which was in flood, carrying the smaller children. Agnes climbed into the small rowboat with the youngest child and the missionary rowed them across. She was more afraid of this crossing than crossing the Atlantic. Several trips later, all were safe on the other side. Jock took his mother in his arms and carried her to the wagon, the rest wading through the wet grass. They all got into the wagon and, with Jock gee-hawing the oxen, drove off with a crack of his whip. Agnes noted the absence of reins and wondered how one stopped the oxen if they should decide to run away. It was a long, rough nine-mile trip that Agnes thought would never end but, at last, she could recognize Maggie, Willie’s wife, coming to meet them with two children clinging to her skirts and one in her arms. At long last, they were at the end of their journey.

The next job was to find a suitable homestead, and to build a sod shanty before winter set in. Andrew finally chose a piece of land with rolling hills, valleys, and the Oak River running through it. He said that it reminded him of the hills of home in the Yarrow Valley of bonnie Scotland. Being a joiner by trade, it didn’t take him long to figure out how to build a “soddy” as the sod shanties were sometimes called. After living in a “soddy” for awhile the immigrants had more colourful names for them! With the help of his eldest boys, he cut poplar poles and put up a framework. Then the tough prairie sod was cut into large “bricks” and these were stacked, one on top of the other, until they reached the roof, leaving openings for a door and a window. The roof was made of poplar poles laid close together, then a layer of hay was added, a layer of sod, more hay, and, finally, the whole was covered with a layer of earth. Sod houses were very warm in winter, cool in summer, and leaked like a sieve whenever it rained. When the house was finished, Agnes put up drapes that she had brought all the way from Scotland thinking to make it look a bit more homey, and the first big rain completely ruined them. The rain leaked onto the bed and Agnes had to put up her umbrella.

That first year was a real hardship so Andrew and son, Willie, got busy the next spring and built a proper log house. It was a tremendous improvement over the sod shanty.

In 1882, life in Manitoba wasn’t all that primitive. True, there were plenty of hardships, but Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald was in the driver’s seat, the Indians had calmed down considerably much to my great grandmother’s relief, the bison had almost disappeared from the Manitoba scene, and barbed-wire fences enclosing cultivated fields were fast taking over the wild beauty of the landscape. This was also a time of transition from old to new farming methods. The European method of farming on small tracts of land didn’t lend itself to the cultivation of the huge expanse of the prairies. The binder was replacing the reaper and, thus, releasing scarce workers from having to hand-tie the grain into sheaves. Long seed drills, pulled by a four-horse team, were becoming numerous but it was much later that a step was installed at the back of the machine to allow the driver to ride Instead of walk. The gangplow, also employing four horses, was quickly taking the place of the walking plow, although the latter was still favoured for the initial breaking up of the sod. Tough horses of mixed breeds with a shot of wild broncho in their bloodlines were taking the place of the slow oxen. The great lumbering steam-engine, coupled with a threshing separator, made its appearance in Manitoba in the early eighties. At first, the separator was pulled between a double row of stacks and the pitchers toiled to keep the sheaves moving steadily through the feeder. In those days, grain was bagged as It came forth from the separator. In later years, a different method was employed when manpower became more easily obtained. The threshing outfit would be placed in the middle of a field of stocks and stock teams, consisting of two pitchers with a team of horses hitched to a hayrack, would bring the load of sheaves to the threshing machine. These were pitched into the feeder of the separator, just as in days of old, and the separator then deposited the grain by chute into a portable granary, and a blower deposited the straw in a stack to be used later as bedding for the animals.

Life for my great grandparents wasn’t without its tragedy. Young George took a homestead not far from the home spread. Being a bachelor, he probably didn’t look after himself very well and, as a consequence, he caught pneumonia at the tender age of twenty-two and died, alone, on May 25, 1888. If only there had been a telephone.  …

One of the first things immigrants did when they arrived in Manitoba was to plant trees around their buildings. Apart from being very fond of trees, the immigrants found them very useful as windbreaks for the farm buildings against the cold north winds during the winter. They usually chose cottonwood or Manitoba Maple because it didn’t take these trees very long to reach maturity in the rich virgin soil. Manitoba Maple was also quite often chosen to line the streets of a town because of its wild array of colour during the autumn season. During summer, the wide spreading boughs afforded welcome shade on a hot summer’s day.

The people in the district thought it was high time they had a church so, in 1888, on a piece of property kindly donated by James Sibbald and with a generous donation from J. W. Wedderburn, my great father, son Willie, and John Ramsay built the Tarbolton Presbyterian Church. It had a coal and wood heater in the middle of the room and those who sat too close were par-boiled, while those by the window nearly perished with the cold. Then they built a stable for the horses and ”’twa’ wee hoosies” at the back of the church and they were in business. Prior to this, services had been held in the Tarbolton school. It is nice to know that, ninety-three years later, the church that my great grandfather helped to build is still standing and in excellent condition lovingly cared for by a small congregation of dedicated people. Incidentally, it is now the Tarbolton United Church.

In 1883, the first schoolhouse was built and it had a complement of sixteen pupils of all ages and grades up to grade eight. However, it wasn’t open all year but closed from December 1st to April 1st and the pupils enjoyed only two weeks of summer vacation. It was struck twice by lightning and a world globe, hanging from the ceiling, was split in two. Luckily, the children were on their way home at the time. . After that,whenever a storm was brewing, the children were quickly dismissed, In 1907, a new school was built because the old one was much too small for the growing population. This school had a furnace in the basement

Instead of the old pot-bellied stove in the classroom. The children used to roast apples on top of that old pot-bellied stove. There wasn’t a well at the school so the drinking water had to be carried from Bill Cochrane’s farm every day, and the horses were lodged at the church stable just half a mile down the road.

Teachers were made of good stuff in the early days. They had to… they wouldn’t have survived! Eight grades in one room, as many as pupils ranging in age from six to sixteen, and all having to be taught different subjects at once. Furthermore, they were well taught. Actually having several grades in one room was quite a good idea, because the the children in the lower grades could listen in on the lessons taught to the older children and, when they graduated to a higher grade, they already knew most of the work. Nowadays, if teachers have more than twenty pupils in only one subject and, in only one grade, they start to scream holy murder.

Agabella’s Dream Comes True

Agabella thought longingly of her boy-friend, Robert Thomson, back in Scotland and wished fervently that he would emigrate to Manitoba. She didn’t have long to wait because he followed her out in 1883, and worked for Jack Johnstone for a short time before taking up a homestead. Jack was a bachelor and he and Robert lived on boiled potatoes, rice pudding and eggs part of the year. On a cold winter’s day, snow would sift through the cracks in Jack’s shanty, the nail heads and hinges on the door would be covered with frost, and ice would form on the water bucket during the night. Of course, this was a common occurrence in most of the early-day shanties, and even the strongest and toughest of pioneers would think longingly of their old homes and would wonder if they had made the right move. Two years later, when Agabella was just twenty-one, Robert proposed and they were married.

The first year was a bit of a disaster in that Agabella, in her enthusiasm to have the yard neat and tidy, let a small fire get away from her. When a fire gets going in the prairie “wool” it is almost impossible to stop. Prairie wool is grass that has been flattened to the ground and has dried and cured itself. The bison liked to eat the nutritious “wool”. She and her sister, Tina, rushed out of the shanty to fight the fire, leaving the door open and the bread baking in the oven. In the meantime, a wandering cow entered the shanty and the door slammed shut behind her. She became frightened and, in trying to escape she made an almost complete shambles of the shanty. When the two exhausted women returned from fire fighting, they had to shoo a wild-eyed cow out of the shanty and clean up an indescribable mess as best they could. One wonders what happened to the bread.

Robert had to haul his grain by team to Brandon in the winter, twenty-five miles away, for the first few years and then to Alexander, twelve miles away. On the Brandon trip he would drive as far as Gray’s farm which was also a half way house, stay the night, drive to Brandon and back to Gray’s farm the next day, and then home the day after. It was a long haul for both Robert and the team. The Alexander haul was an improvement because he could do it both ways in one day. There and back, he would stop at Mrs. Occapaw’s teepee to warm himself.  …

One wonders why the homesteaders didn’t make the trip during the autumn with the wagon, but there was a very good reason. There was no bridge over the Assiniboine River and so they had to wait until the river froze over before they could get across. In 1892, a bridge was built which made the hauling of grain considerably easier.  …

The village of Bradwardine came into being in 1902 and the Canadian Pacific Railway came through in the same year. The first grain elevator wasn’t built until 1903, so all the grain had to be hauled in sacks until around 1906 when the farmers were then able to haul their grain in bulk. The homesteaders were now hauling their grain to Bradwardine because the route was so much shorter. Around 1909 Bradwardine suffered a great disaster when the main street was completely gutted by fire, a tragedy from which it never fully recovered.

The first post office in the district was located in the log home of Thomas Seens and was called Roden. This name was submitted to the post office department by Mr. Seens and accepted, the office being named after a Lord Roden in Ireland. The mail was carried on foot by Davie Aitken from Brierwood. In 1904, Jack Laing took over the task of mail carrier which he carried on until 1918. The mail then came to the village of Bradwardine where Jim Hays ran the first post office until it was taken over by Ab Hays who ran it for many, many years. From 1904 to 1914, the mail was delivered by team. The route followed consisted of twenty-three miles from Roden through Brierwood, Hillview, Maakewata, to Griswold and return, making it a forty-six mile trip in one day. This was done twice a week. The last four years were a bit easier as the trips were made by Model T Ford during the summer.

In early days homesteaders made their own entertainment with dances, skating parties, sports days, picnics and concerts using home-grown talent, some of it remarkably professional.

Dances were held in various homes and people would travel for miles to attend, often not returning home until morning. They worked hard and they played hard. When the slough froze over, a gang would gather together, build a bonfire at the edge of the ice, and enjoy an evening of skating.

Whenever a homesteader required a new barn, all the neighbours would collect on his farm and they would raise it in double-quick time. Women would also come along to help in the kitchen. After all, the builders had to eat. After the barn was finished, there would be a dance and homesteaders for miles around would come. There was always a fiddler around who could provide the music and the festivities would go on until it was time to milk the cows the next morning. Helping one another seems to be a natural trait of prairie people.

A farmer thought nothing of working fourteen hours a day with no overtime pay. Most of the time he worked his guts out for nothing. One minute a farmer could be gloating over his field of golden grain waving gentle breeze, mentally tabulating what forty bushels to the acre Manitoba No. 1 Hard was going to bring him and, in less than half an hour it could he blackened and flat as a pancake from a freak hailstorm. If a farmer was lucky enough to avoid the hailstorms, there was always a cyclone, an early frost, rust, cutworms, or those perishing hoppers with which to contend. Why do farmers take the gamble year after year? Because they are incurable optimists, I suppose. It is certain to be better next year.

Some people seem to have the mistaken idea that farmers had a time during the winter. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially in the early days. When grain was sacked instead of being left in bulk as it is now, the sacks had to be inspected for the smallest hole. These had to be carefully darned and Robert became exceptionally good at darning. Also, the binder canvasses had to be inspected and Robert used to mend his binder canvasses on Agabella’s sewing machine. Can you imagine a modern sewing machine standing up to such usage? Then, all the harness for approximately a dozen teams of horses had to be carefully mended and lubricated to keep it pliable. Add that man hours! When all that was done, the grain had to be drawn by team to the elevator. Can you imagine what it must have been like to sit hind a slow-moving team in sub-zero weather for hours on end? The farmer walked most of way behind the sleigh to keep his feet from freezing.