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Moving to the Moose Mountains

Dad’s parents fitted out a covered wagon in 1880 so they could move from Ontario to the Moose Mountains in the Northwest Territories.

The prairies were good for farming wheat, but if you wanted a log cabin, you needed trees nearby. The closest trees were in the Moose Mountains. My grandparents wanted to live in a log cabin more than they wanted great farmland, so they moved out of the prairies and into the mountains.

They loaded all their possessions into the covered wagon. The last thing on was their four year-old son, who would become my father. Everything went smoothly until they were only 35 miles from their destination, at the Oxbow River.

…I should say, “in the Oxbow River.” They had crossed several rivers on the trip, but they didn’t realize this one was the deepest. When they were less than halfway across, the wagon stopped. The river was so deep the horses' hooves didn’t reach bottom any more. They were treading water and straining to keep their heads above the surface.

The horses couldn’t pull the wagon further. They couldn’t back it up or turn it around either. If Grandfather didn’t do something quickly, the river’s current would topple the wagon and drown the horses.

Grandmother was terrified as she sat in the precarious wagon with her young son and everything she owned. Grandfather didn’t make her feel much better when jumped overboard and pulled the kingpin, setting the horses free.

When the horses got to land, Grandfather hooked a chain from them to the wagon. They easily pulled the wagon to the shore.

When my Grandparents got to the Moose Mountains, they homesteaded a quarter section (160 acres), built a log cabin, and raised their family. Eventually, Dad had two brothers and a sister.

Dad was supposed to grow up with cousins also. Two years after Grandfather moved his family to the mountains, his cousin brought his family from Ontario in a covered wagon to homestead nearby.

They never arrived. Indians massacred the entire family.

Grandfather worked for other homesteaders in the Moose Mountains to earn money. Usually, he was just gone for the day, but sometimes he stayed overnight. On the days he was gone, Grandmother milked the cow.

One day, when Grandmother was milking the cow, Dad wandered into the forest. Grandmother frantically searched a long time before finding him. From then on, whenever she milked the cow, she tethered Dad to the kitchen table leg. Dad hated that, but it saved his life.

One day, Grandmother rushed in from milking the cow and lowered the beam that locked the door. She said she saw about thirty Indians riding their horses towards the house. She untied Dad and they crawled under the bed. They stayed as quiet as they could. When they needed to talk, they whispered.

The Indians looked in the window but didn’t break into the house. Then they left.

Dad’s childhood left then, also. Grandmother didn’t need to tie him to the table after that.

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Grandfather Knows Best

Lots of young Irish people came to America in the 1800s. Usually it was because their families were very poor. That wasn’t the case with my mother’s father, Charles Perry. He grew up in a castle in Northern Ireland.

His mother’s family was wealthy because she was a descendant of Oliver Cromwell. I’m not sure how proud we should be of that connection. He ruled England in the 1650s, but many people didn’t like him. They dug him up three years after he died and executed him.

Grandfather may have had a large dose of Oliver Cromwell’s genes in him. I don’t know what Grandfather did before he left town at the age of 27, but he didn’t want anyone from Northern Ireland to know where he was. My mother said he never talked about his childhood, hometown, or family. He never sent a card on a holiday or contacted them in any way after coming to America in 1875.

When my uncle, Arthur Perry, was on furlough during World War I, he visited the castle and stayed with his relatives. They warned him not to go out at night because the locals might kill him.

That didn’t have anything to do with whatever made his father leave. It was because their family wasn’t Catholic.

My youngest aunt, Pearl Perry-Orr, visited the castle during World War II. Our relatives weren’t living there any more. The new residents didn’t invite her in. They didn’t even open the door far enough for a person to squeeze through.

I’m sure there are lots of interesting Perry family stories from Donegal County in Northern Ireland. Grandfather didn’t want us to know them.

Maybe Grandfather knows best.

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Going West

My mother’s father arrived in New York in 1875 cold, hungry, and very seasick.

It had been stormy during the entire crossing from Northern Ireland, so the passengers had to stay below deck in the rocking, rolling ship. Almost everyone gets seasick down there.

Crossing the Atlantic was expensive, even in crowded ships like Grandpa’s. Many immigrants spent all their money for the fare and arrived broke. Grandpa was one of those. It wasn’t a problem, though. As soon as he arrived, he joined the United States Army.

Grandpa loved the Army. He appreciated the warm clothes and plentiful food, but the best part was that the ground didn’t move.

The Army sent Grandpa out west to fight the Indian Wars. Lots of homesteaders and prospectors were claiming land in the northern Plains and the Indians didn’t like it. The Army kept them from doing anything about it most of the time.

Six years later, Grandpa was discharged as a Major. That left him in northern Minnesota with warm clothes and lots of money. He was quite a catch for the young pioneer woman, Selena York. He met her just across the border, in Manitoba. They married late in 1881 and headed west to claim a homestead.

Selena wanted to settle in Edmonton, where her cousin lived. So they fitted out a covered wagon and bought two horses and two cows. Horses walk faster than cows, so Grandpa hired a man to take care of the cows. Then they started on the 800-mile journey.

During the day, the cowboy and the cows fell behind the covered wagon, but they caught up in the evening after Grandpa and Grandmother stopped to set up camp and make dinner.

Even this faster way of traveling was too slow. By the time they got to the town of Wynyard, about half way to Edmonton, Selena’s pregnancy was showing. That’s where Mr. Wynyard gave them some good advice.

“You’d better build a log cabin here or the baby will be born in the snow,” he said. He also told them the local Indians were friendly. That meant a lot to Grandpa. He’d seen enough Indian wars.

Grandpa and Grandmother homesteaded a quarter section of land near Punnichy, about 20 miles south of Wynyard, in 1882. Thanks to Mr. Wynyard’s advice, Grandmother gave birth to my mother, Verna Perry, in a comfortable log cabin on December 16th.

Mother was the first Anglo-Saxon female born in the Northwest Territories. That’s fitting because one of her mother’s ancestors, William Brewster, was an elder on the Mayflower.

Unfortunately, I never met my mother’s mother. She died shortly after giving birth to her second child, Fred.

Grandpa thought it would be best for his children to live with their mother’s parents, so he brought them to their home in Georgian Bay, Lake Huron, Ontario.

They didn’t stay there long, though. Grandpa married Selena’s sister, Mary, and they moved back to the homestead in Punnichy. While living there, they had eight more children - seven boys and one girl.

Boys are really good to have around the farm, especially if you’re not a very good farmer, like Grandpa. Growing up in a castle, he didn’t learn much about farming. Even when he lived on the homestead, he wasn’t too interested in it.

As soon as the boys were able, they took care of the farm. The eight boys ran it well. Eventually, the fifth boy, my uncle Walter Perry, took it over. Grandpa got involved in local politics.

He was one of five men elected to the board. They governed the equivalent of a county. Grandpa was the chairman of the governing board. That made him the reeve. I don’t know if he earned a salary for his service, but once a year the government paid his fare to Regina, the capital.

One nice thing about growing up in a castle is that it often includes a good education. I’m sure Grandpa’s education helped him in politics. He also passed a lot of it on to my mother. When she grew up and was sent to Regina, she was able to get a teacher’s credential and then teaching jobs in nearby villages.

She enjoyed her one-room schoolhouse in the Fernley district, but gave it up when she met her husband.

How did she know that Walter was the right guy?

It was easy. His last name was “Husband.”

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War and Peace

Does the “Luck of the Irish” work for people from Northern Ireland? My mother’s father had a lot of it on June 25, 1876. That was the date of Custer’s Last Stand.

Grandpa was in the army, fighting Indians in that area, from 1875 to 1881. Luckily, he wasn’t one of the 225 soldiers chosen to cross the Little Big Horn River and fight Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse on that day. None of them survived.

The Indians thought of that as a victory, but it really wasn’t. It prompted the Army to send many more soldiers. The Indians lost a lot more than 225 people because of it.

One of the first things I learned in medical school is that life isn’t fair. All you can do is make the best of whatever comes your way.

In the late 1800s, the Sioux in the northern Plains saw a lot of unfair things come their way. Unfortunately, their leader, Sitting Bull, didn’t make the best of it. Fighting the U.S. Army was a really poor decision. By July of 1881, he realized that and surrendered.

The movies glorify fighting to the death as honorable. I think there’s more honor in admitting defeat as soon as you realize you can’t win. Any lives lost after that are just wasted.

These days, Osama bin Laden is acting like Sitting Bull before he surrendered. While they each had one dramatically successful strike, afterwards, it’s cost their followers dearly. I wonder if an Indian elder could talk some sense into Osama.

When Sitting Bull surrendered, it brought peace to the area and unemployment to lots of soldiers. Grandpa was one of them.

At about that time, a little further north, my young father and his mother were hiding under a bed in their cabin. They were afraid that the band of Indians outside their cabin was going to kill them.

My Grandparents guessed that the only reason the Indians didn’t come through the window was that they were afraid of getting shot. The Indians knew there were guns and people in the cabin, but didn’t know exactly where they were hiding.

The family was glad the Indians decided to leave. Why didn’t they set the cabin on fire? Maybe they were friendly Indians. It was hard to tell the difference.

A year later, my grandfather’s cousin must have met unfriendly Indians while he was moving his family to their area in a covered wagon. The Indians killed them all. 

About 50 years later, I was driving to Carlyle to pick my brother up from the train depot. As I passed the White Bear Indian Reservation, I saw a man a half-mile away, walking though the snow towards the road. I stopped. 

The young Indian thanked me for waiting for him as he got into the car.

“Gonna be storm,” he said. Indian boys spoke a little English because the government built a school on the Reservation.

He may have learned English in the government school, but he learned to read the sky from someone else. He was right. It stormed so hard that evening that I couldn’t drive back home. My brother and I had to stay in a hotel.

When I got to Carlyle, the Indian thanked me again for the lift and got out of the car. He was a nice young man.

Was his grandfather one of the Indians outside my grandparents’ cabin in 1881? Was he one of the Indians who killed my grandfather’s cousin’s family? Did my mother’s father kill any of his relatives?

Those thoughts didn’t cross my mind. They didn’t matter then, and as time goes on, they matter even less. Whatever happened in the past was done by other people, not us.

What’s important is that we get along fine now. We trust and help each other, work well together, and come together in times of need. We don’t waste time trying to hurt each other, and we don’t have to protect ourselves from each other. Peace makes life better for everyone.

In some ways, wild animals are smarter than us. If two bears want the same territory, they’ll show how ferocious they are. If one is obviously going to win, there won’t be a fight. If they do fight, it’s usually over in a few minutes and they both survive. They never have long wars where thousands or millions are killed.

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The Hard Life

A boy becomes a man at different ages in different cultures. For homesteaders, the magic age was eighteen. That’s when he can claim a homestead of his own.

My father picked out a beautiful quarter section of rolling hills and shallow ponds five miles northwest of his parents’ farm. More than half of it was covered with willows and poplars, but there were several meadows for farming and grazing.

Dad loved looking at the Moose Mountains from his land. They were just a few miles south, but surrounded by a blue haze. He named the farm, “Pleasant View.”

If you didn’t improve a homestead within five years, the government took it back, so Dad built a log barn right away for a cow and horses.

Over the next few years, he built a log cabin, fenced the property, built up his herd of cattle, and developed some farmland. – But something was missing. He needed a wife.

Every Saturday night, the farmers in the area got together at the schoolhouse for a little party. A different family supplied the refreshments each week. Most people played a card game called “Whist,” but Dad was more interested in the schoolteacher.

Mother and Dad enjoyed each other’s company and corresponded for years - but every time he proposed, she turned him down.

Mother was a fundamental undenominational Christian and wanted to marry a man who shared her beliefs. Eventually, she asked Dad to join her brother at the Beamsville Bible School in Ontario. Dad couldn’t farm in the winter, so he joined Fred at school for those months.

Mother was pleased when Fred wrote her that Dad was baptized by immersion. She might have married him then if her father’s second wife hadn’t died, leaving two babies and three school-aged children. Mother was the only adult daughter, so Grandfather Perry thought she should take care of the family.

Grandfather Perry asked Mother to quit her job in the Fernley District and move back to his farm. He was chairman of the local school board, so he arranged for her to teach at their one-room school.

Mother liked having her half-brothers in her class. She said that Uncle Harvey as a very good student, but Uncle Walter was mostly interested in sharpening his pencils.

That’s not as foolish as it sounds. Pencil sharpeners were pretty new at that time. The mechanism fascinated Walter. Also, he had just graduated from using a slate and slate pencil to using paper and a lead pencil. The lead pencil was a status symbol for him. He was proud of it and liked keeping it in good condition.

When he grew up, he took over Grandfather Perry’s farm and used mechanical farm equipment every day. He always kept the equipment in good condition, like his first pencil.

Mother was always fair with everyone in her classes, but the parents thought she’d favor her brothers over the other students. She didn’t like the controversy.

She didn’t like the chores at home, either. She was now responsible for a large family in addition to teaching during the day. It was a heavy workload. She worried that she might be the third young woman to die in that house.

Her father and the older brothers could take care of themselves, but the two youngest children needed a mother. She couldn’t leave them…but she could take them with her.

She wrote to Dad and offered to marry him if the two youngest children could live with them. He agreed immediately. They married in January of 1910 and raised Lynn and Pearl as their own.

Mother raised five children. There were plenty of chores, and no electricity or plumbing until the 1950s. This was the hard life she thought would kill her early. 

All the relatives went back to Pleasant View in 1982 to help Mother celebrate her 100th birthday.

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Teamster Without a Card

These days, most teamsters wouldn’t know what to do with a horse, but without horses there would be no teamsters. A teamster used to be anyone who could handle a team of horses – and that included people who operated heavy equipment.

When engines replaced horses, heavy equipment operators continued to call themselves teamsters, even though they didn’t work with horses anymore. My father was a real teamster. He worked with teams of horses, but never had a union card.

When he went to town for the mail and groceries, he just took a horse and wagon, but if he needed to haul anything heavy, he used a team. He usually used a two-horse team on a wagon or sled, but heavier pieces of farm equipment needed teams of five or six horses.

A good teamster could move a larger load with the same wagon and horses by matching them correctly and loading the wagon right. If Dad knew one horse pulled to the right, he paired it with one that pulled to the left – but not so they’d push into each other. Some horses were nervous in the lead, but other’s thrived on it. He balanced the team’s strength by putting some strong horses on each side.

If he just had a two-horse team, one horse was usually stronger. He made sure the stronger horse got the heavier load, so they moved the wagon easier. The most difficult part was getting it started from a dead stop. Sometimes he loaded it so heavy they couldn’t get going unless Dad got off the wagon.

I know that sounds like Dad’s secret was a swig of booze, but he was a strict born-again Christian. He never touched a drop of alcohol.

His real secret was that his horses liked him. He understood them and did what he could to give them what they wanted. They appreciated that and did what they could for him when he asked for a little extra effort.

We never had teams wider than two abreast. The wagons were made to fit that size of a team. – And the roads were made to fit that size of a wagon. Later, cars were made to fit that size of a road. The next time you look at a car, you might notice that the wheelbase is about as wide as two-horse team.

All our roads were dirt, and rutted from wagon wheels. Wagon wheels were pretty large, so the ruts got deep. As long as your wagon had the right spacing between its wheels, the roads fit the wagon well. If your wheels were spaced too wide or narrow, the roads would wear out your wheels and axles quickly.

At one time we had 35 draft horses on the farm. The numbers went up slowly most years, but down quickly in others. Every four or five years, we lost a lot of horses to a disease the mosquitoes transmitted.

By 1930, there was a vaccine to protect horses from the virus. I don’t know if the vaccine was available before then, but even if it was, it wouldn’t have helped us. We didn’t have a vet in our area until then.

When we didn’t have enough horses, my father used oxen. They were a lot slower than horses, but if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have been able to operate the farm. Keeping oxen was like having insurance against horse diseases.

Flies and mosquitoes didn’t bother oxen like they bothered horses, but the heat bothered them more. Horses sweat like we do when they’re hot. Oxen have to stop and hang out their tongues when they get too hot.

Oxen were so slow, some farmers didn’t want to waste more time by stopping when they were hot. My father knew if he didn’t allow the oxen to stop and cool themselves, they would walk to the next pond they saw and lie down in it. Dad was the teamster, but the oxen were the ones who were liable to strike.

In 1922, Dad was so proud of a couple of his sheep that he entered them in the Wawken Municipality Fair. We all got in the wagon with the sheep that morning and drove to Kennedy. While we were waiting for the judging, Dad entered the sled-pulling contest.

Normally, we only used sleds in the winter, when they were easier to pull than wagons. You’d never use a sled when there wasn’t snow on the ground because it would be too difficult to pull. But the purpose of sled-pulling contest was to have such a difficult load that only the best team could move it.

Six farmers took turns harnessing their two-horse teams to the sled to prove they could move it. Then a few men from the crowd stood in the box on the sled. The teams that couldn’t move the loaded sled were disqualified. Then more people got on the sled. Eventually, the sled was so heavy that only one team could budge it. - Dad’s, of course. His horses gave a little extra effort for him.

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Water is Where You Find It*

Not everyone can appreciate an artesian well. It helps if you’ve dug a well or two yourself. I guess that makes my father a connoisseur.

There was an artesian well on a farm two miles south of ours. Underground pressure pushed the water to the surface. Water just flowed right out of the pipe. They didn’t even need a pump.

The next best thing to an artesian well is one like my father’s younger brother had on his farm two miles west of us. He only had to dig down 14 feet. He needed a pump to get the water out, but he always had all the water he wanted. His well never went dry.

My father had to dig down more than 25 feet for water on our property. Even though our well was deeper, it went dry in the winter - usually in February.

When that happened, Dad drove the cattle to Uncle John’s farm, where there was plenty of water.

I don’t want you to get the wrong picture here. When Dad drove cattle, he didn’t put them in the back seat of his car. They walked. He rode a horse.

This was in the early 1900s, when no one in the Moose Mountains had a car. Even though people have cars these days, when you drive cattle, they still walk.

Dad always believed it was possible to dig a year-round well on our property, so he kept digging them. He got pretty good at it. He and a helper could dig a well in a week or so. He never dug a well alone.

One person dug while the other hauled up the dirt. Also, the helper could rescue the digger if the sides collapsed. When the digger got tired, they switched jobs.

Before starting to dig, Dad picked up a wagonload of 12-foot 1 x 4s from the lumberyard in town. When the well was 12 feet deep, he lined the sides with the boards. It looked a like a very tall 5-foot wide barrel. As the boards absorbed moisture from the soil, they swelled, getting nice and tight.

The liner kept the sides of the well from collapsing, so the well stayed open for a long time. It also made it safe to dig deeper. When they dug down to 24 feet, he’d build another liner.

Dad gave up digging wells after his fourth one went dry. That’s when he hired a man with a drilling rig to get water from a lower level.

The man used the same equipment he used to drill for oil. He didn’t expect to find oil on our land, but sometimes you get surprised. My father wasn’t hoping for oil, though. He wanted water.

If they struck oil, it wouldn’t belong to my father. Homesteaders own the mineral rights only within forty feet of the surface. Anything below that belongs to the government. When oil is discovered under a homestead, the homesteader might be able to rent space on the surface for the oil company to place a pump, but he wouldn’t get anything for the oil they removed from his land.

Luckily, they didn’t strike oil. Unluckily, they had to drill for eight days and 276 feet before reaching water. The last foot took four hours. They stopped in a layer of gravel. That’s good for holding water, but it’s difficult to build a well in.

Gravel makes the sides of the hole collapse as soon as you pull up the bit. These days, they pump something like clay into gravel or sand layers to stabilize them until the casing is placed.

It was frustrating to drill through gravel, but maybe they should have spent a few more days doing it. If they sunk the well closer to the bottom of the gravel layer, it might not have gone dry the next February.

Luckily, when the wells went dry, there was plenty of snow around. We used that for water until spring.

When spring came, the snow outside melted. The water dripped into the ground and filled the wells. I’m not sure if it’s always darkest before the dawn, but the wells are always driest before the snow melts.

My father’s last attempt at all-winter water was the dugout. That was a deep pond the government built for farmers in a spot where it would fill with melted snow and ice.

All ponds collect snowmelt, but they silt up and become shallow. Shallow ponds freeze completely in the winter.

Dugouts are twelve feet deep. The top three feet might freeze, but the rest stayed liquid. When you needed water from a dugout, you chopped a hole in the ice with an axe. If you used it every day, the ice over your water hole stayed thin.

Dugout water isn’t good for people to drink, but it’s fine for cattle - and cattle drink a lot of water. The dugout would allow us to keep our cattle at home all through the winter.

On November 4^th, 1943 a large government truck drove onto our farm. The trailer behind it carried a huge yellow Caterpillar tractor. It had lots of power and two wide metal tracks instead of rubber wheels. They drove it off the trailer and started working on the dugout.

By three in the afternoon, they were almost done - then the Caterpillar broke. They said they’d come back the next day and finish the job.

It was starting to rain and my father was afraid the ground would freeze that night. That might mean that they wouldn’t be able to work on it the next day. The ground might not thaw until spring – but by then, the unfinished dugout would be full of snowmelt.

Dad thought if it wasn’t finished that day, it might never get done correctly. So he decided to finish the job that afternoon with my brother, George.

They planned on plowing the high spots with the tractor and using the horses to pull the loose material out with a scraper, two yards at a time. It was wet and muddy, but there wasn’t much work left to do.

They would have finished the job that evening if the mud hadn’t caused my father’s foot to slip off the tractor’s clutch. The tractor lurched forward as the front wheels lifted off the ground.

A tractor is more like a lawnmower than a car. Instead of a gas pedal, it has a throttle. You pull it out to set the engine speed, and it stays that speed without you having to press a pedal.

Unfortunately, you can’t reduce a tractor’s engine speed quickly. Instead of just lifting your foot from a pedal, you have to reach for the throttle and push it in. That’s hard to do when the tractor is jerking forward and tilting up like Dad’s was that afternoon. It’s quicker to disengage the engine by stamping on the clutch, but the unexpected motion must have thrown Dad back to where he couldn’t reach it.

The power kept going to the rear wheels and the front wheels kept going up – then over the top. Within a second, the tractor was upside down with Dad pinned underneath it. He was dead before George was able to get to him.

The next February, we had water. Dad would have liked that.

But the rest of us – we would have preferred him.

* “Water is where you find it” was a local old-timer’s saying. You could never know where you were going to find water. But once you found it, there it was.

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Who Needs Electricity?

We lived a good life without electricity on the farm. We never missed it. We didn’t even know what to miss because we didn’t know anyone who had it.

Candles worked very well for lighting. If we needed an especially bright light we used the kerosene lantern. But, do you know what worked even better? – The sun.

We woke near sunrise so we didn’t waste the sun’s natural light. That made us want to go to bed early. We didn’t need much artificial light.

Refrigerators are nice to have, but they’re expensive to buy and run. We had something better. – The ice block under the porch.

Dad hinged a section of boards on the porch into a kind of trap door. When we wanted to get to the ice block we lifted up the door and leaned it against the north side of the house. When Dad first built the cabin, he dug a hole about four feet deep in that spot. In the winter, he filled it with water and it froze into an ice block. When he wanted to keep something cold anytime during the rest of the year, he pushed aside the sawdust on top and laid the item on the ice.

Even when we had a lot of people living in our house, we never ran out of cold storage. If it looked like we might need more space, Dad enlarged the hole and put more water in it the next winter. By the mid-20s its surface was about two by four feet.

Mostly, we used the ice block to keep milk sweet. If you pushed the sawdust aside and set the pail on the block, it cooled quickly.

Our dairy cows gave us fresh milk twice a day, so we never stored it very long. The babies drank some of the whole milk, but Mom skimmed the cream from the rest of it. The skim milk went to the pigs and the larger children – but not at the same time. We didn’t have to line up at the trough with the pigs!

Mother churned some of the cream into butter. Dad brought the rest of it into town once a week when he picked up the mail. He sold it to the creamery and got enough money to buy groceries and other necessities.

Mother cooked for eleven people during the summers, but never needed much cold storage. She was always preparing fresh food. There was rarely a reason to store leftovers.

Mother usually put leftovers into the soup pot. She kept it at the back of the stove all the time. Soup was more like stew and was always part of dinner and supper.

People use their refrigerators these days to keep greens fresh. We had a better way. We left them in the garden until we needed them in the kitchen.

Most of the year, we didn’t have greens because it snowed so late and froze so early. But when we had greens, they were always fresh from the garden.

During the rest of the year, we used vegetables we stored the previous summer. We filled the root cellar with vegetables like potatoes, beets, onions, cabbage, and carrots. We dried our beans and fruits or canned them in glass jars. We pickled cucumbers in brine.

I probably shouldn’t say “we”. It was mostly Mother. In the summers, when Dad hired three farm workers, he also hired a young woman to help Mother in the kitchen.

The washing machine was on the porch near the ice block. A leather belt ran around the pulley at the bottom of the tub and over to the gas engine beside it. After filling the washing machine, we started it like a lawnmower. – By pulling the rope on the gas engine.

We filled the washer tub with buckets of hot water from the top of the stove. When the clothes were clean, Mother opened the valve at the tub’s bottom and let it drain into the garden. Then she ran the clothes through the wringer and hung them on the line to dry in the fresh air.

They put perfumes in laundry soaps these days, but they never smell as good as clothes line-dried in the country air.

In the winter, Mother washed the clothes inside the house by hand in a washtub. She still used the wringer and hung them on the line to dry. When she brought them in the next day, they were frozen stiff as cardboard until they warmed.

Mother tried making soap once, but it was too much work. She decided we could afford to buy our soap at the store.

No one had a television or computer in the 1920s, 30s, or even 40s in our area, so we didn’t miss them. Radio was another story, though. – So, I’ll tell you about it in the next story.

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People had been lighting their homes, preparing food, and washing their clothes without electricity for a long time. We were very comfortable doing things the same way. - But radio was a completely new thing. There had never been anything like it before, and it needed electricity. No electric wires ran near our farm, so we got a radio that used a battery.

We usually used the radio at night, when the reception was better. Also, daytime is for work. Evenings are for entertainment.

The closest station was in Regina, about 100 miles west of us. Storms usually got there before they reached us, so we listened carefully to their weather programs.

We also liked The Amos and Andy Show. We laughed more at those old radio comedies than any TV shows later. I don’t know why they were so much funnier on the radio.

It may have had something to do with the company. We kept the radio in the living room, and most of us were there from supper to bedtime. If the radio was on, that was our family activity. We had good times together.

These days, people have remote controls they can press to switch stations. We couldn’t imagine anything like that being possible. You were doing well if you could tune in a station in less than a minute. Once you got it as good as it could be, you didn’t want to change it for a long time.

Our radio had three tuning knobs. They all had to be turned just right to tune in the station. Even then, you’d hear hissing in the background. Sometimes the hissing was so loud, the program was in the background. Then, you had to listen really carefully to understand what they were saying.

If the radio wasn’t tuned exactly right, you might hear strange howling sounds. Often, it went out of tune while we were listening to it, so someone always sat by the radio to bring it back.

We also got a station from Winnipeg. That was further away and to the east. Late at night, if there were no storms, we sometimes received a station or two from North Dakota, to the south.

The radio had several tubes that got hot and glowed orange. It used lots of energy from the 6-volt battery that powered it. Dad took the discharged battery into town each week and came back with a freshly charged one.

Mother’s brother stayed with us during the winter of 1932-3. He enjoyed listening to the radio with us and thought of a way to save Dad the weekly chore. He built a windmill to charge the battery.

The battery was the same kind they use in cars, so he got a charger from an Essex car to charge it.

We had good wind at our property and the house was at the highest spot. Even so, Uncle Claude wanted the windmill as high as he could get it. He strapped the charger to the end of a tall log and mounted it to the peak of the two-story part of our house. Three guy wires kept it steady.

He special-ordered wood from the lumberyard and spent months crafting the windmill’s blade. He wanted it to get the most power from the wind. We knew he got close to the best shape because he experimented with it for so long. Several of us helped him every time he needed to take the windmill down and modify the blade.

Once he pronounced it complete, it worked perfectly. We listened to the radio as much as we wanted and never had to worry about charging the battery.

Twenty years later, that was still the only electricity in the house.

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Winter Warmth

Even though we couldn’t grow anything in the winter, we were just as busy.  

Dad spent a lot of time cutting down trees and sawing them to the right length for our cook stove, heater stove, and water heater. The water heater wasn’t for us; it was for the cows.

During winter, the cows stayed in the barn. Their body heat kept the space a little warmer than outside, but the main benefit of the barn was that it blocked the wind. Dad chinked the logs with concrete, so there were no drafts. Without drafts, 20 degrees below zero didn’t seem that bad.

Twice a day, Dad milked the cows and watered them. He also made sure they had food and clean stalls. When it was time to water them, Dad led them outside to the trough near the pump.

When he raised and lowered the handle, it moved a rod that operated the pump about 200 feet down the well. That pushed water up the pipe and out the spigot. When the trough was full, he opened a valve and let the water in the pipe drop about 15 feet before closing the valve again. If he left water in the top 15 feet, it would freeze and burst the pipe.

The water in the trough would freeze solid overnight unless he kept it warm. That’s what the water heater was for. It was a little wood stove that stood in the water trough. Dad always kept a fire going in it during the winter so the water in the trough didn’t freeze too badly. He still needed to crack the surface with an axe when he brought the cows to it, but it never froze solid.

It’s times like this that you appreciate an artesian well like one of the nearby farms had. Water always flowed out of the pipe. It crusted on top, but stayed liquid below.

Once it started snowing, we stopped using well water in the house. Water from clean snow was much higher quality. It tasted like bottled water. Mother said it was easier to wash clothes with. It had no minerals to make it hard, so it allowed the soap lather better.

We also had a special use for clean snow. My sister made a treat for us at Christmas that she called snow cream. I’m not exactly sure of the recipe, but it was probably cream mixed with sugar and vanilla, and poured over snow. That’s as close as we ever got to ice cream at our place.

Our cook stove had a compartment at the back for warming water. It stayed just the right temperature for washing hands. It really felt luxurious to pour a ladle of warm water over your hands after coming in from outdoors in the winter.

We kept our hands warm when we were outside, also. Gloves would lose too much heat between the fingers, so we used mittens. Mother knitted them from wool, and we wore store-bought leather mittens over them to keep out the wind.

Dad couldn’t wear his mittens when he milked the cows. Cows’ have warm teats, so his hands didn’t get cold as he milked them. Also, he milked the cows in the barn.

When the temperature was 20 degrees below zero, we never called it warm, but we might say it was balmy. The coldest I remember it being was 67 degrees below during a blizzard. The wind causes water to evaporate quicker from your skin and makes you feel even colder, so the wind chill would have made it feel much colder than 67 below.

That was a cold day. A calm day with a temperature of 20 below was balmy, especially if the sun was out. Don’t you agree?

Each of us had two sets of long underwear. We changed them every Saturday because that was bath day. Mother washed the dirty underwear during the week so they were ready for the next Saturday. We also had two pairs of flannel sleepers (night gowns for the girls) and we rotated them the same way. Our denim coveralls didn’t need to be washed nearly as often as our underwear or sleepers.

Sometimes you hear of pioneer families using the same bathwater several times. We never did that. Every Saturday, Mother set up the bathtub in the kitchen near the cook stove. She kept the top of the stove covered with pots of water, heating for the next bath.

Everyone got into a tub of fresh water. When I was little, my sister and I bathed together, but the water always started out fresh.

By suppertime, all the children were clean. After we went to bed, Mother and Dad bathed.

It was nice to wake up clean on Sunday because we always had a lot of company Sunday mornings. Dad led a worship service in our living room for our family and about a dozen of the neighbors. No matter what the weather, they showed up and stayed for dinner.

Mother was always prepared for the extra large dinner on Sunday. Every Thursday evening she mixed up a large bowl of dough. By Friday morning the yeast had risen and it was ready to make into loaves of bread. Every Friday she made 35 loaves of bread, so it was fresh for Sunday dinner.

There were lots of ways we kept warm in winter, but none was as much fun as our evening family sing-a-longs. My sister played our small foot-pumped organ and I played chords on the Spanish guitar.

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