(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series of excerpts from the book “A History of Canora and District 1910 – 1960” by J.F. Paul Barschel. Of course, the history of the area begins well before Canora was incorporated.)
CANORA - In 1897 the first homesteaders were waiting for the surveying gangs to finish marking out the townships and sections in the southern portion of the Canora district beginning with the south end of Township 30. No sooner had the steel stake section marker been mounted than were some of the first quarter sections claimed. It was during this year that the Ukrainian settlement started in the Canora district.
The Ukrainian people came here with little or no money, most of them came to their homesteads with only a few tools, sometimes only amounting to an axe and shovel. Some of them had perhaps enough money to buy a cow or a heifer, yes, and maybe a team of oxen. But most of them knew how to build themselves comfortable houses with thatched roofs, the outside being neatly made of mud plaster. Their stables too, were built in the same manner. It was hard for them when they arrived here but they got a piece of land that they could call their own.
From this start they began to build and as the years went by they built better homes and schools in which to educate their children. Today when anyone who had a chance to see the meagre beginning that these people had, starting with the thatched-roofed houses steps into the home of one of their children, one must certainly agree that as pioneers they have been amongst the most successful in building for themselves and this country.
In 1897 another nationality came in, the Doukhobors. When they first came to this country they arrived in a large group, coming as far as Yorkton by train and walking from here to the area of their homesteads. They, too, had little to begin with in terms of equipment or material. Contrary to most types of settlement, instead of building homes on their individual land claims, they built small villages, one of which was situated east of Canora just near the White Sand River. Working together in communities made it a lot easier than when a single family started out. The village was staked out in modern style. The main street ran from north to south and the dwellings were built on each side of the street. The Doukhobors are very clean people, as was apparent from the appearance of their village. Though the whole village was built of sod it had a neat and clean appearance. In the spring the young men went to work about the countryside and the women stayed home, along with the old men, and cultivated the land. At the time they had practically no horses and since spading the sod was such unusually hard work these women turned to a unique way in overcoming their difficulties, and hitched themselves to a 12-inch breaking plough, pulling it through the sod with one of the old men of the community guiding it. In this way they could do their work much more easily and faster. This way of breaking the sod of the virgin prairie had only to be resorted to in their first year of living in Canada.
The Doukhobors, being excellent horsemen, soon had enough fine horses to carry on this work by the usual means. In the years 1906 to 1907 the Doukhobor villages broke up because the Government required that, to that, to fulfill their homestead duties in order to receive the patent on their lands, development had to include construction of dwellings on these homesteads. The Doukhobor villages and customs to some extent have disappeared. As a result these villages have long since crumbled into ruins and disappeared from the district, but I have often wished that I could again see the village of Utachenia north-east of Canora. It would be of considerable historical value to rebuild such a village in order that the people of the future might see how these pioneers began their building, with their neat villages of sod inhabited by these clean sober-living people.
The pioneer housewife
To conclude this chapter on farm settlement of this district I would like to give you a woman's story on the difficulties encountered by the pioneer housewife.
This is how my wife tells it.
"On April 30, 1902, alter a stormy voyage across the ocean our boat arrived in Halifax early in the morning It was a nice sunny spring day and the hills in Halifax were covered with green grass – a beautiful sight to see.
“My husband and I stayed here for two days since the immigration officials knew my husband well from two months previous when he had gone to the old country to get married and told us to wait for an English boat with immigrations that would not be so loaded so that the trains leaving Halifax would not be so crowded. I enjoyed the train ride more than the ocean trip because I could see much of the new country. The people we travelled with on the train were very friendly and the ladies often came up to us and tried to talk to me and I found how difficult it was when another language was spoken that one could not understand. However, my husband acted as interpreter and so I managed to get in some conversation during the long trip west.
"On the evening of May 8 we arrived at Yorkton from Winnipeg by mixed train. There were only three mixed trains a week from Winnipeg to Yorkton, which was at that time the end of the railway. When we arrived in Yorkton, it had only two small hotels and when we asked for a room for the night we were told there were no rooms vacant, so about 10 people, men and women, had to sleep on the floor on mattresses in the parlor of the hotel. It was the first time for me to sleep on the floor, but I had made up my mind before to take everything like other people did in this new country and remain satisfied.
"The next morning my brother-in-law came with a so-called "democrat" with two horses to take us to our homestead which my husband had taken out in 1893. There were no roads at that time and after the spring thaw there were many deep sloughs that we had to cross, and before we got home a snow storm came up and it became very cold and windy. The horses had to often be slowed down because of the lack of roads.
“We started out at 9 o'clock in the morning and at last at 5 o'clock we had finished our 24-mile trip. We arrived at my in-laws' first. They had a large house since my husband had five brothers and two sisters. A few days later he went to Yorkton, our nearest town, to buy a small amount of furniture, including a cook stove, and then we moved into the little log house he had prepared for us on his homestead. The spring was very wet that year and seeding became late. We had about 20 head of cattle and four horses, and we got some chickens as well as little pigs from my husband's folks.
“We seeded a garden and planted potatoes. We milked about six of the cows but there was no creamery and so we got wooden tubs from the store in which to pack our butter. In these we took it to Yorkton and in trade we received groceries.
"In January 1903 our first son, Eric, was born. It was 24 miles to the nearest doctor and the 30 below zero weather and no roads made travel impossible. My mother-in-law had to be the doctor. She had often helped neighbors in cases like this before. By luck she had brought a medicine chest and some books from the old country so that she often fixed sprained ankles and helped in different children's sicknesses. This she did so often that many of the old timers around that part of the country still remember her.
"The following summer was very nice, lots of rain and many, many mosquitoes, but by August came swarms of dragon flies and little frogs of all colors and in a short time the little biters had disappeared. We had seeded some barley, oats and about 30 acres of wheat. The oats and barley had been cut, when on Sept. 16 a snowstorm covered the wheat fields with two inches or more of snow. The wheat was all flattened to the ground and when the snow melted farmers walked ahead of the binder with wooden rails and lifted the grain so that the binder could cut and bundle up most of it. All the grain had to be put into stooks where it stayed until late October since there were very few threshing machines in the district.
"That fall and winter we had snow and more snow – I have never seen so much snow since as in the winter of 1903 to 1904. The spring was late and by the end of April, the snow had just begun to melt, which it did very suddenly.
“The river was not very far from our home and it rose higher and higher. On the evening of April 28, I said to my husband, ‘I am afraid the water will come up to the house,’ and he said that it had never been that high before. In that same night, it came rushing into our cellar and by morning the water was a foot deep in our rooms. My husband got blankets and put them on the chairs and I and the little boy had to crawl out through the window where the land was still dry. We went to my in-law's house that was high on the hill where we stayed for a month before the water had gone down enough so that it was out of our house. During this time the water had risen to five feet in the building.
“My husband and brother-in-law had taken most of the furniture upstairs but they had to leave the cook stove and by the time the water had gone out of the house it had all rusted red and was useless off the walls and mud was a foot deep on the floor. The plaster too had come off the walls and was a foot deep on the floor.
“A few times during the summer we went on picnics usually held on a neighbor's farm. In winter they had parties about three times at my husband's peoples' house. They had a large living room and dancing went on all night during which time meals were served three times.”
In 1903 the right-of-way for the Canadian Northern Railway was surveyed and close to where it crossed the main road north, the surveyors planted a special stake signifying that a station would be situated there.
Wilson Allan realized that this was the spot for a successful business so he bought a building in Ebenezer and hauled it with horses to Norway Road and opened a store. Soon Messrs. Hickling and Dalton built another store on what is now the corner of Charters Avenue and Norway Road. The arrival of these far-sighted people starts the history of our town of Canora.
Don't count on social media to deliver your local news to you. Keep your news a touch away by bookmarking Canora Courier's homepage at this link.
Bookmark SASKTODAY.ca, Saskatchewan's home page, at this link.
