This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on July 23, 1938.
The prairie blooms again! Its fertility is established; its good name is restored. The people who said the Great American Desert is creeping northward are now routed and silent. The prairie has come back!
Discretion makes me say that the crop is still in doubt. Naturally, there are dangers. Frost may wither it, rust corrode it, grasshoppers eat it, but one fact has been established. The prairie is still fertile.
Wild roses, wild strawberries, Saskatoon berries, tiger lilies, have all come out to bear their testimony. The prairie has repented of its evil ways and turned over a new leaf — a nice shiny green leaf, too. There is water in the lakes and sloughs, reflecting the white clouds in the blue sky, and over it the wild ducks draw fans and circles.
There is a festive feeling on the prairie now — a joviality that is part hope, part memory. We are back again in the Good Years. The Lean Years have folded up and departed. Here are dimpling fields of wheat, fat cattle on the lush meadows, and colts in the pasture racing away from the train, pretending they are frightened.
The country is celebrating. It is the Feast of Demeter, the goddess of Earth, the Mother of Grain — who has turned to us after a long absence, with no questions asked.
I felt this when I visited in the two places in Manitoba where we had lived, Wawanesa and Manitou. The Black Creek still runs, full, brown and reedy, past the old Stopping House. The Souris River still flows over its bed of golden gravel on its way to the Assiniboine. The wild fruit has formed on the bushes; the roses on the headlands were never more fragrant.
But another generation has come. I saw new faces, strange faces — changed faces, everywhere. In Wawanesa I felt suddenly strange and lonely. I wanted to see the boys and girls of long ago — Bob Naismith, Lena Merrell, Bert Ingram, Annie Daymond. Even the names on the stores were new.
Life does not wait for any of us.
However, I shall not speak of the past. The spirit remains and there are advancements. Pleasure has come to the countryside. Children passed us on bicycles singing “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, I’m off to Mexico!”
I saw tidy farmyards sown to grass, machine sheds where the machinery is sheltered from the weather, better cattle in the pastures. Not so many in number but of better stock. Again there are horses on the land, fine six-horse teams turning down the weeds.
The trees have grown. Many of the farm houses are hidden by the shelter belts, grown from the seedlings given away by the Dominion Experimental farms years ago.
A few bare houses still stand treeless and grim, a mute commentary on the character of their owners — the people who could not be bothered with trees. These houses look sad and frustrated; and speak of defeat and possible family rows. The majority of women have wanted trees and flowers, just as they crave bright curtains and pretty china. But there comes a time when they cease to struggle, without, unfortunately, ceasing to care.
It was queer to travel the highway and see the houses, whose people I knew so many years ago.
There has always been a healthy, rugged independence about the country people, overlooked by some of the writers who have drawn their pictures of rural life in drab colours, missing the real meaning in the lives of the people. This spirit has always characterized Manitou — the little town I know best of all, for we lived here for 20 years.
Manitou has been an educational centre since its beginning, and even when the Normal School was closed recently, went on independently. The citizens organized a “Youth Training Course,” without outside help. Young people from the farms were invited to come in and register. The Normal School building, with its numerous classrooms, was used, and the classes went on each day for three months.
The United Church minister’s wife, who was a nurse, gave health lectures; the Anglican minister’s wife lectured in domestic science and gave cooking lessons. Manitou has three master farmers, and they conducted courses in agrarian subjects.
Samuel Magee, the veteran architect and builder, turned over his well-equipped shop to the boys who wanted to learn his art and showed them the way to construct farm buildings. An Austrian blacksmith taught the farm boys the tricks of welding and soldering, and a harness-maker contributed his part in teaching the lads to mend and make hames and tugs and collars.
The furniture dealer, who is a man of wide learning, conducted “current events” classes. One of the choir leaders organized singing classes; the banker’s wife conducted book reviews. The girls were taught the art of sewing, basket-making, rug-making and entertaining.
Everyone gave their services freely. It was a community effort to help the boys and girls on the farm to do their work with greater skill and pleasure.
“It was lots of fun,” one of the leaders told me, “and we expect to do it again. A finer lot of young people I never met, keen and appreciative.”
I remember when I went there at the age of 16 I was a frequenter of the WCTU Reading Room and Library, which was the scene of many discussions and debates. The frivolous-minded ones were set to playing games in one room, croquinole, checkers, authors; but the intelligentsia plodded through the Review of Reviews, Scribners, Montreal Witness and the Family Herald, or read Marie Corelli’s Romance of Two Worlds, and argued about the immortality of the soul, the relative merits of science and literature as character builders, and whether or not conscience is an infallible guide.
When I travelled back to Winnipeg on the train from Manitou, I met a woman who told me her father, who lived near Roland, had mortgaged his farm to finance a church in his neighbourhood, 40 years ago. (No, he did not lose his farm, the church people paid him back).
Knowing how a thrifty farmer dreads a mortgage, I can understand this man’s courage. But he believed a church was needed in his community — he believed it passionately and so risked his home to bring it about.
And that, after all, is what we need today to solve all our problems. People who believe, not in any bland, anemic way, but with courage and self-sacrifice. People who will take a gambler’s chance that the promises of God still stand!
