Saskatchewan Gen Web Project - SASKATCHEWAN AND ITS PEOPLE by JOHN HAWKES Vol 1I 1924


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SASKATCHEWAN AND ITS PEOPLE
1924
Volume II



         

HENRY HUTCHINSON AND THE SHIER SETTLEMENT.

Among the interesting groups of settlements in South Eastern Sas- katchewan, along the American boundary, is the Shier settlement, so called after its pioneer Philip Shier, who, however, was not of the very earliest settlers for he did not come in till 1892. There were homesteads to be had south of the Souris Extension railroad till as late as 1901 when the American invasion took place. Numbers of the original settlers from 1882 on abandoned their homesteads, without proving up their claims, in dis- appointment and failure, because the looked for rail extension was not made. These homesteads were open for entry and were taken up when the railroad came in in 1892, but the pre-emptions reverted to the Gov- ernment. When the regulations were changed that a homesteader could obtain his pre-emption as a second homestead on performing certain specified duties, the Government threw open the abandoned and unpaid for pre-emptions for homestead entry. There were quite a few of these pre-emptions in the Shier settlement. Breaking had been done on some of them, but not much, and this had gone back to weeds and grass.

The Shier Brothers were men of gigantic stature and magnificent phy- sique. The shortest of them, and he was looked upon as a kind of minnow among Tritons, was six feet. They were respectively, Philip, Samuel, Wesley and John A. Shier with their wives and a whole raft of sturdy chil- dren. They came from Cannington in Brock Township and of all the thousands that Ontario sent into the west, it never sent a better or more honorable contingent either physically or morally than the Shiers. The general impression got around in the district somehow that they were descendants of the old Pennsylvania Dutch but this was not so, because the founder of the family was an Alsace German, viz.: one Jacob Shier. This Jacob was a Protestant, and over two hundred years ago be fled from Alsace to the South of Ireland, so that, although of German origin, the family is Irish. The mother of the Shier boys was a Miss Dawson, who was born in the north of Ireland not far from Belfast. The Shier who first came to Canada about 100 years ago was a British officer, and the Shiers all belonged to the County of Cork. There were two uncles, John and Joseph, who came from Cork and settled in Kincardine Town- ship, Bruce.

A NEPHEW OF WORDSWORTH.

The Shier settlement is six miles south and four miles west of the town of Carnduff, and extends to the banks of the beautiful valley of the Souris River. The original settler in the district was Mr. Henry Hutchinson, who claims something more than a mere passing word. Mr. Hutchinson came from Herefordshire, England, in 1882, and homesteaded on a piece of open prairie on the bench of the Souris. At that time the C.

P. R. had just broken into the prairie country, but he was over a hundred miles from a store of any description. His father was the Vicar of a parish a few miles from the cathedral city of Hereford. Mr. Hutchin- son had some means, so that he was not dependent on the homestead. During the thirty-one years that he lived upon it, he made periodical visits to England. He was a bachelor and never showed a disposition to be anything else. By no means unsociable, the tall grizzled old man of sixty past, whom we met in 1900, had a considerable share of reserve. There was a certain quiet dignity about him; he was of the old type of Englishman who considered any kind of demonstrativeness to be "bad form". He never put on "side", yet nobody ever slapped him on the back or called him "Henry", much less "old Hoss". He was an excellent shot and took great pleasure with the gun. He was better than a "sport", he was a sportsman; and his British training in this regard was a source of wonderment to his neighbors who shot frankly for the kitchen pot, killing their game any old way so long as it was killed. Following the English tradition, which is always to give game a chance for its life, rabbit must be running, or chicken on the wing before he would shoot. Anything sitting was safe till it got going. He was a true lover of nature, and was always displeased with any one who shot hawks or any birds who were useful. He thought the badgers should be spared.

He died on his homestead in 1913 at the ripe age of seventy-five. Mr. John A. Shier was a good friend of his and acted as his executor as he had no relatives in Canada. He was a member of the Church of England and was buried according to the rites of that church.

When the writer first knew him he was past sixty, a hale wiry man who was never in a hurry. A bond between us was that I knew his native county, and we had mutual acquaintances there, and he never came to Carnduff without dropping into the newspaper office to have a quiet chat. One day I happened to quote a line or two of Wordsworth to the old nature-lover and to my astonishment and delight I discovered for the first time that I was talking to a nephew of the poet. Henry Hutchinson's mother was a sister of Wordsworth's wife "the Phantom of Delight". He distinctly remembered his uncle coming down into Herefordshire, to King- ton, although he at the time was only six years old.

WM. IRA RICHARDSON.

"I was born in Kent, Ontario, in the village of Palmyra in 1860. I landed in Winnipeg on the 28th of April, 1882. I came in from Ontario. I landed at Emerson and passed over the Red River in a steamboat. It probably was a Hudson Bay boat. The railroad track was covered up owing to the flood. After we got out of the grip of the flood, I went to Winnipeg; I stayed there about five days in a boarding tent. We all slept in the tent where there were cots, and got our meals outside, inde- pendently. We paid $6 a week for the privilege of sleeping in a cot in the tent. We waited for a train and eventually got on a passenger. There were washouts at Portage, but we eventually got to Brandon and stayed there and paid at the rate of about $7 a week for board. Geo. Bishop, also of Palmyra, was with me. His brother Steve did not come out until 1884; George was married and had a family, but he left them behind in Ontario. George Bishop and I got a yoke of oxen and a wagon between us and we struck out for Turtle Mountain and we landed about where Old Deloraine was eventually. At that time there was no Deloraine, but there was a blacksmith shop. Stuart & Cavers had a post office and a kind of a general store. There was a land office there and we entered for land without seeing it. They told us at the land office what was on the market and we took the land by the map. We outfitted with about two barrels of sea biscuits which we got of Stuart & Cavers. one of these biscuits would make a good weapon when short of ammunition. We also had sugar and sow-belly, tea, flour, bacon, soda and a barrel of soda bis- cuits, but when we got about a foot down the barrel we found they had gone mouldy. We also had an old-fashioned camp stove. We picked up three other men who had taken up land. They were Ed and Steve Chaplin and George Jones. They went through with us, but when they saw the land they had taken up they got cold feet and went away. We had a tent and a canvas cover over the wagon making the usual prairie schooner. Four of us slept in the wagon and one would sleep in the tent which was a little round thing with a pole.

HITTING THE HOMESTEAD WITH OXEN: A CRUDE OPERATION.

"The country was full of water, and we had to wade through lots of sloughs. In crossing the Blind Souris we had to unload the whole busi- ness four or five times. When we got to Sourisford the river was in flood. We left Brandon about the 10th of May. There was a small boat for a ferry at Sourisford. We took the wagons and goods all to pieces and took them over in sections. There was only a small indication of a trail. At Plum Creek, which is now Souris, we had to take the stuff apart, the same as we did at Souris. We were fifteen days from Brandon before we landed on our homestead near where the present village of Cane- vale now is. I homesteaded a mile east of Carievale. The distance we had to travel from Brandon to Carievale was about 125 miles, so that we averaged about ten miles a day; some days we did not make more than five miles, and some we would make twenty or over. We were much de- layed by having to wade the sloughs. This was reversing the Portage Business; everybody would wade. Ed. Chaplin was a very powerful man; he stood about 6 feet 4 inches. Oftentimes when the oxen would get stuck in the sloughs he would put his shoulder to the wheel and hoist the wagon out. We would give the oxen a cut with the whip to assist the process. The team we had was a young team, about four years old. On the whole they behaved pretty well, considering that we had to prac- tically break them in, but sometimes after a real hard day they would rush into the middle of the sloughs, whether we wanted them to or not. I walked ahead one day and left George Bishop with the oxen. They did not come. He went to sleep and the oxen had made for the middle of a slough and when I went back to see what was the matter I found he was stuck. However he and Chaplin lifted on the wheel and I got after the oxen and we got the wagon out. The mosquitoes and black flies were something awful. I have seen them so bad sometimes that I have seen the blood trickle down the backs and legs of the oxen. It was terrible and I have never seen anything as bad since. However, we hit the home- stead at last. All the creeks were in flood and we could not cross the south Antler without the oxen swimming. When we put our heads over the hills east of Carievale we saw what we supposed was snow; there were acres of it, but when we got near enough we saw that the prairies were covered with acres of wavy geese. This was on the flat east of Carievale, which was covered with them. They rose very nearly in a body. They were very nearly white with black wings. At that time there were ducks by the thousands. We got plenty of duck eggs and plo- vers' eggs; occasionally we would see a deer, but we had only a shot gun and failing a rifle we would not get venison.

"There were quite a few people coming in at that time. They were going on to the Moose Mountain. There was a kind of a Moose Mountain fever which brought them in. Most of the people who came in would have their provisions getting low, and so we would help them out with the natural hospitality of the trail. On the 21st of May we had been out of grub for two days. We had nothing but biscuit left, and we had to do with this and the ducks we shot. On Friday about the 21st of May we had a thunder storm and on Sunday morning it snowed about a foot, but on the whole it was a very hot spring, and the oxens' tongues would hang out on the trail. When we got up on Sunday morning the sloughs were frozen around the edges, and the oxen could not drink until we broke the ice. George Bishop shot a rabbit with a revolver. We skinned it and put it in the pot and made some dumplings, and we were so hungry that before they were cooked we had them out of the pot and had to eat them. We could not wait until the rabbit was cooked. The rabbit was in the family way with two. We cleaned the youngsters out. We saw that our land was partly under water, but we thought that we could not do better, so we thought we had better keep it. We had to go back and get ploughs, and so we went to Sourisford where we bought two ploughs from Alf. Gould. At Sourisford we sold the steers to George Jones for $165, and got a big yoke of oxen from Dave Elliott, of Souris- ford, for $300. We got a breaking plough costing us $25. I stayed at Sourisford and the rest went to Brandon to get supplies. I hired with Alf. Gould, who had a farm, as well as keeping the ferry, and also kept a kind of a little store and stopping place. He had a log house. The first work I did for him was to help thresh some wheat with a flail for seed. We winnowed it in the wind, as we had no fanning mill. I worked on the ferry boat for three weeks. The regular ferryman met with an accident; he brought the boat over on a Sunday to ferry some people across. There was a gun in the boat, and in pulling the gun out of the boat it shot the bone of the wrist of his left arm. There was no doctor there at Sourisford, but there happened to be a little medical doctor by the name of Jakeway camped across the river. He was on the trail coming up to Elmore district and we got him over, but he had no anesthetic, so we decided we would hold the man down while the operation was being performed. There was Alf. Gould and myself and a fellow by the name of Abe Reikie, and we held the ferryman down while the operation was being performed. He cut the flesh with the butcher knife and sawed the bone with a picture frame saw, a little fine tooth saw. Mortifica- tion had set in and so he took the arm right off through the center of the bicep. The ferryman, whose name was Thomas, was a man about 30 years of age, who came from Ottawa. We held him down for fear he would struggle, but he gritted his teeth; he knew it was life or death; if that arm did not come off he knew he had to die. The arm was black to the elbow. Dr. Jakeway took it off and tied the arteries. For three days and nights the man was out of his mind. He raved all the time but he got through, and for some years was the secretary treasurer of the municipality of Arthur in southern Manitoba. He is still alive at this time (1910). He lay in a wooden bunk on a straw tick. He took a fancy to me and I was the only one he would pay any attention to. Another incident was that Gould had to strike for Brandon with a young fellow named Ross, who had frozen his feet. Gould was away a week or more and when he came back he brought back stuff to put on Thomas' arm. All that Dr. Jakeway had to treat the amputation with was some carbolic acid. This, and putting the stitches in was all the treatment the arm got. We fed him as well as we could, and one day we got him some beaver tail soup and he seemed to like it.

A GRAPHIC FERRY EXPERIENCE.

"In about fifteen days Ed. Chaplin, his brother and Jones came back from Brandon with supplies. When we came to the ferry with the sup- plies the wagon was loaded with a barrel of pork, sugar and other things. They took the wheels off the wagon and put the supplies in the boat. Chap- lin sat on the hubs of one of the wagon wheels with his feet down through the spokes. A fellow was riding over by the name of Carl. Carl was nervous and to scare him Chaplin tipped the boat, with the result that the whole thing went over in about eight or ten feet of water. Chaplin could not get his feet out of the spokes of the wheel. A man named Essensey, who was ferrying the boat, Carl and myself were the only ones in the boat. Essensey dove down to the bottom of the water and got the wheel off Chaplin's feet and then got him to the top. Fortunately he was a splendid swimmer-a regular water dog, and Chaplin's life was saved.

"We gathered up as much of the supplies as we could and took Carl across the river and also Jones. Both of the men were very nervous. The river was half a mile wide with the flood at the time. We got most of the stuff out of the bottom of the river, but the sugar was irretrievably gone. We dried the meat. The biscuits got wet and we got them out in the sun. We got across anyway. We should have lost afl the supplies except that Essensey was such a good swimmer and diver, and Chaplin would no doubt have been drowned, being at the bottom of the river with the wagon wheel on his feet. You would see Essensey wading around in the water up to his chin watching for some little thing. One day we took 24 ox wagons across on the ferry and we charged $4 a load. There were, of course, 48 oxen to these 24 wagons and these 48 oxen had to wade across with the exception of one, for we took one in the boat and held him by the horns, and the others followed' him. They all followed one after the other in a bunch. It was quite a sight to see this bunch of oxen swimming the river. Lots of fellows that crossed the river in the boat did not want to get wet and so when we got to the shallow water I used to carry them across on my back, and I would also carry them on my back to the boat and dump them in. After this party was across the river they camped for the night and then started out for the ~~'Lest.

"The two Chaplins, Jones, Robt. Carl and myself then started back to Carievale. We went to work at Carievale, where we camped a mile east of Carievale on George Bishop's quarter, and worked from there. We had a tent. This was in June. We broke up about five to ten acres on each quarter section, and then at night we would come back to the tent to sleep. I was the cook. We sowed wheat on the 7th of June and got 'a good crop. This misled people a good deal, because they found out dif- ferently; they thought it alright to put wheat in very late. Experience taught them that this resulted either in the wheat getting frozen or not ripening. Then I started back to Brandon about the 20th of June to look for work. Bishop and I had a team between us, and we sold the wagon, plough, oxen and everything because we had no money. In Brandon I worked at moving buildings and digging cellars and helped build a wire fence in the country, and altogether by the second of October I had made about $300.

MORE FORDING: SWIMMING ON A BUCKBOARD.

"I wanted to get back to the farm before the winter in order to get a shanty up, so I got a buckboard and pony and made for home. I put up a little sod shanty. Will Arthur and Charles Wellstead were in there; McCarthy was a kind of Christian Science brother; Wellstead was a farm- er. They spent about $5,000 on section 34, east of Carievale. Wellstead put in his time on the homestead, got his patent and sold out later and went east to St. Catharines, Ont., where he is now. Arthur joined the Baptists and is now preaching in Rochester, N. Y. (1910). I then re- turned to Brandon and went east to Palmyra and put in the winter. I came back in March of '83. George Bishop returned with me. We worked in Brandon where he worked at his blacksmith's trade and I worked at odd jobs until about the 15th of March, when we set out for Carievale with a yoke of oxen and sleigh and a load of lumber. We got 'to Sourisford where we found that the ice was breaking up in the spring. If we upset our load once, we upset it twenty times, and we were about fifteen days getting home. Most of the time we walked, but some times we wouldride a bit.

"We had to cross several creeks; one of the oxen would balk; at one of the creeks, when we got out in the stream, the ox balked and refused to go. An Englishman came along with a pony and buckboard and said I had better ride with him, so I got into the buckboard and presently the water got so deep that the man said, 'We had better get out or the pony will drown'. I said, 'You offered me a ride and I am going through'. He got out and waded ashore. He could swim but I could not. I got through alright but the pony had to swim with the buckboard. There was a fellow named Bowers and a minister named Wheeler watching at the time, and they thought we were going to drown. This was at Phinneys' Creek. Phinneys' Creek empties into the Souris river east of Napinka. I got in with a fellow named George Thompson who used to work in McCullough's mill at Souris. That same spring we two started back to Brandon. We got to Souris. The ice in the creeks had broken up pretty well and chunks of ice were floating around. We got a plank and persuaded the oxen to walk on the plank on the ice. We connected pretty well and got across. By the time we got to Brandon the snow had about gone, but the bones of big drifts were left. Bishop and I had a wagon there and we loaded this up with everything for the house and started out again, and we landed home after ten days on the road. This was a wagon that George had had shipped from Ontario. He had made it himself in Ontario while he was away. It was a wide tired wagon with tires 4 inches wide, and that wagon is still going in this district today (1910). We now put up a little frame shanty with the lumber we brought out. It was just one ply of lumber with tar paper. It was built up and down like the old fashioned barns in Ontario, and we sodded the sides for warmth, and George and I batched in the shanty that summer. Will McArthur and Chas. Wellstead were four miles east of us. Tom Nattrass lived south of Gainsboro. George Kidd was a mile and a half west of us. W. A. Smith lived at Workman and had the post office. Tom Wilson and Jacob Burke, Dave Burke and the Shouldices were all on their places, and they all used to bring their ploughshares to George Bishop's to be sharpened. Alf. Fenton lived at Butterfield south of Melita, and they all came that way a couple of times with their shares; it must have been about 25 miles. They used to come also from Alameda, 86 miles. They would come with an ox team and put a lot of shares in the wagon and come down just to get their shares sharpened.

LIVED ON FROZEN POTATOES.

"In '83 we put in 25 acres of oats and 10 acres of wheat and cut our crop with a cradle. We also put up 20 loads of hay which we cut with a scythe and raked with a hand rake. We got our grain threshed by Will McArthur and Wellstead, who had a threshing machine. L. D. Sawyer was the engineer. I batched on the trail and kept a stopping place with George Kidd, and George Bishop went east after his wife and family. People kept coming up and down, some going west and some going out after stuff. We had a tepee of wood. There was a big pile of potatoes that got frozen, and when they got frozen we kept them that way. W. McArthur went out to Brandon to get supplies for we had got out of everything except frozen potatoes. We lived on frozen potatoes and we sold them to other people. We used to cook about four pots of these pota- toes, before we could even get enough to make a meal, and that was all we had until McArthur got back from Brandon. He was detained in a blizzard, so we had to put up with the potato diet longer than we ex- pected. We used to get our mail at Antler, where Gainsboro is now and where the post office was kept by Jacob Hostetter. John Carnduff used also to go to Carnduff and meet the mail from Deloraine.

"George Bishop came back in the spring with a wife and four children. There was no doctor nearer than Deloraine, but Mrs. John Preston was an experienced mid-wife. We sold some of the crop of '83 for seed and kept enough for our own seed. The oats we fed. We took grist to Souris. They charged us 20c a bushel for grinding and gave us 40 pounds of flour and 18 pounds of bran and shorts, 58 pounds altogether. It was an old stone mill at Souris.

FRIED WATER CRABS.

"Steve and George Bishop brought horses up from Ontario in the spring of '84. In '84 they sent me to Malta south of Plum Creek. As they were coming from Brandon one of their horses died on the trail, and they had to leave a load of all kinds of household furniture and truck including a barrel of soft soap and a fanning mill on the trail. The load weighed about forty hundred, and they sent me down with a team of oxen to bring it back to Carievale. I started out on a Wednesday morn- ing from Malta to come home with the load, and I expected to be home Thursday night. I thought two days would be sufficient, but I did not get home until Sunday. From Thursday night until Sunday I had noth- ing to eat. The sand hills delayed me. We had a tremendously heavy load and we had to unload and carry the load forward piece by piece until the load was sufficiently light for the oxen to carry the remainder. Our food ran out on Thursday night, but we caught some water crabs from the Souris river and ate them, and they did not go too bad. We had matches and built a fire and fried them, on a fire of scrub pine. In the sand hills boundary the weather was fine. We slept under the wagon and got the load home safely.

"Throughout the summer we went to the Souris River and dug a big pit. We filled it full of limestone and burned our lime kiln to build a house. We burned 400 bushels of lime, using just lime stone boulders and nigger heads. Steve Bishop built a stone and concrete house and I did the same. My house was 16 x 20 and his was 14 x 18. They were two story houses. George Bishop built a stone addition to his original frame shack.

SICK FATHER IN EAST: A WINTER WALK OF 75 MILES.

"During the winter of '84 my father died in the east. I had word in January that he was very sick and they wanted me to go home. We only got mail once a week, and not very regular at that. I started out on Tuesday morning. At that time there were three trains a week on the C. P. R. main line. They went on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. On Tuesday I left Carievale on foot to walk 75 miles to Virden to get a train. That night I stopped with a fellow named Skelton. I got to Virden on Wednesday night making the trip in two days on foot, and got the train on Thursday morning. I had walked 75 miles. When I got home I found my father was dead and buried. I stayed with my sister until some time up to the last of April. I got a team of horses and wagon. I loaded a car with Ewen McDiarmid, who subsequently was a member for Cannington in the Assembly. McDiarmid brought in horses, a wagon and two cows and household effects, also two sheep and some chickens. The cow was billed to Moosomin. The first load of Ewen's stuff went out to his farm at Old Cannington Manor, from there it went to Old Alameda and from there down home. This was in the summer of '85.

FROSTED WHEAT AT FORTY-FIVE CENTS.

"We made a trip back to the rail and this time we went into Moosomin by John Farr's, north of Carnduff. Moosomin was forty miles without a house. We had horses this time. Altogether we made three trips to Moosomin that summer to get stuff down and also got our crop in. We put in quite a crop and grew 1,500 bushels of wheat; the wheat got frosted but not badly. We did not at the time understand about cutting it on the green side. We could have had it cut quite a bit earlier than we did. The Hostetters at Gainsboro had theirs saved without being frosted that year. Jn the winter of '85 we made 15 trips to Virden to sell our wheat. We would take 100 bushels a load with two teams of horses. We got 45c a bushel for the frosted wheat. If it had not been frosted it would have been worth 58c to 60c. Next year ('86) we broke some more land, and a few more settlers began to come in. '86 was a dry year; we built a new stable. By this time we were getting used to very heavy snow storms with big drifts and holy blizzards. One thing that struck us that was remarkable in the old days in the winter, was the extreme silence of the prairie.

PREACHING TO HIMSELF.

"During the winters that I batched I used to study up Talmadge and Spurgeon's sermons, and get up and preach them in the shack. A man came to the shack one day to see me. I was preaching to myself and he heard me going on like that. He was afraid to knock; he thought some kind of service was going on inside, and he hated to disturb it by coming in.

At last I opened the door and he said: 'What" Was there no church going on"' And I said, 'Yes, but no congregation'. This man wanted to stay all night and he stayed. I would often sit there until three or four in the morning reading. I had all kinds of books and I read my Bible and all kinds of evangelical works. By '85 settlers had come in pretty thick. In '86 I had the biggest house in the settlement.

ROOF GOES AT THIRTY BELOW ZERO.

"I gave a party and George Bishop's wife and other ladies came. A blizzard came up. They could not get away home, so we stayed at it all night long. It was 30 below zero with a wild wind. In the spring of '84 in March I had built my house, and just got up the first story. I was lying in bed and there was a terrific wind blowing; there was nothing between me and heaven but boards and tar paper. I thought to myself if the wind takes that roof off I shall be in a bad place, and no sooner said than done. The roof was taken away and a stone about 75 pounds rolled down on the bed. It was about four o'clock in the morning. The stone did not strike me. I left and went over to Bishop's. I had put that winter in with walls of bare stone and that roof of boards and paper over my head. I had seen the gravy freeze in front of the stove after I had fried the meat. I had an old-fashioned King stove which took a stove stick about three feet long. This stove was minus the high oven. I had been out of wood and I had to burn hay in it. The nearest wood was on the Souris river 20 miles off. We would haul coal from Roche Percee, from the Gow and Hazard Mines.

MINING FOR COAL.

"The man who ran the first drift for coal was named Pocock. He came from England. He went away and never came back. This was in the valley near the Hazard Mine. It was a 8 foot seam of coal. We would use picks and axes to get the coal out of the mine. Once the bank fell in on a fellow who was getting coal, but fortunately did not kill him. We managed to get him out. We would make a drift right in the bank of the ravine to get the coal. It was black but much like chips; it was easy to mine. It was pretty hot working in these drifts in the fall. We used to wait until it froze up and then go. We got our coal from there from 1883 until the railroad came in. Eventually Hazard had a board- ing-house, and we could stop there when we went for coal. He would charge us about $1.00 a load for coal, and for this you could load your wagon with as much coal as your team could carry. We had to help mine it.

As we got in further we would support the roofs with balks of timber. We would back the wagon into the drift by hand. It was less trouble to go to the Hazard Mine for coal than it was to go to the Souris river for wood. We would travel 65 or 75 miles by the trail to get coal, and we used to call it a four days' trip.

BUFFALO BONES

"We used to pass by a hill which was called the Hill of the Murdered Scout in the Boscurvis district. It was a great hill. There was a skeleton lying on the top, but I don't know the story. In the early days the prairies were covered with buffalo bones. Sometimes we would find a head with some hair on it yet. In the hard years we used to pick up the bones and draw them to Minot in North Dakota where we would get $17 a ton for them. Elk horns were also very plentiful. There were a number of elk in the Moose Mountain. Sometimes we would. see them on the plains. I saw a moose in a creek once, and one spring I saw three or four elk. An Indian shot one in the spring of '84 and it weighed 400 pounds. There were quite a lot of jumping deer, chickens and ducks. Ducks were espe- cially plentiful. George Bishop shot and killed eleven one time at one shot. In '86 which was a very dry year, the ducks were very scarce. There were all kinds of ducks, including big mallards. I had a muzzle loading rifle and when I wanted a duck I would just pick one out and knock his head off with a bullet.

EARLY PREACHING: A SOD CHURCH.

"The first preaching in the Carievale district was by a Presbyterian student named Nivins. The first preacher to come to the southern country was Mr. Hay. He was succeeded by Nivins. He held his first service in Carievale district at George Bishop's-after that he held service at my house. The first Sunday school was held at my place in '85. I had five or six children to start with. I was the superintendent and teacher, and in fact the whole works. Every Sunday I used to go four miles over to John Frazer's and hold a Bible class. Frazer came in about '85. We held no service of any kind in the winter. In '86 or '87 the first church was built. It was built of sod on George Taylor's place by the Anglicans. The Rev. Cartwright who came in about '86 used to hold services there. The church is now used as an oat granary. The Rev. Black, Presbyterian, also preached there. Other preachers in the district held service there: Lockhart, St. Clair Bros., and John Scott.

"I built the first store in Carievale for Sam Colquhoun. That was in 1891.

"The railroad was surveyed through that country in 1881. When we came in we understood the railroad would be in next year. When the railroad did not come in every load we drew to Virden or Moosomin we would curse old Sir John A. because we did not get the railroad. Jack Turriff ran in 1891 in opposition to Ex Governor Dewdney as a kind of a protest against the government's slackness in not building a railroad.

"After the dry year of 1886 people were discouraged and began to get out. In 1889 was another dry year and that took a lot more out. After we got the railroad they began to come back, but a great many never came back to the homesteads they had abandoned.

"In the summer of 1890 I went to Deloraine and got my binding twine at 20c a pound. Binding twine now (1910) is 9-1/2~c. The first binder we got cost $300. That was in 1885. It was an Osborne binder with a 6 foot cut. You can buy a Superior Binder now for $180. Our first threshing bill was 4c for wheat and 3c for oats. I had the first threshing all to myself. John Young from Alameda came in with a horse power. I had 1,000 bushels of wheat. That was in 1887. I had to find my own men, except three men who came with the power. The thresher hauled his own power. At that time we had to stack. There was no threshing from the stook. Neighbors used to come and help thresh. I told you I paid 20c for my twine. Mr. French got some binding twine from Deloraine at 13c. He called it moose hair. It was a kind of hemp and was very in- ferior, and his wife and girls gave him a blowing up for buying it. I cut his crop and his girls, Ellen and Laura, stooked it. In '85 there were in the Carievale district the Coades, W. A. Smith, Parker, Wellstead, Tay- lors, the Youngs, the Hedleys, the Gillilands and Smart. Bill Coade came in the same year I did. Dave Frith in '85 got the first buckboard there was in this country."

Note: The story of the Hill of the Murdered Scout is briefly this. The hill, although not very high, is quite a prominent feature on a level plain. The Indians were at war. A scout was on the look-out from the hill, and he fell asleep. An enemy crept upon him and despatched him as he lay. The skeleton lay at the top of the hill for a good many years, and the landmark got to be known as the Hill of the Murdered Scout. I never met any one who had taken the trouble to climb the hill and see the skele- ton. The hill is close to the international boundary. Bibliography follows:



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THE STORY
OF
SASKATCHEWAN
AND ITS PEOPLE



By JOHN HAWKES
Legislative Librarian



Volume II
Illustrated



CHICAGO - REGINA
THE S.J. CLARKE PUBLISHING COMPANY
1924




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