EVOLUTION OF TOWNS AND VILLAGES.
LIFE IN A VILLAGE.
A short time ago a daily paper expressed a wish that some one would
write the story of our "one horse towns" and make them "throb with
life". Here is a story, absolutely correct in its details which admirably
meets this requirement. It is from the pen of Mrs. Christina Willey, and
as a picture of a pioneer town, or rather hamlet we do not think it has
been equalled, certainly not surpassed in the literature of Canada. It
"throbs" with life-real life.
"Towards the end of 1893 the Willeys decided to give up farming. The
wheat crop had been fair, but the price dropped to about 46c a bushel,
and this at the end of a thirty mile haul. The long expected North West
Central Railway was as much a dream as ever; both cash and credit were
about exhausted. As a final blow from fate, our best mare died from colic
so, in December, we moved to Saltcoats, bought out the drug stock of Dr.
T.A. Patrick, and started town life again.
"Saltcoats, on the old Manitoba and North Western Railway, called
itself a town, but was then practically unorganized. It had a population of
one hundred and fifty, a single-sided street, facing the track, whose name
was High Street, and a double-sided road, forming the stem of a 'T', on
the map, Commercial Street. However, we called this district simply 'up
town'; names came into use several years later.
"Our great distinction was that we had the barracks of the N. W. M.
P., the detachment consisting of an inspector, a surgeon and three or four
constables.
"The weekly train came in at midnight on Saturday, if on time; pro-
ceeded to Yorkton, rested on Sunday, and started east again on Monday
morning. We generally waited up on Saturday to see the train, and, many
a time it passed through to the end of the track, empty, except for the
crew. There was neither sleeping or dining car.
"Although the whole reason for the town's existence was the railroad,
we had, of course the standing western grudge against the railroad com-
pany. The freight rates were scandalous (they are higher today) the
passenger tariff was absurd; the schedule seemed deliberately arranged to
annoy us personally yet I believe the Manitoba and North Western was
always run at a loss; poor as it might be, it was ahead of its day. Finan-
cially poor it undoubtedly was. One winter it delivered an ultimatum to
our combined station agent, telegrapher, baggageman and general slave
of the line, Mr. J. G. Phelps, that his salary for the winter must be twenty-
four dollars a month, with, of course, the usual house, fuel, light and scrub-
bing brushes. He accepted the inevitable.
"I remember one remarkable accident on our line. When going east
to Winnipeg the engine took water from a tank on the western side of
the Assiniboine River, before running down the hill to Millwood in the
Qu'Appelle Valley. On this particular morning the passengers noticed
that the speed was greater than usual, and the train ran through Millwood,
stopping only as the hill rose at the other side. But the train had no loco-
motive. The boiler, running dry, probably with a defective water-guage,
had blown up when at the tank, but, by wonderful luck, the force of the
explosion had thrown all the wreckage clear of the track, and the passen-
gers knew nothing of the accident until the up-grade stopped the train.
The engineer and fireman were thrown far, and instantly killed. For
years the wrecked engine lay where it fell, at the bottom of a deep ravine.
"The town had great sport with the railroad on one occasion. It was
a winter of heavy snow, possibly the very winter of Mr. Phelps' twenty-
four dollar salary, and the train, coming in on a certain Sunday morning
some ten hours late, ran off the track. The engine ploughed into the coal
shed and stayed upright, but the tender and two or three freight cars
toppled over and blocked the line very thoroughly. Fortunately there
were no injuries, and the few passengers were merely shaken by the sud-
den stop. It was a warm sunny day, and everybody in town stood or sat
around. The train men at once offered work to volunteers at the usual
rate-something certainly under a dollar and a half a day. But we were
game-Sunday rates were time and a half, and anyhow, we were not par-
ticular about the job. The railroad refused to be held up, but we were
firm, and at last they had to wire to Minnedosa, the divisional point, for a
wrecking crew and men. When they arrived we cheered them on, but
we did not work, not one of us; we gloated over the amount of money the
company was losing. The railroad afterwards had the joke on us, in the
matter of a certain well-which shall be told in its proper place.
"Saltcoats is fortunately built on the bank of a small lake, shallow at
one end, for safety; deep at the other, for swimming. We rowed quite
a bit in the summer, went out in boatloads in the dusk, and sang choruses,
and even had a few little sailing canoes, although the wooded banks and
winding shores made that an adventurous sport, because of unexpected
puffs of wind. One friend of ours, out with a lady who could not swim,
suddenly capsized his boat, and had a strenuous time attempting to swim
out with his burden. Some men on the shore shouted directions, but did
not attempt to help, although they seemed much excited. Finally, as he
came nearer, the words were clear. 'Put down your feet and walk out'-
the water was about two feet deep in that particular spot.
"Churches we had, three of them, Anglican, Presbyterian and Metho-
dist, and everyone went to his own church on Sunday as a matter of course,
but on week days we worked pretty well together. The winter of 1892-93
had been a very long and severe one, while spring did not set in until the
end of May. In the Saltcoats district the wasteful practice of burning
straw in the fall prevailed until this season taught its bard lesson. The
cattle and horses died by hundreds, men started the winter with fifty head
of stock, and in the spring were left with two or three and this just at the
time when the first shipments of live cattle to England were being tried
out, before the embargo. The distress was very actual, and all the women
of Saltcoats banded themselves together, in what we called simply 'The
Guild' to meet the need of the following winter. We raised money some-
how, we begged half-worn clothing, we hunted bargains in cotton and
warmer goods-we made endless garments for the most needy-and in
fact worked as we did, a generation later in the Red Cross. For a
year
or two our work was wanted, and then as suddenly as the need had risen,
it died away, and the guild, happily, was no more.
"A good deal of cricket and tennis was played, and when the bicycle
craze of the late nineties came in I happened to be the first woman to get
one, therefore on Dominion day, some of the leading citizens asked me
to ride round a bit, as few of the farmers had yet seen a woman on a
bicycle
"One Saturday afternoon we had a very particular cricket match. It
must have been a special occasion, for nearly all the players were in
'whites'. That a match could be staged on a Saturday shows the easy
pace of life at that time. You see, from the cricket pitch there was a good
view of the principal trails leading into town, so the storekeepers gaily
locked their doors, and went out to bat or field, knowing that their cus-
tomers would hunt them up if their business was urgent, or, if not, sit in
the grass and watch the match. In the middle of the afternoon a N. W.
M.P. team and rig drove up to the pitch, 'Prairie fire getting out of hand
about three miles east-get brooms and sacks and pile in' The match
stopped, the men jumped and scrambled into the wagon and went cheer-
fully off to fight the fire. An hour or so later a sudden and violent down-
pour of rain checked the blaze. The cricketers returned drenched, with
whites looking like coal miners overalls, and squelchy cricket shoes coated
with mud and black ashes. Also, it was Saturday, and all the kitchens had
been scrubbed for Sunday.
"In the winter there was skating until the lake became too rough with
snow, and some snowshoeing, but the chief entertainment centered round
the 'Agricultural Hall'-a great barn of a place, hard to light and impos-
sible to heat. But it had a real stage, a real proscenium arch, a sometimes
workable painted drop-curtain, and two realistic damp dressing rooms
under the stage. Political meetings were held here, which everybody at-
tended in a sporting spirit, knowing long before the meeting how they
would vote when the time came. I suppose there was some good speaking,
I know there was much windy tosh but the only orator, in the real sense,
that I now remember was Nicholas Flood Davin, splendidly gifted,
doomedby his own weakness to failure.
"Rube Allyn, once a great favorite in the west, gave several entertain-
ments, and Pauline Johnson appeared more than once reciting her own
poetry and acting clever sketches.
"An obscure travelling company, at a one night stand, once gave us
Twelfth Night. Little memory remains of the performance as a whole-
but one player, whose name, even, I never knew, was so fine and human
a 'Feste' that the pleasure of it has stayed with me for, I think, quite
twenty years.
"A quadrille club was formed every winter for a long time. Mr. E. C.
Cass, still in the district, drove in six miles to play the organ for our
dances. Anyone who was able volunteered to fiddle. We took turns to
bring refreshments, and had merry times, we knew every rough board in
the floor, and which were the draughtiest windows, and where the roof
leaked most on a wet night; all was most uncomfortable, and uncommonly
gay. Sometimes, in bad weather I sympathized with the North West
Trooper who, walking beside me on the trail to the hall one night remarked
seriously, 'Your Opry House is in the suburbs, mam'.
"Our own amateur plays were the best fun. We always had some sort
of a dramatic society, and we performed anything that we could get hold
of that had not too many characters. 'Box and Cox'-'Ici on parle
Francais', 'Freezing a Mother-in-law'--'The Area Belle'. I think it was
in this last comedy that there was a Penelope-this caused much trouble
to one of us, handsome, and therefore necessary, but, oh, so stupid-who
would, and did say 'Penny-lope'!
"Still higher we aspired with the old, old pantomimes-Ah Baba, Alad-
din and Robinson Crusoe and in the last we were really up to date, for
we had from somewhere, dissolving views, colored and showed 'Crusoe's
Dream' with great realism.
"We made all our own costumes. Many a foot of new rope have I
entwined to make flaxon tresses and we designed and painted our own
scenery. One particular scene, for a harlequinade, was sketched by Charles
H. Mead-Briggs, now of Bredenbury. It represented, with photographic
exactness, our own 'Commercial Street' and did duty in many a drama,
until use rubbed it out.
"On a certain first of July we had an original play by John Cadden
who is still writing occasional poetry, and 'Gus' Fehrenbach, who was,
years later, to die for us at the front. I do not remember much about
the thing, except that it was so dreadful that it was funnier than any
farce, and threatened to be as long as a Chinese play. Fortunately just
before midnight, a loud cry of 'Fire' in the town emptied the hall. There
had been a supply of fireworks arranged upon a raft on the lake, our first
'display', and A. B. Lander, a very well known citizen, and some friends
became anxious lest they had become wet. They had not. It was over,
in one grand set piece, before the would-be spectators could pile out of the
hall.
"How we managed to live on the very small amount of cash available
is now forgotten, but I have to record that our gross takings in the drug
store for the year, in dollars, amounted to $588.40! Our rent was only
five dollars a month and there was only a dollar or so of taxes. It was
in this year that eggs were sold at six dozen for a quarter, while oats
realized nine cents a bushel in trade, and prime cuts of beef cost eight
cents a pound. Indeed when our butcher raised the price to ten cents for
sirloin roasts there was an outcry. We were very independent; when the
same butcher was suspected of killing an old bull that had been feeding
around the town we promptly declared a boycott, bought a few cases of
meat and refrained from fresh beef for some months.
"The old permit system had given way to the open bar, and we had
two hotels, neither of them particularly select, and both of course, quite
dependent upon the sale of beer and spirits to make ends meet. Still, the
billiard rooms were the only clubs, and filled a certain need. They were,
at any rate, a meeting and lounging place for the men of the district.
"A. H. Lander, then and still the town jeweler, one day, to save his
customers from needless searching, lettered a card neatly, and affixed it to
his store door when he was out--'Try Reimers',-that was one of thehotels.
"There was never any of the 'Wild West' atmosphere about our town,
nor was there about any town in the Canadian west although once I did
see a man ride his horse over the side-walk and into a store; everybody
was very indignant, but the lad was a young half-breed, too drunk to know
what he was doing.
"Also one day, a respected store-keeper went to his till and took out
a five dollar bill. 'I'm going to knock Dick into the gutter' he remarked.
He did, and, being tried at once, had his fine ready. Dick was our lawyer,
clever enough, but possibly he richly deserved what he described as 'this
dastardly, unprovoked assault'.
"The late Judge E. L. Wetmore visited the town to hold Court, and
although he did not think much of us, we respected him highly. His dis-
approval arose from the fact that a local jury, against all the evidence,
acquitted a local tradesman who, it was pretty certain, had attempted to
defraud his creditors. The judge spoke very plainly, and declined to call
a jury from the town for many years. Later during a sitting of court,
Judge Wetmore noticed a wild swan, swimming about on a small slough
in town, quite near the street. There could then have been no protection
for these beautiful birds, because he sent the clerk of the court around and
personally spoke to those he met, asking all sportsmen to refrain from
shooting the swan, as a favour to himself. The swan stayed around until
evening, unmolested, then went its way.
"One custom took a great hold on the staid and mature men of the
town for a season or two. They would meet together at early dark, at
some spot in the bluffs that surround the place, make some sort of fire,
cook some sort of victuals, smoke, yarn, drink too much warm beer, and
then go home stiff from sitting upon hard ground, uncomfortable from
ill-cooked food, much mosquito-bitten, but quite sure they had had a great
time.
"One particular barbecue is remembered. The menu included sucking-
pig, new potatoes, and peas. All were happy, especially Eph. Boake,-now
these many years away from the district-a Fallstaff, who really enjoyed
his food, and a specially invited guest that night.
"The next morning Mrs. Boake was most indignant. She had never
lived in a town where the young boys were so absolutely devilish. Her
potatoes and peas were gone from the garden, her pet little sucking-pig,
being prepared for winter eating, had disappeared from its sty, I think
Eph let the unnamed boys bear the blame; he did not care to confess, at
home, that he had been specially invited to eat his own victuals, stolen for
the occasion.
"We were in advance of our day in some of our enterprises. In 1896
we built and ran one of the first cottage hospitals in the Northwest Terri-
tories, but the expense proved too much for the district, and it was closed
after about four years' struggle. A creamery, running at about the
same time, met with the same fate. A weekly market which we opened
proved to attract sellers, but few buyers, so we also had to
abandon that.
"The first newspaper, 'Saltcoats Siftings' was started in 1896, by G.
G.Meikle, a good all round pressman, but it, like so many of our bright
schemes of those days, died after a few years, to be succeeded after a
long interval, and several poor attempts, by the 'Saltcoats Herald', which
under the editorship of C. MacMurchy, is still running.
"At first the office was in a small wooden shack, with a narrow cor-
ridor for the public, into which we crowded at midnight on Saturday, on
the days of the weekly train. I think, now, that the postmaster was a
very superior brand of official, but at that time we took it as a matter of
course that he should work in the small hours of Sunday morning to sort
and distribute the mail.
"When the old shack was accidentally burnt down he built an up-to-
date cement block office, and a daily mail by this time being inaugurated,
he tried to discipline us, and to close the postoffice at a reasonable hour.
The box-holders being a lawless lot, objected. A broken glass in the door
soon allowed us to spring the latch. He counter-moved by locking it. Then,
more glass fell out, and a small boy could be hoisted in, to open late com-
ers' boxes and hand out the mail. A wooden panel replaced the glass, and
the unruly were foiled for a time. Our store was two doors from the
post office, and one day I made the great discovery that I had a key that
fitted. After that a person 'in the know' simply borrowed my key, got
his mail, and returned it. The postmaster was a long time getting wise
to this trick, he talked quite a lot about 'devils and scoundrels' but gave
up at last in despair, and left the door unlocked.
"We plagued him, but we liked him, and staunch old Conservative as
he was-no Civil Service impartiality for him, thank you, was he not an
Irishman-he kept his job through all changes of government, for a quar-
ter of a century.
"I write mostly of the ten years between 1893 and 1903, for, during
that time there was but little change, the population remained about sta-
tionary, between 150-175, and a resident could give the names and gen-
erally the age and the history of every person in the town. A new school
replaced, at the beginning of the century, the old one-room building, while
two elevators and a grist-mill marked the period when Saltcoats, ceasing
to be a pioneer town, began to dream of progress.
"Many of the friends who greeted me in 1893 are still there. Mr. A.
B.Lander, our only watchmaker and jeweler, was one of the first mer-
chants to settle in town. Mr. T. Carleton, cattle dealer, farmer, and liv-
eryman, was there even before the steel and is still a citizen. Mr. J. E.
Parrott, store-keeper, lumber dealer, mill owner, although retired from
business, is living in town. W. H. Gallett is nearly as old a resident, and
Thomas Bradford, a very young man in 1893, now has grown up sons to
assist him in his hardware store. Mr. S. G. Fisher, the town clerk, has
also been in Saltcoats for over thirty years.
"Then last, but most important to us all comes Mr. Thomas MacNutt.
In the early days he was the helper and adviser of all new- settlers. Later,
we were glad to elect him our M. L. A. at Regina, where he gained the
high honor of the Speakership. After that he was for many years our
M. P. at Ottawa. Of uncompromising honesty, he gained far less from
public life than many less scrupulous men-it is an open secret that a
senatorship could have been his, on conditions that he was unable to
accept. Now, beyond the age of three score and ten, he is again living
in the district, to our great gain. But many feel that Ottawa is the poorer
for the loss of his ripe experience, kindliness and common sense.
"Life is much more civilized. Electric light, telephone, furnaces, ce-
ment side-walks, all have arrived,-but the old days had compensations.
The nearest bank, for instance, was at Neepawa, in Manitoba, although
drafts were but little used then in business, at any rate, in our town. If
your creditors wrote a nasty letter on Saturday night, you could always
refuse to do business on the Sabbath, and thus get a week to think up a
good excuse for non-payment.
"We had queer characters but accepted them as a matter of course.
One gentleman, when his wife intended to pay state visits would trot
around, and seeing a victim, would remark, in all seriousness, 'The General
will be calling today', rather as though Royalty were dropping in, in-
cognito.
"Another friend, a lady this time, had a test of gentility that became
one of the by-words of our time. She would remark of some favored new-
comer, 'A perfect gentleman, my dear, has twelve white shirts'! How few
of us measured up to her standard.
"Another had a mental breakdown, and when he returned and went to
work, explained, 'I went off my chump, so they sent me to Brandon, and
taught me to be a gardener', which was a fact and he was particularly
good at the job, too.
"Yet another of us, for some purely technical offence, went to Regina
jail for a month, and his wife once stated that Mr. Jones was much re-
spected while he was in the jail, it was probably true, but sounded irregu-
lar somehow.
"So I could write on, telling tales as-
"'The' incident of the tall Mountie, the drunken lady, and the wheel
barrow'.
"'The local detective and his many clues'.
"'The fake railway tragedy and the spoof of A. B. Lander'.
"'The prohibited whiskey and the puzzled N. W. M. P.'
"But I will forbear. The inhabitants may tell, if they will-I still have
to live in the neighborhood, and my hide is not so thick as that of some
more famous writers.
"The tale of the well shall now be told. There was a tradition that
during the hard times of the early nineties, the people of the district pe-
titioned the M. & N. Railroad to carry on the grading of the railway and
so furnish employment; whether this was so or not, the steel was laid
as far as Yorkton, and for several years, that village had all the trading
advantage of being the end of the track. When under the C. P. R. the line
was continued farther west, 'the great question for several years was as
to the location of a divisional point west of Minnedosa. We of course,
considered Saltcoats to be the only proper place, and when at last we
heard that Yorkton was definitely ruled out, as making too long a division,
we had high hopes. As in so many western districts, the great question
was the supply of water. Here we felt we held a trump card, for in addi-
tion to the lake, we were most fortunate in our wells-we could get abund-
ance of water at twenty feet or, less-indeed the well for the grist mill,
close to the track, was I believe, even more shallow than that, and had a
full supply. We approached the C. P. R. and they gave us permission to
drill at the spot where they wished to build a water tank. We raised
some hundred dollars at once by public subscription, started a well used
up all our money, drilled seventy-five feet, and got a dry hole. The di-
visional point went to Bredenbury, the next station east.
"Apart from the usual run of independent settler, I have seen four
group immigrations, the Crofters, the Icelanders, the Galicians and the
Welsh.
"There was a saying in the early days of the Crofters, that the best
trails in the country were from house to house in their settlement. Fish-
ermen first, and very small farmers second, they had a hard time to get ac-
customed to the new land. Burdened with large loans for houses, imple-
ments and cattle, and unused to business they were handicapped. They
were good Presbyterians on Sundays, and their doctrine of predestination
often degenerated into fatalism during the week. The older men were
most of them delightful gentlemen, gray, courteous and dignified, speaking,
often, only the Gaelic. The younger men were far less worthy, as a rule,
than their fathers; they were often reckless if whiskey was to be had,
and in business, not always trustworthy. But how they redeemed them-
selves! When the Great war started I would sometimes be at the station
when the troop trains went east and on many a man's coat was a ribbon
I knew. 'Hullo, Africa', I would say, 'I thought you said never again when
you came back from the Boer war'! Alas, from this war so many of them
-faulty it may be, careless, most surely, but heroically brave-never did
come back!
"Of the Galicians there is this to say,-we would have been better with
Northern people-there is too wide a gap for easy assimilation, but be it
remembered that they settled on rough land miles then from a railway,
which had lain vacant, ready for settlement, since the opening up of the
west. They worked nobly, under poor conditions, often breaking up land
with a spade, and cutting with a sickle. They have added thousands of
dollars to the wealth of the west.
"The Icelanders are ideal settlers. Educated, scrupulously honest,
good citizens and good neighbors-sober-industrious.
"Although they are grouped together, roughly, in a district of their
own, there is no sense of separation between them and their friends of
British origin.
"The Welsh immigration was remarkable in some ways. Imagine a
British subject who had never seen Britain or a British colony, and who
spoke two languages but no English.
"Twenty years or more before the Welsh came to Canada, a large party
went from Wales to the Argentine. They settled there with special priv-
ileges as to naturalization and military service, and it was the question of
these exemptions, together with crop failures, I believe, that turned them
to Canada.
"Therefore they came, these most British of all our people, British
subjects all, and sons of British subjects, speaking but Welsh and Spanish.
The younger ones soon learnt English, kept up their Welsh because of
the old folks, but forgot their Spanish. Too many saw England for the
first and last time in the War-they volunteered almost to a man.
"There was an air of romance over the first settlers that has now
passed. Prosaic enough in all seeming, the fact that they had embarked
on the great adventure of a new world must have had an influence even if
it was seldom acknowledged. They had, I think, more background, be-
cause they had other standards of comparison, and they took life more
casually because they had, many of them, lived to maturity in a world
of larger affairs. They brought with them their great contribution to the
life of the Canadian West, the one thing that kept the country so unlike
the American new land, a respect for law and order, and a matter-of-fact
decision to carry British traditions of decent citizenship into the new
life.
"Your bold bad man does not flourish save where there is a sneaking
admiration for his attitude. As ridicule killed the duel in the time of
our grandfathers, so a humorous contempt killed the desperado idea in
the Canadian West-when your picturesque ruffian is laughed at he col-
lapses like a pricked balloon. There is no comfort in carryIng arms if
you meet a grin when you wear them openly and a stiff fine if you try
to conceal them-if the population is united in the impression that you
are either drunk or a half-wit and in either case, a subject for guardian-
ship, not an object of fear.
"Therefore three hundreds of little towns live their peaceful lives un-
troubled practically by either ruffian or policeman. They lock their doors
occasionally, but forget to guard their windows or their coal chutes and
after dark so quiet are some of them that a loud voice in the street calls
citizens to their doors, in wonder at such an unusual disturbance."
Christina Willey.
Bibliography follows:
Next Page