Growing Up on a Canadian Prairie
After the Boer War in South Africa, some British soldiers decided not to return to England, but to take advantage of the opportunity to homestead in Canada. A man and his wife were granted 320 acres each if they met certain conditions. Alfred Gough was one of those soldiers. He was a well educated man from Cardiff, Wales, and he decided to homestead a ranch about 60 miles north of Calgary in l902.
He was not there long before he married a local school teacher. This man was Fran Peart’s father. Fran is a long time resident of Tiffin.
The land was dry, short grass prairie, suitable for raising cattle. In addition to raising cattle and meeting the requirements for homesteading, her father became a foreman for a neighboring rancher, John McDaniel, and lived in his house on the prairie. When Mr. McDaniel visited from town, the children were very impressed with his car because it had windows. They would gather round it and peer in at the luxurious seats, that were protected from the dust. Their father drove a Model T Ford. Mr. McDaniel was known for his cursing and when they inspected the cattle, it was said that he cursed every time that Model T hit a bump.
In spite of his cursing, Mr. McDaniel was very good to the family in his will. He left each member of the family $500. Frances remembers how proud she was of her bank book and the interest that accumulated.
Although Frances was not yet twelve years old, she helped herd the cattle. She rode a big old swayback horse that knew how to head off the cattle when they tried to stray off. According to Frances, the horse did all the work and all she did was hang on for dear life when it made a sharp turn. She rode bareback because her father was afraid of accidents he had heard of when riders were dragged from the stirrup.
She was the oldest of four children and she remembers that life was hard by today’s standards. Their farmhouse had no running water and on bath night, water was heated on the kitchen stove and poured into a big tub. The youngest child bathed first, in the first level of water, and as more water was added, the older, bigger children bathed next. The adults bathed later in the evening.
Life was hard for her mother. She cooked for four hired men and the family. And Frances says those were big breakfasts, followed by two big dinners. Then, there was the family vegetable garden to tend. The seasons were short in Alberta and that limited the kinds of crops they could grow. Tomatoes hardly ever ripened before the first frost
Clothes were boiled on the stove to get them white and water had to be carried from a well outside. There was no electricity.
Her mother loved to read, and many times she would sit beside a lamp with the children around her and read to them. Frances remembers that she and the other children would cry, “Stop, mum, don’t read any more. This story is too sad.” Their mother would always reply that the story got better later on and kept on reading. They read a lot of Dickens’ books.
Frances grew up loving to read and read all the books she could out of her father’s small library, and exchanged books with other families. When her mother sent her up to make the beds, she would walk her shoes around with one hand to show that she was working when she was actually reading.
Another diversion was the radio. A neighbor bought a radio and Frances and her brothers and sisters would travel by horse and sled to hear it. One night the neighbor was excited. “We caught “Cuber” real plain tonight.”
Frances had to walk two miles to the nearest one room school, which had a pot-bellied stove which the teacher and the students kept going. On cold mornings the children eagerly watched the thermometer. When the temperature dropped to 40 degrees below zero, school was canceled.
Every summer in their small town of Carstairs, there was a stampede, or a rodeo. That was a big event, even though it never approached the size of the stampede in Calgary.
A big change occurred in Frances’ life when her baby brother was born. She was twelve years old and the new baby was a complete surprise and not welcome either. However, they soon grew to love him and carried him everywhere. Frances’ mother and the children moved to Nova Scotia for a year to stay with members of her family while her father tended the cattle, and sold their farm.
When they returned her father had bought a farm on the outskirts of Carstairs. The children were able to go to high school. Francis was in a combined 7th and 8th grade and as the 7th graders picked up a lot of the lessons of the 8th graders, the teacher had them take the 8th grade exam. Francis passed as a seventh grader and started high school at l3.
After graduating, she took a year of normal school, and was qualified to teach at the age of l8 . Her first job was teaching l2 pupils in a one room school, and she rode a horse two miles to school. Many of the students also rode horses and housed them in a barn near the school house. One large family hitched a team to an old Model A Ford and their four children rode to school in that.
Frances is 5 foot ten inches tall, and she thought she was so big that she scared the children because she never had any trouble with any of them. After a couple of years she taught 40 first, second, and third graders in town.
She always visited the homes of all her students. One Chinese family had three children, two of whom who were “smart as whips” . The third boy wouldn’t talk at first. His mother said it was because the cooks at their restaurant spoke Chinese to him and the customers spoke English and he hadn’t made up his mind which language to speak. The other children always were eager for him to learn and clapped when he was able to recite. He was perfectly able to walk, but every day the neighbor children would pull him to school in a red wagon.
She said all the teachers lived in terror of the school inspector who came once a year and tested the students in their subjects. Her students always passed, and she was assured of her $800 salary for another year. She taught from l934 until l939.
Frances’ early childhood has made her a very resilient person, and she has always impressed me as a person who is able to face her life challenges bravely. If our readers would like to read more about her later life, and how she came to settle in Tiffin, I can continue in another column.
– Mary