Old Yards

When I moved to Bermuda in 2009, it was celebrating 400 years of settlement and history.  The current presence of or history of human inhabitancy covers every square inch of the tiny isle.  Saskatchewan is a stunning contrast.  For example, Bermuda is 20.6 square miles while Saskatchewan is 251,700 square miles.  Bermuda's population density is 3,293 people per square mile while Saskatchewan is 4.5 per square mile.  No wonder I like my space.  As for settlement of Saskatchewan....that's a tricky question.  It is known that the Blackfoot, Cree, Assiniboine, Sarcee, Salteaux, Atsina, and Lakota Sioux called Saskatchewan home (thank you Wikipedia for making me look knowledgeable).  However the first European settlement was in 1774, a Hudson's Bay Company trading post. Most of Northern Saskatchewan eventually belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company, but a bit of Southern Saskatchewan was held by the French, and transferred to the US in the Louisiana Purchase.  It wasn't until 1870 that Canada acquired the land belonging to the Hudson Bay Company, and everything between British Columbia and Manitoba fell under the North West Territories Region.  The human demographic changed a lot over the next decade -- the government would give free land to those willing to go west and settle.  These were the homesteaders.  And then in 1874 the Nortwest Mounted Police marched in to establish outposts for law and order.  In 1876 Chief Sitting Bull moved the victorious Lakota Sioux into the Wood Mountain, SK area after defeating Custer's army at the Battle of Little Bighorn.  The Canadian Pacific Railway expanded west in the 1880's, bringing more workers, settlers, and...soldiers.    And in 1885 when Louis Riel led and lost the Northwest Rebellion of Metis against the Canadian government, people were scattered across the prairie once again, this time by the government to quell future rebellions.  In 1905, Saskatchewan became a province, and it's borders have remained the same since.

 

When my mom was a young mother, she collected arrowheads she found still present on the land from generations ago. The churning of the land in modern agriculture has probably ground up any that remain,  What remains now is the remnants of homesteaders, early and later.  The early homesteaders, had soddies first, and wooden homes second.  A homesteader could farm much less land with a horse and plow than a modern farmer must today to make a living, so frequent farms dotted the land.  Most of the old homesteads are gone -- the land long ago foreclosed in "the dirty 30's" or sold to larger farmers as people retired, moved to the cities that formed after the railway moved in, or simply passed on, the land passing to the following generations.  Across the land you will see many solitary stands of a few trees....this usually indicates an old yard, though the houses were moved or simply fell back into the prairie landscape.  You will also see many yards standing from a generation or two ago -- homes, barns, machinery, wooden grainaries built when the land owned and used by a family was much smaller.

 

 

This patch of prairie grass shows the field in the distance, and the natural prairie grass that grows naturally in an unmaintained old yard



This house on that same land was build around 1910 -- a homestead home, quite grand in its day.  My grandparents, Frank and Jean Monette, bought it the 60's, and my mom spent her teens here.  The roof, French doors, and flooring were later removed and reused in the 1980's in some more modern homes as far away as Edmonton.

Water is another issue that Bermuda and Saskatchewan share.  Bermuda is surrounded by seawater, has no rivers or water source available but rain.  And so collection tanks are built below every building to collect water for drinking, washing, etc.  Rural Saskatchewan also must fend for itself, and most farms dug wells down to the level of the water table, and pumped the water to the surface by a hand pump.  This is the well in this same old homestead.

 



Dotting the land are more pieces of outdated machinery.  Left in place when newer equipment was designed and purchased.

Old cars and trucks also sometimes dot the land, becoming part of the landscape itself.

 

 

Interspersed with these now stationary reminders of the past are modern buildings and motion.  Still on this same piece of land, past the old well, the old house, and the old diskers and old car, a modern shop stands and a 1997 Case Combine roars to life at harvest.

 



 

The busy season for my brother now begins in this sleepy old yard.