Wolf Willow

  During the month of Indian Summer following the first blizzard people were busy banking their houses with dirt and putting on storm windows and slaughtering steers and hogs and putting eggs down in waterglass and getting the cellars full of potatoes and rutabagas. Except for the twice-a-week train there was no connection with the outside. As a community and as individuals we braced ourselves for the long dark shut-in time. My mother sewed my brother and me into red flannel in November, and regularly thereafter unsewed us every two weeks for a bath in the tin washtub on the dining-car floor. In the intervals of decent weather my father was building us a house in the west end, on the river. He may have bought the lot from Pop Martin, but my understanding always was that he won it in a poker game.

  In nearly every way we were a typical sagebrush village. Though we could not, since Saskatchewan had no counties, reproduce the bitter county-seat battles of the American Midwest, we did have rivalries of a comparable kind with the town of Shaunavon. As elsewhere, too, the town’s founders were of every stripe and spot—farmers, shopmen, sharpies, métis squatters, Texas cowboys, Syrian and Jewish peddlers, and Cockneys straight out of London’s East End. It was a far from unanimous town, and the probity of some parts of it was questionable. Essentially Whitemud drew three kinds of people. One group was made up of sober farmers, family men, members of the Grain Growers Association who had accounts—or mortgages—in the Grain Growers Bank. Many of these were Scandinavians who had begun their North American experience on the plains of North Dakota, and acquired a Populist tinge in the process. A lot of them were still in Whitemud after the other kinds had diminished or disappeared. A second group included the boosters and land speculators, the “service” people, the merchants, the editor of the Leader, the members of the Board of Trade, the priests of Progress. The third group was the gamblers, at best demi-respectable and at worst lawless. For a while these carried on into the tamed agricultural community some of the violence that had marked the Cypress Hills when they were the hideout of whiskey traders and border-jumpers. And there was of course Pop Martin, allied in some ways to all three groups but running his own show.

  The gambling crowd, inevitably, struck the sober farming element as a menace. They should have. All through the winter of 1916, I remember, there was a non-stop poker game going in Joe Knight’s hotel. When the hotel burned down the game adjourned to Christenson’s pool-hall loft which had once served as church and school, and as soon as the hotel was rebuilt it moved back. During the winter the gamblers emptied a lot of relatively empty pockets, but they also took out of one retired rancher the full $16,000 he had realized from the sale of his land and stock. I know, for my father was one of the card players, and a part of that rancher’s stake helped pull us out of our starving time. I know too that at least part of the time in that game the cards were marked.

  The gamblers gave up reluctantly before the Progress-and-Probity campaign pressed by the Leader and the Board of Trade. They had the sympathy of the displaced cattlemen, though they did not especially deserve it. In 1917 and 1918 one of the gambling crowd (and his wife too was a casualty, trying suicide with half a cupful of gopher poison one winter day) allied himself with two hard-case ladies of the region and did a brisk business in rustled stock. I knew him well, and also one of the ladies, who had an adopted son about my age. He died in the flu epidemic of 1918, and she never properly recovered. And yet she was the least sentimental-appearing woman I ever saw. She went around in overalls and riding boots run over at the heels, or in a set of tan coveralls full of pockets. Being naturally ample, she bulged the coveralls in fascinating ways—from a little distance she looked quilted. She had a hoarse, ribald voice and a laugh that threw her into coughing fits and left her glassy-eyed; she swore like a mule driver and she would shoot at anything that moved. Rabbits, stray cats, low-flying geese, muskrats, beaver, meadowlarks—she carried to extremities the destructiveness common to the place and time. Once I saw her staggering back from the dam burdened under two enormous sandhill cranes, which she had shot not because she thought them edible, nor because she wanted their feathers, but because they were standing there in the water. As soon as she had shown them to us, her interest in them was exhausted, and she threw them into the river.

  That was the Bad Element, distrusted by the Sober Citizens and abused, not so justly, by the sharpies and speculators who thought them bad for business. But the Bad Element had little to do, really, with the making of Whitemud; it only threatened to frustrate those who wanted to dream this flea-bitten, false-fronted burg into another Chicago.

  Floods of settlers, thousands of cattle and horses, millions of bushels of wheat, a busy and beneficent railroad, all figured in the dream, as did lignite coal, oil, pottery clay, glass sand, and other vaguely realizable resources upon which the restless promotional eye fell. Towns such as Whitemud have always been floated on the rising gas of great expectations. And true enough—the high benches and the short-grass flanks of the Cypress Hills were horse heaven, and though most of the range out on the prairie had been broken up into homesteads, the protected ranches in the Hills themselves continued every spring to send long trains of cattle cars down the river. And there was some digging of kaolin from a pit northwest of town, and some cars went out to the potteries in Medicine Hat. And wheat? The year 1914 was cold, and the crop mediocre, but 1915 produced a bumper—hardly a field anywhere produced less than forty-five bushels to the acre, and some went nearly to sixty. The town did not ship any lignite, but we all dug our winter fuel from the sidehill, and where else but in the Garden of the World could you do that? As for oil, the wildcat well that went down out by the railroad bridge did not hit anything, and was abandoned, but the derrick was still there for years, a reminder of a hope that might still be realized.

  Progress? It is impossible not to believe in progress in a frontier town. Every possibility is open, every opportunity still untested. In the shadowless light before sunup, no disappointments or failures show. And everybody, everybody, is there for the new start. Not one of them would recognize failure if it was in front of him as tall as an elevator.

  So Pop Martin sold many lots, including whole blocks of them to speculators who could only become, in the circumstances, additional press agents of growth. He could not have liked the Sober Citizens too much, for if rumor was true he had been run out of Butte by just such pious middle-class people as they. But he could cooperate with them, for they were clearly the hope of the new community. He could with a large gesture donate his old race course as a sports ground for the town, he could give the land for the town dump. He may even, though I was never sure of this, have provided the site of the cemetery, which, once it was established, was promptly—supply following demand—fulfilled with its first grave. (Ugh, my mother used to say. No matter what I’ve done, no matter if they hang me, don’t bury me out therel )

  Benefactor, padrone, Pop Martin commanded respect because of his money and power, and owned a good many people because when homesteaders desperate for house-money or machinery-money came around, he would issue them loans, with their land as security. What came in from the sale of town lots he reinvested in farm mortgages; though he seemed to be disposing of his landed holdings, he was actually spreading like an ink-blot over the whole eastern end of the Hills. But not grasp ingly, not for the odd dollar in it; he was far more interested in his position as town father than in money. And he vastly enhanced his status by his handling of the first two crises that confronted him. The first challenge came from the railroad, supposed to be his ally; the second from the Village Council, supposed to be in his pocket. The first had happened just before we came, the second happened just after.

  It is hard to imagine what may have been in the mind of the railroad’s engineers and construction men. Maybe only an error, a misapprehension. In any case, grading their beeline up past South Fork, they first cut across the little pond that drained to two oceans, and so committed a small crime against geography, and then cut ac
ross Martin’s irrigation ditch. When Martin protested, the CPR told him to move his ditch. But Martin was, though a small man, not a man who wilted before a show of arrogance. He is a long way back in my memory, but I remember a cold eye under his ranch Stetson, and a bulldog jaw complete with a slight dewlap. He would have shoved the jaw an inch or so forward and tightened the dewlap by a forward thrust of his head. He sued the CPR, and collected, whereupon the CPR, though it could not move its townsite, since there was no way to get through the Hills except straight up the river valley, decided that it could move its division point, and did—to rival Shaunavon. In actuality it was a blow to the town, for it removed one steady resource. But how I heard it first was how Pop Martin made the CPR back down. His belligerence, and its success, enhanced him in everyone’s eyes, for even before it got steel into Whitemud the railroad was doing more to demonstrate the economics of Henry George than to prove itself the farmer’s friend. There was already, all over western Canada, a growing protest straight out of the Populist agitation of the 1890’s; a protest aimed both at the railroad and at the elevator companies with whom the farmers thought the railroad was in cahoots. To put the CPR down, to sue it and collect, was to become a popular hero.

  But then in the next year, right in the midst of an era of good feeling, right after his donations of dump ground and sports ground and maybe burying ground, Pop Martin found himself nose to nose with the Sober Citizens of the Village Council, and here the Populist feelings that had applauded his victory over the CPR were quaintly at odds with him.

  Many of them came from the Dakotas, many lived and died by Henry George. Here in a new country, starting anew in Eden, they exercised their democratic prerogatives and organized as a single-tax town. It took a little while before Pop Martin, amiably indulgent to his new dependents, discovered that in a single-tax town the landowner pays the taxes. When he comprehended his tax bill, he demurred with considerable heat. The Village Council said, But that’s how the law reads. Well change the law, said Pop Martin. But, they said. Come on, hurry up, said Pop Martin. Or would you like me to give you all my town property, and the taxes along with it?

  Reluctantly they altered the tax structure, but it was a long time before they got over saying what a splendid thing it would have been for the little man and how good for the future of the town, if the single-tax system could have been made to stick. But single-tax or not, the town’s cheerfulness and energy were unchecked, its hope almost millennial, in the year when we came into it, built a house in it, and began to use it as a base for our suitcase farming.

  3

  The Garden of the World

  If you do not learn from history, George Santayana once remarked, you will have to repeat it. But history on the Plains took a lot of learning. For one thing, the frontier was discontinuous. Half-adapted plainsmen were always being overtaken, out-numbered, or replaced by newcomers and tenderfeet whose notions, learned in countries of plentiful rain and moderate weather, were a long time wearing out. The agrarian optimism that broke the Plains sod did not realize all the consequences of what it did until sixty or seventy years after the first dryland farmers edged out into Kansas in the 1860’s. Some things the homesteaders learned, including summer fallowing and dust mulching, and if some of what they learned turned out to be wrong—as, for instance, deep plowing, which was eventually given up in favor of a mere stirring of the surface with a Noble blade or a Graham Hoeme or a rod weeder—at least it was subject to observation and gradual correction. But the lesson that the Plains settler could not learn, short of living it out, was that no system of farming, no matter how strenuously applied, could produce crops in that country during one of the irregular and unpredictable periods of drought and that the consequences of trying to force the issue could be disastrous to both people and land.

  There were books that would have told him (though he might not have believed) that the reduction of the annual rainfall by a single inch, or a shift of the period of greatest precipitation from spring and summer to fall, could mean the difference between a good crop and a burned field. The winds, hail, and cyclones he would believe as soon as he experienced them once. But the large lesson that he would have found most useful—the marginal nature of agriculture on the arid Plains—was precisely the one that as a pioneer he found unacceptable, because it denied his hope.

  His hope was involved with the myth of the Garden West. Franklin and Jefferson had formulated it, politicians and speculators and railroads had promoted it, the ignorant faith of hundreds of thousands of home-seekers had kept it alive well into the industrial age and out into the dry country where it had little chance of coming true. The dream that circulated vaguely in the heads of people like my parents had something to do with the corneribs and pigpens of Illinois and Iowa, but little to do with the arid Plains furred with their curly grass and seared by blowtorch winds. If the frontier had been continuous either as to people or as to experience, Kansas might have taught them something, the Dakotas where they had tarried briefly might have given them a hint. But apparently no matter how hard a time hope may have had in earlier settlements, the opening of any new frontier, even a marginal one, revives it intact and undiminished. In the midst of the worst drouth until then experienced on the Plains, people burned out in the Dakotas turned their teams south toward Indian Territory to give her another whirl.

  So Whitemud, though some of its founders had had experience in Manitoba, Montana, or the Dakotas, and though some of them remembered the dry ‘go’s, simply had to repeat history. What is more, the pioneers unquestionably passed on to their children, including me, some of their faith in the future. At least until the memory of free land fades, hope, it turns out, is heritable.

  Yet the fact is, failure was woven into the very web of Whitemud. It was the inevitable warp, as hope was the woof, of that belated frontier. Our lawyers and doctors, for instance. Once in a while pioneering enthusiasm or a real medical-missionary idealism draws good doctors into the hinterlands, but more often the cause of their coming is incompetence or venality, and what applies to doctors applies double to lawyers. One of Whitemud’s two barristers had lost his license in England and could not get a new one in Canada. He did clerk jobs for the other, a boozer and incompetent who lost papers, tangled titles, irritated clients, and offended the whole town during the flu epidemic by developing an incontinent diarrhea while a patient in the sixth-and-seventh-grade room of the schoolhouse. They said it was just like him. After a few years he simply disappeared, leaving behind him his hopelessly scrambled papers—another frontier casualty, spurlos verloren.

  Of the doctors, the earliest and probably the best, an enthusiastic youngster from Saskatoon, practiced only briefly before he enlisted in the army, never to return. His successor also enlisted, and shortly died of drinking wood alcohol in training camp. The third, a Frenchman who appeared to the town brilliant and well trained, and who may have been both, got into trouble for dispensing drugs (to Pop Martin’s wife—that town was hard on women), and died a suicide, of strychnine poisoning, in 1920. The fourth died, accidentally or on purpose, of an overdose of opiates.

  And not merely the professional men. Witness Sid Crane, for a time the postmaster, a heavy drinker who in deference to his public responsibilities used to gargle rose water, and through his little wicket send abroad, along with stamps and money orders, a mingled rum-and-flowers breath that could daunt the most hardened post-office sitter.

  Or old Hugh McGuire, a gangling scarecrow in a celluloid collar, a lonely bachelor dying of spiritual cold. He was the victim of the practical jokers, a butt more universal and more ridiculed than even Mah Li. And he was the first to fall when a traveling group of hootchie-kootchie dancers pitched a tent in the brush and sent their impresario through town advertising “performances.” If Whitemud was hard on women, it was also hard on unmarried men, who in the face of an actual woman shortage put the virtue of the town girls under constant harassment and rallied like a band of winter-gaun
ted coyotes to every visiting opportunity. The fullest acceptance Hugh McGuire achieved, probably, came when he contributed to the town’s biggest scandal. A moronic girl from the North Bench came to town one day and let it be known that she was willing. Let it be known? She pranced it, tittered it; she couldn’t have walked down an empty boxcar without bruising both hips. She was more than willing. So, it developed, was Hugh, who was always ardent, and so were a half dozen of the town’s solidest citizens. They lined up for her in the brush, and within an hour discovered that she was not only willing, she was mouthy. She showed the money and trinkets they had given her, and named all their names. The tale got around at approximately the speed of light. Within an hour it had leaked down even into the school yard. I have a memory of a couple of girls my age red with shame because their fathers were among the delinquents.

  Old Hugh McGuire. He limped in from Ireland wistfully looking for something, maybe love, and finding little of it he limped back to Ireland to die. There were plenty in substantially his fix, like the barrister with his red, stunned face and his thickened speech and his scrambled papers—I have seen him sitting be wilderedly among them at midmorning, stirring them with his finger as if to discover what they were about—and like the doctors with their drink and their dope, and like the defeated and desperate women. The weak and the hard-luck prone could hardly be expected to make it when practical and hard-working men had trouble doing so. That they did have trouble is evident from some rudimentary statistics I once gathered on the early settlers. Of sixty-five that I was able to trace, forty-nine left Whitemud within six years. The only one of them who seems to have left with any money was one of the land sharks. He left with about three thousand dollars. People said it was about what he had honestly earned in his six years there.