Reactions To The Prairie
New and Naked Land: Making The Prairies Home (1988)

By Ronald Rees

Ronald Rees was a professor of geography. Aside from New and Naked Land: Making the Prairies Home (1988) he is also the author of Land of Earth and Sky: Landscape Painting of Western Canada (1984).

For settlers from Europe and Eastern Canada, the prairie was not just strange; it was probably stranger than they could have imagined. Except for the Mennonites and the Doukhobors, they had known only landscapes filled with trees and hills and hedgerows, and there had been little in the advertising to suggest that the prairie would be radically different from anything they had known. Evan Davies, an intelligent and literate Welshman who emigrated in 1904, expected to find a landscape similar to the one he had left behind: "We had visualized a green country with hills around and happy people as neighbours—no doubt a naïve outlook ... but one common to many people emigrating at the time." Other immigrants probably arrived with no expectations at all. Ivan Pillipiw, one of the first Ukrainians in the West, declared that many of his countrymen had no idea of what they were coming to: "Our people who left home with the world in their eyes had not even the remotest idea of where they were going.... They knew neither the geography nor the language of the country to which they were going."

To many of the immigrants, a great plain covered with grasses or, at best, patches of small, thin trees seemed not just spacious, but vacant: "not a country at all," as Willa Cather's Jim Burden said of Nebraska, "but the material from which countries are made." William F. Butler set the tone for subsequent reactions to the Canadian prairies when he wrote in 1856: "This utter negation of life, this complete absence of history.... One saw here the world as it had taken shape from the hands of the Creator." A sense of barely finished nature also assailed Norah Armstrong, Edward McCourt's Irishborn heroine. She saw the hated Saskatchewan prairie as "[a land] from which the hand of God had been withdrawn before the act of creation was complete." And for Marie Hamilton, an unliterary child from Ontario, the prairie was simply "a new and naked land."

To the explorers and early settlers the grasslands seemed so much more like ocean than land that the very nomenclature of the plains came to suggest water travel. A long, low line of sweeping hills was a "coteau," or coast, and short leaps across open prairie were "traverses," the voyageurs' term for a short trip across a windswept lake. To be in a Landscape in which there were no hills and trees was to be "out of sight of land." As if to anticipate the ocean metaphor, the Indians had referred to open prairie as the "bare land" and from their sheltered campsites in wooded hills and valleys on the edges of the prairie they spoke of distant buffalo herds as "passing far out," like ships at sea. Indian maps, or mental images of the region, suggested that they approached the grasslands warily. When fur trader Peter Fidler sketched a map of the plains based on a description by the Blackfoot Chief Little Bear, he drew a line along the rim of the map and called it "Wood's Edge." The boundary may not have represented the edge of the known world, as did the boundaries of ancient European maps, but it does suggest that the world beyond the woods was less completely known.

For newcomers who found themselves in open, featureless parts of the prairies two anxieties surfaced immediately: fear of getting lost and fear of being caught in open prairie during a fire or a storm. Refuges were few even in the parkland, and the sense of exposure was often acute. It could even be disabling; readers of 0. E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth will recall how a terrified Beret Holm climbed into a trunk in her cabin during a thunderstorm on the North Dakota prairie. Prairie storms, which tend to be of biblical proportions, were awesome: "wild struggles between earth and sky," as the young James Minifie put it, "not English Midlands fireworks." Lightning was the chief cause of the dreaded prairie fires, against which there was little protection in the early period of settlement. With few natural or artificial firebreaks to overcome, flames at furnace heat raced frighteningly before the wind. Until they had ploughed the prairie and created protective belts of fields around their houses, early settlers dreaded them. "Since coming to the homestead [in Alberta]," wrote Sarah E. Roberts, "I have been in abject fear of two things—of being caught in a prairie fire and of getting lost." A frustrated correspondent to the Brandon Times wrote, in 1887, that anyone caught firing the prairie in the fall "would meet that summary justice that would save all legal disputes in the matter."

Without landmarks to guide them, Europeans lost their bearings with disturbing ease. In the bare lands, Indians navigated by relationships, not fixed points, rather like sailors on open sea; they were guided by the position of the sun, by the direction and feel of the wind, and by the lie of the grass. It was said of Jerry Potts, the halfbreed police scout, that he knew the prairie better than homesteaders knew their quartersections, and that he could pick his way through the strongest blizzard and the blackest night. Subtle changes of scene, of sun, and of wind escaped most Europeans who saw only a featureless landscape. Even when moving they felt they were getting nowhere. Evan Davies noted that in Wales he had usually faced the direction in which he was travelling because he liked to see what lay ahead, but on the prairie it didn't matter because the view was always the same. The anonymity of the landscape struck home when he finally reached his quarter section. "What was there to distinguish it from all the rest of the land we had seen...? Nothing, nothing at all!"

Though the prairie would acquire fields, fences, elevators, and towns, the patterns they made were so unvaried that they failed to dispel the anonymity of the landscape. Travellers can still feel they are standing still, though moving at high speeds. On certain temperaments, the effects of movement in undifferentiated space can be very disturbing. Dr. Henry Osmond, a former director of the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital at Weyburn, observed in the foreword to Land of Hope that "Journeys on the prairies have a nightmarish quality [for town dwellers and those used to small, broken countries], dozens, scores, even hundreds of miles revolve on the speedometer and yet there is the same stretch of stubble and slough, the same ribbon of road and ditch, the same half dozen elevators."

In open prairie, features that offered shelter from the elements and relief from enveloping space were a solace. Wooded hills and valleys pleased everyone. As they approached Saskatoon in 1883, members of Gerald Willoughby's party thrilled to the sight of "real" trees—Manitoba maples, cottonwoods, and an occasional ash—beside Beaver Creek. After miles and miles of broad prairie, the creek looked "like a touch of home." For Georgina Binnie Clarke, the Qu'Appelle Valley, where she homesteaded alone, was that "exquisite oasis of the prairie." Farther south, on bare uplands in the short grass prairie of southwest Saskatchewan, valleys were havens from scorching winds and a blistering sun. The young Wallace Stegner, whose parents homesteaded on a baking flat in hot, dry country just north of the border, had reason to be grateful for the willowcovered valley of the Whitemud River: "That sunken bottom sheltered from the total sky and the untrammeled wind was my hibernating ground, my place of snugness, and in a country often blistered and crisped, green became the colour of safety. When I feel the need to return to the womb, this is the place toward which my wellconditioned unconscious turns like an old horse heading for the barn."

Dry, spare country that neither sheltered nor pleased the eye appealed to few immigrants. A wry cockney in Manitoba told Edward Roper, "there's a lot more scenery wanted in this country, ain't there!" Other settlers reacted more dramatically: "O, the prairie ... its vastness, dreariness, loneliness is appalling ... like the sea on a very smooth day, without beginning or end," exclaimed an Englishwoman in Manitoba. Norwegian Iver Bernhard spoke for all immigrants when he wrote: "How could people from beautiful enchanting mountains endure life on this flat moor without even a decent hill to look at?.... On this great plain it seemed there could be nothing to aspire to for long. All poetry and yearning were as though left out of life, or would be smothered if they appeared."

Eyes accustomed to near views were distressed by a landscape so flat and featureless that it seemed to be nothing but horizon. On the drive from the railway station to her brother's homestead, Lucy L. Johnson of London at first thrilled to "the peace that comes with the wide open spaces," but some hours later she complained to her brother of the distance they had to travel. He told her to forget the distance. "As if I could! Every time I gazed across the prairie, it looked like the same old place to me.... All I could see was sky and strawcoloured grass ... and a few trees about every million miles."

Frederick Niven, the novelist, told of meeting a distraught young man in a city hotel who had recently decided that he was "through with" the prairie. He gave as his reason the view from his pioneer shack, and to demonstrate this he pointed to a window sill. "If you just focus your eyes on that windowsill," he remarked, "and imagine, you'll have the view from my homestead. The front of the sill is the beginning of the prairie outside my house; the farther side of the sill is the horizon. Got it?" He quit the homestead on a day when he was working outside and, desperate for the sight of some object between himself and the horizon, rushed inside to look at a wall. He washed the dishes, then made up his mind to leave.

But by no means all responses to the landscape were negative. Immigrants from the industrial and metropolitan slums breathed fresh air and saw unadulterated sunshine for the first time. P. G. Wotton, who had come from a slum in West Bromwich, exulted in the "joy and pleasure of it. Birds, flowers, [and] fruit in summer." Carl Grunstadt from Norway was overwhelmed by the beauty and silence of the grasslands: "Before us was the most beautiful landscape I had ever seen. As we stood side by side gazing over the level, luxuriant prairie untouched and unspoiled by the hands of man, the soft wind came down from the northwest and gently caressed the tall grasses that grew there, and as they moved their silvery sheen gave one the impression of an endless ocean of fertility." For religious groups escaping the taint of the world, isolation was precisely what they wanted. "There was no living human being for miles around;' wrote Peter Windscheigl, a German Catholic who settled near Rosthern, Saskatchewan, "no road, no house, only beautiful virgin prairie dotted with small lakes and poplar groves."

Many settlers also saw the practical advantages of farming open prairie. For G. H. Hambley, who had come from a country of "stones, stumps, hills and poor soils," the prairie was "a revelation." One pioneer woman wrote of her husband: "He fell in love with the Golden West.... Few stones, no trees or stumps to contend with ... no creeks to stop the miles and miles of growing grain." The novelist Frederick Philip Grove told of meeting a settler from Ontario who began ploughing his quarter section on the very day of his arrival.

For some, the sensation of being alone in the world was uplifting. In the empty Buffalo Horn Valley of southern Saskatchewan, Myrtle G. Moorhouse found that she was in another Eden: "I stood in one spot and looked around, especially in the early evening. It was like a huge bowl of blue turned over us. No matter where we turned, we could see the horizon, a complete dome, and I marvelled at it. With a ridge to the west, the waters of springtime divided, flowing to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. On this ridge we could see for ten miles.... There was a profusion of beautiful wildflowers, of all unknown varieties.... The valleys held a mystic feeling that made me think I was the first human who ever walked there.... There were no landmarks, no fences. Just the odd dot of a shack, and at night someone's light." Others thrilled to the melding of the elements. W. J. Ryan marvelled at the way in which the dawn sun—"a great ball of fire in the east"—fused earth and sky, "just like in a painting by J. M. W. Turner."

On others the spell of the plains worked slowly. "Looking back now," wrote Robin Greig, "I do not think the great plains were monotonous after the first month or so.... The unbroken spaces were both soothing and uplifting.... I have understood the native of the Shetland Islands who was visiting the Lothian district of Scotland and remarked that it seemed to be a fine country, but was spoiled by trees." Mr. Faithorn, an Englishman, came to Winnipeg in 1881 and a year later moved west to Fort McLeod with a survey party. He thought the country the "queerest place" he had ever seen—"mile upon mile of rolling country without a house or fence or living thing." But it was, he decided, "a great setting for a new life."

The parkland, with its almost designed arrangement of poplar groves and grassland, was as appealing to many of the settlers as it had been to the earlier travellers and adventurers. Captain John Rigby couldn't have been more pleased with his Manitoba homestead: "Oak lake is a beautiful sheet of water, clear as crystal and abounding with fish and fowl. I think we could travel the world over before hitting another spot to equal Manitoba and this locality in particular." Bertram Tennyson—nephew of the Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson—who spent a few years at Moosomin in the 1890s, was enchanted by the country around Wood Mountain: "A beautiful country gemmed with scarlet tiger lilies and golden marigolds, the champaign broken here and there by clumps of the universal aspen poplar, which give a parklike look to the scenery." The graceful poplar appealed to many of the settlers; the slender trunk, the delicate green of the leaves in the spring, and—thanks to a flexible stalk attachment—leaves that dance in the wind and catch the sun were irresistible attractions.

Other views of the West were determined by utility. Immigrants from the woodscarce Ukrainian provinces could hardly believe that stands of trees were available for the taking, and for them the parkland was a magnet. Germans, on the other hand, were as unimpressed with the slender, shortlived poplar as the English had been with the gum tree or the eucalyptus in Australia. Poplar was too soft to be of much use as timber, and if grown in marshy places it was liable to rot within. As fuel it was not very satisfactory because its special quality is that it is resistant to fire. German immigrants were inclined to dismiss the poplar groves as busch, reserving the dignified wald for the stronger woods of the north.

Though parkland was generally appealing, in the more heavily wooded northern districts settlers were disturbed by the absence of paths and trails. Whether made by animals or humans, a trail is comforting. It signals the presence of life and suggests purposeful, cooperative behaviour. As Gaston Bachelard once remarked, a trail is a beckoning feature that invites us to come out of ourselves. For settlers craving comforting associations, a landscape without trails was unbearably foreign:

I found no path, no trail
But only bush and water
Wherever I looked I saw
Not a native land—but foreign
I found no path, no trail
Only green bush
Wherever I looked I saw
A foreign country

By the same token, the making of trails and paths gave great satisfaction, even in cities. "I knew that path so well," wrote W. G. Herklots of Winnipeg. "I knew and was proud of that little twist by which instead of being a mere track that crossed a vacant lot it became a path directing me to my door."

Most of the comments on landscape were about the compelling plain, but usually the first direct contact with the West was not with the country but with the town or city where the immigrant got off the train. Before setting out to choose a homestead, or to locate one already chosen, most immigrants would have spent several days in a hotel, boarding house, or hostel. For people accustomed to comely villages and towns, built from local materials and occupying sites that offered discernible commercial, climatic, or strategic advantages, prairie towns and cities were disconcerting. They were a reminder, if one was needed, of the raw condition of the land. Whereas European towns and villages looked as if they had been set into the landscape, most prairie towns appeared to have been arbitrarily set down upon it. For Rupert Brooke, who crossed the prairies in 1909, they wore the same air of discomfort as a man trying to make his bed on a level and unyielding surface such as a lawn or a pavement: "He feels hopelessly incidental to the superficies of the earth." Brooke thought that all towns should be on hills or in valleys.

Buildings in the newer towns were made from imported lumber or prefabricated parts, to eclectic designs, so they were in no sense products of place. Forty years after their erection, Edward McCourt could still describe them, collectively, as "alien eruptions upon the face of nature." Many of them were shoddily built, unpainted, and made all the more forlorn by false fronts designed, ironically, to give them a look of solidity and worth by concealing the pitched roofs behind. To add to their discomfort, they were set beside main streets broad enough to be avenues but which were, in effect, merely unsurfaced spaces between boardwalks. In short, the towns were the characteristic and inevitable products of pioneer districts, no worse and no better than pioneer towns in America or Australia. Their function was to tranship wheat and provide basic goods and services; the only buildings that invariably were well constructed and maintained were the grain elevators, railway stations, and banks. Almost everything else was makeshift.

Even seasoned travellers were shaken by the roughness. Washington Frank Lynn, the artistreporter, found the streets of Winnipeg to be in "only. . . the merest embryotic condition." Even on Main and Portage, sidewalks and pavements were "a few broken bits of planking, with long and, in wet weather, muddy intervals between." Hotels were "rough in accommodation, as might be expected," and expensive, so newcomers were often forced to put up temporary shelters in the tent towns that occupied the waste lands scattered around the town. Immigrants were frequently shocked by the condition of the towns. One described them as "clapboard monstrosities," while to a Barr colonist Saskatoon was a town of "large boxes rushed up without regard to architecture and comfort." But perhaps more disturbing than current failings, which were to be expected, was the gnawing suspicion, articulated by Rupert Brooke, that as products of a dynamic, restless age, prairie towns might never mature and so never acquire "that something different, something more worth having."

The visible landscape drew the first responses, but comments about the weather and climate followed quickly. Immigrants from the industrial cities were exhilarated by air that was clean and dry, and by a world that seemed perennially fresh. But as the crisp and sparkling days of fall gave way to the iron nights of winter, the climate took on a different complexion. Temperatures that could actually threaten life were a disturbing novelty for immigrants from Western Europe. In a letter to his Dutch compatriots, Willem de Gelder remarked that, when working outside in the coldest weather, "we continually had to watch each other's noses and cheeks to warn of the possibility of frostbite.... Sometimes I still have cold feet, even wearing 3 pairs of warm winter socks, a pair of sheepskinlined mocassins, and over all that elkskin mocassins. To give you another example of the cold, you can't keep your hands warm in gloves, so you have to wear mitts, and it's extremely dangerous to take them off even for a second."

The length and severity of the prairie winters unnerved even Central and Eastern Europeans. Russian winters were neither as hard nor as long. When Easter came without the accustomed signs of spring, Ukrainians in particular were anguished. Easter in the Ukraine is a celebration of the rebirth of life as well as of the Resurrection of Christ. "All is blooming everywhere / Beauty in the meadows lies" a wellknown Easter poem began. The date of the festival in the Julian calendar could be as much as five weeks later than the Gregorian, but even in years when the holiday fell in late April or early May it could still be too early to celebrate spring. The first nostalgia, wrote Myrna Kostash, was the longing for early spring and blossoming plum and cherry trees, while all around were only poplar saplings, willow bush, and native grasses under the snow.

In open prairie, where nothing held back the swooping winds, winter conditions could be frighteningly harsh. Marie Hamilton spent a few years in Regina when it was still a huddle of shacks and tents on a plain as "flat and featureless as deal boards." Over the unprotected town the wintry winds "whooped and shouted," and when they died temperatures fell to Arctic depths, the sky took on a metallic sheen, and boards warped and cracked like pistol shots. Wind and the cracking of boards were the only natural sounds apart from the mournful cry of the coyote. Winter for much of the time was silent and lifeless, but it could unleash storms that made the stoutest hearts quail. John Donkin described a blizzard as "a storm peculiar to the prairie regions, almost indescribable in its deathly power. It is the most terrible wind that rages upon earth; a cloud burst of powdered ice, accompanied by a violent hurricane, with the thermometer away below zero. I am utterly impotent to describe the cold. During one blizzard in 1884 the thermometer in the barracks showed thirtyseven degrees below zero [F], or sixtynine degrees of frost, and the velocity of the wind—as measured by the anemometer on top of the quartermaster's store—was fiftyfive miles an hour." Had Donkin been able to calculate the wind chill, he would have arrived at a sensible temperature—i.e., the temperature the body feels—of 90 below zero [F].

Rees, Ronald. “Reactions To The Prairie.” New and Naked Land: Making the Prairies Home. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1988. 35-44.