Forest Prairie Edge Read online

  There is a great term, well used by geographers, for the outer edge of human habitation: “ecumene.” Within this line, you find human society. Past this line, human society has no influence. A similar term, and one that is more familiar, is “the frontier,” a North American cultural symbol found in books, movies, and media. Nineteenth-century cultural historian Frederick Jackson Turner interpreted the frontier myth in two ways: first, the frontier is a place, a “thinly-settled … line where civilization ends, an area where man meets the wilderness”; second, the frontier is a process whereby humans (in Turner’s work, Europeans) became stripped of European sensibilities and were reborn and renewed by the vigorous and dangerous life of the pioneer. Pioneers, in turn, built a new civilization crafted on individual values and democracy.24

  Numerous books have referred to human societies built at the forest edge as frontier and pioneer societies, at the place where civilization meets wilderness. The enduring description is the “pioneer fringe” of human settlement.25 The term was crafted by geographer Isaiah Bowman of the American Geographical Society in the 1920s and 1930s. Bowman was deeply intrigued by the social and economic problems presented by “pioneer settlement”: that is, human settlement in completely new, uncultivated places at the ecumene. Following the Great War, Bowman was part of a committee to study geographical and mapmaking information (in preparation for the Paris Peace Conference) to reconstruct or redraw firm national boundaries in Europe. This experience led to his ongoing interest in internal agricultural settlement, efficient planning, and the ability to push the boundaries within a country and turn land at the pioneer fringe into productive farmland.26 He advocated intensive study of such new settlements in pioneer fringe areas around the world in an attempt to determine which conditions, and problems, could benefit from support and solutions to ease successful human adaptation at fringe zones. Bowman called these studies the “science of settlement.”

  The twentieth century was marked by intense human migration into “new” regions worldwide, from the Canadian West to the Andes, from southern Africa to Siberia. Bowman supported governments anxious to solve the problems dogging successful human settlement in “pioneer” regions. His work made the term “pioneer fringe” part of the geographical and historical lexicon.27 Pioneer fringe studies were published in two volumes in the United States, The Pioneer Fringe, by Bowman, and Pioneer Settlement: Co-operative Studies, from contributing authors studying pioneer belt regions around the world, including Canada, Rhodesia, Mongolia, South Africa, Tasmania, Siberia, and Argentina.

  The concepts of frontier, pioneer fringe, and ecumene suggest that cultures move in only one direction, that an expanding culture reshapes the landscape, economy, and society in its own image. Success or failure is measured against the ideals of the parent culture. That a culture adapts to or changes in the new environment, or infringes on a society already resident there, is rarely part of the story. In the case of the forest fringe in Canada, the story has consistently been told as agricultural society moving north. Typical storylines suggest that settlement beyond the eaves of the forest was driven by fear that the free and easily-farmed agricultural land was all gone. Success was defined, therefore, as the ability of a pioneer fringe farm to support a farm family without accessing off-farm sources of income—an ideal built on a prairie wheat model that actually never existed. Prairie homesteaders often took off-farm jobs (on the railway, in town building civic buildings, or with other farmers). Measuring success by drawing comparisons with the parent culture causes real problems in how the story is told. The significant drawbacks of boreal agriculture, including a higher incidence of frost, poor soil quality, and severe transportation impediments, have been well studied, while the non-agricultural advantages of the boreal forest have been downplayed and ultimately misunderstood.

  The story of the forest fringe has been told in one of two ways. The first story portrays the familiar homesteader bravely facing the elements to carve a new life out of the forest in Denis Patrick Fitzgerald’s 1966 geography dissertation, “Pioneer Settlement in Northern Saskatchewan.” Fitzgerald’s work, though never published for a broader audience, redefined human life at the pioneer fringe not just as a repeat of the southern pioneer story but also as something more: forest fringe pioneers “gird themselves for battle in a land ... thrice cursed by Thor.”28 The physical landscape was more demanding, Fitzgerald argued, with trees, rocks, muskeg, mosquitoes, and fires. The pioneers, therefore, had to be something special: super-pioneers. Fitzgerald shaped a classic battle between a harsh landscape and indomitable human will, a process through which human life was expected to emerge strong and victorious. Acknowledging the boreal and non-prairie landscape, he documented non-farm activities and resources found in a forest environment and showed how pioneers adapted to and used these resources. The lens remained focussed, however, on farmers, the “forest invaders” looking to develop “new and moderately expensive farm homes, modern equipment, purebred cattle, full rich heads of grain on thick sturdy stocks, painted barns, oiled highways and other outward signs [of] ... victory.”29 Ultimately, by the early 1960s, it had become “difficult to distinguish the oldest areas of settlement, along the southern margins of the pioneer region, from those in the adjacent parklands.”30 The physical landscape, the economy, and the culture of the pioneer fringe had blended with that of the adjacent parent culture, Fitzgerald noted with obvious pride and delight. What was once northern and different had changed to become indistinguishable from its southern parent ecosystem.

  The second story is told best by retired geographer J. David Wood in Places of Last Resort: The Expansion of the Farm Frontier into the Boreal Forest of Canada, c. 1910–1940. Wood tells a story of decline in which those who attempted forest fringe agriculture were deliberately misled and deluded, either by their own desire for a farm anywhere at any cost or by politicians and religious groups who strongly believed in the importance of a continuing farm frontier. Where Fitzgerald’s thesis recognized the influence of the landscape on pioneer fringe life and culture (ultimately celebrating a landscape vanquished), Wood’s narrative was much more narrowly defined. Wood emphasized the line of farm frontier moving ever farther north, beyond the edge of where it should have been. Interested in the limits of traditional farming and farming practices “that had been perfected over the centuries in northwestern Europe and eastern North America,” Wood’s narrative was built around a supposed universality of farm practices and their subsequent failure on boreal farms.31 His work was pan-Canadian in focus, both worthy of praise and extremely problematic. The experience of boreal forest agriculture in the Clay Belt region in northern Ontario, and the abandonment of those areas (with which Wood was most familiar), were not necessarily the experience of the Clay Belt region of Quebec, or the forest fringe regions of the West, particularly the Peace River region of Alberta, which has continued its agricultural expansion into the twenty-first century.32

  In trying to force a national narrative, Wood missed important regional nuances. In essence, he assumed that the story he knew best applied everywhere—regionalism carried to its absurd degree. He also did not delineate among various migrations to the farm frontier, such as soldier settlement or Depression resettlement, which happened at different times for widely different reasons. As a result, the book tried to compare frontier experiences from 1910 in northern Ontario with those from 1935 in northern Saskatchewan without also comparing the economic, social, and political backgrounds. Wood worked too hard to present a declensionist narrative—describing “places of last resort” in which poor men were duped into trying to create a life on poor farms, with tragic social and environmental results. The lack of investigation of the boreal landscape or culture meant that Wood did not give adequate recognition to the “pull” factors at work that drew people to the forest fringe, either non-agricultural economic opportunities through lumbering, fishing, trapping, hunting, mining, or freighting, or non-economic factor
s such as a desire to live among the beauty of the trees. It should not simply be a story of what people were running from; it is also imperative to consider what they were running to.

  The Nexus of Saskatchewan

  The nexus is the centre; it is also the point of connection, linkage, exchange, and association between two or more people, places, or things. A nexus is both centre and edge—exactly how I will reorient the story that follows. I will use four key concepts to explore the edge: edge as hinge (connection, linkage, and exchange), edge as imagination (wilderness versus civilization), edge as refuge (place of safety), and edge as nexus (centre, place of pluralism, mixing, and resilience). Each had a role in shaping the cultural conception of the forest fringe and ultimately in shaping nature and setting out terms for human uses of the environment.

  The edge is, first, the point of linkage connecting Saskatchewan’s boreal north and prairie south. The cultural construction of north/south has had a profound impact on the physical, economic, and social formation of the province, as it has on much of the rest of Canada. I will show how those contrasts have been used to create particular economic and cultural landscapes. The extensive bison hunting and pemmican industry built across the Great Plains had a particular purpose and customer: to feed the canoe and York boat supply lines strung across the boreal north. The treeless prairie could be filled with settlers because the boreal forest was full of wood, ready to be processed for the prairie market. It is in the contrasts between the two ecosystems and cultures that certain characteristics of each landscape can be most clearly understood. Obvious comparisons include resources versus agriculture, bison versus moose, wet versus dry, treeless versus tree-full. Human descriptions of and uses of these environments have been shaped and reinforced by an acute understanding and exploitation of these contrasts.

  Edge is also a place of imagination—where, on a medieval map, you fell off the edge of the known world into the mouths of hungry dragons. As in the concept of ecumene, edge becomes a rather frightening place beyond which humans have little knowledge or influence. In the Canadian context, writer Margaret Atwood explores Canada’s north in both Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature and Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Fiction as a way to expose the artificial but intrinsic divide between the south as civilization and the north as perilous wilderness.33 Grey Owl, the shapeshifter Archibald (Archie) Belaney, worked to preserve the wilderness and its inhabitants as the last Canadian natural space. The civilization/wilderness divide found traction at the forest edge.

  The forest edge was a place of refuge, of shelter and protection, where the edge environment became a place of safety or sanctuary from threatening, harmful, or unpleasant situations or places elsewhere. A refuge must be considered through two lenses: geography and time. The forest edge became a place to which humans would go to find refuge for a short period of time. Using the forest edge on an occasional or seasonal basis sustained both boreal and prairie-adapted cultures.

  The final concept is edge as nexus or centre. The forest edge was the transition zone between prairie and forest, a space where both farming and forest were evident. From this viewpoint, the edge becomes a place of pluralism where the two parent cultures intertwine. I argue that pluralism was a hallmark of human life at the forest edge, where cultures sought resilience through mixing. Resilience refers to the ability to recover, to adapt, and to be flexible. The focus is not on place as temporary destination to relieve a particular problem but on place as home. Resilience is a long-term concept, encompassing a broader time frame than refuge. The term “resilience” has been applied to both ecotones, with their diversity of resources, and to the cultural intentions of the human occupants of that edge environment. Human society would seek out or use edge places in order to create a more adaptable and resilient way of life. The focus is on the way in which the landscape is used and integrated over time. Those who have studied ecological and cultural edges in an Aboriginal context note that First Nations actively created and maintained ecological edges, whether by fire or other means, over successive generations. Edges were tools to maintain diversity as part of adaptive strategies. Newcomers such as forest edge farmers also sought to use or manipulate the forest edge to promote diversity.

  All of these concepts—edge as hinge between two different landscapes, edge as imagination, edge as refuge, and edge as nexus—shape and inform this book. Often more than one concept can be found within a particular storyline. For example, three concepts were strongly found in the south-to-north Depression migration: migrants were physically moving from one environment to the other; some were seeking a short-term refuge from the prairie disaster; others were looking for a long-term solution to the drawbacks of one-crop farming through resilience and the mixed-farming movement. Similarly, though the creation of Prince Albert National Park and the north Prince Albert “Lakeland” area found cultural strength in the contrast between prairie and forest, tourists heading to those places were looking for a short-term “refuge,” a time of rejuvenation and relaxation within a green and humid landscape. Tourism literature strongly promoted “accessible wilderness” at the edge of civilization. These concepts offer a new language drawn from ecological and cultural edges that moves beyond the rigid terms of “frontier” and “pioneer fringe” and suggests that the forest edge is the point of connection, exchange, contrast, and transition in the Saskatchewan—and by extension Canadian—landscape.

  Place History and the Lure of the Local

  It is important to remember that neither the landscapes nor the cultures that live in them are static; in other words, neither humans nor ecological systems stay the same for long. Place history allows for a deep-time historical investigation that layers, contrasts, and compares different occupations of the same place or sometimes the same occupation but at different times or for different purposes.

  Map 1. North Prince Albert region (including research focus region). Source: Modified from Prince Albert and Northern Lake Country 1, 1 (2008): 5.

  The general area of study in this book extends north from the city of Prince Albert. Bounded by the communities of Shellbrook to the west and Meath Park to the east, the region reaches to the resort community of Waskesiu and the south shore of Montreal Lake at the Montreal Lake Cree Nation Reserve (Map 1). The focus study region is somewhat smaller, corresponding roughly to Cummins Rural Directory Map 258 (Map 2). It includes the farming community of Alingly; the Little Red River First Nation and its sister community at Sturgeon Lake; the village of Christopher Lake; the community of Tweedsmuir at the south entrance to Prince Albert National Park; the resort communities and cabins surrounding Anglin, Christopher, Emma, and Candle Lakes (commonly known as Lakeland); the communities of Spruce Home, Henribourg, Albertville, Paddockwood, and Northside; and the old postal district known as Forest Gate. The region is about 18 miles (29 kilometres) in width and 24 miles (34.5 kilometres) in depth, or just over 400 square miles (1,120 square kilometres) of physical space. It offers a variety of landscapes used in a variety of ways: active farmland, rangeland, and pasture; First Nations reserves; resort communities; Northern Provincial Forest; recreational forest; and, along its border, Prince Albert National Park.

  Map 2. Cummins Map 258. The community names reflect existing postal services as of 1922. Source: SAB, Cummins files.

  Studying a small region over a long period of time is a common historical tool.34 Historian Dan Flores referred to such investigations as “deep time” history, a specific effort to examine environmental change across sequential cultures. My book responds to his call for what he terms “bioregional” histories of place. Over time, a region is physically remade by both natural and human changes and is a place of flux and transition from one to the other and back again. Much of what began as boreal forest was remade into parkland—a form of prairie—through intensive logging, forest fires, and agriculture. As parks were created, fires were suppressed, and some ag
ricultural land was abandoned, there was a long ecological succession back to boreal forest. Throughout its history, human and natural manipulation of the landscape has resonated through cultural and economic adaptations in the local region. As well, humans developed north-south trails to move through the landscape, crossing the transition zone and tying Saskatchewan together on a north-south, rather than east-west, axis.

  Flores believes that history can be effectively studied in terms of bioregion: “natural geographic systems ... [are] appropriate settings for insightful environmental history.”35 Sometimes, though, as another historian, Shannon Stunden Bower, points out, bioregions have no respect for human-created boundary lines, such as provincial boundaries or international borders.36 Although it might make sense on some levels to define a study by a particular landscape, that is exactly the problem I am trying to combat. Studying western Canadian history through the lens of either “prairie” or “boreal forest,” without considering the connections between the two, has created flawed interpretations and a tendency to start with basic (and incorrect) assumptions. Following the strict interpretation of Flores, this book would not work. He might prefer the traditional method of looking at Saskatchewan history as either prairie history or boreal history, as if the two have no points of connection, exchange, or shared history. This book’s study area is not a bioregion but the transition zone between two bioregions. Luckily, Flores notes that, “given the natural human preference for ecotone edges, interesting settings for human history won’t necessarily be bounded [by] ecoregions.”37 I take that comment as a challenge and an invitation.

  The secret to doing place-based history is to think laterally: what activities, businesses, pastimes, transportation routes, or trysts have occurred in the dance between humans and landscape in this place? Published scientific research in archaeology and anthropology, climatology and soils, forestry, forest fires, and ecology gave voice to the landscape and its original inhabitants. Parliamentary debates, speeches, newspapers, and records of the railways and the Department of the Interior offer the Canadian national and Saskatchewan provincial agendas for the expansion of settlement and resource extraction in both the prairie and boreal environment of the western interior. The local story was found in the Department of Indian Affairs RG 10 files concerning Little Red River Reserve, the 1930 Saskatchewan Commission on Immigration and Settlement, Soldier Settlement Board files, Department of Northern Resources files, the 1955 Royal Commission on Agriculture and Rural Life, and regional newspapers (particularly the Prince Albert Daily Herald and other Prince Albert–based newspapers). Community history books gave excellent genealogical, ethnic, and social history and were an important reference for migration information, and they made me think about how people migrate in chains of friends, neighbours, and relations to keep their social safety nets secure. Newspapers and local histories were the two most important sources, for they offered the best assessment of the perception of the locale. Photographs from regional, provincial, local, and private collections added an important visual component to the story, complemented by historical and contemporary maps. Oral history was an integral part of this study, and local residents provided sketches and stories of life at the forest fringe. This book is not a policy history, so I used government sources specifically to provide information and commentary that related directly to the study area or to the broader themes that emerged.