5

“The landscape behind it”: Re-Visioning Some “Other” Subjects of Agriculture

One of the most enduring cultural images of western land settlement is encompassed in a single tableau, one that recurs in prairie fiction, in television depictions of prairie life, and often in the memoirs studied here: that is, the image of the white (assumedly male) prairie farmer and the post-natural, agricultural landscape, usually devoid of any trace of either First Nations or nonhuman animal presence. It is an image that underscores the future-oriented, utopian, and large-scale cultural objectives of western settlement that have already been explored in Chapter Two. The final image in Douglas Durkin’s The Magpie (1923), a relatively “obscure” novel that nonetheless is “importan[t] as a document of social history,” represents the “adopt[ion]” of “one of the great themes of Canadian literature and intellectual thought, the agrarian myth” (Rider xii–xiii). As the main character Craig Forrester rejects city life and returns to the farm of his childhood, he witnesses the following picture: “a team of dark horses entered the field at the farther end and stood while their driver hitched them to a plough…. [Craig] watched them come down the full length of the field, leaving behind them a fresh new furrow through the stubble” (329). In this image, while the horses used to plough the land are mentioned, nevertheless it is the prairie farmer who controls them, and the reader’s focus is ultimately turned towards the work accomplished. Also from Durkin’s text, we see Craig Forrester walking alone across the prairie landscape in an image that optimistically suggests that the mere presence of the idealistic farmer ensures prosperity: “And in the sky before him as he walked steadily on, the shafts of gold shot to the zenith, flooding the earth with the faint glow of early dawn.” The opening to the History Channel television series, A Scattering of Seeds: The Creation of Canada, similarly privileges the image of a lone human male seen literally and figuratively “scattering his seeds” in the cultivation of a nation. Although this series represents the family histories of people from across Canada’s regions, and from a variety of cultural backgrounds, nevertheless it is this overriding image of “Man’s” vertical relationship to the landscape as a symbol for the creation of a nation that has pertinence for a contextual understanding of land settlement issues.

The idealization of “Man” and agricultural production also often occurs within the prairie memoirs gathered for this study. In Marjorie Wilkins Campbell’s The Silent Song of Mary Eleanor (1983), for example, the author describes her father as “a typically lone figure, the oxen’s lines about his shoulders, his hands gripping the simple, single-share plough, [who] gloried in the prospect of mastering the virgin land” (28). In Campbell’s suggestion of the “typically lone figure” of the prairie farmer, we see the simultaneous absence of any prior cultural presence, any dynamic form of the natural landscape (except as “virgin” in need of “mastering”), or any farm animals (except in the “lines about his shoulders”), a crucial part of the farm family’s survival. This typical aloneness is also evident in Sarah Ellen Roberts’s Of Us and the Oxen (1968), in which the author describes her son, Lathrop, as saying that “when he first plows in the spring, he rests under a sort of illusion, for it seems that it is he and not the team ahead that is forcing the plowshares through the stubborn soil. The grasp of the plow seems to give him a sense of power” (99).

The inevitable result of such images is that, borrowing from Josephine Donovan’s suggestion that “dominative modes pervade Western practice” (“Ecofeminist” 74), the mainstream narrative of western settlement privileges an agricultural discourse whereby such words as “cultivation,” “domestication,” and “improvement” refer to a geographic entity in which the naturally fertile landscape, different ways of being in that landscape, and non-human animals are absent. The “cultivated” landscape in Western Canada is a cultural construct, a human-made landscape, thereby eliding the natural state of the landscape that preceded the act of “domestication,” the presence of other modes of relationship with the land, and the living beings whose bodies (alive and dead) sustained human efforts at “improving” that landscape. One of the engaging differences that I feel emerges from within the memoir texts included in this study is the representation – the re-visioning – of these absented realities of agriculture as viable and integral subjects of prairie life and experience. When I began reading these memoirs simultaneous with contemporary and historiographical constructions of prairie life, I could not help but notice that the authors tended to focus less on the specifics of, say, the number of acres ploughed, the kinds of crops harvested, the importance of fields laying fallow, the minutia of farm machinery, the cycle of weather patterns, the politics of tariffs, etc., than one who is familiar with the traditional settlement story might expect to find. Those kinds of concerns are there, certainly, in varying degrees, but there is comparatively more narrative space devoted to other, more personal, more tactile, subjects of the prairie story. In fact, I would suggest that, in the context of cultural constructions of the prairie settlement story, these memoirs extend the confrontational potential of the memoir genre by exhibiting an eco-consciousness that effectively re-visions the dominative and exploitive nature of large-scale agricultural practices.

It has been asserted that memoir writers encompass in their texts “a moral vision of the past” (Billson 261). Given that the writers examined here are providing us with the daily reality of lived experience of prairie settlement, the moral (and ecological) vision I see as an undercurrent at work in their narratives is a foregrounding of the immediate survival needs, both physical and psychological, of one’s family unit as opposed to the profit-seeking imperative of large-scale agriculture. Given that most of the memoirs studied here were written long after World War II, when agriculture and its products had become politicized in the discourse of environmentalism, an eco-conscious reading of these texts seems particularly apt. Written both from within and, as I assert, over against agriculture and its images, however, it is important to remember that these memoirs exist as part of a heritage context in which Canada’s agricultural past is lauded as the foundation of a nation, and to consider that such a context might well prevent an openly ecocritical purpose. Nevertheless, it is my desire as an eco-conscious reader to examine the tactics by which the authors of these prairie memoirs might implicitly confront agricultural narratives, thereby allowing other subjects of prairie life to erupt through a seemingly conventional surface.

In her “Introduction” to The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty states that “corresponding to the feminist interest in the lives of women authors, ecocritics have studied the environmental conditions of an author’s life – the influence of place on the imagination – demonstrating that where an author grew up, traveled, and wrote is pertinent to an understanding of his or her work” (xxiii). Especially given that many of the memoirs studied here are written by women who spent their childhood years growing up on the prairies, Glotfelty’s correspondence of “the environmental conditions of an author’s life” to literary criticism provides me with a suitable starting point for consideration of these memoir narratives as eco-conscious texts. Although Glotfelty was referring specifically to the study of fiction and poetry, the prairie memoirs studied here also encompass the “fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it” (xix), and so can reveal an alternative vision of that “interconnection” than traditional agricultural images of land settlement will allow. Interconnection is an integral part of memoir writing anyway. Going back to the suggestion from Chapter One that the memoir genre is a unique narrative choice for those authors who are less interested in an exclusive focus on the development of a unique selfhood (traditional autobiography) and more concerned with writing about a self in context, an essential component of memoir texts is that the author/narrator “always memorializes the other”; that is, “the narrator finds her own self-performance through the exploration of the biography of significant others who occupy the text as fully as she does” (Buss, Repossessing 37). What “significant others” are available to the memoir author when dealing with her experiences of life on an isolated, western Canadian, homestead in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries? Husbands, parents, grandparents, siblings, children, neighbours, certainly, but the texts gathered here suggest another “act of looking back” at selfhood in context. In most critical considerations of the “other,” the “other” has always been the “same” on at least one level: that is, the “other” has always been human. However, for many settlers on the Canadian prairies, everyday life required a rather different, a rather more integrative, relationship with both the natural landscape and with non-human animals, as a means of physical and psychological survival. I would suggest that it is precisely by reading for the presence of these “other” relationships in memoir texts that we allow for the transformation of cultural images of western settlement.

The cultural image that I suggest has underscored mainstream representations of western settlement (the image of man’s vertical relationship to the landscape as a symbol for the creation of a nation), as innocuous as it might seem on the surface, is a good example of what Riane Eisler calls “the dominator model” of social organization. In such a model, the main focus is on “ranking” as an organizing principle, whether of one gender over another, one culture over another, or even of humans over nature, and the privileging of such values as “aggression, dominance, and conquest” as a means to “maintain this system” (“The Dynamics” 161–62). The language used here by Eisler is certainly reminiscent of much of the language of agriculture that emerged as a product of the prairie settlement project. As noted in Chapter Two, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, the prairie region was considered to be nothing more than a veritable wasteland, an area “ill-suited for settlement and agriculture” (Owram, Images 1). From the 1850s/1860s, however, that negative assessment of the value of the region changed to the positive, and there was a corresponding transformation in cultural imagery that favoured the area as “an Agricultural and Commercial Hinterland” (74) that would help to achieve both national and imperial greatness. Speaking of “The Role of Illusion in North American Geography,” J. Wreford Watson notes that “it is the mental picture a man has about a region that will qualify his use of it” and, further, that “actuality exists, of course, but people project what they hope can be done with it, thus seeing it as something different” (10).¹ The radically transformed “mental picture” of the prairie west had powerful implications; indeed, taking possession of that area would do no less than to rank Canada as a country, as well as British cultural norms, high in relation to other nations and cultures of the world. As enunciated in 1859 by Alexander Morris, taking control of the “new Eden” would help the new dominion to “advance steadily toward that high position among the nations which they may yet attain” (qtd. in Owram 90). And it was this desire for international advancement that would result in the language of domination becoming paramount in constructions of the prairie settlement project.

From the moment that western settlement was conceived as a dream of national/imperial expansion, the federal government undertook a deliberately engineered program of land use that marked the final phase in the “complex of challenge-conquest-domestication” (Osborne 6). “Domestication” is an exceptionally pleasant word (as are its agricultural synonyms, “cultivation,” “colonization,” and “improvement”) that does much to obscure the cultural dedication to transform a land or region away from its natural state through use of force. All of these words imply inferiority, making something better/more valuable, than it previously was; hence they again suggest a concern for ranking. As Stan Rowe asserts, “the land-use changes that began toward the end of the 19th century were no accident. They were the expression of European attitudes and perceptions of the prairies – occupied sparsely then by hunters-and-gatherers – as nothing but wilderness, waste, barren, desert and deserted until colonized and ‘improved’” (13). The prairie region was rhetorically transformed from wilderness to hinterland, but it only ever held the promise of abundance – a promise that required intervention and control by human beings in order to reach its potential. One of the first tasks needed to be accomplished in order to make intervention and control possible was to impose a geometric system of land ownership upon a shapely world that often betrayed its reputation for extremes of expansive flatness.² Bringing to fruition agricultural dreams of economic prosperity necessitated the domination of nature’s productions. In the land survey system adopted by the Canadian government as a means to prepare the vast untamed expanse for the advent of “civilization,” we see a cultural narrative in which “the imposition of [a] mathematical model upon reality reflects a psychology of domination” that “requires that the anomalous other be forced into ordered forms” (Donovan, “Animal” 361–62, 367). On the one hand, the survey system used in Canada was a by-product of the need for the erection of empirical boundaries, as distinct from another nation: “The first essential was to give physical reality to a boundary [Canada-U.S.] that so far had been drawn only by the pens of cartographers” (Thompson, John Herd 45). On the other hand, that same system was the condition necessary for control, or “settlement,” of the natural landscape at the level of the individual farmer. In 1912, Emily Ferguson recognized that the prairie landscape held “little practical value” before being surveyed, and she highlighted the notion of cultural imposition when she stated that “we may not write in the open volume of the land until the hardy young men of the transit have ruled off the pages” (Open 52). The “open volume of the land” merely awaited the “control” of individual farmers who would “cultivate” at the micro-level the larger cultural desire for profit. Accordingly, as indicated in Chapter One, for many settlers the important determination of their arrival upon the Canadian prairies was either the recitation of one’s exact homestead location along the survey grid or the discovery of the survey markers which set out the boundaries of the settler’s land ownership, and which in themselves symbolized the cultural and economic significance of the settler’s physical presence in that landscape.³

As suggested by Henry Kreisel, “to conquer a piece of the continent, to put one’s imprint upon virgin land, to say, ‘Here I am, for that I came,’ is as much a way of defining oneself, of proving one’s existence, as is Descartes’ Cogito, ergo sum” (48), thus establishing the importance of the land survey system as a Cartesian, I-centric, plane. The individual, hence cultural, “imprint” was made first by placing those survey markers in the earth, then by being present and beginning the process of “cultivation.” The desire to “conquer,” or to make an “imprint,” is an ego-centred approach to the prairie landscape, which I believe is best figured by what Laurence Ricou identifies as Man’s “dramatic vertical presence” in an otherwise “entirely horizontal world” (ix–xi). This presence gains expression in Wallace Stegner’s oft-quoted prairie memoir Wolf Willow (1966), in which the author asserts that the landscape “is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing” (8). The figure of the prairie farmer as “upright thing” is also commonly expressed in the works of the major western fiction writers, such as Robert J.C. Stead, Frederick Philip Grove, Martha Ostenso, Sinclair Ross, and W.O. Mitchell. In Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925), for example, Caleb Gare is described as having “a towering appearance” (10), and his family farm becomes a psychological prison, a world of oppression, greed and violence, all stemming from the patriarch’s desire to conquer and control everything and everyone around him. Caleb is often shown walking across “his” landscape, monitoring its productions: thus we see him standing upon “a ridge from which he could look east and west, north and south, upon the land that was his” and upon the land that he wished to have (17). He surveys his possessions, as his daughter Judith suggests, “to assure himself that his land [is] still there,” that he still controls “the yield of the earth” and is thus “a successful owner and user of the soil” (89, 213). Similarly, in Frederick Philip Grove’s Fruits of the Earth (1933), Abe Spalding is noted as being “extraordinarily tall, measuring six feet four” and “built in proportion to his height, broad-shouldered and deep-chested” (19). Most importantly, “temperamentally, [he] was impulsive, bearing down obstacles by sheer impetuosity” (19). The goal of Abe’s homesteading project is made quite clear when we are told that “for a year he had mentally lived on that open, flat prairie, planning and adjusting himself. He needed room; he needed a country which would give scope to the powers he felt within him. Forbidding as it looked, this was that country” (22). Ultimately, we are told, “he would conquer this wilderness; he would change it; he would set his own seal upon it!”⁴

Setting one’s “own seal” ultimately meant the settler’s commitment of his own piece of the geographic pie to the larger cultural project of “cultivation,” or what Frieda Knobloch calls the “arts and sciences of improving nature” (75). It is:

As suggested here, “cultivation” often takes on an aggressive tone, thus suggesting a project of war-making, “an act of violence,” as opposed to the more peaceful concept of land “settlement.” In that cultivation project, the cultural/personal agenda was clear: the prairie farmer “had to conquer…. And his weapon was the plough” (Kamen-Kaye 6).⁵ Significantly, going back to Eisler’s “dominator model” of social organization, she suggests that the overriding image for that model is the “blade,” a symbol of “the ultimate power to establish and enforce domination” (The Chalice xvii).⁶ This symbol thus connects to the technology of the plough as a central and romantic image in agriculture: as Knobloch notes,

There are a number of rankings going on here, not the least of which is the ranking of “culture, and work” over “nature and idleness,” which implies, amongst other things, that the environment is somehow static and thus justifiably prey to a plundering mentality. We can see this mentality at work in Nell Wilson Parsons’s Upon a Sagebrush Harp (1969), in which the author quotes her father as saying, “We’ll have that bumper crop one of these years! Why, one day all this land will be raising prime wheat, not an idle acre anywhere. Follow me, and you’ll wear diamonds yet!” (134; emphasis added). The magnitude of Mr. Wilson’s desire for a financial return on his cultural work is important to our understanding of the agricultural context of the memoirists gathered here, and of the more eco-conscious re-vision that I see happening in many of their texts.

It has been said that “one who looks on the world as simply a set of resources to be utilized is not thinking of it as an environment at all” (Evernden 99). This is certainly true in the transformation of the Canadian West from being feared as a wasteland to being subjected to “the concept of a vast agrarian empire, which emphasized the prosperity awaiting the farmer” (Owram, Promise 48). Moving quickly from one cultural construct to another, the natural environment of the prairie region was effectively eradicated. The cultural focus of western settlement rested on “commodity rather than food production,” as Knobloch notes, and the prairie farmer “was to be a man who bought and sold goods” (Owram, “The Promise” 24). Specifically, the focus was on the large-scale cultivation and production of a single crop, “King Wheat” (again we see a tendency to ranking as organizing principle in the adoption of that regal label), whether or not the soil conditions of the region were actually suited to that particular crop. As Owram explains, “from the time that the West had begun to be viewed as a potential agricultural region the greatest attention had been paid to the possibility of wheat cultivation. Its ability to produce wheat, more than any other single feature, would determine its worth to Canada” (112).⁷ “King Wheat” and all that he represented, including personal land ownership, monetary success, a “new start” for the children of immigrants, etc., became the cultural icon that inspired millions of individuals to leave their homes with their families and emigrate to “the Promised Land.” But this particular crop also had other implications, as “wheat, with beef, was the basic staple of the Anglo-Saxon and European world and as such had special qualities attributed to it”: that is, besides being intended for the world’s most highly “civilized” nations, wheat was also supposed to be productive of “the highest type of manhood” (Owram 112–13).

Despite the somewhat cozy ring to the word “domestication,” then, western settlement had little to do with any personal or intimate kind of “interconnection” between humans and the land. On the contrary, the phrase “vast agrarian empire” suggests the large-scale and absolute domination of nature and its productive capabilities. Inevitably, in order to create an empire big enough for the reign of King Wheat, in order to satisfy the desire to be “a lord of lands” (Ferguson, Janey 204), individual farmers were encouraged (and they desired) to turn more furrows, to get more acres under cultivation, even to purchase more land than the original “free” homestead quarter-section. The pursuit of “prosperity” at the individual level, a micro-version of the larger cultural imperative to create that “vast agrarian empire,” was a rejection of any notion of self-sufficiency. From the beginning, prairie farming was conceived of as a business venture rather than a way of life, and the implications for the natural environment were clear: “The early insinuation into Prairie agriculture of the idea of farming as a commercial enterprise, as a business rather than as a provisioner of food for domestic consumption, lies at the root of the exploitive land uses that continue to plague the West today” (Rowe 14). Once again, we can see the accumulative approach to farming in contemporary prairie fiction. In Harold Bindloss’s Prescott of Saskatchewan (1913), for example, the title hero/farmer enunciates the prevailing credo of land settlement as follows: “Here one goes on from task to task, each one bigger and more venturesome than the last; acre added to acre, a gasoline tractor to the horse-plow, another quarter-section broken. Mind and body taxed all day and often half the night. One can’t sit down and mope” (33). Twenty years later, Grove’s Fruits illustrated that the desire for dominance had not waned, for the main character of the novel, Abe Spalding, is “possessed by ‘land hunger’” (17):

When Abe’s wife Ruth asks, “But why buy more and more machinery and land?,” her sister-in-law Mary simply responds, “It’s the way of the west” (53). In Abe’s mind, the answer to that question is in the dream “of a mansion such as he had seen in Ontario, in the remnants of a colonial estate – a mansion dominating an extensive holding of land, imposed upon that holding as a sort of seigneurial sign-manual” (23). At about the same period, Ethel Chapman marked this frenzy about land ownership as an illness that sometimes threatened the farmer’s completion of the other obligations of homesteading: regarding the hero of The Homesteaders (1936), Chapman wrote that “there was scarcely a day when [Peter Shoedecker’s] axe could not be heard in the woods. Other work like building had to be done, but all the time an impatience to be at the business of making land possessed him – the ‘clearing fever,’ he called it” (191).⁸

Of course, it should be remembered that this seeming cultural mania for the establishment of a “vast agrarian empire” was inherently a future-oriented goal, and the reality for many settlers, as indeed for most of the memoirists studied here, was decidedly smaller in scale and focus. As Rodney C. Loehr suggests of the notion of “Self-Sufficiency on the Farm” in North America, it is “a nice dream of a golden age,” and while it was “possible that on the frontier for the first year or two, when access to market was difficult and before the storekeeper made his appearance, living conditions approached self-sufficiency,” nevertheless “when the storekeeper appeared and as transportation improved, self-sufficiency melted away” (41). But we are dealing with the power of rhetoric here, and how individual settlers both succumbed to and deferred from the stated cultural goals. In that regard, even without the inculcated quest for ever-increasing land-holdings, the original homesteading laws already represent the antithesis of self-sufficiency, as seen in the physical size of the homestead sites: “By orders-in-council in the spring of 1871, entries were to be accepted on ‘homesteads’ for 160 acres (a quarter-section) in exchange for a fee of ten dollars” (Friesen, The Canadian 183). The Canadian homestead system was based upon the American one (Spry 3), and as Knobloch says of the latter,

As Knobloch continues, “of course, any smaller scale of land division was unthinkable … because it took 160 acres at least, and often more than that, to support only one family in a society and an agriculture based on the exchange of commodities for cash.” The real importance of Knobloch’s calculations is that they convey a sense of the mindset promoted by the homestead policy itself, one avidly adopted by so many immigrants to the west. We can see this “mindset” in Nellie L. McClung’s Clearing in the West: My Own Story (1935), wherein the author notes that her brother Will’s enthusiasm for the prospect of emigrating westward in the 1870s was based on comparisons with eastern farming standards: for example, he says, “Out West they do things in a big way…. Fifty acres is the size of a field not a farm” (31).

The dominative and exploitive obsession with establishing a “vast agrarian empire” and producing “commodities for cash” seems to preclude the existence in the prairie west of Riane Eisler’s second model of social organization, the “partnership model,” in which “social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking rather than ranking” and “difference is not necessarily equated with inferiority or superiority” (The Chalice xvii). In contrast to the dominator model, the values associated with the “partnership model” are “caring, compassion, empathy and non-violence” (“From Domination” 77). This second model, in addition to equalizing relationships between genders, cultures, and nations, would also inherently bring balance between humans and the natural environment. In fact, Eisler’s focus on the concept of “linking” is reminiscent of the principal of “ecology,”⁹ which is also about interconnection and balance as opposed to the hierarchical notions of domination and exploitation. We can see something similar happening in what Joseph W. Meeker refers to as a “climax community,” or

In a phrasing that is eerily reflective of my discussion of land settlement in the Canadian West, Meeker goes on to assert that

While the ideology behind cultural narratives of western settlement promoted the “dominator” type of relationship with the prairie landscape, nevertheless it would be my suggestion that in the gap between ideology and actual attainment of the future-oriented goals of that ideology, the daily reality of survival for many settlers demanded a greater degree of eco-consciousness than the agricultural vision appeared to allow, and that an “other,” more “partnership”-oriented consciousness is avidly represented in the memoirs gathered here. I am not speaking of some politically charged and explicitly environmental agenda to defer from mainstream cultural thinking. Rather, I am reading these memoirs for the ways in which the authors document a consciousness, an ongoing awareness, that there was another way of being in the prairie landscape; a different imperative for survival that focused on the immediate needs (physical and psychological) of the farm family unit, but that also respected other presences in the surrounding environment. I believe that this eco-conscious perspective is particularly prominent in the memoirs written by women as a result of their largely domestic role, one which necessitated (as already alluded to in Chapter Two) a “subsistence perspective,” a “necessary precondition for survival” (Mies and Shiva 297–98), as opposed to a commercial perspective. The work that women performed outside the home so often had to do with survival, with the need “to provide staple foods apart from grains” (Knobloch 53), as a means of filling the considerable gap between the ideal and the real.

Women “engaged in home food production as a direct contribution to the uncertain family economy” (Armitage 468), and one of the most common outdoor activities for prairie women was maintenance of a family vegetable garden, from which the family unit (as opposed to the world’s hungry masses) could be sustained throughout the year. A garden, then, acted as a small-scale literalization of one of the prevailing metaphors of the prairie west as a “Garden of Eden” or a “garden of abundance.” Much attention has been paid by historiographers to the importance of vegetable gardens. For example, Frieda Knobloch suggests that “gardening in the West was never seen as more than a supplement to the income gained from the fields, even if it provided the means of subsistence for a family improving a homestead” (72). She then quantifies the subsistence potential of the family garden by saying that, “in the West, gardens produced between 50 and 70 percent of a farm family’s food.” As Mary Kinnear discovered in her study of women’s “domestic economy,” “rural women did have one advantage over town dwellers: their large vegetable gardens. Many could preserve a considerable amount of their food for their families. This would reduce their expenses, but added to their work load” (A Female 73). Contemporary writer Marion Dudley Cran provides an illustration of a prairie woman’s concern for the productivity of the garden plot when she remarks on her experience of a

The diversity and the subsistence potential of this garden seems especially confrontational with the more metaphorical goals of wheat growing, as seen in the borrowed agricultural language which suggests that this prairie woman has “brought” her garden plot to the “pitch of cultivation.”

Given the reality of their primarily domestic responsibilities, it was often difficult for prairie women to find the time to explore the natural environment beyond the immediate boundaries of the homestead, so that a relationship with the physical landscape was often confined to vegetable and/or flower gardening. The obvious first question here is to what extent can the activity of gardening, in which the human participant first changes the nature of the land being used, then to a large extent controls what that land will produce, be considered as anything different from the agricultural pursuits of their husbands? As Leonore Davidoff et al. suggest, historically gardens have been a space “where nature could be enjoyed but was also tamed and controlled” (160). Similarly, as Andrea Pinto Lebowitz asserts about a specific genre of nature writing called “garden writing,” “it can be quite diametrically opposed to nature writing in its attempt to control and transform wilderness into human landscape rather than to appreciate the natural world in and for itself” (5).¹⁰ However, one obvious difference between the activity of gardening and large-scale agriculture is the size of the undertaking: that is, while the cultural project of prairie settlement sought to “transcend nature” (Mies and Shiva 8), to effectively obliterate any traces of “the non-humanized landscape” (Rowe 82), home gardens are decidedly small-scale and thus relatively non-interruptive to the continuing presence of that landscape. In addition, while the agricultural privileging of wheat farming reflects an exploitive motivation in the primary goal of “capital accumulation” (Mies and Shiva 2), vegetable gardening reflects “nature’s subsistence potential” and a motivation that stays within the “realm of necessity” (Mies and Shiva 8). And that “necessity” could be physical (vegetable gardening) or spiritual (flower gardening). In contrast to the rhetorical reign of “King Wheat,” the prairie memoirs make clear that subsistence gardening is about diversity and that prairie women often adapted their cultural expectations about what should be grown to the production capabilities of the prairie soil.

One of the things that needed to be learned in order to maximize the subsistence potential of a prairie garden was how the climate of any given part of the prairie region would affect different plants. In Donnie M. Ebbers’s Land across the Border (1978), a memoir of homesteading life “in the Shellbrook area” (21) of Saskatchewan in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth centuries, the author writes about her family’s intimate awareness of seasonal growth patterns, both domestic and natural:

The equation of “vegetables,” “flower gardens” and “wild flowers” in this catalogue of “everything” that grows on the Saskatchewan prairies suggests a more balanced perspective of the human presence on the landscape than does the notion of a “vast agrarian empire.” I would even suggest that by devoting more narrative attention to natural productions than cultivated ones, Ebbers manages to reject the notion of the prairie landscape as “idle” and show it, rather, as being “more than object; it is presence” (Mann 49–50). As Ebbers’s narrative continues, she illustrates that awareness of seasonal growth patterns translates to knowledge about successful vegetable gardening:

Very often, the memoirs studied here represent women’s gardening labours in narrative “juxtaposition” to the large-scale agricultural activities of the family farm. “Juxtaposition,” or the “ironic arrangement” in written literature of, for example, “titles, epigraphs, the placements of stanzas, voices, or paragraphs,” is often used by women writers as a “coding strategy,” a means of “covert expression” of dissonance with the “dominant culture” (Radner and Lanser 13–14). We see this strategy at work in Jessie Browne Raber’s Pioneering in Alberta (1951), a memoir of homesteading near Lacombe, Alberta, in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth centuries. Raber’s mother’s gardening and preserving achievements often occupy more narrative space in juxtaposition with her father’s less-than-successful farming activities. For example, Raber begins a paragraph speaking about the increase of her father’s cultivated acreage, but very quickly and unexpectedly makes a narrative switch to a discussion of the “abundance” of her mother’s and nature’s gardens:

It is imperative here that we read Raber’s unannounced narrative slip from agriculture to home gardening and berry-picking within the context of the rest of the memoir in which the author clearly shows displeasure at her father’s seemingly endless quest for more and better land. Indeed, Raber’s rather cursory mention of land clearing versus her concentration on her mother’s subsistence practices suggests that narrative juxtaposition, or the relative amount of space devoted to these two acts, becomes a tool of confrontation with cultural expectations about appropriate subjects for the prairie memoir.

Both an intimate knowledge of the natural environment and an ability to provide subsistence for her family through her gardening labours are a part of Mamie Harris’s experience of life in “the grasslands of southern Saskatchewan” (11), as seen in Judy Schultz’s memoir Mamie’s Children: Three Generations of Prairie Women (1997). For example, in a chapter titled “In Mamie’s Gardens,” the author works to establish both Mamie’s, and hence her own, eco-conscious vision of the prairies:

Despite the implied ownership of the natural prairie here, what I find delightful is the fact that the author indicates the equal valuation of the “grassland itself” and Mamie’s “private garden,” a balancing act that confronts cultural notions that rank non-humanized land as less than “improved” land. In fact, Schultz goes on to indicate how the produce of the grasslands was quite valuable to prairie health, especially dandelions, those culturally denigrated “weeds”:

Even in the previous description of Mamie’s “private garden” we can see some confrontational tactics at work, specifically in some interesting juxtaposition of vocabulary. While it is clear that her grandmother cultivates, or “tames,” the spot of earth that makes up her garden, nevertheless the use of the word “coaxes” rather than the cultural attitude of “conquering” suggests a different sort of human-landscape relationship, one that allows for her family’s subsistence:

For Schultz, to explore her grandmother’s gardens is to understand Mamie herself. For example, she writes of the “wild tiger lily,” “an independent flower” that speaks to the emigrant woman’s experience of place: “Mamie taught me not to pick them because the shock of being yanked from their chosen spot is too much to bear and they would wilt before we could get them home and into a fruit jar of water” (84). Speaking of her grandmother’s “private garden,” Schultz says, “like Mamie, this garden is a survivor” (85). Mamie’s companionate relationship to both the natural landscape and her private garden has transformative power, for her physical aspect begins to mirror the natural elements:

In this description of Mamie Harris, we start our return to the beginning of this study, to the original impetus to my consideration of these women’s memoirs, for in this description we see the image of a prairie woman who, like my own grandmother, presents a physical rejection, and hence transformation, of predominant cultural images, such as the unweathered purity of Caroline Ingalls.

While prairie farmers were out in the fields attempting to harvest “the [metaphoric] fruits of the earth” as “commodities for cash,” prairie women were often attending to the more immediate nutritional needs of their family by going beyond the boundaries of the family farm to partake of the naturally occurring fruits of the prairie landscape. Indeed, many of the memoirists in this study represent the activity of berry-picking as traditionally within the female domain and as far more memorable than agricultural pursuits in terms of culinary bounty. In Barefoot on the Prairie: Memories of Life on a Prairie Homestead (1989), a memoir of life in Alberta’s grasslands in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, Ferne Nelson illustrates “A Berry Bonanza” that would offset a winter season in which nutritional variety decreased considerably; indeed, the joy of knowing that there would be colour added to the family table during the white and grey expanse of winter went a long way to make up for the sometimes frustrating conditions of the task of berry-picking. As Nelson writes,

Later on in the same chapter, the author provides an alluringly abundant description of the products gained from this natural harvest:

The Canadian West had been billed, amongst other things, as “The Promised Land,” but for many settlers the promise of a “vast agrarian empire” never materialized. In Nelson’s text we see the tactic of literalization used, for she borrows the propagandist language of western settlement when she refers to the berries as being “full of delicious promise,” then moves towards fruition of that promise when she ends this passage with the abundantly rewarding valuation of “rows and rows of jelly jars shining like clear red jewels.”

When reading Nelson’s text, I cannot help but wonder whether Myrtle Alexander’s “ardency” about picking berries comes more from pride about her contribution to the family’s subsistence purse or in response to the release from domestic routine. In Adeline (Nan) Clark’s Prairie Dreams (1991), a memoir of homesteading near Oxbow, Saskatchewan, in about the same time period as Nelson’s family was in Alberta, “Berry Picking,” because it often necessitated organized travel away from the homestead site, provided a rare occasion for female companionship:

This movement of women away from the domestic space is interestingly labelled: it is an “excursion,” which is “a short journey or ramble for pleasure” (OEED), thus making the task of berry-picking as much about self-gratification as domestic production, but it is also described as an “expedition,” which is “a journey or voyage for a particular purpose, esp. exploration, scientific research, or war,” which puts the significance of the undertaking the women are engaged in on a par with traditionally masculinist pursuits. This activity is a big deal, both personally and publicly. The non-agricultural landscape that the women move into, the “ravines,” become a physical as well as a psychological space of liberation from prairie isolation, a space in which adult women and nature become one intermingled identity:

When representing the morning hours of berry-picking, Clark’s language is filled with expectancy and excitement, such as “joyous,” “lively,” “revelled,” “twittering”; however, we are told that as the day progresses and a return to normal routine is closer, the mood of the group changes considerably:

As seen in Clark’s text, berry-picking often necessitated women’s physical transgression of the confines of the family farm in favour of rambling along the many prairie trails that existed, some of which still left their imprint upon the landscape from the days when Native, Métis and fur trade people led a migratory life, and some created by cattle and wagons. Although the (invisible) land survey system could not literally be escaped, nonetheless much of the prairie landscape remained without actual physical boundaries far into the twentieth century, so that women could, and did, find a certain measure of freedom from domestic routine in the simple act of taking a walk. In particular, women found freedom by taking to the trails which criss-crossed the prairies and which unsettled – or denied physical reality to – the straight lines imposed by agriculture. As Bill Waiser asserts regarding the ego-centric approach that had been taken in surveying the prairie landscape, “the system, based on astronomical observation, completely ignored the natural contours of the land in favour of an artificial, standard checkerboard ordering” (156). Many contemporary writers mocked the straitjacket approach to the environment that the land survey system presented and also remarked upon the liberatory facility of a trail: for example, in 1915 Elizabeth Mitchell wrote that In Western Canada “a Trail is a natural track made by traffic, following the lie of the land and running where people wish to go. As the country is settled and enclosed, these are superseded by a gridiron of wide made Roads, running perfectly straight north and south and east and west” (16). Similarly, three years earlier, Emily Ferguson, in her aptly titled Open Trails, wrote, “every day I explore a new trail, for the country is seamed with them. In the North, they are vastly appreciative of the straight line … but the blessed trails are an exception; they wander free as the air” (150). Some forty years later, Wallace Stegner, in his seminal work Wolf Willow (1955), would also assert his preference for prairie trails, and yet his tone is crucially different from that of Mitchell and Ferguson:

In such words and phrases as “insistence,” “we had a right,” “owned and controlled” and “an extension of myself,” we again see the “dominator mode” in action. We see the cultural need to impose oneself on the landscape as a means to confirm the identity of the conquering hero: says Stegner, “here is the pioneer root-cause of the American cult of Progress, the satisfaction that Homo fabricans feels in altering to his own purposes the virgin earth” (272). Stegner’s reminiscence is perversely aggressive, as when he suggests that “wearing any such path in the earth’s rind is an intimate act, an act like love” (273). It is no wonder that Stegner’s text has become a popular and academic icon of prairie reminiscences in North American culture for, as suggested by Glen A. Love, “critical interpretation, taken as a whole, tends to regard ego-consciousness as the supreme evidence of literary and critical achievement” (230). In contrast with Stegner’s I-scape vision, I would suggest that for many of the memoirists included in this study, the paths and trails along which they wander represent the development of an “eco-consciousness,” an increasing groundedness in the prairie landscape as “other” presence; they allow for a transformation of our understanding of human survival on the prairies by revealing that “there’s no such thing as a self-enclosed, private piece of property, neither a deer nor a person nor a text nor a piece of land” (Campbell, SueEllen 133).

Returning to Adeline Clark’s Prairie Dreams, we see the author’s alignment of the women’s communal berry-picking expedition, an activity that forms a crucial part in the subsistence economy of women’s work, with the brief “settling in” of the birds represented as “gorging in” on the natural fruits. The birds are then overcome by a “migratory fever,” one in which the women themselves cannot participate, having instead to return to the isolation – one might even say, “unnatural” isolation, given that the homestead system is culturally designed – of living a settled and agricultural life. Subsistence and migration, an “other” way of living within the prairie landscape, is thus discernible when prairie women move beyond the homestead and head out upon the prairie trails; when they leave what Edith Hewson in We Swept the Cornflakes Out the Door (1980), a memoir of prairie life “on a Saskatchewan farm during the first thirty years of the century” (n.p.), calls the “world of flat dry fields” and enter the “magic land” accessible only by prairie trails (127). For example, in Hewson’s text an “expedition” to go berry-picking becomes a lesson, passed on from mother to daughter, in subsistence culture:

Beyond re-visioning the natural landscape in this scene, Hewson also manages to re-vision another way of life on the prairie landscape than the agricultural one. She starts this passage, ironically, by using an idiom (“Indian summer”) that, similar to the western settlement project itself, effectively erases the real presence of First Nations people, but then by representing her mother’s simple, non-romantic and non-judgmental awareness of “Indian” culture the author manages to repudiate the “dominator mode” of ranking, the tendency to assert superiority, by suggesting the similarities between that culture and her own. Further, in fact, I would suggest that by recuperating the “Indian” way of doing things as a “healthy” approach to life on the prairies, Hewson implicitly re-values the berry-picking activity about to be undertaken. And re-valuation is clearly needed for, as we are told later on in the berry-picking scene, denigration of the activity sometimes comes from an intimate source: the author notes the presence of her brother, Willie, in this instance, and shows him complaining, “I don’t like chokecherries! This here’s a girl’s job. I just like horses!”

Like Hewson, many of the memoirists gathered here do make a genuine (if sometimes amorphous and sometimes naïve) attempt to pay tribute to the First Nations presence on the prairie landscape prior to the imposition of agriculture. In Porridge and Old Clothes (1982), a memoir of homesteading life in Manitoba in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth centuries, Eileen M. Scott has a chapter titled “Red is Beautiful,” for which she provides the following epigraph from a “Dakota Indian Prayer (author unknown)”: “Grandfather, Great Spirit, fill us with the light. Teach us to walk the soft earth as relatives to all that live” (51). After this very deliberate invocation of an ecological principle oft-repeated in a variety of First Nations stories, Scott goes on to begin her chapter in the following openly confrontational way:

Writing in 1982, there is an astute awareness (and acceptance) of native political agenda here, especially in the use of such keywords as “claim” and “nation,” as well as in the assertion that “No story of Manitoba … would be complete” without restoration of First Nations people. If Cole Harris is correct in asserting of First Nations people that, in the context of westward expansion, “their erasure was textual” rather than actual (408), then their restoration, or re-vision, can be textual as well, as it often is in memoirs such as Scott’s. The other striking element of the above passage is how Scott recuperates the idea of the natural environment as subject rather than object, as seen when she asserts that unconscionable farming practices have “reduce[ed] this land to a mere shadow of its former self.” The author goes on to enunciate the subsistence relationship that “Indian people” had with the natural landscape, and as she does so her narrative eventually slips into illustrating how her own grandparents, Agnes (Agabella) Rutherford Thomson and Robert Thomson, were similarly inclined:

The final line of this delectable treatise on the landscape’s natural productions – “It was truly a land of milk and honey” – represents a narrative appropriation, and subversion, I would suggest, of a key phrase in settlement propaganda, one that was meant to entice prospective emigrants to Canada with images of the wealth and abundance that would (supposedly) be easily achieved through agricultural efforts to “improve” the natural landscape.

Writing Barefoot on the Prairie from the temporal distance of 1989, Ferne Nelson is obviously aware of current debates regarding land ownership and use, an awareness that allows her to revise western settlement myths which figured the prairies as an “open volume” (Ferguson, Open Trails 52) awaiting “civilization’s” imprint. Indeed, she seems acutely aware that the prairies were anything but “open,” which implies “empty,” or as tabula rasa, as when she provides the following glimpse into the Alberta grasslands, which were

In Nelson’s description we see the difference between a tourist and a resident of a landscape, for it is only the latter that “sees a landscape not only as a collection of physical forms, but as the evidence of what has occurred there” (Evernden 99). When she turns to representing the human presence on the prairie landscape prior to “contact,” Nelson, wittingly or not, taps into some familiar stereotypes, including the image of the “Noble Savage” and the concept of the “Vanishing Indian.”¹³ Nevertheless, I find it difficult to condemn any of the writers examined here for using the only language they had available to them (in most cases, the language of popular culture as opposed to academia) in making an honest attempt to acknowledge their own/their family’s/their culture’s role in radically altering the lives of another group of people. However unpalatable the language might sometimes be, I have found nothing openly racist, and the very fact that these women made space in their narratives to acknowledge native presence, and even to acknowledge the politics of land ownership, seems worthy of recognition. Most often, the representation of native peoples is an attempt to critique the rhetoric that transformed the prairie landscape into a mythical rather than a real agricultural paradise. For example, Nelson writes the following about her father’s participation in the land grab of the early twentieth century:

At the level of vocabulary choice, Nelson is providing us with a juxtaposition here between the “hope” and “optimism” which, as I indicate in Chapters Two and Three, was inculcated in settlers by the promotional materials for western settlement, and the reality of prairie farming for so many settlers, as contained in words such as “worthless,” “begrudged,” “ruined,” “dashed” and “flattened.” Having given the lie to Anglo-centred constructs of the settlement project, Nelson goes on to re-vision concepts of land ownership and appropriate usage:

I think that all Nelson is guilty of here is overstatement – of the “much better life” experienced by the “noble tribes” prior to white western settlement and of her parents’ victimization in comparison. But again I find myself wanting to give her the benefit of the doubt; I want to recognize her confession of childhood “unconcern” for the rights of native peoples and also her memoir attempt to redress that unconcern by providing “evidence,” “faint” as it might be, that First Nations people had existed, that they had done so differently, albeit legitimately, and that they had been dispossessed. When Nelson appears to devalue the prairie landscape itself, in phrases such as “this miserable terrain” and “this unproductive tract,” I do not believe that she is actually adopting an agricultural vision that determines the value of the natural environment based on an ability to control its productions; rather, in the context of the rest of the passage, I read these phrases as an appropriation of such a vision as a means to criticize the western settlement project itself. She is reflecting her anger at the mythologizing and homogenizing of the prairie region that obscured differences in soil conditions, climate, etc., and that “lured” (Preface n.p.) people like her parents to take up the agricultural dream in an effort to “wrest a living.”

For some of the memoirists, a movement into the natural environment did not reveal the presence of other people, but rather allowed for the development of an awareness of “what the prairie actually is” (Drake 127) and also sometimes of a strong consciousness of selfhood. Nature as presence, as vital subject as opposed to passive object, often becomes a vehicle of empowerment. In Marjorie Grace Johannson’s memoir about prairie life near Elfros, Saskatchewan, in the second decade of the twentieth century, the author remembers evenings walking barefoot along the “little cow paths [that] crisscrossed the open land” (79). As she writes in The Pink House on the Hill (1986), she and her siblings “knew all these little paths and every foot of the area,” and this familiarity allowed them to appreciate the natural rhythms of the prairie landscape:

What an exciting passage, with Johannson moving from animal to animal, from backdrop to foreground, building an exciting crescendo of vibrancy that brings the prairie landscape “alive” for the reader. In Upon a Sagebrush Harp, a memoir of homesteading life in southern Saskatchewan in the early-twentieth century, Nell Parsons juxtaposes the constraints of cultural authority versus the liberatory potential to be found in a relationship with the natural environment. Speaking of a time when the population was increasing and when the old “wagon trail” had become “a well-travelled road,” Parsons notes the entrance in her community of certain institutional figureheads, including schoolteachers and a “scarlet-coated Mountie” (100). She also notes that

Parsons’s brief but nonetheless compelling scene invites the reader to invert cultural assumptions that “nature is static and culture is dynamic” (Alaimo 4–5), for it is the preacher, the physical embodiment of religious culture and authority, whose presence threatens the young girl with stasis, with loss of personal identity (“bedside prayers”) by submission to social convention (“public confession”), while it is the “strong wind,” a vital and reliable physical element of the prairie landscape, which allows for self-definition in the act of “running against,” even “stand[ing] against,” the noon gale. In using the word “against” here, Parsons is not alluding to domination and control but rather is expressing a sense of invigoration, of life-giving, in the presence of this natural element, one which is so often stereotyped as the soul-draining symbol of prairie isolation and despair. As this scene from Parsons’s text illustrates, “once we engage in the extension of the boundary of the self into the ‘environment,’ then of course we imbue it with life and can quite properly regard it as animate – it is animate because we are a part of it” (Evernden 101).

Jessie Raber, who often exhibits feelings of personal inadequacy in her memoir, also represents a childhood experience on the prairies that provides for a moment of self-definition, self-re(e)valuation: as she describes in Pioneering in Alberta,

Initially in this scene, the natural environment is depicted as concealing; it is threatening in its ability to appear as an alien environment. However, as Raber soon realizes, she is “at home” in nature, for her knowledge of successive landmarks – “the big old muskeg,” “the sun,” “an old tamarack tree,” and “our path to the house” – allows her to navigate safely the “long rough road” to home. The experience is so unsettling that she kept it secret for years, but the retrospective space of the prairie memoir empowers her to publicly represent the experience of self-in-environment, to confess her empowered part in the happy ending.¹⁴

In delineating how the memoirists gathered here provide an alternative “partnership” mode or “subsistence” perspective of human survival on the prairie landscape, some “other” subjects of western settlement keep appearing: that is, intermingled in discussions of gardening, berry-picking and prairie trails, mosquitoes, horses, birds, chickens, turkeys, frogs, partridges, squirrels, buffalo, ducks, rabbits, fish, and cows are an insistent presence. In fact, I would suggest that the non-human animal presence within women’s eco-conscious texts allows for a particularly effective re-visioning of agricultural myths and images. As suggested at the beginning of this chapter, the dominant image of prairie settlement seems to favour homogenous “Man’s” vertical relationship to the landscape, his role as sole protagonist in the fight to “settle” the natural environment. The image is an heroic one, and in putting humans at the apex of agricultural efforts, it effectively obscures the very real presence of “other” participants in the project. In prairie memoirs, however, we begin to find a narrative redress of that absence. In these texts, we are provided with more individualized, more down-to-earth, portraits of the homogenized heroes who have traditionally been the subjects of regional history and national heritage-seeking, and these portraits allow the authors to use “personal history to inquire into mythic construction” (Buss, “Memoir” 23) in a variety of ways. One way to provide such an “inquiry” is to “use” non-human animals as “bellwethers for judging people’s character” (Preece xxii), thereby allowing for the possibility of confrontation with the supposed moral/cultural superiority of heroic figures. We see this, for example, in Land across the Border, when Donnie Ebbers indicates the importance to women of being able to discern male character in this way: as her father says to her regarding his approval of her future husband, “that fellow of yours must be a good farmer. He sure knows how to handle his horses. When his team were nearly stuck with that load, he never used a whip. He just spoke quietly to urge them along and they got right down and pulled that load out for him” (103). In 1915, Elizabeth Mitchell asserted that In Western Canada, “it is noticeable how more than merciful the prairie man generally is to his beasts…. I heard of one man with a reputation for cruelty, and it stood as a mark against him for miles around” (43). Without supporting Mitchell’s general contention of “merciful” treatment by “prairie man,” I do agree that in the memoirs gathered here violence and aggression towards non-human beings is made a disreputable and public matter, while caring and empathy become valued qualities that allow for the re-visioning of animals as partners in the story of western settlement.

In childhood memoirs, fathers are often represented in terms of their treatment of animals. True to her dedication of Upon a Sagebrush Harp to “Papa,” Nell Parsons often represents her father as heroic in his endeavours to succeed at homesteading on the Canadian prairies, indicating through his kindness towards animals that he possesses all the qualities desired in a settler, including the ability to meet the needs of any situation, a courageous response to danger, and innovativeness. On a family trip to the watering hole, for example, Mr. Wilson’s commitment to the family horses is apparent:

Although Major manages to get loose, Kit sinks and lays “still as death in the dangerous ooze” (48), so that Mr. Wilson is forced to chain her neck and hook her to Major to pull her free, a sickening sight for the young author:

The language used here is unequivocally not about domination and exploitation, and not about self-interest, as is sometimes seen when animal bodies are constructed as commodities to be lost and gained; rather, in words such as “desperate,” “stooped,” “urgent,” “coaxed” and “supporting” we see emotional connection to the non-human animal who shares in prairie life. This connection is confirmed afterwards in conversation about the event:

Again, the “power” and “strength” here are not violence or aggression related; rather, they bespeak a moral capacity that encompasses caring for one of the most significant “others” in the western settlement story. And it is not only familiarity with Kit that allows for Mr. Wilson’s kindness, either; indeed, when in a later scene the horse is gored by a cow who has escaped from another farm, the author’s father does not react with revenge against the “other” animal, but instead shows consideration of a being in need: “He had milked the cow to relieve the strain on her overfull bag, and then he had turned her loose” (72) to find her way home.

Not all fathers are depicted as favourably as Parsons’s, however, as seen in Judy Schultz’s Mamie’s Children. In 1996 the author made a visit to the home of her Aunt Violet and there she sees a photograph that sparks the following public confession:

Again we have an author who uses juxtaposition to critical advantage, as the words “bawling,” “lolling,” “terror,” and “burning,” and the accompanying images to those words, together pull more narrative weight than her father’s assertion that “branding didn’t hurt the calf,” and thereby cause not only the young author but also the reader to give the “lie” to this particular use/abuse of an animal body.

Georgina H. Thomson’s Crocus and Meadowlark Country: A Story of an Alberta Family (1963), a memoir of homesteading near Nanton, Alberta, in the early decades of the twentieth century, also questions paternal authority about the subject of animals and their place on a family farm. After Thomson’s brother Jim is sent away to medical school, her father takes on a series of hired men, whom the author recalls positively or negatively depending upon their treatment of animals: for example, as she says of Harry Wakeman, “we girls always remembered him for his kindness to the horses” (247). Harry is immediately contrasted with another hired man:

Although Thomson certainly does not represent her father as unkind to the animals who work on his farm, nevertheless she uses this discussion of the hired men as a subtle means of paternal criticism; that is, while it is Mrs. Thomson who claims authority here on the issue of the use of animals’ bodies and who responds to evidence of cruelty with verbal confrontation, her father’s initial response to the situation is to show concern for the loss of a human labouring body as opposed to caring for a non-human one. Sometimes, in the farm economy, good work appears to have been privileged over the humane treatment of the very animals without whom that work could not be accomplished. Mrs. Thomson has previously been shown to side with the non-human animals in her family, as seen with the family’s first horse team:

As with Mrs. Thomson, many of the women memoirists studied here claim authority to speak on behalf of the labouring bodies of non-human animals by dedicating entire chapters to the representation of those beings who shared in the human struggle of western settlement. Indeed, in their considerable narrative attention to “other” animals, the authors indicate a desire to root the experience of western settlement in something other than agricultural success or failure; to value the production of human-animal relationships over and above “commodities for cash.” An ongoing concern in the debate on representations of animals, however, is the human tendency to anthropomorphize them. The double-bind is clear: as Onno Oerlemans states, “not representing animals at all robs them of their subjectivity and the influence they actually have on our lives. At the other extreme, casting them as fully developed and seemingly human characters robs them of their difference from us and among one another” (181). One of the greatest difficulties for people interested in animal representation, then, is finding some middle ground; but unfortunately, in the fear of committing the latter sin, too many people end up “not representing animals at all.” Most recently, however, the critical tide has begun to turn across the disciplinary spectrum and, as Oerlemans notes specifically regarding the world of science, it is now believed that “the interdiction against anthropomorphism is inherently speciesist, since it assumes that all qualities of mind we appear to perceive in animals are merely projections rather than similarities shared to differing degrees” (183). It is my belief that the memoirists studied here tend not to be naively or overly anthropomorphic; rather, they exhibit an honest desire to express a subject-subject paradigm of human-animal relationships. Sentimentality is normally eschewed in favour of respect.¹⁶ As Heather Gilead states in The Maple Leaf for Quite a While (1967), a memoir of homesteading life near Red Deer, Alberta, in the second quarter of the twentieth century, “in my day we were far too dependent upon our animals to feel superior to them or to sentimentalize them” (96). In some cases, the assumption of shared subjectivity occurs as a result of naming one’s animal companions, of conferring upon them a marker of individuality; nevertheless, it is not always necessary for animals to be named in order to make their presence felt, to recognize their “qualities of mind,” their capacity for individual character and their possession of a vibrant emotional life.

Barbara (Hunter) Anderson’s Two White Oxen: A Perspective of Early Saskatoon 1874–1905 (1972) is dominated by the presence of non-human animals of all kinds, but especially by the titular “two white oxen,” who “were to be bought because they could live on the prairies and horse [sic] could not, so the circulars issued by the promoters of the Temperance Colonization Society said” (13). The two oxen chosen for the homesteading project are described simply at first as “a nice pair of cattle, well matched in color and disposition, ‘for they were twins, identical twins.’” It soon becomes obvious to Thomson that the patient and hard-working animals, together with the family’s “two cows,” are “the nucleus of a living for ourselves” (34). The family project is temporarily decentred, however, when the two white oxen are “lost” in mysterious circumstances: “In the summer of 1886 Father was making another trip to Moose Jaw for supplies. He had our two white oxen, ‘Brisk and Lively’ and camped for the night about 30 miles north of Moose Jaw. When he wakened in the morning, the oxen were gone…. We never saw or heard of them again” (76). After this experience, Thomson enunciates the difference between viewing animals as interchangeable objects versus knowing them as individual characters in one’s life:

Sometimes animal images are used to confront ideals of technological “progress” in the search for agricultural success. For example, at about the same time period as Anderson’s family in Saskatchewan were appreciating the help of two oxen in the establishment of a family farm, in Manitoba, Nellie L. McClung’s family were anticipating “a great event,” the arrival of a new binder (126). As the author remembers in a chapter of Clearing in the West: My Own Story (1935) titled “Men, and Machines,” the new binder makes manifest “the excitement of the coming harvest” and brings “seeming security” to agricultural production on a vast scale; however, the “state of reverent expectation” is profaned slightly when one member of the horse team meant to pull the machine becomes ill, “so the first day of the cutting was robbed of part of its glory,” and the binder itself begins to break down (126–28). As a result, the Mooneys find it necessary to rely upon their one remaining horse, Kate, who is forced by necessity to do double duty:

After documenting her obvious “reverence” for the non-human contribution of Kate in contrast with the new and “faulty” machine, it is no wonder that McClung chooses to end this chapter with narrative attention directed to this more than productive animal labourer: “Before I leave this part of my story, I want to pay my tribute to Kate, the horse who worked beside the two red oxen with such contempt for her humble helpers. Her bones lie deep in the soil of the farm she helped to make in the Souris valley, but her memory will endure as long as any of our family are in the land of remembering” (133). And, one might add, as long as there are sympathetic readers of McClung’s text.

For Jessie Raber, whose frame of reference when Pioneering in Alberta is “Grandfather’s [diversified] farm” back Home in England (43), the presence of animals rather than agricultural production becomes a measure of the growth of a “real” homestead. In preparation for emigration to Canada, we are told, the author’s father “read every book he could get, pertaining to Canada. They all told of the beautiful country where the head of the home could take up a farm of one hundred and sixty acres, and raise cattle, horses and hogs, all sorts of grain and vegetables” (10). Keeping this idealistic image in mind, Raber periodically provides for her readers a tally of her own family’s progress: for example, fairly early on in the homesteading project she tells us,

Despite the fact that western society exhibits a “culturally conditioned indifference toward, and prejudice against, creatures whose lives appear too slavishly, too boringly, too stupidly female” (Davis, Karen 196), chickens being one of the most despised groups of animals, prior to these animals’ arrival Raber can only conceive of the family homestead in theoretical terms – hence the phrase “our farm” couched in quotation marks. Immediately upon their arrival at the “farm,” an event attended with great anticipation, the hens are rather humourously acknowledged by Raber as being vital characters in the family undertaking. Later on that same page, after noting that “Daddy went to town one day and brought home a little kitten,” Raber considers the family’s progress, saying, “so there we were with three hens, one rooster and one kitten. Gradually growing” (37). The tally continues apace, and she is eventually able to note that “we had two cows, one heifer, three horses, a pony and colt, also a few chickens and the cat. So ‘our farm’ was growing” (65). It is interesting to note Raber’s continued use of quotation marks when speaking of “our farm,” a usage that suggests deferral of official farm status until the requisite level of participant animals was reached.

Raber’s assumption of the subjectivity of non-human animals is evident in an anecdote about one particular creature who does not belong to her own family circle. As seen in Chapter Two, one of the values most esteemed in prairie society is hospitality, “the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests or strangers” (OEED), which often manifests itself as a willingness to lend a hand in times of crisis. While respect for hospitable values occurs on a daily basis, it becomes doubly important in the case of a prairie blizzard. One of the most unforgettable opening scenes in Canadian prairie fiction is to be found in Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh (1925), in which Lars Nelson and Niels Lindstedt are fighting their way through the Manitoba bush in a snowstorm and are turned away from the home of another settler, an inhospitable act that becomes an immediate gauge for the reader of that character’s personality. In Pioneering, Raber provides a very similar scene, which, however, ends with a very different result:

In this scene, there is not even a moment of doubt as to helping “the poor thing,” a homesteading neighbour of the four-legged kind, especially given an established prairie etiquette in which such a crisis demands attention (for the Rabers at least) whether it involves man or “beast.” In her discussion of how human beings can “restore power to the animal victim” in western culture, Marian Scholtmeijer examines the work of Philip P. Hallie on Cruelty,¹⁷ and especially his suggestion, as Scholtmeijer summarizes it, that “hospitality gives the necessary recognition of the victim’s identity, and replaces the ‘I-it’ power relation with ‘I-you’ equality” (Animal 66). Hallie’s proposal for human-animal relationships, says Scholtmeijer, is “a highly civilized one,” which is “what makes it so difficult to apply to animals. By convention, social graces like hospitality have been developed in opposition to animality” (67). More importantly, “hospitality coming from humankind to other species would likely imply to most people treating all animals as pets,” which would be “its own kind of trespass against [them].” In Raber’s scene, however, we are already looking at a “pet,” a domesticated animal, so in extending hospitality to the collie dog the Raber family are not guilty of trespass. Rather, Raber’s scene with the collie dog, in its direct invocation of a social convention created in response to the specific conditions of a specific environment – a convention that is then extended to an animal who is part of that environment, without question, and without any sign of the condescension assumed by some to be inherent to owner/pet relationships – puts Hallie’s hospitable “I-you” theorization into practice.

There is one animal in particular whom I would suggest provides an especially effective narrative pivot upon which to mount an alternative representation of prairie life as being about more than agricultural success: the gopher, the supposed bane to every farmer’s productive existence. For example, in a chapter of Ferne Nelson’s Barefoot on the Prairie titled “Papa Vanquishes a Bogeyman,” the author begins with the following seemingly complicit scene:

Nelson’s delineation of the children’s task, a sort of “love-hate relationship,” remains nicely ambiguous as the author vacillates between calling the gophers “little pests,” “lively little brown animals,” “cheeky little animals,” “pesky little rodents,” and “brown creatures.” She enunciates the ways that gophers pose a problem for agricultural interests, albeit fairly vaguely (“a lot of damage”), but she also questions cultural authority on the matter of gophers, as when she notes that “we hated the gophers because everyone told us we should,” “everyone” being “Papa” and “the government.” This cultural construction of the gopher as “bogeyman” to the land settlement project is encapsulated in Papa’s hyperbolic declaration of “war” against them. Thus does the reflective adult-author use the innocence of childhood to oppose the official version of the gopher menace with a more harmonious view of the animals as being a vital part of the natural environment; as being harbingers of spring and living symbols of a new cycle of growth and sustenance on the prairies.¹⁹

Like Nelson, Georgina Thomson and her sister were supposed to attend to the unpleasant task of murdering gophers: as the author remembers in Crocus and Meadowlark Country,

Once again we see an author use the reflective space of the memoir text to juxtapose official opinion on the de-valuation of gophers’ lives in the pursuit of agricultural success with her own sympathetic identification with these intriguing little characters, whom she feels are worthy of considerable narrative space. In the production and publication of Thomson’s fictional story we see the young girl’s rebellion against dominant discourse – a behavioural precursor, I would suggest, of the act of writing a memoir text of western settlement – through the construction of a narrative that values an “other” side of the gopher tale.²⁰

Both Nelson’s and Thomson’s narrative appreciations of gophers bring to light another issue that receives notable attention in women’s memoir texts: animalcide, the deliberate putting to death of an “other” living being, one of the more gruesome realities of human survival on the prairie landscape. The two forms of animalcide, the hunting of wild animals and the slaughter of domestic animals, were traditionally within the masculine domain, as John Mack Faragher suggests: “work which nonetheless played an important role in male thinking, was hunting. For the early pioneers game provided most of the protein in the family diet…. The hunting legacy had one practical consequence for male work loads: men had primary responsibility for slaughtering and butchering large farm animals” (50). While I do believe that the memoirists considered here accept the necessity of animalcide as a part of the subsistence perspective of settlement life²¹ – indeed, I do not intend to interrogate this acceptance by foisting an animal rights/vegetarian agenda upon their written reminiscences – nevertheless I do want to suggest that the considerable amount of textual space devoted to the re-presentation of the animal behind the act of killing provides modern-day readers with an opportunity to re-vision an agricultural myth that pervades much public knowledge, especially childhood knowledge, about farming life: specifically, the myth of Old MacDonald’s Farm, which poses a static vision of rural life, devoid of any reality regarding one of the primary ways that animals contribute to human survival. As Carol J. Adams suggests, “Western culture” is characterized by “patriarchal texts of meat,” in which the animal source from which meat derives is made absent through the use of “gastronomic language”: “Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. Animals’ lives precede and enable the existence of meat” (14, 40). The very term “meat” – like all other terms of concealment related to meat-eating, such as “pork chops, hamburger, sirloins, and so on” (67) – is a linguistic “mystification” that works to “rename dead [and previously whole] bodies before consumers participate in eating them,” so that “we do not conjure dead, butchered animals” but, rather, focus upon “cuisine” (40). However, it is obvious from even a brief examination of women’s prairie memoirs that settlement culture was very different from what is now an urban-centric world in which children’s closest relationship to animals is with “frozen meat wrapped in plastic” (Sanders 193).²² The authors of these texts undoubtedly accept the “expectation that people should eat animals and that meat is good for you” (Adams, Carol J. 14), but their fairly frequent representations of such activities as hunting, butchering, and slaughtering in the context of the family farm allow readers to “re-member” animal bodies and, hence, to “make animals present” (40) in the story of western settlement.

Hunting wild animals for food was a generally accepted practice on the prairies, and for the memoirists studied here it was clearly a matter of subsistence necessity. However, for Donnie Ebbers, the masculinist culture behind the act of hunting provides a narrative moment in which to privilege the animal as living being prior to the act of killing. As she remembers in Land Across the Border, hunting was a measure of manhood for her brothers, as evidenced in a scene in which her little brother Joe, jealous of his older brother’s hunting skills, tries to measure up:

Rather than go on immediately to describe the end result of Joe’s exertions – a miserable failure, by the way, as the moose’s own olfactory hunting skills, his ability to pay attention to “others” in his environment, helps him to effect an escape – Ebbers interrupts the hunting narrative of chase and conquest with the above “majestic” tableau, an ironic inversion of the prevalent belief in Anglo culture that “Meat is King” (Adams, Carol J. 32). In addition to this word image, Ebbers provides her reader with a picture of the whole animal, a “Canadian Moose,” to offset the intentions of her brother. Later in her memoir, in a chapter titled “Butchering and Fall Work,” Ebbers writes about subsistence necessity on a family farm and implicitly questions the notion of “meat” being “raised and butchered” – it is, after all, the animal who is raised and butchered – by providing a lengthy and painstakingly detailed description of the task of turning every last part of the dead animal into usable products for the consumption needs of a family:

The description of “Mama’s disagreeable work” and all the products created from the body of one dead pig goes on for another page, but already we can see Ebbers re-presenting the animal behind the “meat,” first by the seemingly simple suggestion that in order to obtain “the summer’s supply of pork, a pig was usually butchered,” then by making reference to the “dead pig,” and also by using words denoting carcass details followed by live animal explanations in brackets (e.g., “bristles” followed by “hair,” “rind” followed by “skin”). That the reader can infer some level of critique of “patriarchal texts of meat” is also evident in the paragraph that immediately follows this scene, wherein Ebbers juxtaposes the less gruesome harvest of garden produce:

The farm animal is generally assumed to be available in one way or another to satisfy domestic consumption/production needs; however, in the context of the family farm, is there any truth to the assertion that the difference between a pet and a farm animal is that the latter “is dispatched and dismantled with as little feeling as that which attends a car to the scrap heap” (Scholtmeijer, Animal 81)? In The Pink House on the Hill, Marjorie Johannson writes fairly unemotionally about her father’s hunting activities, but when it comes to the killing of farm animals she is willing to court family disapproval rather than participate:

What Johannson indicates here – being unable to “touch meat for days” after becoming aware of the animals behind the food produced from their bodies – is not an unusual reaction for children who realize where meat comes from, and neither is the lack of sympathy for that reaction unusual, especially in a subsistence economy that requires a realistic focus on survival needs. In Crocus and Meadowlark Country, Georgina Thomson also appears to dispute the distinction between pets and farm animals:

There seems to be a bit of a split agenda here. On the one hand, Thomson notes the difficulty with which she, her sister, and her father endured the act of killing animals and she makes clear her belief in animal sentience when she uses the phrase “despairing shrieks.” On the other hand, she is also using this moment to clarify the subsistence necessity of such an act (“if we were going to eat”), which allows her to represent her mother as the more “realistic” participant in prairie life. Thomson is not going to allow her reader to ignore the “unpleasant things” that happened in farm culture. While Thomson is open about the ugly realities of prairie life, she nevertheless does draw some clear emotional boundaries across the subject of meat-eating:

Thomson’s invocation here of the image of “cannibalism,” “the ultimate savage act” (Adams, Carol J. 31), is important because it implies something more than mere “interest and affection” in Ben Hur’s existence; rather, it implies a recognition of independent subjecthood normally reserved for other humans. This assumption of animal subjectivity is what stimulates the sense of a personal boundary or taboo regarding meat-eating, and it is Thomson’s evident “grief,” her “activation of conscience,” that helps the reader to re-member Ben Hur’s presence in the “patriarchal texts of meat.” But do animals first need to be named and individualized, be made subjects rather than objects, before they can be re-membered in this way? Is it unequivocally true that “farm animals are so profoundly entrenched in society as economic units that the attempt to find moral significance in their situation seems foolish” (Scholtmeijer, Animals 81)? Not for Nellie McClung, who, no stranger to making the personal political, includes in Clearing in the West the following (rather lengthy) lament for the fate of her family’s pigs on a farm in Ontario: writing of “a mellow evening in early autumn,” she notes,

For the reader concerned for animal rights, McClung’s inclusion of this gut-wrenching episode in her memoir illustrates the political power of “describing exactly how an animal dies, kicking, screaming, and is fragmented” (Adams, Carol J. 51–52). However hard her sister tries to prevent young Nellie’s awareness of the brutal nature of the slaughterhouse, for McClung this experience is a painfully transformative lesson in cultural realities: specifically, she learns about the non-recognition of the “rights” of “others,” as well as the power of religion to justify human cruelty.²³

In some cases, the memoir authors included in this study find power in self-identification with non-human animals, a suggestion that may seem to be contradicted by the historical truth that “the ideological justification for women’s alleged inferiority has been made by appropriating them to animals” (Donovan and Adams 1). Without in any way desiring to contradict this awareness of the alignment of sexism and speciesism, I would still like to suggest, borrowing from Marian Scholtmeijer’s readings of twentieth-century women’s fiction, that non-human animals often provide a means of “defiance” for female authors; indeed, that these “other” figures provide “a double source of power: recognition of the degree to which women are victimized by androcentric culture, and realization of solidarity in defiance of cultural authority” (“The Power” 232–33). I would suggest that prairie women’s “defiance of cultural authority” is located in the politics of personal experience as represented in their memoir texts and that, by simultaneously aligning themselves with the oppressed image of the domesticated farm animal and appropriating the strengths of any given species, these women manage, however subtly, to contradict those cultural constructions of prairie settlement which deny the free range of women’s sometimes less than positive experiences of prairie life. For example, fairly quickly upon her arrival on an Alberta homestead, Sarah Roberts begins to align herself with the family’s team of oxen, Tom and Bruce, who, says the author of Of Us and the Oxen, “are faithful, patient, long-suffering animals” (11). This is possibly the best description we could be provided of Roberts herself in relation to the decision to homestead. She is certainly “faithful” to what she describes as her husband’s air of “dauntless optimism” (37) about western Canada’s prospects and his belief in the “glowing accounts” provided by others (2). Indeed, throughout the text, whenever the family faces some crisis of faith in the homesteading project, Roberts is there to ensure that “no one admit[s] discouragement” (124) and to reaffirm their unwritten agreement to maintain a deliberately optimistic spirit in the face of adversity. She is certainly also “patient,” especially when work on the family home is repeatedly and (necessarily) delayed in favour of farming operations and she must endure living in a “style to which [she is] not accustomed” (7). As she writes,

Finally, she is definitely “long-suffering” for, especially during the long winters, she finds herself “constantly confined” (65) within her modest house, very often alone as the men usually work together. In the extremity of her experience of isolation, Roberts searches for emotional support, and at one point she finds it in an appreciation of the presence of some non-human animals who provide a poetic image of something “other” than the circumstances in which she finds herself: as she remarks, “there were times when the loneliness was so oppressive that to see even a herd of cattle moving toward a little meadow where the grass looked greener gave me a distinct sense of relief and companionship” (31).

Despite her surface appearance of “faithful, patient, long-suffering” conformity to the settlement project, however, Roberts also provides herself with a space for active rebellion. Going back to her characterization of the oxen, Roberts tells us that although they “seemed very gentle and thoroughly broken,” “however, in certain circumstances, this appearance of gentleness was deceptive” (9; emphasis added), and she goes on to tell the following story:

If we accept the alignment of the author with the nature of the oxen, then clearly Roberts is a more complicated person than her surface narrative suggests. Although she seems to characterize the family’s move to Alberta as a mutually desirable “adventure” (2), Roberts provides another animal image that I would suggest encapsulates her true feelings about having to participate in the undertaking. Juxtaposed with the image of the subtly rebellious oxen, those figures of physical and psychological endurance, is another of the farm animals:

Like Roberts, Crabby has an “unlovely disposition” in terms of total psychological commitment to the settlement project, yet even she is appreciated for her “perseverance and skill,” and for being the “old standby” (143–44).

Beulah Baldwin, whose memoir The Long Trail: The Story of a Pioneer Family (1992) depicts her family’s homesteading experience in the Peace River region in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, sometimes represents her mother’s feelings about participating in her husband’s “adventure” in northern Alberta through animal images. For example, when representing her family’s preparation to leave their hotel business and home in Edmonton to seek their fortunes further north, Baldwin provides a comic deflection of the pain of departure onto the family dogs:

After Olive Freeland has made the trip north, and has even begun to feel a bit of the adventurous spirit possessed by her husband in spades, Baldwin provides another image of Brownie, this time parodying the stereotyped cultural image of the courageous settler woman arriving in the Promised Land: “An hour later they heard the jingle of harnesses and, looking back, saw Sam’s rig approaching at a brisk pace. Mother and Dad laughed at Brownie proudly perched on the seat beside Sam, ‘Looking,’ according to Mother, ‘for all the world like a princess being driven through the streets of her capital by her coachman’” (17). Baldwin’s mother also experiences a psychological closeness with the family’s other dog, Trixie: as the author explains,

Olive Freeland’s alignment of herself and Trixie in terms of potential victimization, as well as her alignment of the “drunken brutes” and the “big brutes” “roaming the streets” of Grouard, calls into question her husband’s essentially selfish decision to seek after adventure in the “wilds” of northern Alberta when he should have been, according to his promises at the beginning of the book, “settling” down to life with his wife and children. However, it is equally important to note that Baldwin’s mother equates herself with the little dog who, despite her disadvantageous situation, possesses a fighting and courageous spirit that demands admiration. In the parallel movement from identification with Brownie’s sadness at departure to her regal entrance at a northern stopping-house, from identification with Trixie’s physical vulnerability to her psychological strength, we see Baldwin’s use of human-animal relationships to represent the transformative potential of her mother’s settlement experience.

Non-human animals were also a vital part of identity-making for prairie children who often had little access to playmates beyond their own family circle. In their study of written reminiscences of pioneer life in the United States and Canada, John W. Bennett and Seena B. Kohl assert that

This is certainly the case in Georgina Thomson’s Crocus, wherein the author uses animal images to delineate a sense of personal discontinuity with the family circle in general and an outright antagonistic relationship with her older brother in particular. It all begins with her family’s acquisition of one of the most common – and certainly most crucial in terms of subsistence potential – farm animals:

It is significant to the rest of her memoir that Thomson herself leads the decision-making process here and shows a special concern for the animal, who is named to give her an identity beyond the “obvious,” and who immediately proves to have a less than complacent nature.

Thomson’s relationship with the cow deepens when she and her sister Chaddy are given the task of taking Annie Rooney to the watering hole, where they promptly attempt to ride the animal, who is described as having an “ungainly figure,” an activity that affords the author narrative space for self-reflection:

The author’s negative self-image is evident in the balancing of terms to describe herself and her sister, as we move from “short and fat” to “small and slight,” from “easily scrambled” to “plodded,” and from “slim and pretty” to “fat and freckled.” Thomson’s freckled features and red hair recuperate a sense of sisterhood, however, although with Annie Rooney rather than her human sister.

Both girl and cow certainly share the experience of being relative outsiders to the family unit, as evidenced, for example, in Thomson’s recounting of her family’s treatment of another animal she loved:

Despite the attitude against Thomson’s cat, the family decides to take the animal on their journey west, although, after having been “probably terrified by the noise and strangeness of her new surroundings,” Muff escapes from the train car full of “‘settlers’ effects’” and leaves behind “her current family of kittens,” who are then given “‘to a kind-faced woman’ in Gravenhurst” (15). Upon hearing the story from her brother Jim, Thomson expresses her discontinuity with the family’s “happy reunion”: “I turned my face to the wall and had a little weep, and for years was to be haunted by the idea of Muff, the pampered household pet, trying to survive in the wilds of Muskoka.”

Thomson also shares another anecdote which makes clear her sense of incongruity with her family unit, an anecdote about having a family picture taken, an extraordinary “event” in those early days. She explains the fury of preparation on the farm:

Up to this point in the text, Thomson’s relationship with her brother Jim has been less than harmonious; indeed, when she says of her brother’s effect upon one of the family horses that when “he held the lines, some current seemed to run along them to Queen, making her become difficult and sometimes even to balk,” she is reflecting what happens in her own narrative at any point that she mentions her brother. It is interesting to note that with her “swollen eyes and rumpled hair” Thomson almost mirrors the “rough and shaggy” Annie Rooney, who becomes the subject of the author’s further sense of isolation in terms of the finished portrait:

Thomson details the photograph of the family farm and its members so precisely that there is an overwhelming sense of artistic unity and coherence, an aesthetic nevertheless undermined for the reader who is aware of the earlier emotional state of the memoir’s author.

Annie Rooney’s “stubborn” nature becomes figured as a tendency towards rebellion against authority, as when she displays a penchant for escape from the confines of the family farm: speaking of the gate positioned “at the entrance to the barnyard” (125), Thomson notes:

In this context of animal-identification, then, it might not seem unimportant to note that Thomson’s “favorite Shakespeare plays” were “‘The Taming of the Shrew’ and ‘King Lear,’ not exactly children’s fare, but good stories” (53), and both tales which feature daughters who are not exactly calmly obedient to patriarchal authority. As Thomson’s narrative moves forward in time, her connection to the rebellious cow becomes further entrenched. For example, one day Georgina goes Saskatoon-picking with her sisters and some neighbours and, although she is given charge of one of the younger boys present, she nevertheless decides to go home early as she is suffering from headache and heat exhaustion (151–52). When she arrives home, however, she finds maternal sympathy for her condition to be less than forthcoming:

Thomson does as she is told, but the situation gets worse while she’s away from the homestead and, once again, she positions herself as emotional outcast in need of retreat from the family unit:

Thomson’s language here is precise – she speaks of cleanliness and dirtiness, of disgrace, personal indulgence and non-charitable thoughts – and sharply discontinuous with the presence of the minister within the family home.

After reading Thomson’s evocation of the cozy domestic atmosphere indoors, the reader almost expects the young girl to feel chastened of her stubbornness and to make a move towards reunion with this scene of cultural authority; however, the rebellious Thomson ultimately moves in a completely different direction, towards the barnyard:

Thomson’s barnyard “confession” effectively undermines cultural authority, as she herself humorously realizes when she returns from the pasture:

Most of the memoirs examined here document emigration to Canada, or movement from eastern Canada to the prairies, as a means to provide a more independent living than could be achieved “back home,” economic security for children, and sometimes even health benefits; but these positives were gained, at least initially, at the expense of extended family and community. Sylvia Bannert’s Rut Hog or Die (1974), however, tells the story of a lower-class family already experiencing dislocation and breakup after a father’s death. Hers is a family for whom the move to Canada from the United States in 1911 represents, in addition to supposed economic renewal, a chance to gather together the family unit. It is no wonder then that they easily fall prey to propaganda claims:

As Bannert suggests, “Canada was our hope for the future,” “we would get rich [there] and then go back to Iowa” (22, 26). Nevertheless, the very title of Bannert’s text provides us with a clue as to the results of that early optimism. This title is a fortunate misrepresentation of the well-known cultural phrase, “root hog or die,” which appropriates the resourcefulness of the pig species and is generally interpreted as “the necessity of labour or exertion to maintain life or prosperity” (OEED). In addition, in the context of a prairie settlement text, the word “root” provides a sense of establishing one’s roots, of achieving a stability and endurance of the family unit. If Bannert had chosen this “correct” phrasing, her text would be fronted by the optimistic “promised land” (24) image of prairie settlement. However, her slippage into the phrase “rut hog or die,” and her decision to make it the title image of her text, conveys a less positive lived reality of prairie life. Indeed, the word “rut” itself is highly negative, as to be “in a rut” means to experience a “fixed (esp. tedious or dreary) pattern of behaviour that is difficult to change” (OEED), which certainly picks up on the reality of the farm animal’s life. The Bannert family, like most immigrants to the Canadian west, discovered upon their arrival to the prairies that life was not going to be as easy as suggested in the settlement pamphlets. In fact, life continues in much the same “rut” for the Bannerts as it had in the United States, with all members of the family again finding it necessary to disperse and go out to various places to work – far from the expected ideal of the whole family gathered together and working towards the agricultural fruits of the homesteading project.²⁶

Indeed, Bannert’s story of her life on the Canadian prairies is the complete antithesis of most settlement memoirs, which usually begin with a nuclear family’s decision to emigrate, the parting from friends and extended family, arrival in the new land, initial feelings of isolation and deprivation, with the gradual re-establishment of community and varying degrees of economic success. In contrast, Bannert’s family experiences a far more chaotic version of the typical settlement pattern, for, at the time of her family’s arrival in Canada, the author was only ten years old, her father was dead, and, despite the fact that an older brother and an uncle are both already established on homesteads, her mother and older sister had to go out to work in order to save the money required for the purchase of their own land and the building of a house. When the older women are gone, the young author is variously housed with her Uncle Frank or whatever other family needs cheap labour. While Bannert never openly criticizes the state of affairs in which she finds herself, nonetheless through all the episodes represented in the text (some of which are frankly abusive),²⁷ the author’s title begins to take on another meaning as the words “root” and “rut” slip into the word “runt,” which the author repeatedly uses to describe both her position in the family unit and her seeming physical unfitness for the hard work of prairie life. We are told that Bannert was considered by her parents as the “runt” of the family litter (25, 29), which immediately implies a certain neglect in how she is treated. Indeed, as her father once explained to her, “a mama pig has twenty-one dinner baskets; the last two are small ones and the runts feed on them” (29). By appropriating this image of maternal lack, Bannert implicitly criticizes the lack of nurturance and support that she experiences in her own family. Here we see that it is not so much the cultural ideology of prairie settlement itself with which the author finds fault, but rather her own family’s, and especially her mother’s, inability to materialize their expectations and achieve the desired ideal of the nuclear family farm.

Once she is in Canada, Bannert continually notes people’s reaction to her as being “runty” for her age, which does not bode well for her success as a “pioneer,” given that, as she is told by a neighbour named Mr. Daniels, “it was a hard country and you had to be strong to take it” (28). Before filing on a homestead, the women have to find work to make money:

The designation of “runt” is thus a condemnatory evaluation of the author’s worth, her market value in the settlement project, and this valuation is reflected in her physical weight. Indeed, while she is working for the Mac family we find out that Bannert is incredibly small:

It is thus significant that, not even one year later, after having proven her emotional strength, she has almost doubled her weight:

This dramatic change in Bannert’s weight documents a change in her status within the family unit as she appropriates the feisty fighter status of the “runty” underdog and begins to take action against her oppressive circumstances. Although Bannert appears on the surface to be fairly philosophical about the failure of her widowed mother’s dream to keep her family together and provide a stable home by emigrating to a homestead in Canada, nevertheless there are moments when Mrs. Cooper is clearly held accountable by the reminiscent author for not taking charge. Almost as soon as they arrive in Canada, the Cooper family begins to disperse in search of work. Sylvia’s older brother, who has filed for his own homestead, initially stays on his mother’s land in order to build a home for the family, and the young author, who has been living at an Uncle’s home temporarily, eventually goes to help him in that task. Indeed, she becomes instrumental, despite her small size, in completing the family dwelling, although anticipation of the moment of reunion is effectively quashed for the young author:

Bannert’s decision to describe the elder women of her family as “bawling like babies” clearly indicates her sense of their (and especially her mother’s) abdication of domestic responsibilities, but it is interesting to note her deflection of disappointment upon the figure of her brother who, like herself, worked very hard and “felt really bad about their [ungrateful] reaction.”

After this inauspicious beginning, Bannert is forced to go out to work to contribute to the family purse (57, 59–60), as is her mother, a situation that indicates there is no real home for the young girl to return to, so that she ends up moving to her uncle’s place, then a neighbour’s place, then eventually home again with her mother. Years of unsettlement now ensue for the Cooper family, until finally Sylvia attains a permanent home through marriage to a young farmer, Frank Bannert. Despite her mother’s reluctance to let her daughter marry at the age of sixteen, as Sylvia’s older brother (and the authority figure of the family) assures Mrs. Cooper, “I know Frank. He is a good man. Sylvia will be better off looking after her own home than working for all kinds of people” (110). By taking over the maternal role of provider, both before and after her marriage, she breaks free from the family “rut” and “roots” out an existence for everyone, thus defying her “runty” position. In fact, it is after her first act of independence helping her brother to build the family home that Bannert experiences personal growth, both physical and emotional. She effectively summarizes her own story by representing an experience with another of her mother’s employers:

Bannert’s immediate personal identification with the abandoned and frail calf reinforces the ambiguity of her memoir’s title, and the anecdote assures the reader that the calf, like the author herself, survives against all the odds of human devaluation and transforms to become a productive part of prairie life.²⁸ For Bannert and many other of the memoirists whose texts are the subject of this study, agricultural myths failed to live up to settlers’ dreams, thus making it inevitable that a narrative consideration of self in environmental context would find expression in some things “other” than a “vast agrarian empire.” For many settlers, prairie life necessitated a rejection of notions of dominance and exploitation and the adoption of a “subsistence perspective” that regarded the natural environment as an active and productive partner in the work of survival. Whether in prairie gardens or in partaking of the literal “fruits of the earth,” the natural environment had presence, and recognition and knowledge of that presence allowed for both physical and psychological survival. Sometimes in the act of recuperation of a subsistence perspective there is recognition that an Anglo-centred belief in the need to “conquer” and “control” the productive capabilities of the prairie landscape, as well as the goal of transforming that landscape into an agricultural Eden, were not the only visions available to participants in western settlement. There had been “other” ways of relating to the natural environment, as evidenced by the (sometimes painfully generalized) lifestyles of the “Indian people,” and practising such ways would prove to be more valuable to prairie families in the gap between ideals of agricultural success and the reality of settlement life. It has long been recognized that the “dominator mode” of relationship between humans and nature leaves people “spiritually alienated” (Harrison 101) from the landscape, and many of the memoirists examined here prefer to represent an intimate relationship to nature as presence, as dynamic force inspiring self-reflection as well as cultural critique. But perhaps one of the most surprising elements of these women’s texts has to do with the amount of narrative space they devote to re-membering the animals who shared in the realities of prairie life. While settlement narratives have tended to privilege the lone human, memoir writers have re-visioned our focus onto the labouring and sacrificial bodies of those animals without whom the work of prairie life could never have been accomplished. In the restoration of some “other” subjects of western settlement, then, the writers examined here provide us with a more fully fleshed, more eco-conscious, re-vision of an agricultural story.

Sadie Victoria Landry Matthews, Regina, Saskatchewan, circa 1995.