Fickle Prairie Weather

After a less-than-snowy winter, after a long warmer-than-usual spring, after a long scorching hot and dry summer, we are now in autumn. The harvest season.

Too bad there’s not much to harvest.

The drought across the prairies – from Manitoba to Alberta – has brought back memories of the Dirty Thirties. A time of no snow, no rain, no crop, no income. A time of dust storms that obliterated visibility and buried shelterbelts and fence lines. A time when farmers abandoned their farms and moved elsewhere. Anywhere.

This year’s crops are stunted due to lack of rain and bleached or burned due to the intense heat. The heads are only partly filled, the kernels in them shrunken. It’s not a pretty sight.

Harvest started two to three weeks earlier than usual. Those crops that are worth combining are so short that the combine table barely clears the ground. Other crops aren’t even worth the cost; farmers have turned their cattle in to graze what little grew. They will be depending on crop insurance to see them through to spring. No farmer likes that, if only because it means next year’s premiums will rise.

Ranchers are in no better situation. Cattle have eaten pastures down to the dirt. Hay crops are abysmal. A cousin got just over 300 round bales off his hay field this year. Last year, he got over 1000. They’re selling off their cattle because there’s little hay to bale or to buy, and what is available is horrifically expensive. Ranchers, like farmers, are depending on government relief payments. They don’t like that any better than farmers like crop insurance.

I joked with my brother a few weeks ago that the rains would come as soon as the combines rolled into the fields. And they did. Last week, the rains came. Good steady showers and rains. The kind that should have come in May. Or June. Or July. They’re too late to help this year’s crops and pastures. They might help restore ground moisture for next year.

If more rain comes. And winter snow.

In 1986, my father had a bumper crop. He combined one field, 40 acres of Canada No. 1 Hard wheat in the bin. And then it started to rain.

It rained all September. Not just showers, but downpours. Constant. Steady. Occasionally, it stopped raining for a couple of days, just long enough for Dad to think, “If this keeps up a bit longer, I can get the rest of the crop off.”

He’d wake up the next morning to pouring rain.

The crops deteriorated. They were so wet, kernels sprouted in the heads.

At the end of September, the clouds rolled away, the sun came out, the breezes blew, and the crops dried out. Too late. The damage was done. The crop was ruined. What had been a bumper crop of Canada No. 1 Hard was now barely feed quality.

All this makes you wonder why farmers keep on farming. Why they persist in spite of fickle prairie weather.

I think it’s because there’s nothing else they’d rather do.

#PrairieWeather #Drought #PalliserTriangle #HarvestTime #ClimateChange #FarmingChallenges #TooMuchRain #HannaHistory #MargaretGHanna

Yet another rhubarb tale

One of our neighbours says she can’t grow rhubarb – it always dies on her. That must take a special talent. We can’t kill it. Not that we want to.

My Dad, age 6, and the giant rhubarb.

At every prairie homestead, occupied or abandoned, you can find caragana, honeysuckle and, yes, rhubarb. We had one long row of rhubarb in our farm’s garden. It was one of the first fresh foods, along with asparagus, that we harvested each spring. It was “heritage” rhubarb – the extremely sour green-stalked variety that my grandparents planted ca. 1917. My brother and I dipped stalks in sugar to eat it raw (doing so gave you bragging rights about how tough you were). Mom stewed it and made pies and puddings with it. She froze bags of it for winter use. There was never enough rhubarb to satisfy our longing for that delicious tart-sweet taste.

This spring we decided to move our rhubarb, in part because it was desperately in need of being divided and in part because it was in the shade of a large laurel willow tree. Also, we had plans for that corner of the garden which meant we would be unable to get to our precious rhubarb.

Rhubarb roots are not delicate, fragile, fibrous things. Oh, no. They are tough and thick as your forearm. They twist and twine around each other. They go half-way down to the molten core of the earth. No wonder it’s impossible to kill rhubarb (unless you are our neighbour). The roots were a mangled mess by the time we finished digging. Would the plants survive? Would they grow? Would we ever have fresh rhubarb again?

Foolish questions. Of course they survived. More to the point, they flourished. Last week, I picked our first crop and made rhubarb pie. Oh, that wonderful tart-sweet taste. There’s nothing like it.

Here’s my favourite recipe for rhubarb pie from Carol Acoose, a friend from my Regina days:

Rhubarb Custard Pie
4-1/2 cups of rhubarb, cut in 1″ pieces (more or less)
3 tbsp flour
3 eggs, beaten
1-1/4 cups sugar
1 tbsp soft butter
nutmeg to taste
pastry for single-crust pie

Mix all ingredients well. Pour mixture into pastry-lined pie plate. Bake at 400F for 15 – 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 350F and continue baking for 20 – 25 minutes or until rhubarb is tender, custard is set and top is golden. Let cool. Salivate! Smack your lips! Enjoy!

#RhubarbPie #Gardening #Cooking #HannaHistory #MargaretGHanna

Purple Gas

In a previous post, I referred to “purple gas.” Prairie people are very familiar with the term; people elsewhere, not so much.

Beginning in the 1940s, the Government of Saskatchewan (among others) exempted bulk fuel purchases intended for farm use from provincial tax. This could amount to a savings of 10 cents a gallon, not an insignificant amount back then. Since this fuel was to be used only in farm trucks and machinery, it was dyed purple in order to distinguish it from domestic-purpose fuel (colloquially known as “bronze”) used in cars and other non-farm vehicles.

We used purple in the farm truck which was easily distinguished from non-farm vehicles not only by mud and manure permanently adhered to its body but also by the “F” on the licence plate. Purple (and diesel) also fueled our tractors and combine, and they were not exactly “fuel efficient.” Consequently, we had two 500 gallon fuel tanks, one for diesel and one for purple. Every so often, Dad called the bulk station and soon Mr. Conlan, and later Mr. Lalonde, arrived with his big tanker truck and filled our tanks. The reek of gas and diesel hung in the air, and on Dad’s clothes, for hours after these visits and Mom refused to let Dad in the house.

It was not at all unusual for the RCMP to stop non-farm vehicles and inspect for illegal purple gas. Woe betide the person driving a car who was caught using it. Fines ensued. Vehicles could even be impounded.

But there was a work-around, according to my anonymous but totally reliable source (not that my anonymous but totally reliable source would ever do anything of the kind). A solution that only a farm kid could dream up, a farm kid who wanted to take his newest “squeeze” out for a spin but couldn’t afford to buy legit gas. Pour purple into clear glass jugs, set in the sun for a few days, and voila! The sun had bleached out the purple dye so, go ahead, Mr. RCMP, check all you want.

In the 1990s, the Saskatchewan government abandoned the tax exemption. Now farmers pay the tax up front and receive a rebate. Purple gas has become a thing of the past although some jurisdictions still use it.

Our family has a purple gas incident that involves our 1958 Ford, a neighbour couple, a ram, and an unsuspecting RCMP officer.

From about 1968 to 1975, my parents and their good friends, George and Muriel Morrison, jointly owned a flock of sheep. For the first couple of years, Dad and George “borrowed” a ram to, well, you know what rams do. They decided they needed their own ram, so off they went to Regina to the livestock auction to buy one.

During this time, my parents were living in Moose Jaw so that my brother could attend school. George also lived in Moose Jaw. Neither had a truck to bring back the ram, so a truck-owning friend agreed to meet them at the auction mart and ferry said ram back to the sheep yard.

All four drove into Regina (about 75 km away) in our 1958 Ford. Dad and George bought the ram. The friend with the truck did not show up. Now what to do?

Dad took the back seat out of the car and stowed it in the trunk (remember cars with giant trunks?). They covered the floor with plastic, and between Dad and George, with the help of a bucket of oats, they managed to wrestle the ram into the back where they crouched, uncomfortably, holding the ram in place. Ram was not amused. Neither were Dad and George but what else could they do?

Mom and Muriel got in the front seat, Mom driving. Half-way between Regina and Moose Jaw, she saw the flashing lights of an RCMP cruiser behind her. Being a good law-abiding driver, she pulled over and got out her licence and car registration.

“I’m checking for purple gas,” the RCMP officer said, and walked back to the gas cap. Just as he walked past the rear door, the ram stuck his head out of the window, gave an ear-splitting B-A-A-A-A in the officer’s face, and further expressed his displeasure with the situation by taking a big dump of you-know-what.

What Dad and George said cannot be repeated in public. The RCMP officer decided he didn’t need to test for purple gas. Mom drove home, windows rolled all the way down. The ram was delivered to the sheep yard. The car received a thorough cleaning.

We still laugh about it.

#PurpleGas #FarmFuelTax #HannaFamilyHistory #ChildhoodMemories #PrairieHistory #SaskatchewanHistory #MargaretGHanna

Disappeared Giants

In the Beginning:

When my grandfather homesteaded in 1909 in what was to become the Meyronne district, there were no roads, there was no railroad. Everything – mail, groceries, supplies, harness, wagon repairs, even machinery – had to be freighted from the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) mainline to the north, three days one way northeast to Moose Jaw or two days one way northwest to Morse. And yes, the grain the farmers grew also had to be freighted by horse and wagon over those same routes to either Moose Jaw or Morse.

That changed when the CPR, in 1912, started building the line from Weyburn clear across the province to Shaunavon. The “steel” arrived at Meyronne on September 3, 1913. Everyone was ecstatic. No more long-distance freighting. Now everything, including passengers, came and went by train.

Right behind the railroads came the grain companies building elevators to buy and ship wheat. Names like Patterson, Federal, UGG (United Grain Growers), Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator, Parrish and Heimbecker, Pioneer, Olgivie’s, Blanchard’s, Province, Saskatchewan Wheat Pool – these and others were familiar to every town, to every farmer.

Traffic Jam at Harvest Time, ca. 1925

Grain elevators stood out on the prairie, visible for miles, hence the nicknames “Prairie Sentinel” and “Prairie Giants.” They were massive structures, standing 150 feet tall; the later ones, even taller. They were built of old-growth fir 2″x4″s, laid on the flat and nailed together with 6″ spikes. Within that giant structure was a belt with scoops that lifted the grain from the receiving hopper up to an assemblage of distributing spouts that poured the grain into vertical bins. The “annex,” a secondary storage bin, was built likewise, and reinforced round-about with 2″x6″s to withstand the tremendous pressure of the hundreds of thousands of bushels of grain stored within them.

Meyronne elevators, as seen from our farm, ca. 1965

Photo courtesy of Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society

Grain elevators were symbols of hard work, of perseverance in the face of adversity, of wealth and prosperity. They defined the prairie economy and skyline. Saskatchewan billed itself as the “Breadbasket of the World,” and a line of elevators every six or seven miles gave credence to that motto. Towns took great pride in their “Elevator Row.” Every town had at least three elevators, some as many as a dozen. The greater the number of elevators, the more the townspeople boasted.

Every child growing up in a prairie town has memories of those grain elevators. Here are two.

I remember:

A trip to the elevator always began with Dad coming into the house and announcing, “Quota’s open.” A one-bushel quote meant he could sell one bushel of wheat for every acre of wheat he had planted. He hauled the auger to the granary and loaded the old blue International 3/4 ton truck full to the brim. I got to go with him, a special treat when you are ten or so. We drove the 1/4 mile into town, clunk-clunked across the railroad track and along the dirt trail paralleling the railroad, past the Co-op Bulk Station where farmers bought diesel and oil and “purple” gas (therein lies another tale) and up the gangway into the elevator and onto the grate and scale.

To my ten-year-old mind, the elevator was a place of wonder and mystery encompassed by ritual. We got out of the truck. Dad and Mr. McCaslin, the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Elevator operator, chatted about anything and everything – they were probably solving the problems of the world – while Mr. McCaslin weighed the truck and jotted the result into a book. That done, he said, “Okay, you can dump now.” Dad opened the hatch on the back of the box – if I was really lucky, I would be given that honour – and then activated the truck hoist. As the box rose up, the grain poured out through the grate into, into where? I stared down into the grate, trying to see where the grain was going. All I knew was that it was pouring into some dark mysterious place and somehow it was lifted up into the bins above. But which bin? How did Mr. McCaslin know where it was going? Meanwhile, he held his scoop under the golden stream until it was full and then dumped it into another scale. A bushel of wheat at optimum dryness weighs 60 pounds (forgive me using old-fashioned imperial measures but in the mid-1950s we knew nothing of metric). If that bushel weighs less, it is because it is contaminated with weed seeds. The weight of that measure determined how much the load was worth. That bit of information also was jotted down.

Once the last of the wheat was scraped out of the box, Mr. McCaslin weighed the truck again, the final figure needed to determine the value of the wheat we had just delivered. Truck full – truck empty = weight of grain / weight of one bushel (as measured above) = total number of bushels x price per bushel = a grain cheque and money in the bank! Who knew an elevator agent had to be a math whiz?

Mr. McCaslin’s son, David, remembers:

“Back then, grain was shipped in wooden box cars with sliding doors on the side. The doors had to be “coopered”, i.e., sealed so no grain could leak out. I have a lot of great memories about “coopering”! It was my first job as a teenager. My Dad (the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool) paid me $1.00 per car to “cooper.” A dollar’s pay for 45 minutes of work was big bucks for a thirteen-year old, way back in the day.

Dad would sometimes get five to ten boxcars at time. Having to stop and “cooper” the next car greatly slowed the process. I got quite skilled at it. Although it was pretty straight forward, it had to be done 100% correctly.

The CPR provided prebuilt slabs the width of the doors. Each slab weighed about 25-30 pounds and each door required about six to eight slabs. The process of loading slabs into the car and then nailing them in place took about 45 minutes. After the slabs were securely in place, the whole section was covered in sheets of industrial paper to ensure there was no leakage.

The last step was to get out of the boxcar after you had boarded up the doors. There was a two foot space at the top. You had to pull yourself up to the top (well over your head) and then slide sideways in order to get out.

Although it by no means qualified as a craft, I took great pride in it., The experience had a profound impact on my personal development. Among many things, it taught me about personal accountability, attention to detail and the importance of meeting deadlines. In hindsight, most significantly, it sparked the beginning of what became an adult relationship with my Dad.”

Today:

Grain elevators, like gambrel-roofed barns and church steeples, were such a part of the prairie landscape that we almost didn’t see them any more. Until they disappeared.

The 1950s and 1960s accelerated a decline that had begun during the Dirty Thirties. Highways were improved and now became the lifeline of prairie towns, replacing railways. Railway stations closed. Old people passed away and no young people took their place – they had fled to cities in search of education and work. Houses were shuttered. Businesses closed.

Many of the smaller grain companies had disappeared or been bought out by the big ones – Pioneer, Cargill and the Wheat Pool (now Agrium). By the 1990s, grain companies were building centralized monster concrete high-capacity inland grain terminals; they were more efficient and cost-effective. Farmers traded in their three-ton trucks and invested in semi-trailers to haul grain the 20, 30 or 40 miles to the terminal.

• 

• 

Now you see them, now you don’t. Left: Meyronne’s Elevator Row, 1917; Right: Same place, 2019.

Some elevators are still in use. Some were purchased by farmers and moved to their farms where they continue to serve. A few others have been converted into museums. Some crumble in place, abandoned, rotting, falling apart, home to pigeons and rodents. Most were tipped over and burned, a raging conflagration so intense that the outsides of houses a quarter-mile away were hot to the touch. The few remaining townsfolk cried as they watched what had once been a source of pride reduced to a pile of ashes. It was the end of an era.

As the grain elevators disappeared, so did the villages, visually if not in fact. Now, as you drive through southern Saskatchewan, you can’t tell if that cluster of trees and houses a half-mile or so off the highway is what was once a town or is merely a very large farmstead.

To those of us who remember, that vacant space pains.

#GrainElevators #PrairieGiants #PrairieSentinels #ChildhoodMemories #SaskatchewanHistory #PrairieHistory #MeyronneHistory #HannaFamilyHistory #McCaslinFamilyHistory #MargaretGHanna

Grandmothers

It takes a village to raise a child, so says the adage.

Or a grandmother, according to anthropologist Dr. Kristen Hawkes at the University of Utah.

Her thesis is as follows: grandmothers perform “motherly” duties, such as feeding and tending young children, thereby allowing mothers more time to forage for food and more energy to have more children. She developed this hypothesis while working with the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer society in Tanzania. Hadza mothers were able to forage for food and care for a child as long as they had only one child. The birth of a second child limited the mother’s ability to both forage and care for the existing child, and that’s when Grandmother stepped in to help.

From this hypothesis, Dr. Hawkes argues that grandmothers were a significant factor in the evolution of modern Homo sapiens because a grandmother enabled the birth of more descendants thereby increasing the probability of her genes surviving in subsequent generations. This, in turn, led to slower aging and increased longevity. Her reasoning is complex (you can read more about it here).

Another study published last year in Current Biology argues that the ability of grandmothers to be able to participate in child care was dependent on geographic proximity. The authors examined familial data from 17th and 18th century St. Lawrence River region (now the Province of Quebec). They found that the presence of a grandmother not only increased the size of the family but also the number of children surviving to age 15 (read about their study here).

Grandmothers did more than look after children. They were essential as midwives to help bring children safely into the world. Childbirth is one of the most deadly periods of a young woman’s life. It’s impossible to say what the death rate per 1000 live births was when we lived the hunter-gatherer life, but statistics from 18th century Europe and the USA paint a deadly picture. In England, the death rate was 10.5 per 1000 live births, dropping to 7.5 deaths in the last half of the 18th century. It was just as deadly in the United States, about 12 deaths per 1000 births, dropping to about 6 deaths per 1000 births in the 19th century. Even today, it is still the sixth most common cause of death among women aged 20 to 34. So, grandmothers who had survived childbirth knew from experience how to help their daughters successfully give birth.

Grandmothers were also the keepers of stories and traditions and knowledge (so are grandfathers, but sorry, men, this post is about grandmothers). These wise old women had seen it all; they’d lived through childbirth and disease, possibly even famine and war. They knew how to negotiate difficult situations and how to survive in times of scarcity. They were a pillar of security and confidence in an otherwise insecure world.

Unfortunately, our modern world has removed most of us from our grandmother’s sphere of care and influence. The need to move to where work is has splintered families across countries and continents. Social media provides one means of keeping in touch, but it’s no substitute for sitting snuggled up to your Granny while she reads you a story or feeds you your favourite cookies in defiance of your mother’s edicts or shows you photographs from the “old days.” Social media don’t allow you to have a sleep-over at her place, or help her weed her garden, or hug her or be hugged by her.

Grandma Hanna with baby Margaret

Like most kids growing up in the 1950s in prairie villages and towns who had their grandparents nearby, our paternal grandmother, Addie Hanna, lived only a quarter-mile from our farm, in the village of Meyronne. She played a significant role in our lives: she looked after us when Mother was in the hospital, we went to her little house after school for milk and cookies and a visit, I learned to ride a bike in her back yard, and we often slept over at her house just because we could. We had Sunday dinner at her place, or she at ours. She sat with us in church, she tolerated us at Ladies’ Aid meetings that Mom dragged us along to, and she tut-tutted over what she viewed as inappropriate behaviour. She was just “There,” and it wasn’t until I left for university that I learned how unusual it was to have a grandmother so close to hand.

Addie Hanna, ca. 1955

Perhaps that is the reason I decided to have her “narrate” my book, Our Bull’s Loose in Town!: Tales from the Homestead. It is a way of honouring all she lived through and all she contributed to our lives.

Thanks, Grandma.

#Grandmothers #Childbirth #ChildCare #HannaFamilyHistory #ChildhoodMemories #MargaretGHanna

Prairie Architecture: The Barn

(Written in response to Challenge Your Camera)

Every farm has one. They may be of different sizes and configurations, they might be build of different materials, but they all have the same function – a place to shelter livestock during inclement weather, a place where cows/sows/ewes/horses give birth, and a place to keep their fodder and bedding.

This is the barn I grew up with. My grandfather, Abraham Hanna, had it built in the summer of 1917, the year he moved the entire farmstead one mile, from the east side of Sec. 25 clear across to the west side, just north of the village of Meyronne, Saskatchewan. It was built under the direction of local carpenters, Norman Hisey and R. Leadley, who built to last – huge old-growth fir posts, beams, joists and rafters are the “bones” of the barn. Mr. Leadley had the misfortune of falling off the roof and, as my grandfather recorded in his diary, “was badly injured.” When the barn was finished, Mr. Hisey painted “Cloverdale Farm” on the roof.

It no longer houses livestock – the last horse died about 1949 and my father sold the last of the cattle about 1968 – but I remember it as a place filled with the aroma of manure and straw and chop and cattle. Those aromas seeped into the concrete floor and the fir beams, never to leave. Three milk cows – two Jerseys and a Guernsey – stood in the stanchions to be milked, their tails constantly switching back and forth, threatening to swat the unwary milker. The bull filled one of the box stalls both physically and psychologically (I was terrified of the monster). Two other box stalls were well-used come March and April as “birthing” rooms; I remember Dad coming in from the barn and announcing, “We’ve got a calf!” The barn cats ruled, semi-wild creatures that birthed in the mangers or the hay loft, that sallied forth to hunt mice and rats and gophers, that vanished in a trice when we walked in and peered suspiciously at us from their hidey-holes. The former horse stalls housed equipment or were boarded up to hold grain.

The loft housed the straw pile and the chop bin and flocks of pigeons and barn swallows and sparrows. The straw pile was our “mountain;” my brother and I trekked up and down it, rolled in it, threw handsful of straw at each other, and then spent an eternity picking straw and chaff out of our hair, our ears, our clothes. The chop bin – “chop” being oats chopped into a coarse, flour-like feed – was the bane of our chores. It always clogged in the chute, forcing us to hammer at it with the shovel until it dislodged and came thundering down, covering us from head to toe in an itchy cloud. We spat it out, dug it out of our ears, tousled it from our hair, slapped it off our clothes and then carted 5-gallon pails of it in our little red wagon the 100 yards or so to the chicken coop.

Hisey and Leadley built well – the barn is as straight and solid as it was 103 years ago. The neighbour who bought our farm respected the barn’s antiquity – he painted it and reshingled the roof. It now looks almost like new, although the roof no longer proclaims “Cloverdale Farm.”

ChallengeYourCamera #PrairieBarns #PrairieArchitecture #HannaFamilyHistory #ChildhoodMemories #MargaretGHanna

Christmas Traditions

Family Tradition #1: The Fence

Traditions – what would we do without them? Celebrations just wouldn’t be the same. It doesn’t matter what the occasion, we expect that certain foods will be served, certain practices followed and certain things said, and if they’re not, well, the whole shee-bang falls apart.

Traditions represent continuity through past, present and future. They cement family ties and provide a sense of security and normalcy even if all else is falling apart. They give us something non-tangible yet still very real to pass on to our children and grandchildren.

Traditions make sense to those who follow them; to outsiders, they might raise eyebrows.

Take the Christmas Fence that stood around our tree for decades. A fence? you say. Why a fence?

Once upon a time, many years ago, a certain toddler by the name of Margaret just couldn’t keep her hands off the shiny baubles that dangled off the Christmas tree, despite numerous admonitions and even punishments. They were so enticing, they demanded to be grabbed at, handled and, Oops! dropped and broken.

My Uncle George, who lived with us that year, came up with the idea of a fence. He cut a sapling into lengths, nailed them onto wooden bases, bored holes through them and strung two lengths of silver garlands through the holes.

I was informed that everything behind the fence was a “no-touch” zone. Apparently, I listened. However, if even the tiniest bit of a branch extended outside the fence, well, it was fair game.

By the time I had grown past the “grab and dash” stage, my brother had arrived, so once again the Christmas Fence was needed. By the time he had grown past that stage, the Christmas Fence was as much a part of the tree decorations as the lights and tinsel. For many years, once the tree was in place and decorated, we put the “snow” (a.k.a. white cotton batting) around the base and on top of it went the manger scene, the church, the snowmen made of styrofoam balls, the plastic Santa in his sleigh pulled by six reindeer (only six?), the pipe cleaner evergreen trees and, of course, the presents, all securely protected by the fence.

Yes, it got a bit ratty over the years, all that security work took its toll. Eventually – I don’t know when – it fell apart and was discarded. Ever since, the Christmas tree has looked so unfinished, so alone, so unprotected, without it!

Next time: Tradition #2 – she isn’t just any angel!

ChristmasTraditions #ChristmasTree #ChildhoodMemories #HannaFamilyHistory #ChristmasDecorations #MargaretGHanna

Chores!

“Margaret, today I think we should do . . .”

Uh-oh. I knew what that meant – Mom had a chore for me to do.

Mom loved the Royal “We.”

Doing chores for Mom often meant doing chores with Mom. And doing chores with Mom was always an adventure. It was a time for stories, jokes and laughter.

Especially jokes. Mom was never above pulling a fast one, even on her daughter.

Like one time when we were doing dishes – Mom washing, I drying. It devolved into a game of “I can wash faster than you can dry!”

I was keeping up but I seemed to be drying an inordinately large number of saucepans. Wait! Didn’t I just dry this saucepan?

“Mom!”

She laughed. “I wondered how long before you noticed.”

Instead of putting the saucepans away, I had put them on the stove. Which stood beside the sink. Within Mom’s easy reach.

Silly me!

#ChildhoodMemories #HannaFamilyHistory #NonFiction #FamilyHistory #Humour #DoingChores #MargaretGHanna

Women’s Suffrage

A Brief Account of How We Got from There to Here, and of Those Who Had to Wait. (Seven minute read)

This year, 2020, marks the centennial of the passing of the 19th amendment to the American Constitution that gave women the right to vote. It was the culmination of a seventy-some year-long battle. For seventy-some years, women had marched, petitioned, demonstrated, conducted sit-ins and hunger-strikes, lobbied and, ultimately, were arrested and jailed. They were beaten, spat upon, and called all sorts of nasty and derogatory names. They remained steadfast and continued to fight, in spite of all the odds and resistance, for what they saw as their right.

On August 18, 1920, the American Senate, by the narrowest of margins, passed the 19th Amendment that acknowledged women’s right to vote in federal elections.

If you were white, that is.

Black suffragists had found themselves excluded from the general suffrage movement because the latter did not want women’s suffrage to become entangled with race. That did not stop Black suffragists from continuing to fight for women’s suffrage. In theory only did the 19th Amendment accord voting rights to Black and well as white women.

But being able to vote was another matter. Because voting registration regulations are set by the individual states and not the federal government, states could determine who was and was not permitted to vote. They exercised that licence to create discriminatory rules that made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Black persons – male and female – to register to vote, instituting literacy and property standards that few could satisfy. It was decades before African-American women could exercise the same right that white women had enjoyed all those years.

Alas, in the U.S., universal suffrage seems to be under attack. Even now, some states are enacting restrictive and discriminatory registration rules that seemed designed to prevent African-Americans, or perhaps anyone of colour, from voting.

It seems universal suffrage is still a goal to be attained.

Two years previously, in 1918, Canadian women won the right to vote in federal elections. It, too, was a hard-won battle following 40 years of struggle, beginning with acquiring the right to vote in municipal elections. By the 1890s, women’s organizations across the country began agitating for expanded voting rights.

Women’s federal suffrage was granted in 1918 due in part to considerable support in the population and in part to Prime Minister Borden’s anxious need for his Unionist government to be returned to power. He had already granted limited voting rights to women whose husbands/sons/brothers were fighting overseas and those who were nurses or otherwise working for the war effort. When Borden’s government was returned to power, he fulfilled his promise. Women gained the right to vote in federal elections.

But only if you were white.

Indigenous people were considered to be wards of the state, similar to minors, and therefore were not eligible to vote. However, if an Indigenous person relinquished his/her Indian status and met certain property conditions, then he/she could vote. Few wanted to relinquish their status, fewer still met the property requirements. Even those who served in the First and Second World Wars, many with distinction, were not given voting rights. Finally, in 1960, after the Canadian Bill of Rights was adopted, the Canada Elections Act was amended to extend to Indigenous people the right to vote in federal elections.

Indigenous people weren’t the only ones barred from voting. The War Time Elections Act of 1917 disenfranchised thousands of immigrants from enemy countries as well as conscientious objectors. The Dominion Elections Act of 1920 – the act that gave white women the vote – continued to bar anyone who was not of European descent. People of Asian ancestry were denied the vote until after World War II.

Who could vote in provincial elections was determined by each province. In 1916, women in Saskatchewan won the right to vote. Unlike many women’s suffrage movements elsewhere, there was little formal opposition although there were nay-sayers.

The main protagonist was Violet Clara McNaughton, the first President of the Women Grain Growers in Saskatchewan. Beginning in 1913, the Women Grain Growers formed an alliance with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and other womens’ groups. Their first petitions were not considered, so in 1915, they established the Provincial Equal Franchise Board and requested rural and urban organizations to submit petitions. The Premier of the day, Mr. Scott, acknowledged there was little opposition to women’s suffrage but stated he had no electoral mandate to proceed with new legislation. Instead, he asked for more petitions. On Valentine’s Day, 1916, a delegation of women presented petitions totaling more than 10,000 names to the Legislature. The bill granting women the right to vote in provincial elections was given royal assent on March 14, 1916.

I never heard anything about the discussions that may or may not have happened in my home village of Meyronne during the suffrage movement. However, given what I remember about the temperament of the men and women of my grandmother’s generation, I am sure there were many heated exchanges. I imagined some of those “frank and open discussions” (to use a politician’s phrase) in “Our Bull’s Loose In Town!” Tales from the Homestead. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 15, “The Great Debate.” (Note: My grandmother, Addie Hanna, is narrating the tale.)

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“We argued about it at home, too. Every now and then, Abe would make some remark that we women should mind our own business and let the men get on with running the country. “Government is about managing the economy and making life and death decisions about international relations,” he’d say. “Women are emotional creatures. Women don’t think out matters coolly and calmly, and you need to think that way to make wise decisions.”

“You think this war is a wise decision?” I would retort. “You men have been running the world forever and all you give us is one war after the other with all our young lads getting killed. And for what, so that you can get us into yet another pickle?” Then I’d remind him that women were fighting the war too. Maybe not in the trenches, but many were nurses overseas and others were working in factories doing men’s work, so why shouldn’t we have the vote, too?

“The man is the head of the household,” Abe would say.

“Getting the vote has nothing to do with who’s head of the house,” I would reply. “And furthermore, if women could vote, perhaps we’d get prohibition in sooner. You men don’t seem to be getting anywhere with it.”

That’s when he would suddenly remember something important needed doing in the stable or some machinery needed fixing, and off he would go.

It was in early January of ‘16 that I read in the Meyronne Independent that Regina was finally going to give women the vote so long as they were British subjects. The report said that it had been flooded with one petition after another, one even had over 10,000 signatures. March of that year, we got the vote and only a month later I was pleased as punch to be able to vote in the referendum on prohibition. The results were overwhelmingly in favour of prohibition and I am sure that it was only because we women were finally able to vote.

I was in for a surprise come the federal election of ‘17. I thought since I could vote in provincial elections that I could vote in the federal election. October, I think it was, when Mr. Scott came around to enumerate us. I took a break from frying up potatoes for supper to pour coffee for both him and Abe.

“Sorry, Mrs. Hanna, I can’t add your name to the voters’ list,” he said.

“Why ever not? I thought women could vote,” I said, putting the coffee pot back on the stove.

“The only women who can vote are nurses overseas or those who have a relative serving in the armed forces,” Abe said.

“Now, let me get this straight. I’m intelligent enough to vote in provincial elections, but not in federal elections?” I turned back to the stove, gave the potatoes a good stir and then banged the spoon against the frying pan.

“The election is about the conscription issue, not about women getting the vote,” Abe said.

Mr. Scott cleared his throat. “Mr. Borden has promised that if his Unionist government is returned to power, he will extend the vote to all women.”

I wagged the spoon at both him and Abe. “In that case, you men had better make sure that Mr. Borden is returned to Ottawa.”

“Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Hanna,” he said, saluting. He got up from the table. “I’d best be getting on my way, Abe. I’ve still a few farms north of here to visit. Thanks for the coffee, Mrs. Hanna.”

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For further information:
https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/19th-amendment-1
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/suffrage

WomensSuffrage #19thAmendment #CanadaElectionsAct #SaskatchewanSuffrage #VioletClaraMcNaughton #Dr.EmilyHowardStowe #NellieMcClung #WomensChristianTemperanceUnion #WomensGrainGrowers #UniversalSuffrage #BlackSuffrage #IndigenousSuffrage #OurBullsLooseInTown #MargaretGHanna

The “Chocolate Squares” Caper

I made “Chocolate Squares” the other day. That’s what we called a certain decadent, toothachingly-sweet, calorie-laden, carb-ridden, chocolatey dessert when I was growing up. Only when I was well into my adult years did I learn they had another name: Nanaimo Bars.

“Chocolate Squares” have a special place in my memory bank because one day, when I was maybe 12, I decided to make them. On my own. No help from Mom. I was a “big girl” now.

We had received the recipe from Mrs. Hill, one of my grandmother’s friends. It was hand-written on a 3″x5″ file card. And, as with many recipes from people of that age, details were sometimes a bit sparse – they assumed you knew what to do.

I didn’t know that.

The first layer was no problem. I melted the butter, cocoa and sugar in the double boiler, then added the beaten egg, the crushed graham crackers, chopped nuts and coconut. Once it was well mixed, I spread it in the pan.

So far, so good.

The recipe for the second layer read “Spread on . . .”, so I spread on the icing sugar and sprinkled on the Bird’s Custard powder. Next came ½ cup of butter.

That’s when I realized there might be a problem. How do you spread ½ cup of butter, even when it is soft, into a powdery layer of icing sugar? Not only that, but then I was supposed to add some cream. Things did not look quite right.

Time to call in the expert. “Mo-om!”

Mom was in the living room or maybe in her sewing room doing something, certainly not housework. She was a staunch believer in the “Housework if necessary but not necessarily housework” philosophy. There were so many other things to do that were far more interesting or rewarding than – Ick! – housework.

She also had a warped sense of humour.

Mom walked into the kitchen, took one look at my messy spread-on-as-the-recipe-said layer and burst into peals of laughter.

I was devastated, traumatized. For life. (No, not really but it sounds more dramatic, doesn’t it?)

When she finally stopped laughing and had wiped the tears from her eyes, she said, “You’re supposed to MIX it before you spread it on.”

“But, but, the recipe didn’t say anything about mixing it!”

Like I said, some of those old recipes are a bit shy on details.

Anyway, Mom helped me scrape the mess into a bowl where I mixed it up, as I should have, and then continued with the rest of the recipe. The Chocolate Squares turned out just fine. Only Mom and I knew how they had almost been made.

#BakingAdventures #BakingDisasters #Baking #ChildhoodMemories #HannaFamilyHistory #NanaimoBars #MargaretGHanna #Humour