(Written for the history of
Invermay, Saskatchewan, Canada)
My father, Thomas Walter Moores, arrived at Invermay[1],
Saskatchewan in the spring of 1906. It
was then the end of rail on the C.N.R. Line.
He was preceded the year before by his younger brother, Samuel Moores,
and his wife Margaret. With them came
Walter’s oldest son, Leonard, and Len’s cousin, Harold Morphew. All except Harold took up homesteads. Samuel’s was on Section 21.32.8 and by the
time Walter arrived Sam had acquired horses, cattle and a big flock of
sheep. Having been a butcher in England
he went on with the same occupation – butchering, packing the meat in his
democrat and travelling round a large territory to supply the families settled
here.
When Walter arrived with his
second son, Eustace Walter, they located on the north and south quarters of
Section 16.32.8. All these were within
the Invermay municipality. (There was
no Rama[2]
at the time) and the boys put up a little one room log shack with sod
roof. They lived in it during the
winter months as they HAD to do in order to “prove up” and get title to the
land. In the summer they worked on the C.N.R.[3]
in order to obtain a little money for food for the rest of the year. The ties and rails had just been flung down
on the prairie sod. When rain came they
were floating on a sea of mud! Father
and the boys were part of a gang of men who shovelled gravel down from the
freight cars loaded with it and pushed it under the ties. What
a hard job – day after day – mile after mile.
But they had to do it in order to live.
My mother, Lillian Moores,
who was left behind in England until May, 1908, when with her three youngest
children, Helena, Cyril and myself, Olive, boarded the “Empress of Britain” and
sailed off for the New Land. We
crossed, by train, the vast miles from Montreal to Invermay where Father met us
with a team of oxen and a big farm wagon – borrowed from Uncle Sam!
Invermay then consisted of
Walter Tulloch’s store, with Post Office therein. Monty Bergstrom was the young assistant; the general store of
Adam, George and Jack Neuert (from Portage la Prairie); the hotel, owned and
operated by Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Turner – I believe the same building still
serves as an hotel. Thomas Condon was
the blacksmith; we were invited to the Condon home for a cup of tea before
driving out to the bush and slough[4]
area which was Father’s homestead. We
stopped at Uncle’s big log house on the way where Auntie had a good meal for
us, and our brothers were waiting for us.
Then we all walked down to the ‘new home.’ There was snow still lying in
the bushes and we travelled along a trail with prairie fires burning all around
us.
By the spring of 1908 they
had managed to erect a four-room log house with sod roof, hard packed dirt
floor in back kitchen, and a tiny hole in the ground for a cellar. This house was built with green, unpeeled
logs and plastered, just between the logs, with clay and straw. Later, the logs shrank and plaster fell out
every year so that it had to be done each fall anew. It was a terrible house, really, for a lady from England who had
lived in a city all her life. Father
had done his best but he was no carpenter.
So we came to the house which
was to be our home for fourteen years.
The beds were built-in bunks made of poplar poles; the rough board
floors had wide cracks in them as they were made of green lumber, which later
shrank. The house was surrounded with
sloughs and the little cellar hole under it was full to the floor with water
every spring. In winter it was filled
with potatoes packed in hay to keep them from freezing, but they usually froze
in spite of that, and the smell of boiling frozen potatoes made me feel ill; in
memory it does to this very day!
The well was on slightly
higher ground about two hundred yards away; it was about eight feet deep and,
with no cribbing, was constantly caving in.
One spring, the water had a distinctly ‘queer’ taste and, when Mother
complained, Father bailed out the well and found 27 dead rabbits at the
bottom. It is a wonder we were not all
sick, or even dead! Often mice or frogs
would get in there and die – then the job of cleaning it out was undertaken
again.
Father had little idea how to
set about building or, indeed, any phase of farming! So it was a continual struggle to manage all the years they were
on the farm. We always had food because
we raised a big garden, had cows to milk and even had our own wheat ground for
flour and porridge at a mill in Sheho, about twenty miles south on the C.P.R.[5],
a long two-day journey with oxen. My
brothers worked away from home all the spring and summer months, being part of
a telephone gang putting in the first poles and lines and installing phones in
and around Yorkton and Saltcoats.
Leonard became the camp cook, thus starting a lifetime of cooking as a
chef in some of the big hotels in Winnipeg and Brandon, Manitoba, and Edmonton
and Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta.
Eustace became very efficient in telephone construction. He became interested in electronics and, at
home in the winter, he took a correspondence course in the subject, sending in
examination papers each month. He passed
each test with good marks and received his diploma. So it came about that our family had the first telephone in the
district, as my brother built and installed it himself, between our home and
the Samuel Moores’ home. He ran a
connecting wire from the house to the nearest barbed wire fence and thence the
messages ran along fences to my uncle’s house.
It was quite an event in the neighbourhood and this served us until the
Government phones were installed, which was not until after the 1st
World War (if I remember rightly). By
that time, my dear brother had gone to serve his country in France. He did not return, but is “forever part of
Canada” over there.
During the war my older
brother (Leonard) came home to help on the farm, but he was a cook and no
farmer – so was next to useless. I
carried on my usual chores – rounding up the cows, milking them and separating
the milk. One day, while raking hay
under a very hot sun, I suffered sunstroke!
My aunt who had spent time in India knew what was the trouble. I was put to bed and Mother nursed me till I
recovered. Mother was almost like a
doctor. We had various accidents and
illnesses. My brother was cleaning out
the mower blade when the horses moved slightly and the tips of several fingers
were sliced off! We carried him in on a
ladder, as he had fainted. Mother
replaced the fingers and bound them up and they seemed to function
normally. Another day, when Father was
trying to lead an unruly cow, she hooked her horn into his arm and ripped it
from wrist to elbow. Again “Dr.” Moores
had to operate and, although sore for a long time, my father fully recovered.
As there was a shortage of
men to work on road making and repair, the road “boss” asked me if I would
drive a team. My father was working on
it and they were building a piece of road near our farm so I agreed. The boss let me drive his big team of
Clydesdales of which he was inordinately proud. He was very particular about who handled them, so it was quite a
feather in my cap to be even given the chance.
I must have satisfied him as he told me I handled them better than the
last man he had. He paid me off from
his own pocket (in the usual way it came off the worker’s taxes). This team was on an ordinary small scraper –
later on they used the big “frez-noise” with a four-horse team on them.
But this is supposed to be a
history of Invermay, not just my family.
So I should like to mention the names of some of our neighbours in those
very early days. On the farm next to us
were Mr. and Mrs. Turberfield with their three children – Leslie, Jim and
Olive. They were very nice people but
did not stay in the area long; they moved down to Yorkton and farmed there. Mr.
and Mrs. Chesley Willis were next to the Turberfields – our very good
friends. Most of you who read this book
will have known Mrs. Willis and her three sons, Bruce, Don and Jason who have
lived here all their lives.
I wonder if there are any
people left who remember the Abbotts?
Miss Abbott and her two brothers, Charles and Harry, who lived close to
Rev. Neil Morrison. I believe one of them
died and the other two returned to their point of origin, but I have no idea
where that was, or have forgotten.
Their farm was taken over by Jim Young whose wife, May, was one of “the
Bradley girls.” Another girl, Grace
Bradley, was my age and we were friends.
When I arrived in Victoria in 1949 I found her here, but she passed on
not long after.
Mr. and Mrs. Condon – the
blacksmith – had a splendid farm on high rolling land north of Chesley
Willis. My father had passed by those
sections on his way out to Section 16. The
latter was low-lying and almost completely covered with water and scrub. So little did he know how to judge what was
desirable farm land, having been in the grocery business all his life, and now
over fifty years of age, it must have been terribly hard to make such a drastic
change, to learn a completely new way of life.
Other neighbours and good
friends were Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Price, Welsh people who came to Saskatchewan
via Chicago and were later followed by their Chicago neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Harry
Atkins and their son and daughter, Fred and Florence. The brother of Mrs. Price was William Davies. They lived on the next farm to Prices and
had two girls and a boy. The son was
Llewellyn Davies.
My parents lived in the log
house until after the war and the boys came home; took over a frame house
vacated by brother Len, later moved into Rama for a few years, then moved on to
Lethbridge, Alberta, for their last years on earth. That was a very happy time for them, I believe, near their two
sons[6]
and grandchildren. They are buried in one grave in the Lethbridge Cemetery.
There are many more of the
old-timers of Invermay and Rama that I could tell about … but time does not
permit. My brother Eustace is buried at
Ypres, Belgium; Leonard at Royal Oak, Victoria, B.C.; Nora Churchill at Wadena,
Sask.; sister Helena at Lethbridge, Alta.; brother Cyril at Edmonton,
Alta. I am the only one left of the
Walter Moores immediate family. My time
will soon come, no doubt, but I am ready for the joyful reunion.
Olive O. Lockhart
[1] Invermay, Saskatchewan: Small town in the Province of Saskatchewan in Canada, near the larger center of Yorkton. This is the brief story of one family among the early settlers in that area.
[2] Rama: a neighboring town with which the family had
connections.
[3] Canadian National Railway
[4] Slough – a small, shallow body of water often found on the prairies.
[5] C.P.R. – Canadian Pacific Railway.
[6] Sons Leonard and Cyril and their families.