Strangers in the House by Candace Savage

Author:Candace Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2019-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

MEANWHILE, A FEW miles down the trail at Harris, everything was full steam ahead. No time for controversy or politics here, just work from sunrise to sunset. In short order, Cléophas had doubled his horsepower, from four beasts to eight, and acquired a small herd of milk cows and a couple of hogs. If only his old neighbors in Penetang could see him now: his granaries, his sheds and stables, the wood-framed annex he’d added to the family’s sod house. They’d needed the extra space, especially after the arrival of baby Antoinette, little Nettie, in the winter of 1906. Her mother, Philomène, was now thirty-six; her father, still vigorous and unstoppable, in his early sixties.

The younger men in the family were also getting ahead, and no one faster than Napoléon. Fully recovered from his illness and advancing through his mid-twenties, he took on the homestead requirements at a frantic pace, meeting and exceeding the annual targets by breaking fourteen, then forty, then sixty acres in successive years and seeding his expanding fields to crop. By the fall of 1907, three years into this venture, he had his own shack, his own stable and granary, his own team of draft horses. A man could curse at those sweaty, swaying backsides in English or French, whichever came naturally; the horses didn’t care about your religion or your ancestry. What mattered out here was keeping your eyes on the far horizon, keeping your plowshare in the ground. Do that, and you were guaranteed a prosperous future. Before you knew it, this land, which had cost you a tenner, would have doubled or tripled in value, and you, who had started with nothing, would be worth a fortune.

Whatever hesitation settlers like the Blondins had felt about coming west quickly faded away in the sunshine of their early success. “Quand on a bu de l’eau de la Saskatchewan,” a satisfied homesteader noted, “on ne peut plus se passer d’en boire.”6 Once you’ve drunk the water of Saskatchewan, you can’t stop drinking it. In this same state of near-intoxication, one of the Blondins’ new Scottish neighbors wrote to his family back home: “I am getting on fine and am liking the country very much and you can do anything you like out here and nobody says anything to you.”7 In this atmosphere of freedom and liberality, a descendant of impoverished crofters or habitant farmers could become a man of substance and means, entirely through the exercise of his own abilities.

On April 29, 1908, having fulfilled all the prescribed duties and filed the appropriate paperwork, Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin became the registered owner of his quarter-section homestead. Within months, his father and his brother Hercules had received their titles as well, with Alexandre following suit a few years afterward. The family, which had been land-hungry for generations, had suddenly amassed an estate of 640 acres in four separate plots, the equivalent of one square mile of farmland. And that was just a start. In one way and

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