SASKATCHEWAN, PRAIRIE NILE

Articles

MARJORIE WILKINS CAMPBELL

UP NEAR the Great Divide of the Rockies, at the foot of the ageless Saskatchewan Glacier, in t he shadow of Mounts Athabaska and Saskatchewan, a cascade of pure ice water tumbles toward the foothills, gathering to itself a lacy network of other putty-colored streams until it grows into a mighty, many-forked river that knifes through the mountains and onto the rolling ranchland.

On the Prairies its channel bit«* er and deeper into the soft rock, doubling hack on itself a thousand times in an agonizing, meandering course across the wheat Ixdt until it becomes a vast fan of great twisting ditches which drain off the only water the country knows.

Then, united again as a single stream, it winds its lonely way through a blanket of jack pine to the muskeg 1,000 miles from its

The Blackfeet knew there was a spell on this mighty river in the days when it was the highway of the West. Today the curse of wasted water and erosion still hangs over the Saskatchewan

source where, in a rush of furious rapids, a mile wide and roaring like a trapper on a spree, it throws itself into Lake Winnipeg.

This is the Saskatchewan, the continent’s sixth largest river, the great aorta of the Prairies, the life stream that, drains 150,000 square miles of Canada’s food and forest belt, in many ways the North and South Branchesof theSaskatchewan are the Prairies. The river flows in a wobbly “Y” from its sources in the Rockies through the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and half of Manitoba, dropping a full 5,000 feet in its 1,200mile course. Its main branches start within a few miles of each other and bulge out across the foothills—the North Branch flowing through Edmonton, the South Branch linking the waters south and east of Calgary—to meet east of Prince Albert. There the united streams, the base of the “ Y,” flow on together to Lake Winnipeg.

To the people who live on its banks -farmers, ranchers, housewives, oilmen, miners, townsmen, trappers and lumbermen—it is more than a river. It is a way of life—free, easy, hard, cnaiienging.

The Blackfeet believed there was a spell on the river. “Whoever drinks its water will return to it,” they warned. If there is a spell, there is also a curse. On the arid Prairies, which can produce 400 million bushels of wheat in a year, water is more precious than gold. Yet each spring the Saskatchewan’s South Branch carries off the flow of melting glaciers, winter’s snows and summer’s scant rainfall before the needed moisture has a chance to seep into the rich soil or raise the water table. It is Canada’s No. 1 irrigation challenge, at once the farmer’s hope and despair.

Its deep valleys pattern the rolling steppes and the high billiard table plains. It drapes a winding garland of foliage on towns like Edmonton and Saskatoon, Medicine Hat and the Battlefords. It is the happy break in the monotony of the prairie landscape. But the long stretches between bridges separate

neighbors as surely as a medieval moat.

It. is lonesome water. Yet fewer than 200 years ago it was one of the world’s most exciting waterways.

It was the highway of Canada, the road that led to the discovery of the Northwest. The rapids at its mouth beckoned François and Louis Joseph de la Vérendrye to paddle west one warm day in the early summer of 1742 on their voyage of discovery to the foothills of the Rockies. From then on, its waters—swift and swollen in spring, shallow and muddy in August, floated the canoes of thousands of voyageurs who plundered the lush beaver meadows on its banks and steered their pelt-laden craft down its winding course.

A Sheep-Headed “Sea” Serpent

ON the North Branch explorer Peter Pond cached the first supplies of pemmican (dried meat) to inaugurate a supply line of the 90-pound, hide-covered sacks which are still occasionally turned up today. Samuel Hearne, of the Hudson’s Bay Company, paddled up the Lower Saskatchewan in 1774 to build Cumberland House, the first, permanent white settlement west of the Bay. David Thompson with his half-hreed wife, Charlotte, and their latest dusky baby, struggled up the tortuous shoals of the North Branch to discover the river’s source.

And yet today you can’t, make a reservation for a boat trip anywhere on the river. Except, for the Dieppe landing boat which supplies Cumberland House and a string of small motor boats, the only reminder of the river’s historic past is the occasional lover’s canoe. The 202-foot, stern paddle wheeler Marquis, largest and proudest of a dozen which plied the river before the turn of the century, has rotted away at Prince Albert. The screw steamer Lilly, assembled at Grand Rapids by workmen from the Clyde in 1874, was wrecked long ago at Medicine Hat. The shoals, the spring floods and the crushing

ice boulders were too much for the boat builders.

Now only the occasional adventurer travels the water. In 1947, 27-year-old Peter Burt.t, of Victoria, B.C., fulfilled a boyhood dream when he paddled down the North Branch in an aluminum canoe—the route which fur traders and explorers had once used to cross the continent.

Today you can see the Saskatchewan by plane, train, car, bus, horseback or on foot— by any means of transportation other than the river itself. The best place to start is at one of the river’s sources in the Columbia Icefields.

You can reach the spot by car or bus from Banff or Jasper. Men like Jim Simpson, of Bow Lake, who has lived among the glaciers for 50 years, are watching the ice slowly recede. They saw the glaciers move back 250 feet in the 1945-47 period. What will this steady recession mean to the Saskatchewan’s flow?

No one worries too much, for the river still carries enough water to excite Ottawa with huge irrigation schemes. The silt that settles along the curves of the upper reaches of the North Branch even carries a little gold; a stubborn panner can make his $5 a day at Rocky Mountain House or near Edmonton. When Robert L. Ripley heard that. Edmonton used Saskatchewan River gravel for its concrete he announced in his “Believe It or Not” panel that “the streets of Edmonton are paved with gold.”

The North Branch escapes from the Rockies through the great Saska r.chewan Gap, easily visible on a clear day from Rocky Mountain House. Members cf Edmonton’s Canoe Club like to ship their craft up to this town within sight of the mountains and let the river carry them home.

On this stretch of water one of the Saskatchewan River’s “sea serpents,” a sheepheaded monster with a long thrashing tail, is sometimes reported. Cynics say he’s probably a large sturgeon that got away, though local ranchers Continued on page 26

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The Saskatchewan, Prairie Nile

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insist he’s gobbled their livestock.

Edmonton is the first of the prairie cities strung out along the river’s tawny course like beads on a string. Here, as everywhere, the Saskatchewan plays its two-faced role—angel and ogre.

The North Branch is the city’s only source of drinking water and in the winter it is the scene of the annual ice harvest when great blocks are cut for summer use. The river gives Edmonton its winding boulevards, like Saskatchewan Drive with a view for every home. It also gives it the flat treeshaded parkland under its high banks, the four bridges which span it and the lovely curves which break the prairie monotony. In the early days Edmonton bush pilots with float or ski planes used it as a landing strip.

Yet the river is a devourer. Edmonton children learn early to keep away from it. It’s illegal to swim in the river yet scores of youngsters have been drowned by its dangerous undertow and treacherous current. When U. S. swimming champion Marvin Nelson gave an exhibition in the river in the 30’s he warned that even the strongest swimmer should shun it. The High Level Bridge is still Edmonton’s favorite “suicide leap.”

In 1915, during Edmonton’s worst flood, railroad cars loaded with sand were used to weigh down the Low Level Bridge and save it from the river’s fury. A group of sea cadets last summer had their 30-foot power ketch hurled on a gravel bar, canceling a trip to Prince Albert after only 15 miles of navigation. In the old days steamboat dance cruises often ended abruptly when the dancers had to get out on a sand bar and push.

Devon, the first model town on the Prairies, lies on a lovely bend of the North Branch. It is named after the Devonian Limestone in which the great Alberta oilfields are located. Nothing like Devon ever happened in the West before, but it is the river that gives it its charm. The town, 15 miles southwest of Edmonton, is bounded by water on three sides. To the north the sheer banks are gaudy with the rich colorings of the local strata. In autumn aspens turn yellow and the river, by then having deposited its silt, is blue as the sky. Oil well sites are located on the brink of the south bank. One is on the river’s shore 200 feet below the town. Now there is talk of drilling for oil on the river's islands.

Safety From the Scalpers

Downstream from Edmonton and past the Alberta Saskatchewan boundary the North Branch separates the historic town of Battleford (North West Rebellion, 1885) from North Battleford, centre of a flourishing agricultural district. Seen from the air the river meanders across a patchwork of fields. Its valleyB and those of the confluent Battle River are one lovely curve after another, of wooded slopes and stretches of wide horizons. Many of the older buildings on the banks have a few boards salvaged from the flatbottomed boats which came to their end on the river’s shoals.

The North Branch swoops in a deep, southward curve between the Battlefords and Prince Albert. Many of the Prince Albert lots are old river lots— about 10 chains wide by two miles long- surveyed this way for early settlers who built their homes close together and on the river for protection from the Indians.

Here, as all along the river, there is great excitement over the perennial spring gamble on the ice breakup. In April no one breathes normally until the earth suddenly shudders and the long silent stream comes to life.

Prince Albert hasn’t been so happy about Cole Dam, the structure about 28 miles from town which slipped off the river’s old mud bed three decades ago to put the city, and many of its citizens, seriously in the red. Cole Dam was an ambitious scheme to produce power, but the river wasn’t ready to be tamed. All that remains is one large concrete spur around which the North Branch swirls defiantly. Today it is a minor tourist attraction but most oldtimers prefer to remember nothing about it whatever—especially those taxpayers who are still paying for it.

Just beyond Prince Albert the South Branch of the Saskatchewan joins the North.

The South Branch starts out as the Bow River in the Rockies, gathering up the waters of Bow Lake and Lake Louise. It is the green stream which romps past the CPR tracks and the highway between Lake Louise and all the way down to Calgary. The big foothills ranchers all use its streams for stock watering. Beside it Calgary has built its clean buildings and its famous Stampede. Its waters lap the high boots of back-aching irrigation farmers and it has helped boost Southern Alberta’s seed production to the highest in Canada.

Here It Meets an Oldman

Bubbles breaking its surface at Medicine Hat back in the 80’s led to discovery of the subterranean lakes of natural gas which free Southern Albertans from having to shovel coal and ashes for their furnaces. That casual discovery today generates electrical power for homes, for the high temperatures required to fire bricks and pottery, for pumping water to irrigate alfalfa fields. It led to the myth that Medicine Hat never turns off its lights because it’s cheaper to leave them burning.

The Bow becomes the South Branch proper when it meets the Oldman River between Lethbridge and Medicine Hat. Here it becomes the river of the Prairies, the only real river in the whole arid land where rainfall is low and summers are almost tropical. Yet it has brought the country its world wheat championships and helped develop the tough nourishing grass which builds beef steers and sheep.

During the dry cycles, when rainfall drops below 16 inches, the river is a torment to women who need water to rinse their babies’ diapers and the despair of men who have not any means of lifting it from 200 to 500 feet to water gardens and fodder and livestock. Then the dust blows, crops fail, cattle starve unless they are fed stored or imported fodder, and people make poignant jokes about children of four or five who never saw a rainstorm.

Surveys show that Saskatchewan water could Ire used to irrigate about 3 million acres. Three million acres where soil wouldn’t blow, where food crops (like sugar beet) and fodder were assured year after year would go a long way toward combating the dry cycles and stabilizing prairie economy. Now fewer than 500,000 acres #f the prairies are irrigated.

Well-known irrigation expert, Dr. L. B. Thomson, director of the Prairie F’arm Rehabilitation Act, says the development of the untapped resources of the Saskatchewan River is “one of the most important and complex problems in the field of resources manage-

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ment with which Canada is faced

today.”

Accustomed to wide horizons people along the South Branch take superlatives for granted. The Mitchell’s 50,000-acre ranch below Medicine Hat, right on the river, is only one of many huge holdings. Great herds of whitefaced Herefords are as common as big flocks of sheep; wheat fields are a mile square; and recurrent dust storms penetrate storm windows that most folks washand put up again each spring. Well-known rancher William T. Smith built the largest barn in the world near Leader. There’s still plenty of room to breathe, still a laugh at the old joke, “Who’s your nearest neighbor?” and the old reply, “God!” Along the Saskatchewan the population averages from one to six to the square mile.

Towns on the South Branch are few and far between, and there aren’t many bridges, except at Medicine Hat and Saskatoon. People living north of Swift Current have been agitating for an improvement on the old four-vehicle ferry at the Landing for so long that they believe the work now well under way is a mirage. Sometimes there are as many as 200 vehicles a day to cross.

In many places the river is a barrier which keeps people four or five miles apart from knowing each other. One woman says she has lived beside it for 23 years without ever crossing. She could swap similar experiences with many other women who have looked down at the swift, treacherous tawny stream and wondered where it went, where it came from.

A Pulse for Saskatoon

Past the town of Elbow, near the site chosen for the big South Branch dam, the river meanders on, deep in the valley it has cut through the soft rock, past wind chargers and grain elevators and the endless blanket stitching of telegraph poles, on to Saskatoon.

Saskatoon lies on the edge of the arid prairie known as Palliser’s Triangle. Here, in the early days, pioneers used to stand on the river bank and attempt to exhort passengers coming down on the steamer May Queen to stop off and make their town a great city. The river is Saskatoon’s pulse. Its bridges are part of its character. In summer, youngsters in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve train on the dammed-up stretch of river below the bridges. In winter, people learn to skate below their overhead strings of lights. Saskatoon’s soil is rich enough, with the aid of river water, to produce gladioli blooms that regularly exceed 20 inches. The river’s left bank is a worthy site for the grey stone buildings of the University of Saskatchewan.

Yet, here as everywhere, the river can be a monster. Old-timers still remember the spring of 1904 when the citizens of the new town were first gloating over the new CNR bridge. On April 15 great boulders of ice broke away from the swollen stream. The acres of ice and the rush of water broke off the bridge's wooden piers like pipestems. With a terrible crunching sound the first span gave

The cry spread across Saskatoon, “The bridge is going down.” The whole town stopped work and rushed to the river bank to see the river tear away span after span, to watch the rails dangle in mid-air briefly before they went down with the current.

It was a terrible setback to Bettlers waiting with all their belongings to cross over to the quarter section of their dreams. As a former mayor put it: “Bad enough that cars might be stalled on the east side of the river but a

thousand times worse that they should be stranded at Regina.” Many of the settlers never reached Saskatoon but went elsewhere.

Nearly 50 years later the hazard is lessened only by improved methods of combating it. In 1947 the big railway bridge at St. Louis, north of Saskatoon, was saved by flat carloads of gravel rushed to the scene to hold it down. A dam or weir has been built at Saskatoon, allowing some boating on the river. But the current still takes its toll. Just last year three university students went over the top of the weir in a canoe; one was drowned.

Water for Pea Soup Peas

The South Branch flows past Maple Grove Farm at Rosthern where Seager Wheeler five times won world wheat championships. “Sig” Wheeler started out in a sod shack, like most pioneers 40 to 50 years back, and ended up with anLL.D.from Queen’s for his contributions toward hardier wheat. He faced hail, rust, frost and drought with the faith and optimism which are part of the Saskatchewan way of life. He met the challenge.

It was near Rosthern that big Tom Houri swam the river with dispatches from General Middleton at the time of the second Riel Rebellion in 1885. Gen. Middleton had to get word to Col. Irvine of the North West Mounted Police, at Prince Albert. The river was a torrent of spring floods and jagged ice floes. There was no other way to cross. So Tom stripped off his clothes, stowed them and the dispatches in a small cradle raised above a miniature raft, and took the string between his teeth. Plunging into the water he pushed his way between chunks of ice and swam to the far shore, his body smashed and bleeding. After that he walked 16 miles to reach the North Branch at besieged Prince Albert.

The two Branches, so close together at Rosthern, meander side by side in a two-toned ribbon for miles before they merge to form the base of the “Y.” Each year about 18 million acre feet of water flow by here on the way to Lake Winnipeg and Hudson Bay, most of it in a mad springtime fleod.

From the air the steep, eroded banks look like the back of a horned dinosaur. Settlements peter out to end near Nipawin, the busy agricultural settlement on the edge of the forest, the community which grows, among other crops, peas which are shipped to Quebec to make habitant soup. At Nipawin the river leaves the farming land behind and is into frontier country.

The main river has the look and the smell of the North as it goes below Nipawin, a long length of rickrack braid on a vast stretch of dark green jack pine. Here and there the water shows white at its many rapids. Gradually the steep banks lower until the white-painted buildingH of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Cumberland House gleam through the green and water, 160 air miles downstream from Prince Albert.

At Cumberland House post manager Ed McLean and Mrs. McLean talk about “coming in” and "going out,” their only contact with “outside” being by air or on the river. The latest river craft is a sturdy landing boat which saw service at Dieppe. The mountie's house and that of the government are, like most of the Indians’ homes, built of logs. So is the little hospital where Indian women are encouraged to come to have their black-eyed babies.

The fur trade is the business of Cumberland Houw and that trade still turns out men who are not easily forgotten.

“I'm 83,’’ one fur trader remarked

not long ago. “All my life I’ve made hard trips on the trap lines. I’ve eaten my moccasins to keep from starving, cut away gangrene with my hunting knife, suffered heat and cold, blackflies and mosquitoes. I’ve got 75 children here and there along the traplines. And I’d like to take one more trip and make it an even 100.”

A practical joke of early fur-trade days was to let a newcomer steer his canoe into a false channel and then guffaw as he retraced his way and searched for the channel of the main stream. To anyone flying the lower Saskatchewan today the joke looks far too practical, for there are at least 100 channels. Each year they change.

In the low country the river becomes a wilderness of fine veins threading through the jack pine and muskeg. At The Pas (elevation 843, population 3,800) log booms and small boats force planes to land on nearby Grace Lake. Planes come in often from the south and wing north to the ore mines at Flin Flon and Sherridon and Lynn Lake. Tom Lamb operates a large transport company founded in 1900, and has his own Norsemen. The whistle of the sawmill cuts the day into tidy portions.

The Saskatchewan helps give The Pas its winter entertainment—the dog derby. Cries of “Mush!” echo across the still white path of the river to mingle with the whir of ski-equipped planes and the roar of tractors. And when the nights are long, as they are up at the 54th parallel, The Pas takes to square dancing, calling off in mixtures of French, Cree and English to gay and happy crowds.

Below The Pas and to the north of the blue Pasquia Hills the Saskatchewan widens into 40-mile Cedar Lake where the river drops the thousands of tons of silt it is constantly moving from the Prairies and parkland. Then, when you think it has completely lost itself, it becomes river again, clear and blue as nowhere else on its course.

For a few miles then the Saskatchewan runs down a deep, wide channel through the new hard rock, a channel down which pours all the drain-off of the Rockies from Montana to the Icefields, from its 150,000-square mile basin.

“Go Softly by That Riverside”

At the mouth, where the mighty Saskatchewan empties into the inland sea of Lake Winnipeg, lies Grand Rapids, once the greatest obstacle of all to the voyageurs.

From the icy cascades at its source, down the twisting, tortuous branches, down the rickrack of the main stream that loses itself in Cedar Lake, to the great rush of clear water at Grand Rapids always the Saskatchewan will be part of the reality honored by white men and brown-skinned natives in the treaty phrase, “While the sun shines and the water runs.”

Rudyard Kipling sensed what it means to the tourist and the rancher, the hush pilot and the busy farmer’s wife, what it meant years ago to the trader and the voyageur in whose children’s veins ran the blood of the two races who have made it home. Kipling summed up the Blackfoot saying and the challenge more aptly than he knew:

"Go softly by that riverside or, when you would depart.

You'll find its every winding tied and knotted round your heart',

fíe wary as the seasons pass, or you may ne'er outrun

The wind that sets the yellowed grass ashiver 'neath the sun.” *