Lizard Lake ...and Land. Part 5

Continuation of my education in winter of 1910-1911

At last I went to Lizard Lake to meet my parents, brothers and sister there, but my stay there was very short. I was taken to Arelle, 35 miles East of Lizard Lake to continue my English education. Brother Ivan took me there to one Russian farmer by the name “Big Mike Rabuka” where I had to stay and from where I had to walk to school with his children. While I lived there that winter so I felt it was my duty to work to repay them for my stay at their place. So very early every morning while everybody were still asleep yet I woke up, lit the lantern and was gone to clean the horses and cattle farms and throw the manure on a pile outside farms.

After cleaning manure from the farms or stables, I return to the house where by this time everybody is awake already and Mrs. Rabucka is making breakfast. After breakfast we are off to school, which was situated quite a distance from their place in the open country as there was no town of Arelee yet at that time. What time I was getting up in the mornings, I don’t know as not only watch, but being immigrant boy I didn’t even have decent or enough clothes to wear.

One time on the way to school my feet was so frozen I could not feel them, and when in the school they began to thaw, it seems as my shoes is going to burst. On Saturdays, had to cut firewood with a buck saw on a saw horse, as to encourage me one of the girls pointing to pile of many cords of already sawed firewood said, that your brother Eli did all that. He sure did it, as when he came to Canada in the fall of 1909, so that winter 1909-1910 he worked for this farmer.

My education had no progress at all here, as their home language was Russian and I had no home work at all. So I don’t think that I learned more than a few words during this winter. One time when we were coming from school through the yard of one Englishman, one of the girls said to him “you must go too.” What those words meant, I did not know. Later I found out from them, that there was some kind of gathering and she said to him he should go there too.

While I had no progress in education I had one progress in raising lice on my head. My hair was swarming with them. At school they were dropping on the scribbler and when I pull the hair with a fingers, I’ll have them in my hand. I was often scratching my head, so everybody was laughing at me knowing that I have lice, but I have no fine comb to comb them out of hair, and I couldn’t do it with my fingers.

Mrs. Rabucka had a fine comb, as I saw she often combed the hair of her daughters. I admit she was a nice woman, but for some reason she never offered me that fine comb, that I could comb out insects of my hair. Due to my shy character, I never dared to ask her.

Only once during my stay there, after washing her daughters hair and combing them she asked me to come and wash my hair, saying “The girls went to bed now, so come and wash your hair.” Well I did wash my hair in a wash tub, but it didn’t help me much to get rid of my insects. Oh if I had a fine tooth comb I could have rid them earlier. After washing I was looking for comb on open spaces. I thought maybe she left it there, but couldn’t find nowhere. Well I blame myself for not asking her but that is a bad side of my nature, I couldn’t dare.

Well at the end of the school days term I happened to be at our newly acquired home in this country at Lizard Lake district, where our immigrants started to establish themselves on their homesteads, building the houses and other buildings and started to cultivate the virgin prairie land with Oxen.

As I see it now, what a waste of time it was in my schooling days, placing me in Russian homes. If I was placed in English speaking home I am sure I could learn faster to speak and understand English.

As an example, the other immigrant boys who started to work for English speaking farmers, they in a short time could communicate with them though they couldn’t read or write yet, but in opposition to them I could read and write but did not understand the meaning of it.

Well once again in the late fall of 1911 I was taken to Arelee and placed again in the home of a Russian farmer by the name Jim Perepelitza, and I will not stay unfortunately but fortunately that there was no teacher yet, so I stayed there only one weak. During that time have been sawing or cutting logs for firewood with a bog saw for two. So one of the older girls and myself was doing it. I remember when Mrs. Perepelitza gave me her boy’s buckskin moccasins to put on my feet, and how cold it was in them to stand on snow, while sawing wood because there was no insoles nor felt socks. As there was no teacher yet, so I was taken home. Later Pereplitza boy wrote me that there was a teacher, but I did not go there anymore.

 As during summer of 1910 and next winter I was absent from Lizard Lake so I couldn’t relate much of the hard ships of our immigrants that first year but to establish themselves in a new country or virgin prairie land. I’ll say it wasn’t easy task. Of course there were already some farmers but they were poor themselves to render much assistance to the new comers.

All men who were 18 years and over could obtain from government one quarter section of land free, paying only 10 dollars fee only on such conditions that the farmers during 3 years, has to live and improve their land, cultivating 20 or 30 acres. At the end of three years he would take the oath of allegiance, and he will be a British Subject (as that time there was no Canadian citizenship yet) and he will get a title to his land as owner, and now as British subject he has the right to participate in elections of all forms of government by casting his vote for the man or party he thinks best.

So the first thing a man looking for land has to get a list of available free homesteads from land office in town. Then he has to pick one that suits him, or whatever is left, then to register it in his name at land office paying only fee of ten dollars.

Now he has to procure, oxen, plow, wagon, sleigh and of course axe as the main thing he has to build is shelter for himself and family. Fortunately the forest wasn’t very far and our immigrants were hard working and laborious people. All their buildings were made from logs, plastered with mud clay.

Now with the Oxen and walking plow he started to break down that strong virgin prairies and it was a hard job. Due to rocks it was tossing the man handling the plow on all sides, even many was hurt. Only due to slowness of Oxen it wasn’t so extremely bad yet. However one man obtaining a homestead tried to plow the land with the walking plow and found out that there is more rocks than soil. So he canceled it and took another one.

My first activities and incidents as a farmer boy.

My father obtained homestead by the lake. It was North West quarter of section 20^th township 39 and range 14 and it was not full quarter, as some land was underwater.

Now since summer or spring of 1911 and on I stayed at the farm with father and mother. Father has already built house and smaller buildings but the tee pee poles was still standing reminding their first Indian like shelter, where they could not hide anything edible from the gophers.

Father also had already four huge horned old oxen and a walking plow. So when he was plowing, I have seen what job it is but never the less, he broke in that two summers 35 acres and my job was to pick stones.

Later we got from some place an old fashioned two furrow plow, with 10 width shares and the made of cast iron, so whenever the plow strikes the stone the is gone, it easily brakes. This plow had no seat but handles so you have to walk behind and steer it. So father was doing it and I handled the oxen and whenever you make them go little faster with a willow whip, there goes Conynka again! You hit another stone.

My father also had a horse by the name Jack, the one which Brother Ivan had when he was on the farm near Borden. Also later he bought from Antov Eichler domesticated sterns so it was easy to break them for work, and the ones he had before he traded to Jew for a horse named Joe.

My first trip to Biggar with Brothers Paul and Eli, and with a three loads of fire wood, pulling by three teams of oxen, took us 24 hours both ways. Biggar on a straight line is about 22 ½ miles south from father’s place, but there were no constructed roads yet just Indian trails. So we had to take one either East or West 2-3 miles to go around gullies and lakes, so this way it was about 28 miles.

We started from home at midnight, and it seemed to me we were going long enough. So I asked brothers if we will be soon in Biggar. They only laughed at me, as we have gone only about eight miles yet. So we travelled and travelled until at last we reached Biggar at noon time. There we sold our firewood to Biggar residents, bought only necessities for existence and are off on return trip for home which we reached at midnight too.

As I mentioned already about the gophers, there were so many of them, that the farmer can’t expect any crop unless he gets rid of some of them. So every year in the spring, we had to poison them, placing at each hole of their abode some wheat kernels saturated with poison. Also a lot of howling coyotes and badgers and skulls and bones of previously roaming herds of Buffalos, which Hudson Bay Company had to kill, and in compensation obtained some land from the government.

Of course in small lakes and sloughs were a lot of muskrats, and late in the fall one can see a lot of muskrat houses on the ice built by them for winter from grass and reeds. There was a lot of grass on this lake East sec. 17

As their furs were valuable, so that fall of 1911 I was a muskrat trapper, and trapped quite a lot of them. Skinning them right there on the lake but at that time we did not know yet how to stretch the skin, so my father cut it, Willow twigs, about 20 inches in length and bent them on the center and we stretched skins on them, and the shape of them was like a triangle.

When my brothers went to town of Radison I gave them those skins to sell. They took them there to a Jew store keeper and when he saw these skins he said, they were not stretched properly, and not worth much. So for all that skins I can’t remember exactly how many but over fifty, they brought me shoes, cowhide or whatever skin it was but they was like iron, hard to bend them.

One day just before Christmas time father and myself went to Biggar by horse drawn buggy, as though there was snow, but not enough for sleigh. We started very early, the day turned to be very cold and windy with blowing snow. My feet began to freeze in those hard shoes. I tried to walk behind buggy but to no avail, so I pulled the shoes off the feet and wrapped in some kind of a rag we had and on reaching CPR station, I tried to put on my shoes again but I couldn’t as the shoes was frozen too. My hands by trying to put on shoes started to freeze. So we proceeded to Biggar and stopped on the street in front of a T.H.C. dealer office. Mr. Tom Ellis and it was 9am and the agent just came in and was making fire in stove.

So I get up from buggy and ran to his office, and took off socks whatever they were and here my toes and half of my feet were all white as snow. So I asked Mr. Ellis to bring me some snow, and I started to rub them with snow. It took me quite a while to do it, until I started to feel them normally again.

Well this was the last time my feet were so badly frozen, and though for some time yet, they were tender and subject to frosts but never in my life experience such a thing again as that time in those, my hard earned hard shoes.

But in mans’ life there is always something to happen again, as the people’s Wisdom Says: “There is no man, whose life will not be subject to some unlucky adventures” So it was with me in the winter of 1911-1912. We still had that first old huge horned oxen with sharp tips and they were in the stables for the night with a rope over their horns and tied to a manger pole.

Well in the morning I went to the stable to untied them and let them out, and I did untied two of them , and when I came to third one whose horns were the biggest and sharpest, to untie him he stepped back, and the result was that his rope was stretched tight and his head bowed. So I could not untie him from manger pole, unless the rope will be slackened. So I faced him and he all at once struck me with his sharp horn in the forehead, just above the top of a nose between the eye brows. Of course I was unconscious, I don’t know for how long. When I came to consciousness, I was lying still in the stable or sty but at the door. I don’t know how and when I crept there, but it is then when I started to cry and scream and of course was heard and led to a house where first aid was applied. It took some time until the wound was healed.

Well the Lord was good to me, he spared my life. It could have been worse, even death if the horn of that Ox slipped only half an inch to the right or left. I could be hanging on the ox horn by my skull. In my later years there were four more incidents, maybe I will tell later, the Lord my good shepherd was my helper and watched over me.

As it is written in Psalm 34:7

“The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them.”