When ‘fact’ contradicts reality
People of think mostly of ‘things’ when they think of museums. The artefacts we collect are important, but the stories they represent are just as important. The stories we treasure most are those that tell how people used the objects, and what the objects meant to them, their families, and the community. These types of stories often can’t be revealed through research; we rely on donors telling us this history, and on museum staff accurately recording it. Sometimes, like a game of “Telephone” played over decades, the story is garbled in transmission.
Such is the case with this fine bridle in the Museum’s collection. It is made of horsehair, carefully knotted together in a process called ‘hitching.’ This skill was once taught in prisons as a way to keep inmates occupied while serving time. Sale of these items helped support the families of inmates. The story we had on this bridle is that it was made by a prisoner serving a lifetime sentence in the Fort Saskatchewan jail. It was purchased by two brothers of a local ranching family, and given to their sister at her 1903 wedding.
Our research into this piece started with verifying the facts we had on hand. The wedding was easy to confirm with census data. After that, confirming the information got a bit trickier.
The jail in Fort Saskatchewan opened in 1914 - 11 years after the wedding where the bridle was a gift. As a provincial jail, lifetime prisoners were never held there; life sentences in Canada are served in federal prisons.
It seemed unlikely the piece came from Fort Saskatchewan.
A little digging around the internet found the Correctional Service of
Canada Museum in Kingston, Ontario. We asked them what they could tell us about lifetime prisoners and horsehair hitching in Canada. Their collection had some prison-made horsehair pieces dating back to the 1870s, but all of them smaller and cruder than the Esplanade’s bridle. They also told us our federal prisons didn’t have craft programs until the 1930s. Evidence seemed to suggest the bridle wasn’t made in a Canadian prison.
Our research on the bridle took a bit of a break at this point, until a researcher from the University of Manitoba came to see us on a completely different matter. She had done research on western US prisons, and was eager to see this bridle after I casually made mention of it. She concluded that it was most likely an American prison-made piece. Specifically, it was probably from the Montana State
Prison at Deer Lodge where horsehair hitching had been part of the recreation program since the late 1800s. A number of local ranchers traded livestock across the border in the early 1900s, so there would have been opportunity to purchase the piece in the US.
We may never know much more about the bridle (such as anything about the person who made it), but at least we resolved where the ‘facts’ we had recorded for it contracted reality.