The Serial: Far From the Rowan Tree Day28

Tom Jacobs liked children and could speak their language. The boys held him in high esteem.

On top of everything else they would have to endure a variety of biting insects – clouds of them, all waiting to inject or suck the immigrants’ fresh sweet blood – mosquitos and flies, from the ferocious “bulldogs” (bluebottle size) to the almost microscopic insects that the natives called noseeurns, which gave a far nastier bite than any midge from the glens or hillsides of Scotland.

How eerie it must have been at night as they lay awake listening to the noises of these strange wild places, the grunt of a bear, howl of a wolf, crazy laugh of a loon across the water at sundown.

They were probably people well-versed in the Bible. I wondered if they saw themselves as a tribe being led through the wilderness to some land of Goshen. If so they must have got a shock when they saw their Goshen because there was nothing – nothing there at all.

They had to start from scratch and clear the land. If we grumbled about no furniture, they had no house and would have to build one, were it only a sod hut, before early winter set in with its searing frosts. Intrusion In some respects Selkirk was a poor Moses, letting his people fend for themselves, having made no proper provision for them.

They were set down among unfriendly Indians to manage as best they could. The Assineboines, angry at the white man’s intrusion into their land and his destruction of their livelihood, the buffalo, were known for their murderous and scalp-hunting ways.

There was no one sent to protect this little band of Scots.

It is a strange and touching story that for these first settlers there were times of such dire need that they had to go to the Assineboines for help. Sometimes they were gentle and kind, helping them in their distress.

The miracle is that, one way or another, the little colony survived and began to cultivate the land to find that crops grew tall and yielded well.

Later on Selkirk was accused of using the settlers to prevent the Hudson Bay’s rivals in fur trading, the North West Company, from getting their boats further up the river.

The rival company was older than theirs and largely run by French Canadians. The line, Selkirk hoped, running up the river from Montreal to Athabasca, would be cut at the point where the settlers lived.

Eventually a bigger-than-usual skirmish broke out between the rival companies, both using locals to augment their forces and the colonists became embroiled in a fight not of their own making.

This incident, however, led to the temporary evacuation of the people of the Red River settlement to a more civilised area.

Also it brought the Canadian and British governments together, both insisting that the rival fur companies unite and thereby make possible the permanent and peaceful establishment of the Red River Settlement. Staple diet Slowly, more people came and began to drift further west into this land that could grow good crops, until eventually it was cleared of the huge herds of wild bison (the staple diet of the nomad Indians).

By the time we came to Alberta, all that was left of these powerful animals was a small herd kept, for their protection, on the shores of Cooking Lake, near Edmonton.

In the spring of 1959, Tom Jacobs was impatiently waiting for the frost to lift, ready to start seeding the moment it was possible.

I took a photo of Ronald on his first time out on the tractor, in his fur-hooded parka and with a three cornered scarf tied across his face, muffled up against the cold with only his eyes showing.

Betty Jacobs kept up the kindness shown to us on our arrival, always coming over to see if there was anything we required.

She never stayed long to chat, however and I didn’t learn as much as I would have liked about what was, for us, a new part of the world. Certainly, when I asked direct questions she always answered but never enlarged on the subject and never offered any information other than what was immediately relevant to the moment.

“These small lakes,” I asked one day, “that we see not far from here, they look inviting with their white sands. Do you visit them when the weather is warm enough?”

“These lakes are good for nothing,” she told me. “It isn’t white sand that you see, it’s an alkali deposit.”

“The road running past your house going north – where does it go to?”

Betty Jacobs thought for a moment. She looked a little taken aback, as though no one had asked her that question before and she hadn’t thought to question herself.

“I dunno,” she said. “I guess it must go somewhere.”

I thought this strange. It surprised me also that she was not in the least curious as to where we had come from or why. Unassuming Anything to do with our former life held no interest for her. That we were here now to help them and that we were people in need of help ourselves were the things that mattered and she helped us gladly in a natural and unassuming manner.

Tom Jacobs was helpful too in his own way. He had difficulty, I think, communicating with adults, especially our sort from a different country and culture but when it came to children he had no difficulties at all.

He liked children and could speak their language. The boys held him in high esteem. One day he presented them with two tricycles that his daughters had recently given up now they had bikes.

Also, he showed them the way to a large sandpit where, in the long summer days that lay ahead, they were to have endless hours of fun.

He let them play among old implements where everything was made as safe as possible. From time to time he would lift them up on to the high seats of the monster tractors, where they felt very important indeed.

He was tolerant and good humoured with the boys and Tom Jacob’s place had everything a growing boy needs and with minimum restrictions. (More tomorrow.)