I am sure everyone has heard of the hundreds of out of work men who road the rails in search of work during the Great Depression. As a child of the 1930s I and my 2 brothers and 3 sisters saw many of these sad mostly young men, but to us they was just a part of our life.

Our farm house was only a few steps off the highway from North Battleford to Saskatoon and running adjacent to the railway. I and fellow schoolmates walked that route back and forth to school every day. As we went we were happy to offer a friendly wave to dozens of young men riding atop the train boxcars, or with legs dangling out the boxcar door, and they seemed just as happy to return the friendly greeting.

It was, of course, illegal for those riders to “steal” that ride by rail and so many walked from community to community, hopelessly seeking a job or handout meal. There was a limit to the number of free meals available at any one town or city, so the luckless had to move on to the next place if he wanted to eat. For us this meant there was a constant stream of youth going one way or the other past our home.

I don’t think my mother fed all that stopped and asked for a meal but for a great number of those wanderers she would give them a chore, usually chopping some wood for the cook stove, while she put on the frying pan and stirred up the sourdough pancakes.

After all, and sadly, it cost little to provide that food. Almost all was produced on the farm; lard to fry pancakes was rendered from fat of hogs raised on the farm and what little wheat was grown was worth nothing on the market. It did produce the family flour and made it possible to share a meal with men who needed it.

It was an all-day trip to take a wagon box load of wheat to the mill in old Battleford across the river, and return with several 100 pound bags, proudly stamped with the slogan “When better flour is made, Bishop will make it”. Bishop, the mill owner, kept some of the produce to sell to paying urban customers who had money.

Except for the sugar in the syrup, the cost of feeding those unforutunate fellows was little beyond the labour that went into its production. That labour, especially in those days and particularly for Mother, working over that hot stove, was great.

We children enjoyed those fellows who told stories of places they had been and things they had done, quite exotic and thrilling to us country bumpkins.

After being fed and a visit, the wanderer would tread off in his aimless journey, often in worn-out shoes and blistered feet.

Mother must have fed hundreds of those unfortunate fellows in those hard times. We are lucky today that there are programs in place to, mostly, prevent that happening again.

*This article was published in “The Senior Paper” November 2017. It has since had some revision.