STARTING A NEW CAREER AT FORT BATTLEFORD – 1953
It took me six years to decide that teaching school was not the career for me. So, in 1953 I applied for a position as officer-in-charge at Fort Battleford National Historic Park. It seemed a good fit as I was no stranger to the old North West Mounted Police barracks at Battleford, Saskatchewan nor to […]
Family Library
Notes from Sue: Dad tells me that the house at Brada was home to a, for that time and place, large library. I don’t remember it, I was only about 8 the last time I was in the Brada house when it was furnished but Dad says the library was in a cupboard on the […]
Adventures on a bike – circa 1934
Notes from Sue: I am always on the look-out for something new to post. A few days ago Dad asked me to help him find an old Wordperfect file he wanted to work on. While checking for it on his laptop I came across a file called ” Early days at Fort Battleford”. What is […]
Why are monuments call ‘cairns’ and why are they made of stone?*
The word ‘cairn’ is a of Scottish origin. A cairn is a pile of stones, usually made as a memorial to some significant event. The story is told that in olden times the warring clans of Scotland, before going into combat, took the time for each warrior to gather a stone and throw it onto […]
Wild Ride -1929*
The nearly two miles to Brada School seemed like a heck of a long walk when I started there in the fall of 1929. I was scarcely six years old, and although there were older siblings for encouragement, it meant many steps for short legs. My sister Bee, nine years my senior, kindly came to […]
Small perk for homebound WWII soldier – 1942*
My mother, Grace Attix, was raised by her grandfather, Judge Octavo Barker. The Judge had served in the American Civil War, and had been captured and imprisoned in the terrible Andersonville Prison. He was one of the few that survived. Mother grew up with stories of the horrors of warfare of that time, where advancing […]
Mother Fed Hobos and Tramps*
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 […]
Search for a National Historic Site part 2 – The Flying E (about 1971)
THE ALMOST FLYING E NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE It will probably never go down in history that there would not be a Bar U National Historic Site. Back in the early 1970s a lot of work and time had been spent in studying the potential of so many early, big ranches which had a very colorful […]
Search for a National Historic Site – The BAR U Ranch (early 1970s)
“The purchase of the Bar U Ranch headquarters site by Parks Canada in 1991 was the culmination of a search and evaluation process which stretched back over more than twenty years. In 1968 the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada came to the conclusion that |the ranching industry is of national historic significance.” They […]
THE MOVE TO THE NEW HOUSE and MAKING A NEW FRIEND? 1928
It was somewhere near my fourth birthday when we moved to the newly built house one half mile north of Potvin’s. During the late 1920s, farming in the North Battleford area had paid well and new houses were started by Dad for Grandma and Dave, and for our own family. But when the depression threatened, […]