she continued. “I think young ones are spoiled nowadays. Many were the days that I’d go out and disc with four horses. I had to take [son] Leon with me and he sat on my knees while I drove. We’d stay out from morning till evening, then figured that the horses needed a rest.” 5 (Ed, meanwhile, was working for neighbors to earn some much-needed cash.) A note at the end of the entry informs us that Marie and Ed lived and worked on their farm until 1954, when they retired into town. They died there, aged 94 and 101 respectively, in the early 1970s, shortly after celebrating their sixty-fourth wedding anniversary.
I spent hours leafing through the volume, with its tales of runaway horses and broken machinery, lightning strikes and blizzards, good crops and bad, all animated by a surprising lightness of spirit. Even the 1918 influenza epidemic, which had taken the lives of so many and left a bruise on Wallace Stegner’s thoughts, could be construed as having unexpected benefits. “There was an atmosphere of ‘togetherness’ . . . that united the community,” one survivor recalled. “Truly these folks were the best in the world.” 6 Reading between the lines, it appeared that this same togetherness had helped to bring the community through the terrible thirties drought. “With no crops, no money, in debt and on relief, times were hard,” one old-timer admitted, “but we got along somehow . . . There were picnics, dances and parties. The women would bring lunch and the men paid a quarter. Part of this bought the coffee, and the fiddlers were given the rest.” 7
Hard work and fiddle tunes, bread and roses. Through sheer stick-to-it-iveness, these dauntless people had created not only farms and ranches but also churches, libraries, hospitals, and schools. They had played in dance bands, organized Christmas concerts, and planned community fairs; they had raised flocks of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Even though I had never met any of these people, I recognized them as my own. Here I was in Eastend, home away from home.
One morning, Keith and I decided to treat ourselves to breakfast at Eastend’s premiere dining establishment. Jack’s Café is on the main drag, a couple of doors up from the late-and-lamented antler museum. Very much a going concern, it is nonetheless also a blast from the past, complete with a soda fountain, a glass cabinet full of pies, and, on the wall, one of those old-fashioned rotary displays that flips from ad to ad. Fabrics and Notions, flip. Livestock Hauling, flip. Septic Service, flip. One of the oldest surviving businesses in town (a tidbit I had picked up from the local history book), it had been founded by immigrants from the Peloponnese, of all places, around 1920 and then lovingly passed down, from hand to hand, to a succession of Greek-Canadians. One husband-and-wife team, George and Angela Doolias, had become so renowned for their steaks and Greek specialties that they earned annual listings in Where to Eat in Canada, the national guide to fine dining.
When you order pancakes at Jack’s, you get pancakes: they arrived three high and large as platters, with sausages on the side and cups of acrid coffee to wash them down. As Keith and I attempted to do justice to this munificence, we had plenty of time to look around and admire our surroundings. It wasn’t just the vintage fittings that caught our attention, as charming as they were. Angie Doolias was not just a restaurateur; she was also an artist. From counter height to ceiling, all around the room—jogging above the cabinets, slipping over doors, flowing seamlessly around corners—the room was encircled by a mural.
Beginning on the north wall, above the cash register and partially obscured by a Coke machine, it showed the primordial prairie landscape, unpeopled and untouched, grazed by herds of buffalo and overflown by a golden eagle. Moving around to the east, humans enter the scene, and we see them driving buffalo over a cliff and, later, pitching their tipis in a broad valley. But change is coming, just around the bend. Beyond the pies and above the door to the kitchen, a column of covered wagons is wending its way toward a fort, led by a pair of riders in red-serge tunics and pillbox caps. Clearly, these are not the blue-coated fighting men that so stirred Bill Cody’s pride. Instead, as a loyal Canadian, Doolias has memorialized the arrival of the North-West Mounted Police at what I assume must be Fort Walsh. With law and order now assured, the pageant of progress picks up, as homesteaders break the sod with oxen along the south wall and a train steams into the station of a nascent Eastend in the southwest corner. If you look closely, you can see Jack’s Café already in place, between the bank and the hotel.
I’m guessing that it was at about this point in the creation of the mural when two Aboriginal men came into Jack’s for lunch. (I have this story from a friend who happened to be there at the right moment.) “Where’s it going to end?” one of the diners asked the artist, as he surveyed what she had done. “With a mushroom cloud?”
“No,” George Doolias shot back, coming to his wife’s aid. “It’ll be two Native guys in a Lincoln, pit-lamping deer.” Everyone had a good laugh.
But of course the mural does not end with a nuclear apocalypse or with poachers, either. In fact, Aboriginal people have disappeared from the action halfway around the room, as if they have no part to play, for good or ill, after the incomers appear. Instead, as the mural rounds the home stretch onto its final wall, it celebrates the fulfillment of the settlers’ dream, with a century of technological advancement and plenty. The story draws to its triumphant conclusion above a bank of orange plush booths in the northwest corner of the café. In the foreground a pair of combines plies the fields of a prosperous, modern farm, its yard lined with shiny bins poised to receive the golden harvest. In the middle distance, a landscape once dotted with buffalo is now studded with oil wells, and the crenellated skyline of Calgary lures the eye, ever onward, into the future.
That evening, I stood in the yard of the Stegner House, under a sky quilted with clouds, and listened to the yip-yip-yipping of coyotes on the hills above town. Tell the truth. Although I had been brought up on the Creation Story of prairie settlement and, as the past few days had proven, was still susceptible to its charms, I was no longer a true believer. It was one thing to sit in Jack’s Café, blissed out on maple syrup, and enjoy a confident portrayal of the pageant of progress. But did I really believe that a prairie landscape dominated by pump jacks and industrial agriculture is, in any ultimate sense, an improvement on the now-shattered buffalo ecosystem? And while it had been entertaining and, yes, even inspiring, to sit with the local history and recall my debt to the people who had planted me here, did I really believe that the West had been won while whistling a happy tune?
If I interrogated my memory, I could hear my mother’s voice turn brittle when she spoke, as she rarely did, of the beatings her own father had inflicted on his sons, but not his daughters, violent explosions of rage that seemed out of proportion to youthful misdeeds. Frustration refracted into cruelty. The Stegners, with their two sons, had been able to pull up stakes and leave when things turned sour on them; the Humphreys, with a brood of ten, did not have that option. They had toughed it out on a bankrupt farm, too proud to accept relief—but not too proud, in my mother’s nightmare recollection, to attempt to abandon a promising little girl, her own small self, to the care of a more prosperous neighbor. When she told me this story eighty years later, her voice still cracked with grief. Perhaps I had been avoiding Wolf Willow out of mere cowardice, a reluctance to face home truths when they were offered.
The night wind had an icy bite and it chased me back indoors, past Keith dozing on the couch and up the narrow stairway to the back room, where young Wally and his brother had once slept. With the spectre of their bewildered grandmother in the hallway behind me, I gazed out the window into the heavy dark and recalled how my own sense of Western history had, over the years, gradually come unmoored. I remembered sitting in Sunday school one morning (in the minister’s study at First United Church in Vermilion, Alberta, to be precise) and suddenly seeing with irrevocable clarity that the assurances of Christianity, and of a divinely ordained plan, were an illusion. This revelation left me with little to show for my religious upbringing except the Golden Rule and a slightly idiosyncratic version of a favorite children’s hymn:
All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All
