Recently, we hosted a ranch visit as part of the local Elder College program posted as a historical ranch visit.
It was some 80 years ago that our dad bought a ranch on Beaver Valley from some European immigrants from Austria who thought the world (European world) might be coming to an end since Hitler was extending his grip on Eastern Europe and had invaded their homeland in Austria.
Unsettled times can beget waves of settlement and resettlement. European settlement in America followed an imperialistic expansion of influence enable by growing power of sea travel and exploration ion search of new products.
Canada was in the way of the search for a new route to the riches of Asian impeded by the vast American land mass. Explorers Mackenzie and Fraser both were looking to get to Asia and found (not “discovered”) “Indians” and they thought this might be India.
I think the opportunity to escape the rigid undemocratic and impoverishing European feudal society was. An incentive for people to travel here. They must have heard, wrongly, that a vast, rich land was open to adventure, freedom, and settlement which really was “resettlement” since all of America was settled, albeit sparsely in some cases by indigenous civilizations.
I have in a previous article referred to the notion that the real nomadic people in America (Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden) in the early days were Europeans, not the indigenous people most of whom had some “seasonal rounds” as they followed hunter gatherer regional travel opportunities: fishing and hunting as animals travelled and as these societies supplemented whatever crops the nurtured locally.
It as drought in the American west in the 1920s that drove some of our family to this area of plenty and opportunity. Taking farming skills with them our family eked out an existence helping large British land holding business entities and families.
As I was growing up, I romanticized being indigenous riding my horse bareback complete with buckskin jacket with a beaded and embroidered horsehead on the back and sporting knee high moccasins made thanks to Rosie Thomas from Sugarcane (Williams Lake First Nation).
At this time, we would holiday (urban mother stayed home) on the farthest abandoned homestead of the collection of homesteads that made up the ranch our dad bought. I remember him saying to me as a young adult that he and I should have traded places in time. He liked modernity and innovations-he sold “light plants” and washing machines to ranches who could afford them- while I romanticized about building a dream dwelling and homestead ranching in arguably one of the most beautiful places on earth, right where we live now. I think I must have inherited that from somewhere in our family.
I will continue this exploration about a desire to live sustainably on the land all the while respecting larger natural forces around us. As ranchers, many of us see our place as a little fiefdom that we can mostly control: our house is our castle, our house is your house.
Do we build little empires, or do we promote a sharing of the land and the bounties of the land?
A future column will speak to this issue.
