CHAPTER 1

The Early Years

I, Anna Margaret Euretta, only child of John and Uretta Carter Clarke, began my life on January 8th, 1907 in a farm house three miles north of the location where the little village of Spy Hill, Saskatchewan, Canada would later be built. The railroad on which the village was built was not completed until about two years later. I arrived in a cold, stormy winter of deep snow. My father alerted the nearest neighbor about a half mile away, who drove about five miles to ask Uncle Selby Carter to bring the doctor from Tantallon, ten miles farther on, the entire distance made by teams and sleighs.

In attendance was my fathers mother, Ann Green Clarke, and my mother's sister, Elsie Carter. I arrived about 4:30 a.m. after a long and difficult labor; weighed about nine pounds, dark hair and blue eyes. My father at that time was almost forty-six; his birthday being February 28, 1861. My mother was almost thirty-nine, her birthday: March 10, 1868. They had been married October 31, 1904.

The house where I was born was of logs, plastered inside and out. Downstairs one room, about 16 x 20 feet, upstairs three bedrooms. A closet built around the stairs stored home-canned goods and other supplies and a root cellar under the house was reached through a trap door in the floor. Later a lean-to was added on one side of the house to provide a kitchen, wash room, and pantry.

The farm buildings were located close to the center of a 320-acre farm on the west bank of a 40-acre lake which stretched a half mile east to the public road. In summer, our private road followed the lake shore. In winter, we drove team and sleigh over the ice which often reached a depth of three feet or more. We also had a private road a half mile west to the public road.

My father was the third child of John and Ann Green Clarke. The older brothers were Robert and Henry. The younger children were Jane, Eliza who died at age twenty-two, James, Margaret, Thomas and Charles. My grandfather Clarke came from Ireland when he was sixteen, to Ontario, Canada; the only one, as far as I know, of his family to leave the Old Country. It must have been about the time of the big potato famine in Ireland. I was told that he was a hot-headed, hard-riding, hard-drinking man who was injured in a fall from his horse and died when Uncle Charlie was four years old, leaving the older boys of the family to help in supporting their mother and the younger children.

My grandmother Clarke came with her parents and two younger sisters from England when she was nine years old. They came by sailing ship and in the north Atlantic were struck by an iceberg and the ship sank. The family and another passenger were put into the life boat with the Captain and drifted for days before being picked up by another vessel and taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The entire trip took nine weeks. As a little girl, I liked to hear her tell of the adventure, how food and water and blankets were put into the life boat and how kind the Captain and the sailors were. This is the only grandparent I can remember. She never went to school as she was needed at home to help care for younger brothers and sisters; so she never learned to read or write.

My father never finished grade school. At the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to a shoe maker to learn the trade of making hand-made shoes. Factory-made shoes were not yet a popular item on the market. My father was born with club feet and had never had shoes until he learned to make his own over lasts that he whittled out of wood. Until that time, he had gone barefoot in summer and for winter, his mother had taken hand-knit wool socks and sewed over them heavy cloth in a sort of moccasin fashion. He made by hand, every pair of leather shoes he ever wore.

The apprenticeship lasted seven years and was spoken of as "being bound out." At age twenty-one, he returned home to assist the family. During those seven years he was given board, room, and clothing, and instruction, for the labor he could contribute to the shop.

Country dances were the main form of entertainment in those early pioneer days and my father, not being able to dance, would go along with the other young people and play his Jews Harp along with the fiddles that supplied the music. I remember him playing the old time tunes when I was a little girl.

He came to the North West Territories (later divided into provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, etc.) about 1890. He worked for farmers and in the Duck Mountains logging camps and then homesteaded a quarter section (160 acres) of land. The Homestead Act allowed the government to give this land to a person who would build a house and farm the land for a certain number of years. Later, he bought the quarter section just east, part of which was the forty acre lake. At first he used oxen and later horses to pull the plow and other farm machinery.

My mother's family came to the prairies from Arthur, Ontario shortly after my father came from Markdale. The towns were not far distant from each other but the families did not meet until after the move. The family consisted of John and Esther Calkins Carter and their five grown children, Elsie, Selby and his wife, Margaret, Herbert, my mother, Uretta, and Frederic. They all settled on homestead land close to each other, near Spy Hill. Herb married Clara Armstrong and after a few years sold his land to Selby and moved to the west coast. Fred married Addie Ferrin after his mother died at age 58. His father and Elsie continued to live with them until the father's death. Elsie never married and continued to live with them until she died at age 80-plus. My father and mother were married in that home just fifteen days after Fred and Addie's wedding and moved directly to the lake farm.

My earliest recollections of our family involved my cousin Charlie Clarke, son of Uncle Robert, who was about twenty years older than me. He had come to work for my father on the farm when I was just past two and stayed with us for over five years, going home only on brief occasions and hurrying back to our place for relief of severe asthma attacks. I can still remember the smell of the fumes from the medication he occasionally used.

The first thing I can really pinpoint was my father bringing home from town a 1910 calendar when I was three. I was about four when I saw my first automobile and that only at a distance of nearly a half mile as the doctor from Langenberg drove along the public road west of us in his little red runabout.

Shortly after this, I remember waking in the night to the sound of hoof beats of a horse and shouted words. Charlie quickly dressed and rode away. Next morning we were told that his sister Etta Cowen had died in the night from a self-inflected overdose of laudanum, leaving her husband and two small sons. We attended the funeral (the first I can remember), always held in the home in those early pioneer days. The living room was crowded and I sat on the open stairs with other children during the service. My mother had arranged early poppies and geranium blossoms from her flower bed for the casket, the only flowers there. The funeral procession was led by a team of black horses hitched to a spring wagon to carry the casket (the slowest team in the country, some said) and made its slow progress nearly five miles to the cemetery.

When I was six, my parents left me with Uncle Selby and Aunt Maggie for a few days while they went to the Provincial Fair at Brandon, Manitoba. They brought home to me, a red glass tooth-pick holder with my name and the date, 1913 on it. I still have it.

It was about this time that plans had been made to go to Tantallon to a country fair. Mother was ill that morning but she insisted that Daddy and I go. It was a fifteen mile drive with team of horses and buggy. There were a few cars on the roads at that time but so new that most horses were very frightened of them. Going down a winding road into the valley, we met a car coming up. The horses bolted, tipping the buggy so much that my father fell out, taking the reins with him. I hung on until the horses ran into a little grove of saplings, stopping them. When my dad and the driver of the car caught up with me, they found a very shaken and frightened little girl.

The men got the horses untangled and onto the road again and we continued onto the fair.

My mother was always mindful of the fact that I was a lone child with no near neighbors and the family too busy to visit others often. She tried to help me amuse myself by giving me a corner of the room for my own with crates stacked for shelves for my few toys, books and crayons. She often played games with me as she went about her work. At tea parties with the doll dishes, I was Mrs. Snodgrass and she was Mrs. Tippitoe.