Prairie Roots

Date: 18/02/2026Author: vequinox 0 Comments

excerpt

…him to make sure he did not get in
the way all the time, as we wanted
our turn as well. It was fun to explore
the site, watch the construction and
try to help.
The new home was being constructed
of local product as much as
possible. The prairie poplars were
felled, peeled, cut to size, notched,
flattened where necessary and put up
as walls. The floor was Saskatchewan
prairie clay, leveled and tamped
hard. The roof consisted of a frame
of poplar saplings covered with thatch, yes, a thatched roof woven
by mother and father from local grasses, cut by sickle in the farm
sloughs. Only the single door and the windows were bought, two
windows in each of the two small rooms. These were single paned
which, in the fierce prairie winters, frosted over thickly and gave
us hours of enjoyment as we scraped the beautifully patterned
hoarfrost to develop our personal peeping holes. It was the
television of the era.
The two rooms were small, a kitchen-eating-living area of about
15 feet by 20 feet and a bedroom for all about the same size. The
chinks in the log walls of the house were filled with a mixture of local
clay and straw, which adhered and hardened and had a tendency to
get wet and fall out during major rainstorms. The inside was similarly
finished, then whitewashed with a lime whitewash coating. For
winter heat we had the cook stove in the kitchen and what was
known as a box heater in the bedroom.This was a cheap, hazardous,
oval shaped, front loaded wood burner made of very thin gauge
metal, which glowed red when the fire was stoked up. Many a pioneer
tragedy was caused by this flimsy excuse for a heating system
which certainly put out the BTUs, but just don’t let anything touch it
when it’s glowing red and no one is looking . . . As for power…