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- Vers 1906, immigration en Saskatchewan.
In approx. 1906 the whole family pulled up roots, heading for Saskatchewan where the government was giving free homesteads. They travelled by train to Mortlach and sixty miles beyond in three covered waggons, Grandma told my mom there were big iron pots dangling on the sides of the waggons. The prairie story is another very long story, they had built a sod house and started pioneering all over again, till they finally moved to Edmonton when their land became the dust bowl. My uncle told me the story that one day their soil was in their neighbours yard and visa versa next day. They knew nothing about crop rotation and exhausted the soil.
Off to Edmonton where I was born. I and my mother had lived with my grandparents as I had been an illegitimate child, my mother married when I was three, had other children. My stepfather didn’t much like me much so I spent most of my time at my grand parents house. I was happy as long as I had a little pair of scissors and a bottle of thick white paste and a scrap book.
There was lots of action at Grandmas, lots of parties and fiddle music. Grandma always made her own liquor, there was a room in the house I wasn’t allowed in, knew there was a barrel of salt pork, as French Canadians that was staple food, barrels of other foods and I suppose Grandmas liquor making paraphernalia.
You can imagine the hard life she had bearing all those children and working so hard. In Saskatchewan, she opened a boarding house and a meat market. She fed the thrashing crews, had jugs of cream from her sons farms. Apparently at other farms they served only bologna sandwiches and we fed well.
I loved my grandmother, she became my best friend, I slept with her when I was there. Not long ago, my relatives reminded me she had become very child like, probably why we got along so well. Guess today it would be called senile. I actually slept with her the night she passed away when I was five years old. We woke up and she had died peacefully in the night. She stayed in the front bedroom in a casket for awhile, there were lots of candles and relatives. I remember I never cried, just in awe of all the activity. Then she disappeared.
The day she died the daughters took her feather bed and shook it out in the yard, her broad gold wedding band fell on the ground. I was there. She always said if ever it were found, it was for me.
In a child like moment I suppose she had tucked it into the feather bed and then forgot. Money and gold rings were valuable and rare in those depression years. They had badgered her a bit to try and coax what she had done with it, it didn’t work.
She had lived a full life at seventy one.
Source Lou Henshaw, grandson 2017.01.30
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