You’ve probably heard of the gigantic wooden horse the people of Troy pulled into their city, only to be slaughtered by the Greek soldiers inside the thing. Or the father-son duo who flew too close to then sun on their homemade wings and were destroyed.

These are myths--stories, partly fact and partly fiction--from ancient Greece, handed down from generation to generation. Every tribe and  nation has its historic myths, its heroes and villains, including the indigenous people of North America.

Well, those of us whose parents and grandparents were pioneers in Saskatchewan and  the other prairie provinces during the late 1800s and early 1900s have our own myths. They are legends of their times handed down to us from our older relatives.  Your grandparents probably told you some of them. Here is what I gathered from my family memories:

They tell of bold settlers clearing the land, breaking it with horse and ox, using large chunks of it to construct sod shelters, tilling it with hope, planting it in faith, watching it blow into Ontario. It was a harsh existence.  My pioneering great uncle used to tell of a prairie fire that destroyed his buildings, hailstorms that pulverised his fields, a horde of grasshoppers that devoured every plant. He said the week after that one wasn’t so great either.  That’s why he and thousands of others in the 1920s and ‘30s moved  to the Promised Land: the northern prairie fringe, what is now the Northern Grain Belt.

The storytellers speak of the Good Times, when the settlers reaped bumper crops, built schools and churches, laughed, sang and danced with joyful spirits (they could be called free spirits too, as they were manufactured locally from grain, fruit and the like).

But it is when they speak of the Evil Times, which occurred with considerable frequency, that they become most colourful.

Then they weave epic tales of dark, satanic forces called Eastern Interests, sometimes referred to as Eastern Politicians, the Eastern Establishment, the Bay street Boys, and other names I can’t repeat in print. From time to time these fiendish hordes swooped down upon the simple prairie people, led by demonic spirits with names like Bennet the Bungler, Pierre the Pestilent  and others.

Fortunately godlike superheroes such as (depending on who’s telling the story) Douglas the Bold, Gardiner the Good and Diefenbaker the Vengeful arose to defend the West from its unholy foes.  These struggles gave us a heroic past. They  fulfilled the same purpose for prairie people as the War of Independence did for the Americans, or the 1789 Revolution did for the French. (The Dirty Thirties and the Great Depression are very useful in this regard as well.)

OK, I’ve obviously treated our  prairie mythology without much seriousness and with considerable exaggeration, but it does give some idea of how traces of our ancestors’ historic attitudes can still be seen in rural prairie people.

My parents and grandparents all came around 1930 from the drought-stricken lands further south and took homesteads in the Northern Grain Belt from where I write. They certainly did fill me in on events of their pioneer past and I often kick myself for not questioning them further about certain details I’d love to know more about. I did have the good fortune however of being born just seven years after my father took his homestead  north of Snowden, so I do know something of the primitive living conditions of those times. 

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