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Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 20
by L. G. Thomas Ranch Houses of the Alberta FoothillsAn increasing interest in the social history of the Canadian West gives a significance to the domesticities of the region's early settlers that might a generation earlier have been dismissed by the scholar as totally irrelevant or at most merely amusing or picturesque. In spite of diligent collecting by institutions, groups and individuals, the number of adequately authenticated artifacts is comparatively small. There has been little written on their provenance or their relationship to one another in their daily use, and farm and ranch houses, even some built as late as the early 1920s, have in many cases perished or, more often, fallen into ruin or disuse. Even where there has been an intelligent and careful attempt to recreate the setting of a pioneer room, the product often seems to the observing eye, no matter how sympathetic or perceptive, sadly unconvincing as a means of transmitting historical knowledge to the beholder. It may be that the weakness of the exhibit arises not from the use of the wrong materials, but from an absence of information about the social history of the period and locality portrayed. The contriver of the exhibit is certainly not to be blamed it his tableau fails to come alive; the onus rests on the historian who has failed to record and even more to interpret the past in a way that conveys to his audience the kind of sensitivity to the implications of a piece of china or the hang of a curtain that converts an object into a visual, emotional and intellectual excursion into the past. Recent studies have begun to illuminate and indeed to reinterpret the past of the ranching community in southern Alberta. They view it as an experience that, although related to large-scale stock raising in North America and indeed in the world at large, was at the same time uniquely Canadian, significant not only for the locality but also for the region and for the nation. The uniqueness of the ranching community in terms of its economic and governmental relationships has been convincingly demonstrated; the impact of these relationships upon the social development of southern Alberta has been less fully explored. In such an exploration, the houses in which the ranchers lived, the way they were equipped and the way they functioned in relation to the ranch buildings and to the world outside are all relevant. This paper, the reader should be warned, is very much the product of the personal experience of the writer. He grew up in the Alberta foothills in the years between the wars, in a district that lay on the northern fringe of the ranching country not very far, even by team or on horseback, from the urban influences of Calgary, which were felt in this area as early as the 1880s. The nearest town was Okotoks (previously known as Sheep Creek and, briefly, as Dewdney) on the north side of Sheep Creek. Most of the families who settled along the north side of the valley of Sheep Creek before 1914 called themselves ranchers though they were really small stockmen. The overwhelming majority were of United Kingdom origin though a few well-connected families from continental Europe contributed a cosmopolitan note and fitted easily and creatively into the life of the valley. An even more overwhelming majority shared a passionate addiction to horses, and polo, racing and the gymkhana lingered even after the war of 1914-18 dealt its shattering blow to the polite society of the Alberta foothills, if such a society ever existed. The majority of the prewar arrivals had at least a sentimental attachment to the Millarville church. Christ Church, uniquely built of vertical logs, survives as the most important architectural relic of the community's past. Cottonwoods, the house in which the author was born, was built in the early 1890s by the Austins, one of the relatively few Eastern Canadian families to settle as early as this and as far west of Okotoks. George Frederick Austin, a retired surveyor, probably from the Ottawa valley, came to homestead in 1885, accompanied by his much younger wife, the intensely musical daughter of a clergyman, and his son, Edmund. The house they built is reported to be the earliest frame house, as distinct from a log house, to be built in this part of the foothills. The site of the original log house, slightly to the west of the existing frame house, may still be distinguished. It was burned about 1910 as a sanitary precaution; it was infested by bedbugs. The site successfully resisted the archaeological fumblings of a young boy inspired by the exploits of Dr. Schliemann of Troy. The frame house, originally consisting of two ground-floor rooms each about 16 feet square, with bedrooms above, is T-shaped and each part has a steeply sloping roof (Fig. 1). It is believed to have been built in two stages, with the kitchen that forms the stem of the T added to the original living room, now the dining room of the house. The stairs rise steeply from the latter room, and the locations of the outside entrance to the cellar and of a trap door, long unused, in the dining room floor suggest that this room and the bedrooms above formed the dwelling unit for the family at least for a short time. The difference in interior finishing of the two bedrooms above the dining room and the two above the kitchen also suggests that the house was built in two stages as the latter (and presumably later) are almost entirely finished in conventional lath and plaster and milled lumber like the two downstairs rooms, while the inside walls of the former and the doors into them are of wide plank. The two bedrooms over the kitchen (though not the door to the fairly large linen closet that, except for a landing or corridor, occupies the rest of this floor-space) have conventional doors and locks rather than latches.
The doors on the ground floor differ in style and though some of these have been moved from their position of 1910 when the house passed from the possession of the original owners to that of the writer's family, this seems to confirm that the house was built in stages. The chimney, most of its original brick still intact, is of a yellowish-brown brick, quite unlike the red brick made not far away at Sandstone, just west of Okotoks. (It reminds the writer of the brick of old houses in Calgary and indeed, subject to confirmation, of the brick used by W.R. Hull to build the substantial ranch house on Fish Creek, east of Midnapore, which later passed into the possession of Patrick Burns and was more recently extended and restored by the latter's great-nephew, Richard Burns.) The chimney runs up the south wall of the kitchen, the common wall between the two original rooms. If the kitchen were built later than the dining room, the chimney, if built as part of the first unit, must have been on an outside wall. This may seem unlikely as the chimney is not brick-built to ground level, but rests on a timber frame. The latter opens to the kitchen and, with a shelf half-way up and just behind the kitchen stove, still forms a convenient airing-cupboard. A door out of the kitchen into a small pantry under the stairs presents a puzzle as it is of the same plank construction as doors in the bedrooms above the dining room. In 1910 the cellar steps were reached by a trap door in the middle of the kitchen floor. They were moved to the pantry in the interests of safety. If the door to the pantry were put in while the first section was in use as a dwelling, it would have served little purpose and caused a draught formidable even to hardier and more youthful pioneers than the original owners of Cottonwoods. The T-shaped floor plan, steeply pitched roof and frame construction are common on the prairies not only of western Canada but also of the United States and, for the late 19th and early 20th centuries, might almost be called "typical." The house is also evocative of those built in the later 19th century in the Ottawa valley, with which the Austin family had associations, Its outlines are perhaps less grimly Gothic and more comfortably Georgian than is characteristic of the style, but this impression may be due to the setting in what has become a grove of tall trees, most of them Russian poplar planted about 1930. Certainly the earliest snapshots suggest a bleaker line. The impression may also owe something to the later additions (Figs. 1-4). These, a sitting room (the term commonly used by most of the Sheep Creek settlers, "drawing room" being too pretentious and "lounge" not having achieved its later vogue in the United Kingdom), an adjoining sun porch, an entrance porch, a verandah, at first open but later screened, and a "toy house," now used for storage, on the north, were added to provide additional amenities. Most of these assumed their present form as the result of alterations in 1928-29 when the sitting room and sun porch were added though the "toy house" and the porches at the front (south) and back (east) doors were built in 1910 when the property changed hands. Though the porches also served as cloakrooms and as storage space for indoor and outdoor tools and for the tennis net and racquets, their primary function was to protect the inner doors and those who used them against the weather. The small verandah was added about 1912 to provide a protected outdoor play-space.
The effect of these alterations and additions was to give Cottonwoods a distinctive character (Figs. 6, 7). This arises, in the writer's view, from the way in which the roof lines of the additions echo the line of the roofs of the original T and the shed roof of the sun porch and sitting room. This was, I am confident, a fortuitous rather than a contrived effect. The basic pressure for the additions came from my mother who knew what she wanted and undoubtedly, if the success of her room arrangements is a criterion, had an eye for the relationship of shapes as well as for colour and texture. Though she sketched in pen and pencil and painted a little in watercolours and in oils, it would not have occurred to her that her talents would extend to producing builders' drawings. The work was executed wholly by my father and his bachelor partner, both with some training in civil engineering in England. The partner was much more interested in carpentry than my father, who was essentially a horseman. Whatever the source of the design, it may be properly designated as vernacular architecture. Indeed it would be difficult to think of any foothills buildings of this period that owe much to formal training in architectural theory or practice though many were enriched by skilled craftsmanship. This is not to say that the buildings, however simple in construction and primitive in material, owed nothing to architectural tradition or to eyes insensibly trained by looking at the architectural heritage of older societies.
The original house and the additions were all built not on stone or concrete foundations, but on wooden sills resting on the rocks and boulders plentiful so near a creekbed. The house, after as much as 80 years, still appears to be sound and is easily heated; it has long enjoyed the reputation of being warm in winter and cool in summer. Electric power and propane central heating were installed recently without major alteration to the structure and the two original cellar-holes are still in use for storage. On the hill behind the house, excavations, presumably for root cellars, may still be seen, but these have not existed within present memory though quite commonly used elsewhere in the district and throughout the ranching country of the foothills. Water supply has never been a problem as, apart from Sheep Creek, there are flowing springs in the vicinity and water is reached in the gravel of the valley by digging a few feet from the surface. The gravel also provides excellent drainage. Water has never been piped in for domestic use, but for a time a pump in the kitchen provided water for the sinks and for the washbasin and tub in the adjacent bathroom, made in 1928 by partitioning off part of the kitchen. The water from the well this pump served was slightly sulphurous to the taste, a not uncommon phenomenon in a location so close to the pioneer oil field at Turner Valley, and sweeter water is now pumped from a well outside the kitchen door, not more than ten yards away. An earth-closet, not the original, is still in service. Little of the original siding has been replaced and a number of the original window frames and four-paned sashes survive where least exposed to the action of the weather and the fumes from Turner Valley. It is said that the soundness and durability of the structure owed much to the fact that the Austins had the materials on hand for at least a year before they began construction and the wood was thus thoroughly seasoned. The wood probably came from Okotoks, eight miles by road to the east, where the Lineham lumbermill was the major pioneer enterprise. The Linehams came to southern Alberta from Ontario and the milled lumber, used to trim doors and windows, the balustrade that protects the upper landing from the stair opening and the older hardware have in their modest ornament a late Victorian flavour that perhaps lingered longer in the colonial atmosphere of central Canada than in the more sophisticated metropolis. Whatever the Austins' taste, and Mrs. Austin's few surviving letters do not suggest an easy fit into the stereotype of the pioneer woman, people building a house on Sheep Creek in the early nineties would have little choice to exercise in terms of the niceties of design unless a great deal of money was to be spent. By the late twenties a broader choice was available, but in a household of limited means was still restricted. The same restrictions of variety and cost affected the interior furnishings. Little can be said of the appearance of the rooms at Cottonwoods before 1910 except that Mrs. Austin had both a piano and an organ and it would be surprising if the rooms were not strewn with books and magazines and sheet music. Apart from a taste for music, the Austins were great readers; the attic when they left was filled with old numbers of periodicals like Blackwood's and Etudes. Some of their furniture remained in the house after they departed and an elm double-drop-leaf kitchen table with turned legs and at least two chairs with moulded backs and shaped seats, made of an extremely tough wood also probably elm, painted black and exceedingly comfortable, are almost certainly of Ontario workmanship. They are of a design still popular as late as 1870. Whatever their virtue for today's admirer of Canadiana, these pieces were not highly regarded as objects of beauty by my parents and probably not particularly cherished by the previous owners who, after all, left them behind. The furnishings of the house after 1910 can be described in more precise detail. The heavier pieces were generally of Canadian manufacture and some were homemade, including a huge cupboard in the kitchen, one of whose doors later became part of a built-in corner cupboard which was among the many products of my mother's inventiveness and my father's partner's addiction to joinery. Also in the kitchen was something called "the bamboo cupboard," certainly not homemade though it stood on a home made stand that concealed behind a discreet green curtain my father's boots except for his best riding boots which, because of the height of their wooden trees, were allowed a place in my mother's wardrobe upstairs. "The bamboo cupboard" was perhaps not fully appreciated as the elegant expression that it was of the first fruits of the revolt against the overwrought elaboration of Victorian domestic furnishings. Only its frame and those of the doors were decorated with bamboo; its top, sides and doors were covered with carefully wrought cane. It had a long career; for a time it served, on a more carefully carpentered stand, as the sideboard in the dining room of the small house in Okotoks which we occupied during the weekdays of the school term, my parents having lost confidence in the one-room school nearly three miles from Cottonwoods which my sisters had briefly attended. Where "the bamboo cupboard" came from I do not know, but it may have been from the same source as the chairs in the dining room which until 1928 was simply the eastern half of the sitting room. These chairs, a set of six including two armchairs, had been purchased on a visit to "the old country" at an auction sale of the effects of an invalid lady. She must have furnished her house in North Wales under the influence of William Morris for the chairs, of light oak with woven rush seats, had the simple and slender lines of the movement he inspired. The dining table, which could be extended to seat a crowded 12, was by contrast dark and heavy, presumably made in eastern Canada. The finish was probably described by the original vendor as "walnut." When not in use it was covered by a fringed greenish-brown chenille cloth. The sideboard was unashamed fumed oak, solid and simple in design and extremely well-made. The date would be approximately 1910 as I believe it was purchased new at a respectable Calgary furniture shop. It has — it is still in the same room — a mirrored back and a plate rail which displays some of the plates of a dessert service, certainly purchased at a North Wales auction, I believe for half a crown for its 16 pieces, and perhaps from the same invalid lady as her simple green and white Foley (or Shelley) china was for a long time part of our daily life. The dessert service, lavishly decorated in black, gold and deep autumnal shades and with a curious crackled surface that suggests earthenware rather than fine china, has never been identified as to maker or period. Self-styled connoisseurs have both praised it as of exceptional beauty and antiquity and dismissed it as the worst sort of Art Nouveau, but no one has been able to interpret its obscure and scarcely visible markings. Along with other odds and ends, the service had been packed for export as "settlers effects" in a tin hipbath, formerly the property of my Flintshire great-grandmother. So skilfully was it packed that it survived the passage, all except the two-tiered centre comport which broke at the join between the two parts. My mother placed it in the rubbish bin where it was shortly observed by her Scottish neighbour, a lady noted for her business acumen and her plain-speaking, who did not hesitate to reprove this reckless discard of a valuable object that could be easily and inconspicuously mended. Perhaps tired by her exertions in putting her house in order and possibly resenting this Scottish aspersion on her own West-Country industry, thrift and appreciation of fine things, my mother rather crisply offered the comport to its admirer. The gift was carried off; what became of it was never revealed though I was a frequent and, I think, observant visitor at the recipient's house. The episode, trivial though it may be, indicates how casually household objects were often treated even though their merits were appreciated. My mother was on another occasion scolded by a male caller for using an oriental rug as a hearth-mat. It had been a family relic, but had been tied across great-grandmother's hipbath and the projecting handles had rubbed holes in it. My mother mended it carefully, but stuck to her guns and the rug ended its career at the back door. The sitting room chairs included a gold-oak armchair with wide wooden arms and an adjustable back, dedicated to the comfort of my father's partner. Its two loose cushions were upholstered in a hideous but durable velour, a kind of plaid in reddish-brown and black that recalled Queen Victoria's worst excesses at Balmoral and Osborne. Such chairs are commonly illustrated in Canadian newspaper advertisements and catalogues from the 1890s to the 1920s; they are sometimes characterized as "mission." A sturdy table stood beside this chair to support a lamp that must have been the most commanding object in the room. The operative part of the lamp was of glass, but this was set in a bowl supported on an elaborately decorated column on claw feet, all silver-plated. This formidable base was surmounted by an equally elaborate silk shade. Where it came from I do not know; perhaps it was a wedding present, perhaps a trophy of the auction room. When it was new it must have been most expensive and I am quite sure my parents would not have thought of such an extravagance. It may have been Edwardian, but I am inclined to think of it as high Victorian at its most robust. As a lamp it was an early casualty of childrens' play — the table on which it stood had, like the dining table, a cover that reached almost to the floor and served once too often as a safe refuge in a game of hide-and-seek — but as a stand for many years it held a plant — wandering Jew or Irish moss — until at last the silver-plate yielded to the many cleanings dictated by the sulphur-laden air that was carried eastward from the oil field across the creek at Turner Valley. The other furnishings were less substantial. My father occupied a wicker armchair that had the same light and elegant lines as the invalid lady's dining chairs; my mother, a tub-shaped chair with legs and back trimmed with cane or rattan and upholstered in green. The latter chair had, at first only on occasions when guests were invited, a slipcover made of a heavy cretonne or chintz closely patterned in blue and white which matched the slipcover my mother tailored to fit the Winnipeg couch, called "the sofa," whose rather drab green-covered mattress with its pendant frill did not greatly please her eye. There were a number of cushions on "the sofa," whose covers changed with the years. One, very much her "best," was a floral chintz, predominantly rose, with a corded edge. I can remember removing it from under the feet of a visitor in 1920; I noticed it not long ago still doing duty as part of the bed of a much-cherished cat. An upright piano and stool were not part of the original furniture but were added about 1918. The only other piece of furniture I recall was a small fumed oak desk with two bookshelves below; the lid dropped forward to form a writing-surface and though it was really intended as a lady's desk, it was in its pigeonholes that my father kept his papers and there he wrote his letters, including his weekly letter to his mother. The desk, very simple in its lines and extremely well-made, was probably purchased in North Wales in 1910 as it was a gift from my father's sister and seems to me to reflect her advanced and somewhat austere taste (Figs. 8, 10).
The carpet was an Axminster of bold design, richly floral and predominantly red. It covered most of the sitting room side; the floor of the dining room part had a brown linoleum intended to imitate parquet and requiring at least as frequent waxing and polishing. The illusion of wood was scarcely sustained by the brass tape that covered the joins. The kitchen linoleum, a green "inlaid," was prone to lose bits of its inlay not by any inherent defect or for any lack of care, but because of the roughness of the wooden floor beneath. The curtains of the four windows did not match. In the sitting room the two windows had delicate lace curtains, net with a pattern appliquéed over it in a heavier thread. They were floor length and tied back to allow the view to be seen. There were no side drapes, though a heavy red one was pulled over the outside door to minimize draughts. Instead, cream-coloured blinds on rollers with a spring action gave protection against the sun and were pulled down in the evening more for cosiness than for privacy which was adequately assured by the mile of uncertain trail that led to the nearest public road. For the two dining room windows my mother made simple straight curtains, of cream-coloured casement cloth, whose brass rings pulled back and forth on thin brass rods. At a later date the faithful carpenter made window boxes that held houseplants and which, on the coldest nights, could be conveniently removed to a place of safety. This room, like all other rooms in the house, was calcimined annually. Pink and green were the common colours, but my mother was quick to take advantage of other shades when these became available. She was also soon experimenting with wallpaper and became adept at hanging it with the assistance of anyone tall enough to be useful. The doors, the wooden trim around them and the windows, and the skirting-boards were varnished though it was not far into the twenties when the possibilities of light-coloured paint were discovered and one by one the rooms transformed. There were many ornaments, though fewer than was perhaps the general fashion. Two of my English uncles had a taste for carving and fretwork and contributed a clock-case, a rather unstable plant table, whose lower shelf displayed a Japanese bowl in the Imari style, and a small hanging corner cupboard which had a lock and key and served as a medicine chest. All three were painstakingly carved and stained black. A large oak tray, left in its natural colour, was carved in a representation of the arms of the City of Gloucester. Bits of china which varied from a Chelsea piece, badly chipped but of some rarity, to souvenir plates of the coronation of George V, small silver boxes and mugs, a small brass dinner gong on a stand, vases of flowers when flowers were available and framed photographs all found a place somewhere. The pictures on the walls were a heterogeneous lot reflecting, among other things, my father's interest in horses and my mother's hobbies of painting in oils and watercolours and of photography. The only picture of more than sentimental value was a sketch in oils of an old man's head and shoulders by George Morland, one of the many he is said to have done to pay for a drink. It had caught my father's eye at an auction and he had bought it for the proverbial half-crown. The large photograph of race horses belonging to King Edward VII, showing the owner as well as the trainer and jockey, did duty for the portraits of royalty so widely popular throughout the empire. Several colour prints of the works of the cowboy artist, C.M. Russell, recalled my father's early experience in South Dakota and Montana. The room was heated by a stove, the only source of heat, except for the kitchen range, for the whole house. Its stovepipe disappeared through the ceiling and reappeared in my parents' bedroom, whence it crossed the upstairs landing to the single chimney which also served the kitchen stove. Perhaps the earlier occupants, ageing central Canadians that they were, had a stove upstairs. There was space for one on the landing and an opening for another stovepipe, but there was never a stove there after 1910. Instead the space was enclosed to accommodate a chemical toilet which could be served by the convenient vent. The first sitting room stove that I recall was a gigantic "base-burner" which could, with suitable attention, be kept going for 24 hours. Its place was taken, when the chimney and stovepipes were cleaned in the spring, by a small air-tight stove. Then the briquets which fed the voracious appetite of the base-burner ceased to be available or perhaps became too expensive and it was relegated to the granary and replaced by a Quebec heater, splendidly black and much ornamented by gleaming steel, an excellent and economical source of heat but incapable of maintaining a fire through the winter night. Cutting wood for the two stoves was a time-consuming task especially as it was all done by hand using axe and saw. Willow was plentiful on Sheep Creek and its quick and intense heat made it the wood preferred for cooking. The four bedrooms allowed even more scope for improvisation than the downstairs rooms. The beds had enamelled iron frames, some with ornamental brass rods, and were severely practical. There was one feather mattress but it was regarded with some suspicion as possibly unhealthy and its contents were gradually transferred to make pillows, cushions and the quilted "eider-downs" that supplemented a supply of blankets that never-seemed quite adequate. Each bedroom had its washstand, all but one made of packing cases of one size or another, suitably padded, lined and draped. Dressing tables and bedside tables were similarly contrived. Only two rooms had a chest of drawers; these were of eastern Canadian manufacture as was my mother's dressing table. The narrow boards of the walls in two bedrooms were later painted or papered over, but for a time those in the room my sisters shared were covered with pictures cut from every available source and pasted to the boards. I cannot begin to describe in equal detail the other Sheep Creek houses that I knew well in the years between the wars and can offer little more than impressions. Out of the composite of those impressions emerges a sense that they had more than a little in common, yet they were of great variety and individuality and all reflected the backgrounds and characters of their owners. It is sad that so few have survived, as Cottonwoods has survived, as crystallizations of nearly a century of foothills living. Many of them were of log, of great variety in size and design, and almost without exception built in successive stages. One of particular interest, the Gate Ranch house (Fig. 11), lay far to the west with a long view up the meadows of the north fork through the foothills' ridges to the splendour of the Rockies. Like many of the earliest houses, it seemed to have been sited with regard to the outlook and its dependent buildings and corrals were, as was generally the case, so placed that they did not obstruct the prospect from the main rooms of the house. From the first the house was seen not merely as an adjunct to the work of the ranch, but as the foundation of the owner's private life and the setting for his social life.
The first dwelling here proved to be too close to the creek and this may explain why the first unit of the house that developed was more carefully constructed than many of its contemporaries. The builder and owner, Joseph T. Waite, had a knowledge of carpentry acquired in northern England and in the oldest part of the house the logs were squared and the corners painstakingly dove-tailed. This part of the house, the bar to the future T, was almost square, divided into two rooms, one much wider than the other, and with a steep stairs between to an attic which was high enough to provide sleeping quarters. The second stage, the stem of the T, was much more ambitious and reflected the tastes of a new owner, a former British officer. It consisted of two very large rooms, a sitting room and a kitchen-dining room. These rooms were both lined with narrow tongue-and-groove which darkened with age. The two two-paned sashes of the windows were set to move horizontally rather than vertically; these were called "lazy windows" and their effect was to heighten the impact of the view and to emphasize the horizontal lines of the house as a whole. The logs of this and other parts of the house and of the outbuildings were left in the round with the saddle-back corners characteristic of much foothills log building (Fig. 12). At right angles to the kitchen was the bunkhouse, itself a building of considerable size. The roof of the bunkhouse projected to join that of the kitchen and thus gave a sheltered passage which had a door at its north end and at once gave communication between and separated the bunkhouse and the kitchen. The passage at its south end was open to the verandah that stretched along the east wall of the sitting room and, in the years between the wars, looked over a flower garden which was thus well-protected on the north and west from wind and frost. Another range of buildings was destroyed by a fire from which the house narrowly escaped and the working buildings and the corrals were, when I knew the place best, all to the northeast of the house. They were admirably maintained and kept meticulously tidy. Some of the outbuildings, all of log, were stained or allowed to weather to a silvery grey, but the roofs, like that of the house, were painted red. The logs of the house were regularly whitewashed and the trim painted black. The house was banked with earth; it had been banked so often that by 1930 the grass grew almost at the level of the windows and the whole house appeared to grow out of its surroundings. It no longer exists but I am sure that the scene of which it was the focus was for many others, as it was for me, the epitome of the log house of the southern Alberta foothills.
Like the other houses of Sheep Creek, the furnishings of this house were a miscellany gathered over the years, some passed down from earlier occupants, many improvised, and some made by a handy craftsman who could easily manage a shelf, a bench or a cupboard even though he certainly would not have considered himself a cabinetmaker. One of the things that distinguished this house in the years between the wars was the bold use of colour, in paint and in materials, in a way that recalled the vernacular decorative arts of south Germany. The family then occupying it were indeed from Munich though with connections reaching into almost every European country. The house was full of books; though well-filled bookshelves were no rarity in the Sheep Creek houses, one did not often find a library in four languages, German, French and Italian as well as English. Nowhere was the synthesis of the exotic and the local more gracefully and unselfconsciously accomplished. It never for a moment seemed odd that at one end of the sitting room there should hang a portrait painted by one of Europe's most fashionable artists while in the corral nearby the subject demonstrated her notable ability to shoe a horse. Though sandstone was locally available and much used in southern Alberta prior to 1914, Sheep Creek had only one house, the Viewfield Ranch house (Fig. 13), wholly of this material, though another nearby, now derelict, had a basement and ground floor of stone and a charming adjoining garden walled on two sides with blocks from the same quarry. The Viewfield Ranch house, which like many others commanded a handsome prospect of the valley and the mountains, was built by a well-off Englishman. It was of a very simple design; a long, low rectangle with a wooden verandah placed asymmetrically to shelter the front door. The huge attic, lit by a dormer window, was not used. The plan was very English. The front door opened into a square sitting room, almost a hall in the English sense (Figs. 14, 15). It had a brick open fireplace in one corner; the chimney served the stove in the adjoining dining room, a somewhat larger room to the left, and the range in the kitchen behind the dining room. What seemed a long passage led off to the bedrooms to the right of the sitting room. The upper sashes of the windows had a number of small panes; the thickness of the stone walls gave the windows very deep ledges. The house must have been expensive to build; apart from the skilled craftsmanship needed to work with the local stone, the plasterwork of the walls and ceilings and the tiled bathroom were exceptional in this period and this setting. The date when the house was built is not known; the other house where stone was used was built about 1906, perhaps a little earlier. Both had furnaces, though these were not notably efficient, and one had "waterworks" and, by about 1920, a somewhat tempermental electric lighting system.
Everyone had a kitchen garden and almost everyone a flower garden though the latter were not always as faithfully maintained or as ambitious as that at Cottonwoods. Again the gardens reflected the transatlantic heritage of most of the gardeners. They were not elaborate; few attempted more than the cottage garden of England. Plants and seeds were exchanged and the hardiest flourished. Scarlet lychnis or Maltese Cross, perhaps one of the first "exotics" attempted on Sheep Creek, flourished everywhere, notably at the Millarville church. The humble hop and the annual cucumber vine were popular creepers; Virgina creeper was not considered hardy enough to withstand the late and early frost of the foothills. Though the cottonwoods attained a respectable height along the creek, other than native trees grew slowly though gardeners were soon planting Russian poplar, Manitoba maple and caragana to give shelter not only from the wind but also from unseasonable frosts. The gardens and indeed the whole landscape of Sheep Creek by 1930 gave a feeling of sheltered lushness very unlike the stereotype of the prairie, but photographs dating from the eighties and nineties suggest a much more open and less wooded view and indeed these were the years when prairie fires were still a menace. The present garden at Cottonwoods dates only from 1910 and it was much enlarged to accommodate the sheltering trees at the end of the twenties. Dating the gardens is even more difficult than dating the houses and their furnishings, but I am inclined to think that Cottonwoods was exceptional in the absence of a garden in its early years. I am inclined to think that by 1890, and more certainly by 1895, almost all the early settlers had attempted something like an ornamental garden, however modest. An extraordinary number of Sheep Creek houses had tennis courts; I can think of at least 16. They were grass courts though it is possible that the tennis club courts, near Ardmore, were clay courts, as the second Mrs. Welsh was a player of near championship quality. The vogue for lawn tennis seems to have spread to Sheep Creek almost as soon as the game was invented in North Wales and its popularity survived the war of 1914-18 though by the end of the thirties few of the courts were still maintained. "Maintained" is a relative word for the courts reflected the same talent for improvisation as the furnishing of the houses. The one at Cottonwoods was largely my mother's work. There was a piece of more or less level turf directly south of the garden and approximately the size laid down by Pears' Encyclopaedia, a much-thumbed work of reference. The lines, determined by the same authority, were laid out with lime and an old broom. The net had to be taken down between times as stock roamed at large; indeed to make the court my mother cut turf to fill a cow path that bisected diagonally her chosen site. The court ran east and west, which gave a certain advantage to the players with the sun at their backs. There were no backstops and balls had frequently to be retrieved from the little creek that in wet seasons ran only a few feet beyond the court's southerly limit. Our equipment was modest; balls were used year after year, surviving frequent total immersion, and one of the racquets was of such antiquity that, judging from its curiously unbalanced shape, it must have been made before any nonsense about standardization. The Sheep Creek houses that I remember had great individuality yet they reflected certain common concerns that grew out of a diversity of backgrounds. Their mood was to a degree nostalgic, a harking back to a past that was remembered with affection, if not always, or even often, with regret. Their mistresses showed remarkable adaptability and in the interest of comfort and convenience they did not hesitate to compromise. Thus they drew their furnishings from a variety of sources. In one house a fine pair of early Wedgewood vases might sit on a carpenter-made cupboard or a Chippendale dressing-mirror on a golden-oak chest of drawers from Lindsay, Ontario. Family portraits from the 18th century might hang side by side with a carefully tanned coyote-skin. No one furnished a house with antiques, but if they had cherished possessions from another age and another way of life they used them and enjoyed them. On these extraordinary juxtapositions the patina of a generation's living imposed a congruity of their own.
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