When you order pancakes at Jack’s, you get pancakes: they arrived three high and large as platters, with sausages on the side and cups of acrid coffee to wash them down. As Keith and I attempted to do justice to this munificence, we had plenty of time to look around and admire our surroundings. It wasn’t just the vintage fittings that caught our attention, as charming as they were. Angie Doolias was not just a restaurateur; she was also an artist. From counter height to ceiling, all around the room—jogging above the cabinets, slipping over doors, flowing seamlessly around corners—the room was encircled by a mural.
Beginning on the north wall, above the cash register and partially obscured by a Coke machine, it showed the primordial prairie landscape, unpeopled and untouched, grazed by herds of buffalo and overflown by a golden eagle. Moving around to the east, humans enter the scene, and we see them driving buffalo over a cliff and, later, pitching their tipis in a broad valley. But change is coming, just around the bend. Beyond the pies and above the door to the kitchen, a column of covered wagons is wending its way toward a fort, led by a pair of riders in red-serge tunics and pillbox caps. Clearly, these are not the blue-coated fighting men that so stirred Bill Cody’s pride. Instead, as a loyal Canadian, Doolias has memorialized the arrival of the North-West Mounted Police at what I assume must be Fort Walsh. With law and order now assured, the pageant of progress picks up, as homesteaders break the sod with oxen along the south wall and a train steams into the station of a nascent Eastend in the southwest corner. If you look closely, you can see Jack’s Café already in place, between the bank and the hotel.
I’m guessing that it was at about this point in the creation of the mural when two Aboriginal men came into Jack’s for lunch. (I have this story from a friend who happened to be there at the right moment.) “Where’s it going to end?” one of the diners asked the artist, as he surveyed what she had done. “With a mushroom cloud?”
“No,” George Doolias shot back, coming to his wife’s aid. “It’ll be two Native guys in a Lincoln, pit-lamping deer.” Everyone had a good laugh.
But of course the mural does not end with a nuclear apocalypse or with poachers, either. In fact, Aboriginal people have disappeared from the action halfway around the room, as if they have no part to play, for good or ill, after the incomers appear. Instead, as the mural rounds the home stretch onto its final wall, it celebrates the fulfillment of the settlers’ dream, with a century of technological advancement and plenty. The story draws to its triumphant conclusion above a bank of orange plush booths in the northwest corner of the café. In the foreground a pair of combines plies the fields of a prosperous, modern farm, its yard lined with shiny bins poised to receive the golden harvest. In the middle distance, a landscape once dotted with buffalo is now studded with oil wells, and the crenellated skyline of Calgary lures the eye, ever onward, into the future.
That evening, I stood in the yard of the Stegner House, under a sky quilted with clouds, and listened to the yip-yip-yipping of coyotes on the hills above town. Tell the truth. Although I had been brought up on the Creation Story of prairie settlement and, as the past few days had proven, was still susceptible to its charms, I was no longer a true believer. It was one thing to sit in Jack’s Café, blissed out on maple syrup, and enjoy a confident portrayal of the pageant of progress. But did I really believe that a prairie landscape dominated by pump jacks and industrial agriculture is, in any ultimate sense, an improvement on the now-shattered buffalo ecosystem? And while it had been entertaining and, yes, even inspiring, to sit with the local history and recall my debt to the people who had planted me here, did I really believe that the West had been won while whistling a happy tune?
If I interrogated my memory, I could hear my mother’s voice turn brittle when she spoke, as she rarely did, of the beatings her own father had inflicted on his sons, but not his daughters, violent explosions of rage that seemed out of proportion to youthful misdeeds. Frustration refracted into cruelty. The Stegners, with their two sons, had been able to pull up stakes and leave when things turned sour on them; the Humphreys, with a brood of ten, did not have that option. They had toughed it out on a bankrupt farm, too proud to accept relief—but not too proud, in my mother’s nightmare recollection, to attempt to abandon a promising little girl, her own small self, to the care of a more prosperous neighbor. When she told me this story eighty years later, her voice still cracked with grief. Perhaps I had been avoiding Wolf Willow out of mere cowardice, a reluctance to face home truths when they were offered.
The night wind had an icy bite and it chased me back indoors, past Keith dozing on the couch and up the narrow stairway to the back room, where young Wally and his brother had once slept. With the spectre of their bewildered grandmother in the hallway behind me, I gazed out the window into the heavy dark and recalled how my own sense of Western history had, over the years, gradually come unmoored. I remembered sitting in Sunday school one morning (in the minister’s study at First United Church in Vermilion, Alberta, to be precise) and suddenly seeing with irrevocable clarity that the assurances of Christianity, and of a divinely ordained plan, were an illusion. This revelation left me with little to show for my religious upbringing except the Golden Rule and a slightly idiosyncratic version of a favorite children’s hymn:
All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wild and wonderful . . .
I thought of the day, a few years later, when I looked down on the prairie from an airplane and for the first time saw how the curvilinear contours of hill and valley, with their scribbled water courses, seemed to struggle against the straight lines of the surveyors’ rule. This wild and wonderful land was caught tight in a net, and my people, and others like them, had ensnared it.
And there was something else. On the homestead in the Peace River Country where my dad grew up, there was, and is, a piece of land known affectionately within the family as the Indian Quarter. Closer to a half-section in reality, it consists of a cultivated field bisected by a track that leads to a brushy ridge. Past this horizon, the land folds downward, through a tangle of aspen and spruce, to the wild currents of the Beaverlodge River. On the grassy ledge beside the water, the whole family often gathered together when I was a kid—a happy tribe of aunts, uncles, and cousins—to picnic and swim in summer or, when the ice was clear, to skate and drink hot chocolate on winter afternoons.
According to the family story, this spot had once been a favorite stopping place of the local Beaver Indians, who had continued to camp here until about 1910, when my pioneering great-grandfather and his sons had purchased the property from them. Like many family legends, this account is at least partly false, since treaty Indians at that time were not permitted to hold individual title to land. But whatever the truth of the matter, I was fascinated by the thought of those disappeared encampments and of the people who had lived in them. Now we were here, enjoying ourselves, and they had vanished.
I’m not sure how old I was when this discomfort first coalesced into an image, though I may have been eight or nine. In my mind’s eye, I saw my late grandmother (think Queen Victoria in a housedress) crossing the field on the dirt track that led toward the riverbank. Opposite her, at a distance, a young Beaver woman (an Indian princess in buckskin) stood at the edge of the brush, as if she had just come up the hill from the water. The two women faced each other across the clearing, as diffident as stones. No matter how often I conjured them there, they never approached each other, and neither uttered a word. The silence that lay between them seemed impenetrable.
Nights passed, and days, and our two-week booking at the Stegner House was drawing to a close. Our van turned up, roadworthy, with a little time to spare, but to our surprise we no longer wanted to go anywhere. Keith had settled into a happy routine of reading in the backyard—summer having graced us with a brief return—or just sitting and looking across the creek at the sun-cured hills. The land was tawny, streaked with black in the gullies where brush flowed down the slopes, and it reminded him, in a distant way, of his East African boyhood.
Stay put, the quiet voice had told us. Pay attention to where you are. We were in Eastend, Saskatchewan, on the northernmost edge of the great North American