"Them Days": Memories of a Prairie Valley

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

This portrait of the settlement of the Souris Valley, Saskatchewan, is a
collage of recollections and memories selected from interviews with 20
seniors.

The material was gathered as part of an archeological and oral-history
survey conducted between 1984 and 1991 in preparation for construction
of the Rafferty–Alameda dam. Archeological digs were carried out on a
number of farms; photos of some of the artifacts are used to illustrate
the text, as are a few “family album” finds. Unfortunately, these
photos are consistently of very poor quality, fuzzy, muddy, and
uninformative.

The text is little better. The interviews have been cut into short
segments and these snippets grouped by subject—settlement, work, food,
clothing, fishing, hard times, recreation, and so on. This approach to
organizing oral-history material can be very powerful when skilful
editing is used to create focus and retain local color while discarding
clutter. Such editing is missing here; the excerpts of interview
transcripts are often rambling, offer very little information, and
irritate the reader with irrelevancies and repetition.

Despite the considerably flawed text and photos, those who persevere in
reading the book are rewarded with a sense of the challenges that faced
Prairie settlers in the 1910–35 period, and the creativity with which
they responded to those challenges.