The Silent Song: A Daughter's Tribute to a Reluctant Pioneer

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and the co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

Marjorie Wilkins Campbell came to Canada in 1904, when she was just two,
with her parents and baby sister. Their destination was a homestead
north of Qu’Appelle in what became, a year later, the province of
Saskatchewan. Campbell’s father was an ambitious man who gloried in
the challenges of turning the wilderness into a prosperous farm. Her
mother was very different. London–born and bred, she had rejoiced in
singing, playing the piano, and attending concerts and operas. In
Canada, that rich heritage was replaced by the great loneliness of
wide-open spaces, not to mention the backbreaking toil involved in
pioneering. She and her husband shared an enduring love for each other,
but little else.

Though this is a family memoir, Campbell focuses on her mother,
particularly on how she coped with adversity by trying to make the best
of things. She entertained her increasing brood of daughters with songs
and games, identified for them birds and wildflowers around the farm,
and later insisted that they receive a proper education. Her declining
health helped ensure this outcome; to make her life easier, her husband
staged a series of retreats from his beloved farm. Campbell’s mother
died at 42, from tuberculosis, at Swift Current.

Although this pioneering tale covers the usual hazards of prairie fires
and early frosts, it is also a poignant account of mutual love and
frustration. An accomplished writer, Campbell persuasively reconstructs
many of her parents’ thoughts and feelings, aided by her father’s
diary and farming records, her mother’s music and musical scores, and
her own memories.