Growing Up in Manitoba

Michael Payne is head of the Research and Publications Program at the
Historic Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development, and
the co-author of A Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

Since the 1880s, the history of the Canadian west has been shaped by two
remarkable demographic stories. First, between the 1880s and 1920s the
land was filled with literally tens of thousands of farm families who
took up virtually every available quarter section of land in the prairie
and parkland belts. Second, from the 1920s to the present the
countryside was emptied of most of these families. Today, most people in
Manitoba, Alberta, and even Saskatchewan live in cities, and farming
takes place on a massive scale inconceivable to homesteaders with their
160-acre farms.

This book gives a human face to this transition. Harold Draper was born
in 1924 at a time when the great expansion of the farm population was
cresting and the long, slow decline of rural communities had begun. As a
result, his memoirs are not a conventional narrative of struggle and
eventual triumph. His parents and older siblings certainly struggled,
but without triumphing in any obvious economic way. What is perhaps most
remarkable is that Draper’s parents faced crisis after crisis and
disappointment after disappointment without obvious despair. His father
was inclined to observe, “Well, we shall just have to put up with
it,” as each new problem developed.

The bulk of this book, however, is not about the problems of farming or
the decline of rural communities, although these play a significant part
in the story. This is a child’s-eye view of a vanished way of life. As
Draper points out, children experience momentous social and economic
upheavals such as the Great Depression in ways that confound later
historical analysis. If everybody is poor, then poverty has no stigma
and little meaning to children. In fact, Draper suggests that growing up
in the 1930s on a small farm in Manitoba had many advantages from a
child’s perspective: dogs, horses, .22-calibre rifles, occasional
chocolate bars, time, and lots of freedom. Without being simplistic or
overly nostalgic, the book does make the point that we have lost more
than just a rural population with the decline of the small family farm.