Gully Farm: A Story of Homesteading on the Canadian Prairies

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

In 1903, six-year-old Mary Pinder came with her family to Canada, as
part of the Barr colony, a dolefully executed scheme to bring 2000
English settlers to the Canadian northwest. Most of the settlers came
from cities and had no experience of farming, much less of living in
such a harsh environment. Mary was lucky in that her father, Walter
Pinder, was a farmer. In England, he could never have hoped to afford to
buy the land he rented. He yearned for his own farm and for an expansive
future in which he could be independent. There was nothing in the
promotional literature to suggest that the climate in the area around
what is now Lloydminster was particularly challenging.

Gully Farm begins in England, where the Pinders live cosy, settled
lives, surrounded by family, shops, school, and church—the world to
which Mary’s mother longs to return and for which Mary is occasionally
homesick. It proceeds to recount the long journey: the miserable sea
voyage, the even more uncomfortable train trip to Saskatoon, and finally
the slow wagon trip to Battleford and beyond, to the Lloydminster area.
Here they search for a promising 160 acres of land that they can turn
into a farm. The main emphasis of the book is on the first year of this
process, when survival was so problematic.

There is more to the story than hardships. Hiemstra is keenly aware of
the prairies’ beauty: the flowers, the butterflies, the birds, the
small animals, and especially the summer air, “both sweet and
sharp.” “The wild, keen fragrance the wind knew in those days is
gone forever,” she notes sadly, a victim to the plough and the
cultivation of wheat. Mary Pinder’s observant young eyes witnessed the
process of settling, and her older self has evoked it memorably.