The Farthest Frontier
by John Brown
The cowboys of the Cariboo and the Chilcotin are riding this way again.
Their great-grandparents passed here a time or two a hundred years ago. In this
country, that was a time not much different from today.
They came, first of all,
because a fist-sized chunk of pure just-found gold will always, always buy a man
a good steak. Many of them were raw farm kids, hardened as school-children,
grown into twenty-somethings, those earliest cowboys across a then-unmarked
Canadian border alongside a thousand head of cattle with some ear, some horn
about them. Those stockmen still called themselves "drovers," in fact, in 1858 when
the first herds tromped north following, as the cattle business always does, the
market. Thirty thousand miners had preceded them in the year just past, rootless
men chasing quick riches in the discovery of gold up on the lower Fraser River in
the Crown Colony of British Columbia. A similar rush at Sutter's Mill nine years
earlier was playing out, and with the dwindling of the California gold-finds came a
concurrent decline in the demand for beef in the area. And so the Oregon ranchers
looked to satisfy demand elsewhere, seeking now to feed the hungry nouveau riche
of British Columbia with cattle driven overland and ferried by steamer beyond the
mountains and the mayhem of far western North America in those days.
Ranching is all about forage and fodder, and British Columbia is strong on both, despite a short growing season. |
Other early BC cattlemen came from the east, from
eastern professions. The anecdotal evidence goes that a
retiree from the Hudson Bay Company, Donald
McLean, moved his family from Kamloops to Hat Creek
in the Cariboo country in 1860, founding there the first
permanent cattle ranch in the province's interior. A second
claim says that, no, the oldest cowherd in British
Columbia foraged in 1861 on a range some 50 clicks
south of Williams Lake. The rugged individualists, the
speculators, the young cowboys looking for grass of
their own came to the Chilcotin (sprawling, intimidating,
inspiring country in the province's western middle,
south of Prince George, west of Williams Lake) and the
Cariboo (sprawling intimidating, inspiring country in
the province's eastern middle, south of Prince George,
east of Williams Lake). They built their cabins and their
barns essentially indistinguishable but for size, breeding
their cows, surviving the winters a dozen years or so
until the Feds got involved.
In the early 1870s, the Canadian government began to
use ridiculously cheap land to encourage settlement in its
vast western provinces, with homesteading policies modeled
on legislation in the United States of a decade earlier.
Suddenly, families could claim a farmstead for just $10
and the keeping of some promises, chiefly the construction
of a residence on the land and the cultivation of
required acreages, perhaps after requisite clearing of timber.
The arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway on the
prairies in the early 1880s let the boom times roll, and the
great cattle companies in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and
British Columbia answered the expansive hunger for
good beef in Great Britain, now easily transportable back
east. With the railroad though came also the dirt-farmers,
the sod-busters demanding free and open settlement, the
termination of the old ranch leases, the subdivision of
Crown lands into the roundabout squares of the one-bottom
plow.
Four decades (1890-1930) of gritted teeth then as the
grazers and the cultivators fought their battles face-toface
across a fence line and political-party-to-politicalparty
down in Ottawa until, as usually happens in agriculture,
the weather finally worked its way. After a hundred
months of drought, the same refusal-to-rain that lay
behind the Dust Bowl of our own American century, there
came for the dryland settlers an eventual, badly
begrudged recognition that, in the mountains of British
Columbia as on the semiarid prairies to the east, here was
terrain far better suited to ranching than to farming.
Model T's and Percherons
Joe and Katie Shuk at home. |
KATIE SHUK'S DAD LEFT HIS RAILROAD JOB in Nebraska in 1924 to
return to the cattle business, this time in the Tatlayoko Valley of the
Chilcotin, years having passed from his teenaged time spent working
on ranches in Colorado. Land had been thrown open again, land
from the Canadian government, land in 1920 for clearing and settlement.
"Pre-emption," it was called now, but the old rules
applied. And so Katie Shuk's dad drove his Model T Ford to Big
Creek, BC, where he traded the new-fangled thing for draft horses
and a wagon. And he did day labor as he needed and, like so many
cowboys hereabouts back then, he trapped. He spread sprungmetal
jaws, and he found in the pelts of the river animals the grubstake
to a fully working ranch. Katie's husband Joe's father meanwhile was hauling hard wheat
to a Saskatchewan elevator with a team and wagon for 19 cents a
bushel, wheat grown on "a mixed farm" the family had also, according
to pre-emption, cleared for cultivation. By 1936, Joe's relatives
up around Horsefly in the Cariboo-"some good Germans over
there," as Joe describes his uncles and cousins-had convinced his
dad that "grass up to the stirrups and not so many trees" looked
exactly like a new start. And so the Shuks drove their own Model T
west, bringing along their Belgians and a saddle horse.
"All sorts of people were trying to make a start," Joe remembers.
"They'd look to find a meadow or a shallow lake to drain. Lots of
guys had already come here because of World War I," guys who, for
reasons of their own, chose to sit out global conflict involving mustard
gas and midnight bayonetings. In her barely audible softness,
Katie Shuk nods at her husband's recollection, and she says, "I
don't really blame them. I wouldn't have wanted to go either." The Great War raging in Europe made its awful presence felt in
these mountains in the cold void of those gassed at Verdun, shot
point-blank at Ypres. In the pivotal year of 1919, with the armistice
finally signed, British Columbia was open again, with land and
more land waiting for those strong enough to live on it.
A second world war would pass, however, before they found each other. Joe carpentered for Katie's dad in 1946, cowboying some,
starting a herd with two mother cows, the first bought and paid for
at $15, the second at $22. And Joe was trapping, of course-martens
mostly and beaver, the fishers long gone, "too easy to catch, just send
a dog after them, and up a tree they go." Like the farmers, unsuited to
predatory times.
"The first place Katie and I owned was 120 acres with a house,
some chickens, and a couple of milk cows. We paid a thousand dollars
for the whole deal," Joe says, "But land wasn't really worth anything
then. You couldn't borrow money to buy land beyond pre-emption.
There was just no money available for anything fixed. I remember the
first time I went to the bank for a loan. I wanted to borrow $75, and
the banker wanted a cosigner. But I wouldn't do it. You know, I told
the man that I didn't need a cosignor. I just wouldn't do it." The Shuk ranch runs spring calvers, the heifers delivering in
March, the cows on through April, all the calves sold as yearlings,
hauled now on trucks to the sale at Williams Lake. Gone the days of
Joe and Katie driving the cattle to market, 125 miles to the northeast,
a minimum of 16 days on the trail, just the two of them gone for most
of October, spending at least a week in town for honeymoon hours on
money left after the bank manager, standing right there at the sale
clerk's desk, took his cut from everybody, from all the ranchers bringing
maybe 10,000 head into Williams Lake before Halloween. "We'd
leave home on a wagon track and off we'd go, staying overnight at
ranches, on government lands some evenings," Katie remembers,
"almost like going on holiday, those cattle drives."
Riding all night to the promised land
BO LEFT A SMALL FARM in northern Sweden 40 years ago. He left
with a cousin also wanting "to go somewhere," and they landed in Montreal, and they bought a bus ticket to Prince George, BC,
where, they were told, "you two guys can find a job just by walking
down the street."
Bo and Joann Ericksson. |
Only 250 miles down the road a reclusive beauty named Joann
Brebner was living the bucolic life, cowgirling, helping out at her
family's remote ranch-based resort. The great-granddaughter of a
First Nations sweetheart who married a Mountie, granddaughter of
a fisherman-trapper, Joann sees some similarity to the romantic
experiences of Katie Shuk. Like her neighbor from the next valley
over, Joann watched the young cowboy come to work for her father,
and she says, "My dad brought him here, but I made him stay."
A few years after he had bought a second-hand saddle and proclaimed
himself a cowboy, self-taught in endless hours of day labor,
(On his roping skills: "Sooner or later, you'll catch one.") Bo
Eriksson was the real deal when he showed up at the Brebner place.
When Joann and Bo spoke their vows, he took his new bride off to
the sticks, the really, really remote country in northern BC. "There
was just so much I wanted to see," he says. "We wanted to do our
own adventure," she says, and so for the first 10 years of their marriage,
he cowboyed where he could, perhaps no job better than on
the Deer Park Ranch where he "rode a horse all day, and my only
other responsibility was to have a nitroglycerin pill ready to pop into
the boss' mouth if he were to have a heart attack." This was the ranch
where Bo and another cowboy roped a buck once, castrated him, and
fattened him just like a Shorthorn steer: "We had some excellent
venison that winter," the roper says.
Then it was back home to buy the ranch near the point of Tsuniah
Lake and 50 Herefords trailed out from the stockyards, and the early
years tough, the Erikssons selling all the calves just to break even,
building the ranch's improvements by hand, doing day labor wherever
it could be found-gold-mining, carpentry, logging-and begin-ning the energy efficiencies that keep the
Eriksson ranch self-sufficient still: the lights
on 12-volt, switching over to 110-volt to
watch a little television, firing up the generator
for laundry and vacuuming.
The cattle, crossbred Angus and Hereford
and some Charolais in there too, stay on the
deeded ground October till mid-May, then
up to the mountain ranges on over five miles
and more to high pastures best reachable by
helicopter.
"You have to like this life," Joann
Eriksson says, "and you have to like each
other. Our ranch makes for a strong marriage.
My gosh, it's almost a hundred miles
just to go pick up our mail once in a while."
This September day, the Christmas
wine-making has begun, Joann fermenting
a merlot and a white zinfandel. Coffee
from an old metal pot that the most sniffish
barista in Seattle ought to know about,
cookies made from three ingredients that
taste just like manna, Dahla horses set here
and there in a living room and kitchen that
amplify the stereotype for Scandinavian
housekeeping, and she says: "Maybe the
pine beetles will make it a little easier to
get land up here." Joann Eriksson lives in, arguably, the
sweetest home on earth, flowers grown in an
unflowered land by the sheer insistence of
her care, barns and staircases and greenhouses
built with the skilled, sure hands of a
wild man she persuaded to stay and prosper
right here, here with postcard mountains
and the creator's close-up sky all, all around,
and she says, "The pine beetles are killing the
trees, and maybe in a backhanded way, those
infernal bugs will make it easier for ranchers
to find new land." Right there, the paradox. Right there, the
indigenous cowgirl watching in her heart
her perfect, her Technicolor Disney view of
the world turn brown. Joann Eriksson, who
makes diva blossoms shout and shine in the
cold and the wind, must watch the trees on
her family's ranch wither and succumb.
The timber, British Columbia's erstwhile
most important resource, dying on the
vine, the victim of beetles that too many
non-40-below winters didn't kill.
Thousands of square miles of God's own
pines dying because the government made
laws that prevented man's beneficial interference
in "parks." "Parks," places where Nature must work her worst in a purely natural way. And so, the
beetles were not contained in the tight, confined, known places
where first they festered, and now billions upon billions of them
burn the mountainsides as surely as ever did a forest fire. But good comes from everything up here, even in the big fire that
in 2003 arced across the Eriksson ranch. That fire took 12 miles of
fence and all the Eriksson corrals in the meadow. "I'd gone down
there in the evening to watch the firefighters hose down the corral,"
Bo says, "and when I came back the next morning, the pens were
gone." The smoke-eaters controlled the blaze eventually, and the cattle
skimped by on what the flames had left behind. "But the next year
our calves came home 25 pounds fatter on average. Those mountains
looked as if we'd seeded pinegrass up there.
Good comes then from
everything. Ask the Fosters
The Fosters--Walt, Jr., and Carol |
IN 1961, the Canadian government again encouraging development,
Walt Foster, Sr. rented a big Cat to build the road into what is now
the headquarters of the Foster ranch, south and west of Tatla Lake,
down the West Branch Valley. Walt Foster's original reasons for
moving to BC called for a survival school, an extension of the outdoor
courses he had taught back at the Thacher School in Ojai,
Calif. Soon enough the Outward Bound ideas gave way to a different
sort of survival, as he trucked the new-bought Herefords and Charolais up to leased grass at Bluff Lake. Walt Foster, Jr. was just
six years old when he first came to the family ranch.
"The early ranchers up here ran their calves to yearlings and
older," Walt, Jr. knows. "They confronted the expenses of the winter
and the threats posed by predators. We try to manage our cattle
around market forces, making best use of our grass in the meantime.
It's an exceptionally short season at our ranch's elevations." The Fosters bring the cattle horseback with their dogs-Dan,
Tom, and Ryder-the twelve miles from the summer range, a drive
that in the spring becomes an incremental, 45-mile effort across
country capable of overshadowing an IMAX camera. And so last
year a production crew for a film recording the performance and
the permanence of the horse-Ride Around The World, it's called-
left the Four Sixes in Guthrie, Texas, to helicopter around the Sand
Creek Ranch, the New York film-makers sleeping on the ground
next to the four-legged cowhands Dan and Tom. The ranch where
Walt and Carol Foster home-schooled their three sons before they
too completed their secondary education at the Thacher School,
the ancestral boarding hall where their dad had run the horsemanship
program. The elder Fosters drive cattle alone these days, the boys off to
lives far gone from Sand Creek. Josh, the oldest, an erstwhile English major at Colby College in Maine,
now flies for the Marines, his ranch-based
skills, his cowboy attitudes at the controls
of a Harrier jumpjet. Ryan, the adventure
guide down in Vancouver, is studying
tourism management with an eye to an
MBA. Jake, the youngest, is using his geology
degree from Denison University in Ohio
as a mud engineer with Haliburton in the
Wyoming oilfields. "The boys always went
with us when there was cattle work," Carol
says. "Our ranch is so remote, the five of us
had to do it all." The cowboy community up here does
come together for brandings, neighbors
sharing help in the busy season, and no way
but the old way, dragging calves to the fire.
"We enjoy a lifestyle up here that you might
call 'traditional,' and we have ways of doing
things, of keeping ourselves self-sufficient,"
Walt says. "Living here demands
some sound, practical knowledge, because
this country can be unforgiving." Unforgiving as in nine head down and
going under in a bog, some out in the middle
trying to swim across, six roped and
pulled to safety, three mother cows dying
and nothing to do but watch. Unforgiving
as in Dad at a cattle sale in Williams Lake,
heading home in the November early dark,
and the snow building, and the boys home
with Carol alone and the power gone, getting
cold in the house and the calves trying
to feed, Walt as far as Tatla Lake, holed up
there for three days, and the boys deciding
to start a four-wheel-drive tractor and, two
of them out the door, Carol saying, "What
have I done?" Broke down nine miles out to
trudge on home, until their Grandpa came
back with another leased bulldozer, an
uncle plowing in as well, the road Walt Sr.
built buried under an avalanche of heavy,
windblown snow.
Where the streets have no names. Yet.
THE RANGELANDS here face encroachment
from towns and cities. The filtering of rural
ecosystems, the mudding up of country
places born in the entanglements of governmental
policies of land use and the pressures
of a changing British Columbia economy.
And so the Grasslands Conservation
Council of British Columbia is following a
strategy common in the United States,
wherein a fluid association of groups with
vested interests in the grasslands-agencies
of government, environmentalists, ranchers,
academics-addresses the overwhelming
questions. What are the specific threats
to the grasslands? What are workable
responses to those threats? What stands in
the way of those responses' success? In cowboy British Columbia the loss of
large, natural grassland areas follows directly
on two main issues, urban sprawl to some
extent but more the fragmentation of rural
landscapes. The abstractions ride every-where. Criss-crossed land use policies.
Stupefying regulations. Random socio-economic
pressures. Hyperventilated environmental
issues. Remember: almost all-
95%-of the grasslands in BC are working
rangelands, whether privately owned ranches,
governmental land leases, or First Nation
reserves. That said, ranching in the province
is most certainly in transition. Ranch families
are aging, and the kids are not choosing the
old folks' lifestyle in large numbers. Come
now the hard familial decisions, maybe selling
the land for development, taking advantage of
skyrocketing land prices particularly for the
pristine, ultrascenic spaces so coveted by the
city-bound wealthy, prices easily a hundred
times greater than any value that might
accrue agriculturally, prices to be paid for
resorts and hobby farms, for hotels and retirement
homes. Prices paid by developers who
might very well treat Grandpa's land like dirt. The Sand Creek Ranch is 90 minutes down the road that Walt Foster built from
the population center that is Tatla Lake, 50
hardy souls there. Cattle roam contentedly
on the Sand Creek at 6,700 feet. Especially
here, the Fosters worry about over-grazing.
The land is fragile, sensitive even to a proven
cowboy's touch, and so the Foster cows
must move along now. The popular historical conception of the
British Columbian drover involves a crosscultural
accumulation of the indigenous
First Nations' reverence for the land, British
regimentation, the Americans' demand to
see what lies over the next hill, and the
Mexican vaqueros' clothing, equipment, and
skills horseback: all in all, a wooly character
ideally suited to the rigors and the opportunities
of a very large, quite majestic coldstorage
locker.
British Columbian cowfolk
are coming this way.
AND LOOK HERE. In the shadows at the edge
of the road. In the ditch there, half asleep, real
or really imagined, he's there all right.
Doris Lulua and her calf Mary. |
It's a neighbor come to help. Jim Madden.
Out of history and invisible to IMAX, him.
Linebackerish. Hairy in a sasquatch sort of
way, dressed as always-in calving season, in
haying time, amid the eight hours of sunlight
that is the winter around here-in wool, logger's
shirt and the baggiest of pants shoved
into a pair of ancient boots laced to his knees.
The shirt yanked open and the britches
flopped to the breeze in summer, all pulled
tight in December, the greased-up misshapen
old hat there New Year's to Christmas, Jim
Madden's clothes mark him again, as the
clothes did among those who knew him then
in British Columbia's Nicola Valley in 1890, as
a cowboy's cowboy. In his day a day-laborer, he
seeks to work once more for the big ranches,
asking Walt Foster if again he might to go it
alone. Building a Russell fence. Clearing some
timber. Tending those heifers in the middle of
a blizzard.
The next valley over. A similar place, in and
out of time, and multiple vehicles park on the
Shuk ranch. This Sunday night the Shuk son
Clifford is loading nine mature, exceptionally
well-fed Hereford mamas onto a flatbed fitted with stock racks, and he looks over at his parents'
home, and he thinks of his own six
daughters, and he knows that he has built
something here, a place to start beloved little
girls' lives. And Clifford Shuk he looks across
the barnyard, and he sees the Cadillac. The
black Escalade. His dad's, Joe Shuk's, ride.
The make and model that first caught the
elder Shuk's eye. "Now that's a good-looking
car, I said to myself," Joe says, remembering
his first visual encounter with high-dollar
General Motors sport-utility vehicles. "It
looked tough too. So I get on the Internet
where I found 10 or 12 of those Escalades, one
right close to where my brother lives in
Burnaby, and I had him take a look at it. Well,
he says it looks pretty good and so I say 'What
they want for it?' And then I say 'What will
they take if I pay cash?'" Being Joe Shuk, he
pressed on, and now an extra $4,000 back in
his pocket, no cosigner needed this time
around, and his cow/calf operator-type partner
of 60 years rolls her eyes in knowing
Joedom. "There was a fella named Watt
Bennett-everyone says he built British
Columbia-and he drove a black Cadillac. My
husband thinks he's Watt Bennett." And Joe
Shuk grins, and he rocks easy in his chair, and
he forgets in a good woman's love the unmudded
Escalade parked in a barn worth, to the
world's eye, a tenth of the car's purchase
price, and so Joe he will drive young Katie in
another, a different Shuk ranch vehicle
tomorrow afternoon to visit a neighbor.
More cowboys on
this old road tonight 
NORMAN LEE WHITTLES there ditchside,
shavings in a pile since 1898 when, Cookie and
his chuck overshot by an hour's ride, old Norm
and his hands and his cattle paused there on
their tramped-over trail, hungry and no place
to go but to the mudded canvas, the blackened
beans back of the cantle. They were on their
way to the Klondike in 1898, another gold-rush
up there, and those miners needing some
burger. And the grass gone, the cattle grazing
not much, the cattle wanting something, anything
green, and the wild larkspur, that deadly
forb, right there, and 13 steers dead at the
moment, and the cowman Norman Lee, he
says to chop off some tails, bleed the damned
rest of those sick kids good, and an extra ration
of bacon grease all around, cows same as cowboys. Sarah Brockel walks here this evening,
down from her forestry work in William's
Lake, with Cameron and Amber along, and the
three slip loving arms around their mother
and grandmother, and they say to her, to Mrs.
Joann Eriksson, "We know, honey. We know."
Dogs sniff at the heels of time passing.
"Tom. Dan. What's there, huh? What's going
on, guys?" Mr. Bo and Mrs. Joann Eriksson walk roadside
this evening among flowers and fat cattle,
lost in a marital idyll of their own devising. And
if you must know, Dog, it's Darryl again. Darryl Keith Eriksson, b. March 10, 1972, d. July 25,
1993. The fence-fixing for Dad done, friends up
from California, a gathering over at the lake,
then the boat circling in something like loss.
Thirteen years later and parental grief not
going very far, hanging hereabouts in stupid
outboard, ditchbound bubbles and the warm,
tight hugs of little kids who most certainly
know, but who don't yet understand.
"There, Tom. There. It's Darryl our young
neighbor and his family. It's Norman Lee
and Don McLean and old Jim Madden.
Come off the herd there. Come off the herd." THE GRAVEL UP FROM CHILKO LAKE packs
hard next to the made-perfect plywood
floor of the home of Ms. Doris Lulua, her
pickup parked smack dab next to a Dorismade
deal where salmon gaffed from the
Chilko, as is Doris' First Nations' right,
smoke in a makeshift shack for Valentine's
Day. Ms. Doris Lulua, 80 years old and living
oh alone, with her cows brought 20 miles
home horseback, her sister Madeline up
behind. Doris Lulua with this calf six
months' handfed off an old broke-down
mom. Handfed and fat, doing just fine at last
and named "Mary," this heifer calf. And
Doris Lulua, she says two of the twenty
words she may or not speak in English in the
next week or so. "Eat, Mary."
A dog barks over north there, beyond the
new airstrip bringing adventure tourists in,
up by the plastic flowers, the geegaws and the
hand-carved heartbreak of her family cemetery
off where no one... no one!... but Doris
and the sister Madeline, with whom she fusses
now and then, know for sure what it all
might mean.
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