Strangers in the House. Candace Savage
Catholic fathers based at the Mission de Saint-Florent at Lebret. Although Lake must have passed through the mission, his diary does not acknowledge this “Papist” presence.
By the end of July, the little party of self-confessed tenderfoots finally reached their promised land. Once on site, they wasted no time in choosing a location for their new settlement. They were assisted in this decision by the Dakota chief Wapaha Ska, or Whitecap, who had recently settled, with his community, on a small reserve within the borders of the Society’s grand domain. There was no better place than this, Chief Whitecap assured the new arrivals, for a future river crossing.
With that practicality out of the way, Lake hurried back to Ontario and returned the following spring, 1883, with a sturdy band of “earnest, determined” Methodists from Toronto, who were to get the colony up and running. By mid-August, a townsite had been surveyed on the east bank of the river, with a main street (christened Broadway because it was wide enough to accommodate a U-turn by a team of horses) that ran north toward the river and then northeast along an already established trail leading to the Métis community of Batoche. Lake named his new settlement Saskatoon, after a local berry. By September, a number of houses were poking out of the ground, straight-backed as prairie gophers keeping watch by their holes. “Had a general jubilation,” Lake reported, “all the settlers around . . . to the number of 30 or 40 people.”3
By then, one catastrophe had already been averted through Lake’s quick and decisive action. He had discovered, to his consternation, that the surveyors whom the government had hired to demarcate the Society’s estate were laying it out in long, narrow strips with river frontage, “like the [Métis] lands at Red River,” following a pattern borrowed from the seigneuries along the Saint Lawrence River in New France. What kind of backward, Frenchified thinking was that? Lake immediately rushed off to Ottawa for urgent consultations with the prime minister and other top-ranking officials. Soon, the telegraph lines were buzzing with orders to lay out the land in the officially approved American-style square sections.
But not even the ardent and well-connected Reverend Lake could prevent the successive disasters that were about to smite his godly initiative. Through an unholy confabulation of poor planning, inadequate infrastructure, ill-conceived government policy, internal discord, and uncooperative weather (on the prairies you can pretty much count on that), the project quickly foundered, and by 1885, even Lake was out, leaving, by his accounting, “about $8,000 of hard cash in the wreck.”4 When violence ignited at Batoche that year, provoked in large part by the government’s prolonged refusal to acknowledge the right of Métis settlers to their riverfront lots, the Temperance Colony was essentially done for. Attracting incomers would prove extremely difficult for many years to come.
Nonetheless, the fledgling settlement carried on bravely as it had begun, as an outpost of strict and particular Protestantism. Even after the railway arrived in 1890, change was glacially slow. When a cluster of stores and houses sprang up on the west bank of the river (near the new railway roundhouse) and took over the name “Saskatoon,” the east-bank community shuffled the syllables, more or less back to front, and rechristened their settlement “Nutana.” (As city archivist Jeff O’Brien notes, the phonemes were “scrambled, no doubt, because of the small likelihood that anyone would ever want to live in a place called ‘Nootaksas.’ ”)5 The place was a backwater, caught in a listless eddy.
Then, in 1903, a trainload of settlers from England, recruited under the slogan “Canada for the British,” steamed into the station on the way to their own promised land, a tract farther west known—lest anyone mistake their intentions—as Britannia. Many of them stepped off the train, gazed at the dizzying horizons around the platform, and decided they’d come far enough. With these new additions, Saskatoon and Nutana were well on their way to becoming an enclave of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. A WASP nest.
Three years later, when the two municipalities came together with an adjoining hamlet to form the City of Saskatoon, the event was marked with patriotic speeches and a flurry of Union Jacks. A parade wound through the muddy streets to the stirring beat of an anthem of British supremacy, “The Maple Leaf Forever”:
In days of yore, from Britain’s shore,
Wolfe, the dauntless hero, came
And planted firm Britannia’s flag
On Canada’s fair domain.6
A few years later, in the 1910s and 1920s, the city would open its doors to a flood of immigrants from other parts of Europe, including the “men in sheepskin coats” from the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Galicians, Ruthenians, Poles. The self-appointed WASP elite made no secret of their disdain for these “aliens” and “non-preferred Europeans.”7 Soon, the population of the city began to segregate, with most “ethnics” residing in the working-class neighborhoods on the west side of the river, where they enjoyed ready access to purveyors of strong drink, and citizens of British ancestry, upright and proper, ensconced on the gracious streets to the east. And yet, a man with a frankly French name had managed to gain a toehold inside this ultra-respectable domain. Who was this Napoleon S. Blondin, and how had he crossed the divides that marked, and in some ways still mark, this city?
ALTHOUGH I HAD tucked Diana’s list away for safekeeping, there was no immediate way of answering the questions it had aroused. We set our curiosity aside and continued with our lives. It was then, as we settled more deeply into our house, that we began to sense something about it that we hadn’t noticed at first. Something downright peculiar. Most houses are designed to provide clearly separated spaces, each with a designated use. But our house had been built to an unusual, flow-through plan, in which every room provides access to adjoining spaces. For instance, the back porch opens into the kitchen, which opens into the dining room, which opens to the living room, which, in turn, leads to a small front hall. From there, you can loop through the master bedroom, via a mini-corridor, back to the dining room or, alternatively, continue straight on to the den. A doorway on the far side of the den provides access to a steep set of stairs leading up to the second floor, where three more spaces are laid out end to end, like train cars. Except for the bathroom, every room in the house has two or three doorways, each of which leads in a different direction.
On a practical level, this design has a few, readily apparent disadvantages. If you’re the kind of person who likes to go into your room and shut out the world, it wouldn’t work for you. But for us, the flexibility of this layout has turned out to be surprisingly accommodating. Opening the spaces to one another has also freed them up, to an unusual degree, for reinterpretation. Thus, the “master bedroom” was once Diana’s room, then a guest room, and is now my office. And the fact that every room is designed to make connections and to take you somewhere you need to go—isn’t that exactly what stories are for? Every episode leads you on to the next and the next, so that it is never quite clear where one ends and another begins, or which door to choose, or when it’s the right time to loop back to the beginning. This house isn’t just a house. It is a story.
IT MUST HAVE been around the time of Diana’s memorable visit to the library, give or take a few months, that a new and unexpected happiness found us. Who knew that True Love could walk up to your door, ring the bell, and take a seat at the dining-room table? As it happens, it was the very table where a few weeks earlier I’d sat alone and clipped an ad from the Companions column of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. “To enjoy travel, the arts, books and other pleasures,” the ad promised. “For a relationship based on equality and love.” Yes, please, I’ll have one of those. And now, here he was, that “friendly, attractive professional man, mid-40s,” in our dining room, serenaded by the splash of Diana’s pet turtles, the rustle from her cage of white mice, the miasmic wheeze of our smelly old dog. If he’d made a run for it, who could have blamed him? But he didn’t run; he lingered. In fact, when he headed home that evening (and wouldn’t you know it, this being Saskatoon, he lived just down the block?), we’d been tête-à-tête, in conversation, for six entire hours. Where does the time