June 20, 2002

Plains Folk: The Stegner Homestead

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Memory is a slippery thing. That's what I'm thinking as I close the last gate, exiting Battle Creek Community Pasture, in southwestern Saskatchewan. We had come in search of the Stegner homestead, the half-section of land once claimed and worked by the family of Wallace Stegner, the greatest of western American writers. We had found it, for the original survey stakes are still in place, but the memories -- well, they had moved around a bit.

Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but perhaps his greater legacy for western Americans is that he taught other writers (like Larry McMurtry, author of "Lonesome Dove.") This great American writer had a Canadian boyhood. In the years 1915-20 the Stegner family resided in Eastend, Saskatchewan, and summered on a homestead south of there, smack up against the Montana line.

Stegner wrote a book about this. It's called "Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier." There's that word "memory" again. As for the "wolf willow" part, that's an oleaster shrub native to the northern plains, the musky scent of which, Stegner wrote, took him back to his boyhood.

He writes in "Wolf Willow" about a particular place, but he speaks for all of us who grew up on the plains. He writes about life both in town and on the land in a way that speaks to me, whose boyhood was in Kansas, and to the many North Dakotans with whom I have led discussions of the book. I'm saying we need to remember as we read that Stegner, like all of us, rearranges the furniture of his past.

He writes of homestead life as a matter of extreme isolation, a family in the middle of nothing but prairie, battling rust, drought, and gophers to try to make a crop, and eventually failing. Isolation is a key theme of the homestead material in "Wolf Willow."

Now here we are on the west half of Section 3 Range 24 West Township 1 North. The GPS coordinates at the southwest corner read N 49o00.003' W 109o08.707'. Peter Butala, who has spent his life ranching the nearby Old Man on His Back prairie, has brought my companion and me here. We are, in fact, pretty darned isolated. None of the homesteaders of this area remain. The few who proved up and stayed eventually sold out to the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, their lands becoming part of a community pasture. (Community pastures are similar to national grasslands in the states.)

You can't ask directions of anyone to find the Stegner homestead. You have to find the stakes. Here's the one at the northwest corner. The iron standard reads "IV-I-XXIV" on one face, because it marks the northeast corner of Section 4, adjacent on the west. "Penalty for Removal Seven Years Imprisonment" reads another face. So permanence is encouraged for the markers of the land, if not for its residents.

The only signs of habitation we can find here are rocks remaining from the Stegners' reservoir, which dammed a gully in the northeast corner of the claim. I rather think Stegner would like it that way.

Here's the problem, though, with looking around here and assuming Stegner indeed lived the life he wrote about in his book. Right there across the Montana line the ghost town of Hydro, Mont., is clearly visible. The Stegners lived within sight of a village. Not only that, in the provincial archives we found a 1917 plat map and tract books showing that except for school sections, every bit of the land in this township was claimed. Surely there were other homestead shanties all around that of the Stegners.

Sometimes we imagine ourselves alone.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Tom Jirik, (701) 231-9629, tjirik@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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