Summer looks like the easy season. You cut hay in good weather and store it for winter. In the Cariboo the good weather was the unreliable part.
Bessie Lowry arrived in May 1933 to get away from the weather. She and her husband, Jim Lowry, had lost two crops outright in southern Manitoba before they drove west in an old Chandler with a trailer behind it and homesteaded near Horsefly Lake. It rained here. It also frosted in summer, often enough that green beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers were not worth planting. She preserved what did grow, more than a hundred quarts of blueberries in a season.
The Wet Years
Harry Brown bought his Beaver Valley ranch in 1939 and put up roughly a hundred ton of hay the first season, working three teams of horses. One summer he cut a meadow and rain kept him off it for six weeks. Grass grew up through the windrow. He raked it, stacked it, and fed it, but the nutritional value was gone. “It was just filler,” he said. A second cut was never possible in Beaver Valley. Cutting early enough to get one risked losing the first.
The Dry Years
Glenn Walters, born in 1902, had the opposite problem. He had seen summers dry enough that the bench land produced almost no hay, leaving the entire crop to the low meadows, which could be flooded. Irrigation in Horsefly at that time meant gravity flow off the creeks and lakes. Land that could not be reached that way was left alone. After several dry summers, Glenn priced a pump to lift water out of the river. The men selling it called the rig a rainmaker. The first quote came in at five thousand dollars. He collected two more, and the third was substantially lower. He was ready to sign when the rain returned, and he dropped the idea.
The Stack
Hay went up with slips and slings under an A-frame of poles about fifty-five feet high, using cable, blocks, and a deadman anchor at either end. A team hauled the load up and swung it over the stack. One man could keep pace with three or four slips arriving in sequence, and a good crew stacked twenty to thirty ton in a day. Glenn’s daughter, Loreen Walters, worked with them. She could ride and handle a team, and by her mother Lily Walters’s account, she was rarely in the house long enough to learn to cook.
The tractor arrived in 1944, a Ford, bought together with a mower, side mower, power saw, pulleys, and plough for about eighteen hundred dollars. Patenaude had bought one a year earlier, and Jack Wynstra at roughly the same time. Glenn’s oldest son ran the cutter bar and mowed after supper to stay two or three days ahead of the stacking crew, the margin the hay needed to dry.
Glenn sold that tractor thirty years later and it was still running. He remained unsure the machinery had paid for itself. “You can do it so much quicker,” he said, “but do you have any money left in the finish?”
Somewhere in Beaver Valley this month there is hay on the ground and someone watching the western sky.
Sources
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Bessie Lowry, interview by Leslie Crow, Accession No. 21-1, August 12, 1980.
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Harry Brown, interview by Christine Houghton, Accession No. 8-1, July 28, 1977.
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Glenn Walters, interview by Christine Houghton, Accession Nos. 1-3, 1-4, 1-5, July 1977.