Delta Olden Days

by F. Arnold Lejeune

It was in the early spring of 1909 that I decided to find myself a job on the Fraser River Delta, on the coast of British Columbia. I knew the Gulf islands to the West, but the farming there was primitive, and I had been told that agriculture was far more advanced on the mainland. At the age of 21 one is full of curiosity, so off I went to Ladner’s landing, an old steamboat stop on the lower Fraser.

I soon found myself a job on a dairy farm. “If you can use an axe, and a saw, and milk cow, you can always find somebody to hire you.” That was the way the young man talked in those days. My work was to milk the cows morning and evening, prepare their feed, clean out the barn, and mend fences in between these daily chores. I asked the other hired man where the cows got their drink and the answer was, “They wait until the tide comes in.” That puzzled me at first; I could hardly imagine them drinking salt water. But the explanation was simple. The farm was right next to a branch of the Fraser, and, sure enough, the tide went in and out twice a day, but the River was well banked in. There were sluice gates, which opened automatically when the tide went out, so that the ditches from the wet farm lands would drain into the River. But when the tide was in, and the River full of brackish water, the gates would shut. Then the freshwater stayed in the ditches and the cows could drink fresh water to their hearts content.

One day two American farmers from the prairie states came to see the boss; they were looking, they said, for land they could rent on a share basis and on which they could grow grain. The deal was made and one morning they started to plough a field near the river which had been in grass for hay as long as the oldest inhabitant could remember. After a few minutes the plough stopped with a jerk; it had evidently hit something below ground. One of the men got a shovel and dug till he found that a sunken log was the obstacle. A chain was attached to the log and the team of horses dragged it out and parked it along the side of the field. The team was hitched to the plough again and off they went, only to stop short again in a few yards. It was another sunken log and the whole operation had to be repeated. Then another and another and another.  Finally the whole field was plowed and wonderful rich topsoil it was, washed down by the Fraser River in the course of hundreds of years. But with the topsoil had come the dead logs from the forests upstream. Gradually the floods had covered them with mud, thus excluding all air and preventing the rotting process which would have occurred years ago, if they had been on the surface.

It was my custom to go over to the farmhouse for breakfast, after the morning milking was finished. One day after breakfast the farmer said to me, “I want you to take a message to the two Chinese men who live in the cabin in the wood you can see.” So off I went and delivered the message, but there was such a strong smell of skunk on the lean-to porch of the cabin that I asked the men if they had a skunk around lately. One of the Chinese answered me, and I remember his words exactly, although it is over 60 years since he spoke them. Pointing to a small bundle of what looked like chicken bones tied to one of the rafters of the porch, he said, “Skunk bones. Hang them up to dry – not in the sun, but in the shade. Keep them till Christmas. Grind them to powder; mix them with Rye whiskey and drink them. Make your belly warm.” No wonder it is doubtful whether we Westerners can understand the Oriental mind.

There were other Chinese farmers not far away and I will remember the squealing of pigs from their farm when I went to milk long before daybreak. But the strange thing was that it was only on Friday mornings. At last I learned the explanation: the meat market in New Westminster was on Fridays and that was where the slaughtered pigs were going.  We ignorant Occidentals like our meat to be well seasoned, but not so the Oriental; to him the fresher it is the better.

But never look down on those who come from far off countries; I learned a lesson in hospitality that I have never forgotten, from a Japanese man who worked on the next farm and lived in a cabin right by the bank of the Fraser River. He said to me one day, “How old are you? We can never tell with white men; old ones, young ones – they all look alike to the Japanese.”  But he said to me another day, “You got a bath where you live?”  I had to admit that I did the best I could with an old wash tub every Saturday night, filling it with water picked up from the ditch and heated on the kitchen stove.  “You come to me”, he said, “I got a good bathtub. I get water from the River for you, when the tide is high, heat it up on my outside fire and fill my bathtub.” And that, to my mind, was real understanding and hospitality.

It was usual for Mr. Jones, the boss, to come over to the cow barn and help the other hired man and me with the morning milking. But one morning, no Mr. Jones!  We naturally were late for breakfast and found Mrs. Jones in a dreadful temper. The other man gobbled his breakfast and went back to work; I have always been a slow eater and suddenly Mrs. Jones turned on me in anger, although I realized later that it was her drunk husband who was really the cause of her temper. “Where were you brought up” she shrieked at me. “You’re no use to us. Take your time (the Canadian word for wages) and go.”  “Just what I was thinking myself,” I said. So, I left and went back to the Gulf islands, never to return to the Delta again.