Ffield Reflection #4: Lac Du Bois

I stood over the small plaque that read “Site of Maurice Scott’s homestead built-1914”. I tried to image what it was like more than a hundred years ago. It was difficult to image that these hills used to be full of homesteads, and farmers who raised cattle and worked the land. Life was tough, and making a living was nearly impossible. As a result of hardships, the government and the economy, people abandoned their homesteads and left the area of Lac Du Bois.

            We walked away from the vehicles that took us up the snaky dirt road from Kamloops. The hills were full of colour, there was a tree line that bordered the grasslands and a thick Douglas fir forest that filled the mountains behind it. Aspen littered the area with splashes of orange, red, and yellow. The air smelled like crisp, dry leaves and dirt. The colours encouraged me to enter a state of serenity, the everyday life stresses were blowing away into the wind and into the clattering leaves of the aspen trees.

            There were small hills atop the large hills, these were kettle holes at one point. The hill was littered with blooming purple flowers, of chicory and a few other species. I was surprised to see flowers this late in September, the colours were inviting and looked as though they promised us that after the winter, colour will return in these hills. Colour. The look of possibility. As I looked past the hills, there was only the land, and the symphony of it, the orchestral maneuvers of wind and rock and sky.

I was touched by the opportunity to experience history. Horses of the Hudson’s Bay Company roamed this area in the 1860s, and cows grazed in large numbers as the beef industry expanded in the early decades of the twentieth century. Homesteads littered these hills, homes and small barns pricked the countryside, and a small one room school house was even present in these hills. Lac Du Bois was a booming community with a population of more than 200 people. Farming families lived a life of isolation. Under the Homestead act, farmers would receive 160 acres of land to settle, so their neighbors were miles away. Social life was usually limited to church on Sunday. The nature of farming drastically changed from self-sufficiency to specialization in order to compete in the national market. Farmers gained debt and sometimes had to take on another job on the side in order to pay taxes to the government. For many farmers in the late 1800s and early 1900s, debt grew until the farm itself was finally lost. Farmers who lost their farms left to the urban areas such as Kamloops to find jobs. Now. Lac Du Bois, a place that was a flourishing farming community, is now haunted by the ghosts of the past, with only the wind, trees, cows, the old rusted tine cans, the home and barn foundations, and a plaque marking the homestead, to tell the story of the land.

References: 

  Wagamese, R. (2014). One Native Life. Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing.

photo: http://visitbarriere.com/our-story/our-history/