History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 274

Shortly after building a residence, the married Belgians who came alone would send
for their families, although in some cases it would be several years before the families
could come to Canada. One of the requirements for obtaining a homestead was that a
residence had to be built, [so after building their log house,such as that of Augustin
Godard shown here,]1 many left to look for employment elsewhere to earn money to
send to their families, or to buy whatever was needed to begin farming, as very few of
them had sufficient funds to start. Many of them found employment on the railways.
The C.P.R. was being extended west of Cypress River, and to the southeast the
Pacific Northern Railway (later to be known as the C.N.R.) was laying a line which
would pass through Somerset, Swan Lake and Mariapolis in 1889/90.
Henry Swennen 's father who came to Canada with him in 1951 had lived up until the
1920's in a thatched hut made of clay reinforced with branches. Its floor was packed
dirt and the animals: a horse, cow, pig and chickens shared the same hut with the
farmer and his family!
Many of the settlers would go away to find work elsewhere in summertime, and return
to their homesteads in the winter to start clearing land for breaking. The tool they used
was a grub-hoe, also called a mattock &emdash; a tool with a sharp blade on one side
tnb cut roots, and on the other a curved hoe-type blade to clear the dirt away from the
roots. With the coming of the railways there was also a market for cordwood. This was
a source of revenue in the wintertime and only wood cut in the winter could be sold.
Many thousands of cords of wood were hauled to the railway stations at Holland,
Swan Lake and Mariapolis, where the wood was piled on flatcars and shipped to
Winnipeg.
In order to haul the wood to the railways the settlers needed horses or oxen. Of these
the oxen were the most popular as they could "live off the land', whereas horses
needed oats which were not always available. Also, when an ox became too old to
work it could be butchered, and the meat used for food. It was said that ox meat was
so tough you could sit down to dinner hungry and get up tired! Oxen were slow and
had a wor