Another long post from me on things that were… Moose Jaw exists in memory and in the heart, for many of us any way. It includes places a little further flung, like Belbec, Boharm, Greybeg and Parkbeg, and for me, Battle Creek way down in the south west. I do not know the roots of this story. I was never told. But, when my father was a very young man he became friends with a very old man who had mustered out of the NWMP and settled a ranch about 8 miles from Fort Walsh. When the old man, ‘Pop Kelly’, died he left the property to his daughter Aggie, who married Bill Parr. There was one codicil – that the ‘old cabin be left for Bill Nichols (my father) for as long as he might live.’ Whatever the bond was, it was worth writing down. In the ‘20’s, in the fat days, the Parr’s built a new house close by, from an Eaton’s kit probably, with bedrooms and windows that opened so you could empty the chamber pots. For one reason or another (mostly world wars), most of my blood relatives had gone. We were family with the Parr’s. Bless ‘em. Even in late August, even when I slept in the big new main house sometimes, the water in my side-stand wash basin froze, not to mention the chamber pot. The altitude was higher than Banff. But most of my magic days there ended in the old log cabin built by Pop Kelly, getting on for a century before. The Battle Creek (empties into the Milk River and Mississippi) was just beyond those trees in the photo. Just a few feet to fresh running water. Whiskey traders had a post here, just before Pop Kelly settled it. There was a battle, right outside of where the front door was. You can read about in Guy Vanderhaeague’s book. Sober red-coats with bigger guns won. Up the hill behind. were some low rises lumped up, Sitting Bull camped after Little Big Horn. The site was older than that, probably by centuries, and arrow heads were a reason for tire changes when moving the cattle up there.. That is where we spread my Granddad’s ashes. The oldest boy in the Parr family trained the Musical Ride horses over the rise at Fort Walsh – just saddle up and go over the hill.... The valley burst with pride when the Queen was given one of his colts and she favoured to ride it for many years. Things never end as you think. All the ranching families who lived in the valley were bought out on an expropriation order from Parks. Parks wanted to ‘reclaim’ the land as it originally was, and so flattened everything – the old cabin, the house, the stock pens, the home-made crank-phone lines between the ranchers built along the old Fort Benton telegraph wires dating back to the Indian wars…. 1870 was worth preserving but 1890 was a blot on the landscape. I got some pictures of the old cabin before it was flattened in the interests of preserving the past. But I was a lucky kid to live like that for a bit. Like Ian sings “Get her all down before she goes”
Posted on: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 17:33:38 +0000