It's murder mystery night at the Alleykatz Cappuccino Bar. As I look around the room at the other suspects, I see a cross section of a small prairie town: teacher, rancher, waitress, writer, businesswoman, farmer, artist, civil servant, truck driver. The fact that I am here with these folks tonight is a clue to the character of this place. Eastend, Saskatchewan (estimated population 650), is a homey town where people make their own fun and are quick to befriend a stranger.
I’ve come to Eastend not to solve mysteries but to search for ghosts. Specifically, the ghost of Wallace Stegner and the spirit of the windblown plains that shaped his writing, his values and his sense of self.
Stegner (1909-1993) spent a large chunk of his childhood here before emerging as an archetypal Western voice—one of North America’s finest writers ever—and the founder of Stanford’s creative writing program. His family came to Eastend from Iowa by stagecoach in 1914 and stayed on until 1920. In the summers they farmed a homestead on the open prairie; during the school year they lived in town.
“If I am native to anything, I am native to this,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning author wrote of Eastend, or Whitemud as he called it, in the semiautobiographical novel Wolf Willow. “I can say to myself that a good part of my private and social character . . . [has been] scored into me by that little womb-village and the lovely, lonely, exposed prairie of the homestead.”
After the family home in town reopened as a residence for writers and artists in 1990, the 81-year-old Stegner vowed: “I intend to haunt that house, just to keep track of what goes on.” Haunt the house he must, as I fell under his spell from the moment I walked in. My first visit was a year ago, when I spent two weeks living in that house and photographing the landscape he so vividly described. Now, I’ve come back to explore the town and its people, to see how much of the Stegner experience lingers. Part of the lure, perhaps, is my recent return to my own prairie roots.
Like Stegner, I grew up in the West but appreciate the rich culture and gentle countryside of the East. Living in Ottawa for 30 years, I have enjoyed galleries and performing arts centers as well as canoe trips and hikes. But prairie roots run deep. The roots of the rough fescue grass go down more than 25 feet, thus escaping drought and fire and resisting attempts to pull them out. So, a few years ago, I decided to move back to Calgary. An hour to the west lies the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains; to the east lies the “bald-headed”—or, depending on the company you keep, “bald-assed”—prairie.
Most people driving across the plains describe them as boring. For some of us, however, they evoke an awe that only a writer with the skills of Stegner can begin to articulate. I sometimes feel defensive agreeing with the comment of one dyed-in-the-wool prairie person who, when asked what he thought of the beauty of the Rockies, is said to have replied, “They are very nice, but they block the view.”
Stegner, of course, said it better: “Over the segmented circle of earth is domed the biggest sky anywhere, which on days like this sheds down on range and wheat and summer fallow a light to set a painter wild, a light pure, glareless, and transparent.”
The Stegner family farmed a piece of land some 50 miles southwest of Eastend, along the Montana border, where they tried, without success, to make money growing wheat. The homestead was isolated and austere: a shack and barn in a shadeless field. Stegner's only sibling, an older brother, stayed in town with a summer job, and the nearest neighbor was four miles away.
Those solitary summers deepened his sense of self. “I would not have missed it—could not have missed it and be who I am, for better or worse,” he wrote in Wolf Willow. “How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know? Who ever came more truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon the first pale primrose on the coulee bank?"
The landscape left him not humbled, but stoic and independent-minded. “Standing alone under the bell-jar sky,” he wrote in Wolf Willow, “gave me the strongest feeling of personal singularity I shall ever have.”
It also instilled the conservationist values he would put forth so eloquently during his decades at Stanford. By the mid-1950s, Stegner was not only an award-winning writer but also a leading environmentalist. In 1960 he wrote an influential treatise, the Wilderness Letter, urging congressional support for a national park system. He argued the need to preserve areas of great beauty, natural diversity and recreational potential and to set aside places for “spiritual renewal, the recognition of identity, the birth of awe.” The letter left little doubt that his boyhood experience contributed to this thinking: “A prairie . . . big enough to carry the eye clear to the sinking, rounding horizon . . . is asgood a place as any for the wilderness experience to happen; the vanishing prairie is as worth preserving for the wilderness idea as the alpine forest,” he wrote.
The native prairie is indeed vanishing. Modern equipment and government incentives, combined with above-average rainfall in the past 20 years, have allowed efficient farming of marginal lands throughout the plains. But Eastenders seem to love the prairie as much as Stegner did, and there is growing pressure to save what’s left. Several major conservation activities are springing up in the area. A local family has donated a parcel of rangeland to the Nature Conservancy of Canada to form the bulk of a 20-square-mile “Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area.” And the Canadian government has established a 185-square-mile “Grasslands National Park” that will eventually encompass 350 square miles.
As farms here expand, many are becoming “industrialized,” with absentee owners or very large family holdings. Thus, while houses remain scarce, the prairie is no longer a boundless wilderness, but a collection of grassy islands in a sea of agriscape. Driving through is still thrilling, however, because these are some of the largest islands of grassland left in the Great Central Plains.
On one of those islands lies the abandoned Stegner homestead. The site is within a federally run grazing reserve and wildlife area, off-limits today without a special permit.
At the end of every summer the Stegners left the homestead and headed back to Eastend. The trip took two days by lumber wagon or eight excruciating hours by Model T. Today, it’s little more than an hour.
If homestead conditions were harsh and lonely, life in town was convivial and snug. “I never returned to town in early September without a surge of joy—back to safety and shelter, back to the river and the willow breaks, back to friends, games, Sunday school parties, back to school, where I could shine,” Stegner recalled in his essay collection, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs.
Eastend in those days was a cross between frontier encampment and infant town—so young that his family’s arrival in 1914 coincided with the birth of the town’s first Euro-Canadian child, aptly named Eastena Anderson. Stegner’s biographer, Jackson J. Benson, noted that he “was probably the only important writer living into the 1990s who actually experienced the pioneering period of North American history.”
Stegner went back only once, in 1953, to conduct research for Wolf Willow. In the book he drew a generally fond picture of his youthful adventures in town, relishing “a wild freedom, a closeness to earth and weather, a familiarity with both tame and wild animals [and] the physical sweetness of a golden age.” Yet he also scoffed at Eastend as a “dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere, utterly without painting, without sculpture, without architecture, almost without music or theatre, without conversation or languages or travel or stimulating instruction, without libraries or museums or bookstores, almost without books.”
The ambivalence is striking. “To tell the truth, I am not sure I would trade my childhood of freedom and the outdoors and the senses for a childhood of being led by the hand past all the Turners in the National Gallery,” Stegner wrote. As an adult, however, “I would not for a thousand dollars an hour return to live!”
He concluded: “Give it a thousand years.”
If Stegner was right that Eastend needed a millennium to develop, what chance did I have of finding significant changes after a mere half-century? True, the population of about 120 has since “ballooned” to about 650, but the town has hardly grown in physical size. Stegner’s father built the family home on Eastend’s westernmost street, and it’s still the westernmost street today. In fact, the town has not expanded in any direction beyond its 1953 limits, and the highest structures by far are still the grain elevators.
Tracing Stegner’s footsteps as described in Wolf Willow, I found many of the old landmarks, including the cemetery with names made familiar through his writings, and the Pastime Theatre, now the Eastend Historical Museum and Information Center. The Cypress Hotel, where I stayed on this second visit, looked as grand as when it reopened after a fire in 1916. The blaze destroyed both the hotel and the Stegner family’s potato crop, which was stored in the hotel basement. When I recounted the incident to Ruben Stredwick, a schoolmate of Stegner’s who still lives here, he didn’t remember the potatoes but commented that it was “a great way to bake ’em, ho, ho, ho.”
I then passed the school Stredwick and Stegner had attended. Stredwick said he remembered “Wally” playing in the schoolyard. Empty now and looking a little decrepit, the school must have been the core of their community—not only for education, but as a social center and, in 1918, as an emergency hospital during the great flu epidemic, which killed 10 percent of the townspeople.
I was admiring some gardens on my stroll through town when, from behind a hedge, a crisp voice greeted me with a friendly hello and an invitation to come on in and see the garden. The voice belonged to Bea Tasche, a born raconteur and source of unlimited information on all things Eastendian. After inviting me in for tea and a tour of her home—the original house of the Z-X Ranch, on which the town site of Eastend was built—Bea noted that some folks in town were upset about how Stegner described Eastend. But, she confided, “he was right about some of it.”
Then back to my room at the Cypress, which, like Eastend itself, was a mix of old and new. Though recently renovated, it had no phone, so I found myself standing in the kitchen at 10 p.m. after the office and restaurant closed, checking my e-mail through the only available telephone jack.
This is not to suggest that Eastend is standing still, set to dry up like so many other small prairie towns as huge agricultural operations displace family farms. To the contrary, there is a sense of vitality in the air. New buildings are rising next to false-fronted frontier classics, and Eastenders point with pride to their exemplary public library/high school complex as well as an important new paleontological museum and research center.
Indeed, the town is experiencing a bit of a cultural renaissance. A local resident, Sharon Butala, has become one of Canada’s bestselling authors, putting Eastend on the mental map of many Canadians. And the Wallace Stegner House is a magnet for creative minds in need of quiet to finish their works. At $200 per month in Canadian dollars, the rent cannot be beat.
There’s even a burgeoning tourist industry, thanks to the $3.1 million fossil display and research center that opened last year after paleontologists unearthed a rare Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton near town. One of the most complete specimens in the world, the behemoth is in the new museum, and the area is now being billed as the Valley of Hidden Secrets. Wandering around the outskirts of town, I can never decide whether to look up and drink in the sky or keep my nose to the ground in search of another dinosaur.
How much of Stegner’s boyhood world is left here today? Modernization has made its mark, but the frontier spirit persists. Eastend is still a place where, by the second day in town, you say hi to familiar faces and are asked over for lunch. And outside of town, it may yet be possible to find a young lad who feels the isolation and awe that Stegner did. Coyotes still howl at night, and the wind still “blows all the time in a way to stiffen your hair and rattle the eyes in your head.”
Even on my short visits, there were times when the forces of nature jerked me back to the harsh reality of this environment. While photographing a tranquil scene at the local reservoir, I saw a huge cloud boiling over the horizon, and my first thought was that a prairie hailstorm was on its way. But the cloud was an odd brownish-black, and I realized I was facing a massive dust storm. My mind flashed back to the stories my father told of blinding dust storms and failed crops during the drought of the Great Depression. Was I witnessing the inevitable return of the dry times? Suddenly, the front hit and the wind whipped the dirt around my feet. I snapped out of my contemplation, grabbed my precious camera gear and dove for the safety of the car.
As cushioned from the Stegner experience as modern life may seem, this place retains a character increasingly hard to find in southern Canada and the lower 48 states. It provides room to take a deep breath, let the mind float and search the soul. Even the tourism literature for Eastend invites the visitor to come “find yourself . . . in the middle of nowhere.”
Like Stegner, I need to get back to those wild places and simpler ways for “spiritual renewal, the recognition of identity, the birth of awe.” Eastend remains such a place. I hope—and I suspect Stegner would as well—that it will stay that way for another 50 years. Or, better yet, a thousand.
Jim Foley is a writer, photographer and conservationist in Calgary, Alberta.
