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The Lure Of The Peace
by Rosemary Neering
This article courtesy of Beautiful British Columbia Magazine
Part 1
Leo Rutledge walks through waist-high prairie grass to reach the bank where the Peace River flows high and brown, half-drowning the willows along the shore.
"There's a necklace of islands of spruce and willow out there," he gestures across the
river, "as pristine as
when Alexander Mackenzie first saw
them." Then we turn
back across the meadow, and Rutledge parts the grass to
reveal the
remains of an old homestead stake,
planted here when
settlers arrived earlier
this century. Later,
on the wide bench
above the river where Rutledge and his wife, Ethel, live, he pads silently to a sheltered spot where an old buck has taken to resting. The deer is absent today, but Rutledge is still enchanted by the fact that the beautiful animal has chosen this spot as its temporary home.
Southerners might see an irony in the deep love Leo Rutledge shows for the wide, sprawling Peace River region. Here, east of the Rockies, west of the Alberta border, south of the boreal forest, he has been a trapper, a rancher, and a guide for big-game hunters. But now, at 85, his love for this land has made him a committed environmentalist.
"When I was a boy growing up, the successful people, the men you wanted to be like, were the trappers. When they came in, you asked, 'Did you have a successful catch?' You didn't ask, 'Did you hurt the wee beasties?' Either you trapped, or you got the hell out of the country. But as you get older, you roll things around in your mind.
You ask, 'Is this right?"
Few who live elsewhere comprehend the strong, though sometimes inarticulate, bond Peace River residents have with the land. An extension of the Alberta plains, the area has a reputation as boring flatland, buffeted equally by summer heat and winter cold, different from the mountains and sea coast many consider quintessential British Columbia. But those who love the Peace see something special: rolling hills clothed in soft spring green, brilliant autumn yellow, or shadowed winter white; high and deeply cut riverbanks dramatic in the oblique light of a long summer evening, northern lights that shift and dance across the wide winter sky. For them, the lure of the Peace is its different and special beauty.
John Imrie, writing in the Canadian Geographical Journal in 1931, tried to capture something of that lure: "Only those who have visited its far-flung stretches as well as its areas of present settlement can have any adequate conception of the Peace River country. To a unique degree, it is a land that defies description.... There is more than a germ of truth in the old Indian legend that he who tastes the waters of the Peace shall return eventually to make his home within its valleys."
Geographically and geologically, this region is a land apart from the rest of the province. In 1861, faced with a gold rush and the need to control the Omineca country west of the Rockies, the British Colonial Office drew a straight line through territory of which it knew little. The line followed the 120th meridian rather than the crest of the Rocky Mountains, leaving the resulting territory to BC. Not that the office had much choice: then, the land we now know as Alberta was still owned by the Hudson's Bay Company. Yet the decision tacked on to BC a region both remote and very different.
Much of BC's geological origin stems from the collision, millions of years ago, of land masses on the continent's western edge and the subsequent uplifting and folding of rock slices. But the Peace River region was shaped by gentler - though equally relentless - forces. Over many millions of years, the sea advanced and receded across the ancient western coastline of Canada. For long geological eras, the Peace River region lay at the ocean's edge, now land, now seafloor. The skeletons of simple sea creatures eventually formed
the reefs that would house, deep below the earth's surface, oil and natural gas. The oil and gas were transformed from organic material, much of it marine plankton, under the heat and pressure of advancing rock.
The Peace region, together with the rest of the western plains, emerged from the sea for good some 100 million years ago. Ice ages continued the process the oceans had begun, rounding the contours of the land, carving deep river valleys, and leaving behind fertile soil. Erosion by wind and water over thousands of years after the glaciers retreated has continued the process of forming this land.
The Peace River valley is one of a number of deep, incised river valleys in the region. Naturalist John Macoun wrote in the early 1870's, "Any one sailing up the [Peace] river would be impressed with the idea that he was sailing through a mountainous country, as the banks are constantly from 600 to 800 feet above him, in many places rising almost perpendicularly.... Terraces are of frequent occurrence but not continuous until we approach within 30 miles of the mountains, where they assume truly gigantic proportions."
Those river valleys are dear to Rutledge's heart. In 1967, B.C. Hydro completed the W.A.C. Bennett hydroelectric dam, drowning 166,000 hectares of land under the resulting Williston Lake reservoir. Submerged were the river valleys where Rutledge had trapped and guided for decades, and the trapper's cabin where he wintered for many years. In the 1980s, when B.C. Hydro bulled forward with plans for the Site C dam near Fort St. John, which would have flooded the Peace River called between Hudson's Hope and Fort St. John, he rebelled; his rebellion set the seal on his conversion to environmentalism.
Part 2
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the following pages: |
• Hudson's Hope Museum
• BC Tourism
• Hudson's Hope History
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Part 2
"When the Williston came up, the world went down, Hydro had been running roughshod over the province. They tried to tell us if we didn't get on with
Site C, it would be twilight over B.C. But I felt that what we would lose
would
not be worth it. We had already lost the upper Peace region, seen
the hell and havoc that took place over 640 square miles. I said, 'You've wrecked the rest. Here we stand.'"
And so, for all the months the hearing on Site C took, he travelled form his
ranch to Fort St. John to sit in on every day of hearings; he was a big part
of the successful bid to stop the dam. Now, he continues the battle to
preserve the valley, this time from logging, and lobbies to have the Northern Rockies declared a protected area.
Some, like Rutledge, have learned to love the Peace through long years of
living here. Others are more recent converts. Bruce Lanz, publisher of
the Alaska Highway News, has been here just a few years. He finds the beauty of the country keeps sneaking up on him. "When we got here, the canola was in bloom, and it was like a bright yellow explosion. Then, a day
or so later, we drove down to the Beatton River. It's a roller coaster of a highway and I
said, "I thought we were talking flatland here!" To call this a prairie is a misnomer. You want to stop every hundred yards or so to look
at the rivers, the trees, the cuts, the switchbacks. On every side road,
there's something different. And you have the sense of being able to
reach out and touch history: every mile, there's an old building falling down. Here, history is very close to the surface."
That it is. The Carrier and Sekani people have lived in this region for several thousand years, but the white man is a relatively recent arrival, and it's not unusual to meet a first - or second-generation pioneer. Through early fur traders travelled through the region 200 years ago, most of the agricultural
land was home-steadied only a few decades ago. For many, this was the
last frontier: the last Canadian lands suitable for agriculture, opened to settlement between 1911 and 1929. Roads were rudimentary and no
railway linked the region to other regions until 1922. And those new
avenues led only to Alberta: Peace River residents had to wait until the
1950's for direct road and rail connection to the rest of B.C.
A close connection to the past is a big part of many residents' feelings
for the land. As a boy, Fern Martens lived on his parents' ranch on the
banks of the Beaten River. He was just 10 or 11 years old, lately
intrigued by studying buffalo in school, when he found a dry and whitened buffalo skull above the river. That moment remains in his memory, for it
took him back to the days when thousand of buffalo roamed this region.
"This country is so crowded with animals," wrote fur trader and explorer Alexander Mackenzie in 1793, "as to have the appearance, in some
places, of a stall-yard, from the state of the ground, and the quantity of
dung which is scattered over it. . . . In every direction the elk and the
buffalo are seen in possession of the hill and the prairie."
By the 1940s when Mertens was a child, not a single buffalo remained
in this country. But in his dreams he envisioned the big shaggy beasts
once more grazing the grasslands and making trails along the riverbanks.
He acquired his first real buffalo in 1982; now he runs about 300 cows
and 30 bulls above the Peace in woodlands and grasslands south of
Cecil Lake.
On a sunny summer afternoon he drives across the bumpy pasture and
in among the shaggy beasts. "Watch now," he warns as visitors
clamber out to walk among the buffalo, "they can move really fast,
outrun a horse over a distance." He watches one chew on a willow
branch. "Willows helps them when they get a headache or parasites.
Aspirin comes from willow, you know. Before they put in a road from
here to Fort St. John, when I would feel real bad, I'd chew on a willow.
Course, it was hard to know what was worse, the pain or the bitter
taste of the willow."
Like Mertens, Pat O'Reilly has a love for this land that comes from long acquaintance. As a child. he roamed the farm his parents homesteaded
in 1928, near the now almost-vanished community of Rolla east of Dawson Creek. Some of his strongest memories are of the slough below his
childhood home. "I have known that slough since I was a young child,"
he recalls. "I walked down to it, waded around it, hunted ducks on it as a teenager, built rafts, skated in winter. That was a beautiful time: you
could look down through the clear ice into beaver runs and through their houses."
His boyhood playground was McQueen Slough, a rare B.C. example of
a prairie pothole, a grassland depression with no outlet for the water that collects in it. Over the last decade O'Reilly has spearheaded a drive
to preserve the marsh and surroundings area, an important part of prairie ecology.
Sedges, cattails, willows, grasses, and aquatic plants fill the marshy
parts of the two basins that cover about 250 hectares. Up to 150 bird
species live in or visit the slough: eared grebes - the largest nesting
colony in B.C. - loons, kestrels, swallows, owls, woodpeckers, bluebirds, warblers, and many more species. Muskrats, mink, weasels, beavers,
coyotes, and foxes live or visit here, as well as shrews, bats, hares, woodchucks, voles, toads, and frogs.
McQueen Slough provides a microcosm of the beauty O'Reilly sees
throughout the region. His house overlooks Dawson Creek and plains that stretch to the east and west. "It's really something," he says, "to watch a thunderstorm go across the valley. Sometimes, you can see 30 or
40 lightening strikes at a time." The valley is at his front door; the
mountains are at the back. "I can load up my horses in the truck,"
he notes, "and within two hours be at 6,000 feet. There are rivers to
paddle. I have 12 kilometers of cross-country trails outside my door."
Through a casual glance at the map might suggest this region is too far
north to be good agricultural land, in fact, the rich glacial soils and warm microclimates - as much as five degrees warmer, on average. than the surrounding countryside - make it ideal for growing grain and oil seed and raising cattle. A.M. Bezanson, writing at the turn of the century, extolled
the area as "the paradise of the Northwest." Its location is such that
"the Chinook winds come down through three mountain passes and
sweep across it like a warm ocean current in an Arctic sea, warming
everything they touch and melting the winter's snow as quickly as it
falls. . . ." With the moderating weather always keeping the snow down,
"the horses experience absolutely no difficulty in feeding all winter on
the native grasses. . . . The blue-joint, pea-vine and vetches would
hide a horse in August."
But no early visitor could be more fervent than Debbie Butler in praising
the agricultural possibilities of this land. She and her husband moved
from Victoria to Rose Prairie, north of Fort St. John, 22 years ago, looking
for affordable land. Through they had not expected to farm, they soon
found themselves raising cattle. Butler writes articles from a rural
perspective, is preparing a film of Peace River agriculture, and is one
of the region's most energetic publicists. "Do you know," she asks,
"that this is where bees produce the most honey per hive in the province?
We produce 90 percent of the grain, 100 percent of the oil seeds and
rescue, a third of the beef cattle. The Peace River has the majority of
bison and reindeer production."
Butler says she doesn't like "really steep hills or really flat land." For her
this feels like the top of the world. "That's why they call it wide-sky
country. I think you need this space in order to have a clear head. You
can see so far; you get fantastic sunrises and sunsets. I have always
loved the quilt, all the fields of different colors. And I love the poplars
and the aspens, the noise they make when the wind blows. When you
drive down the road, it's spectacularly beautiful. You get the muskeg,
the little swamps alive with birds, the ducks, the waterfowl." One reason
she feels strongly about raising cattle is that it's almost conducive to
the natural environment. "A lot of the pasture is natural grass, so we
are in harmony with nature. In winter, we get 150 deer in our haystack;
it's a problem for us, but it's spectacular."
Out behind the farmhouse, Butler leads the way to a patch of wildflowers choked with the roses that gave Rose Prairie its name. She gestures
up at the big sky.
"When we really see the northern lights is during calving, in early spring.
You're up all night, checking on the calves, and the lights sweep across
the sky, all green and pink and mauve. For us, this country was love at first sight."
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Our thanks to Rosemary Neering and Beautiful British Columbia
Magazine for the rights to reproduce this article. |
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