The Lure
Of The Peace
by Rosemary Neering
This article courtesy of Beautiful
British Columbia Magazine
Part 2
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.
"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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