1

Height of the prairie grasses
1971
Living Prairie Museum, St. James, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

2

What's the tallest kind of grass you've been in? or you've seen?

Well, patch of...plants, well I can't really say it was grasses, it was just mostly like weeds and stuff, it got up to here. But most grasses usually can range from here to here. When my mom was little, there's this huge grass, there's this huge grass field that she'd go through that was like real big--like it ranged from about up to my neck.

3

Riding Sweet Marie at Sunnyside Ranch
May, 1957
St. James, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

4

I think growing up out here you, you learned to make do. If you didn't have what, what you needed to do a particular thing you made it. Or you figured out how you were going to get it. Um, so you learned to, you learned to work for something and work towards something. Um, and it was not…. A good example is, when we went riding, as kids, we were lucky to have a saddle and a, and a bridle. Now today if you go riding, you have to have a saddle that fits you and fits the horse, and there are umpteen different kinds of bits that you can use and, you know. Um there are so many things that… We just were fortunate if we had two pieces of rope that came on a piece of leather and were attached to the bit. And, and we thought we had the world by the tail. We didn't, we didn't know.

5

Peeling Chocolate
1923

Credits:
Image courtesy of: Glenbow Archives, ND-3-2073

6

The word, bananas. I can remember in the general store, with my father, I suppose about 3 years old or something and I had seen a chocolate bar. But there was a fellow with a banana and he was unpeeling--taking the peel off this banana and I always remember I thought it was a chocolate bar. I had never seen one before. It's funny you mention that.

7

Flying tractors
1909

Credits:
Image courtesy of: Glenbow Archives, NA-2547-7

8

We didn't see a lot of things living in the country. The neighbours had a tractor-- we didn't have a tractor. But I remember one day I was out in the yard, and I heard a noise and I thought I was a tractor. And here it was an aeroplane. I think it was the first airplane I ever saw in my life-biplane of some kind--and it was making a loud noise. And I remember thinking that it was a tractor that somehow had got up in the sky, I didn't know what an airplane was…now I'd be very young at that time, but that's one of the things I noted.

9

Farmland as Prairie
1976
Living Prairie Museum, St. James, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

10

My grandparents were farmers in Ontario, so in a matter of speaking, that's prairie I guess. But as to life on tall grass prairie, I think growing up my impressions of praire were that farmland was prairie, that fields--it was all prairie. And I'm realizing now that those are entirely different things.

11

Prairie upbringing
1920

12

...and emotionally maybe a more difficult life in some ways, because I think that if your feet touch the earth, you know, you you're in touch with something important. And so I think the fact that we were in the prairie was a very health upbringing, you know.