Ranch women have traditionally
helped wherever they were needed and Mary was no exception. However,
she claims she was not much of a rancher's wife. She had lived
a pampered life in a beautiful home with her family in the town
of Fernie before she met Elmer and her tiny frame was not designed
for manual labour. She was not mechanically inclined either. She
drove the tractor over the fence stile one day. When she helped
Elmer cut Christmas trees, sometimes her axe bounced off the springy
branches instead of cutting through.
Nevertheless, she helped as much
as she could in any way that was required. "I used to have
to drive the team but I was always poor. The horses knew more
than I did. Elmer would get mad at me if I got out of the furrow.
Then I'd fling the reins down and go back in the house. He'd come
in and talk nice because he had nobody else to do it when Lynda
was in school. So he'd get me back out there again."
Mary's was more at home within
the domestic domain. She looked after Elmer, Lynda and the house,
chickens, and a big garden with strawberries and raspberries.
Besides the daily meal preparation and other chores, autumn brought
saskatoon picking and canning season.
One
winter Elmer and a partner shot three moose in the same day and
she put up 72 quarts of meat. Canning meat and vegetables in a
hot water canner is a long arduous process which requires scrupulously
clean jars and utensils and hours and hours of cooking. If it
is not performed methodically, botulism can develop in the jars
and cause food poisoning. Mary stored the jars in the root cellar
dug into the bank behind the log house. "I was so proud of
all the jars in that cellar. One fella told me I had enough carrots
to feed all of Sand Creek!" she giggles. In the 50s they
took their meat to butchermarket freezer lockers in Fernie and
that cut down on the amount of canning required.
