Who Calls? A Qu’Appelle Quest [2]

The Canadian National passenger line was threatened with mothballing when I travelleled it, but is still operational, as a sop to Western sentiment. It skirts the Qu’Appelle only at the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border, near the east-flowing river’s junction with the mightier, muddier Assiniboine. However, it does traverse an intermediate landscape, crossing and paralleling numerous streams, gullies, ravines, cutbanks, sloughs, and coulees, as the northern prairie gradually rises toward the continent’s jagged cordilleran spine. (“And Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan said the train”—Malcolm Lowry, October Ferry to Gabriola).

These transitions—eminently paint-worthy, to Jeffery’s fresh eye—suggested why he would choose to focus on the Qu’Appelle when he returned to the West in 1911, rather than, say, on the flatter and less vegetally varied terrain across which the CPR’s surveyors and engineers had chosen to lay their tracks to the south in the early 1880s. The reasons that artists before and after heeded the call of the Qu’Appelle are as numerous as the twists and turns in this storied river. (Two main attractions: trees and water. Essential ingredients for Ontario-based landscape painters who hoped to sell their work.)

What also struck me, as I gazed out on the slowly evolving scene, was how accurate were Jefferys’ treatments of the muted colouration of these fields and vales, copses and glades: a very different palette from the flaming fall tints and blazing blue lakes of mid-northern Ontario—the favourite sketching-ground of the Group of Seven until that loose-knit collective began, in the 1920s, to range farther afield, ultimately to Ultima Thule. Even more than in the rocky Pre-Cambrian highlands the future Group would entrain to, immediately before and after World War One, this was a topography defined and moulded by cloud shadows as much as by sunrays, by the incessant, restless movement of wind. A “bare” landscape, if only in contrast to the bewildering tangle of the close-up coniferous forest, but by no means a barren one. Elemental, yet as rich as the dark, deep soil underlying the grasses across which the wind relentlessly sweeps. As difficult to paint or to photograph effectively as to describe, and yet, once seen, an unavoidable artistic challenge. At least in retrospect, if not in fact, as the history of Canadian art—and, specifically, that of the West—demonstrates.

My interview with the Mendel’s director went well, and we agreed in principle that the gallery would host a travelling Jefferys exhibition, allowing me to pursue my researches further into his still scarcely known or largely forgotten western output.2 Western Sunlight: C.W. Jefferys on the Canadian Prairies opened at the Mendel in November 1984, its itinerary then taking it to Calgary, Lethbridge, and Regina, before it headed east to Oshawa, St. Catharines, and Halifax.

I had begun to correspond with the distinguished University of Saskatchewan geographer Ronald Rees, whose seminal 1976 article “Images of the Prairie: Landscape and Perception in the Western Interior of the Prairie,”3 featuring a reproduction of Jefferys’ A Prairie Trail of 1912,4 had laid the groundwork for his 1979 Mendel Gallery exhibition, Images of the Prairies, and its follow-ups, Land of Earth and Sky: Landscape Painting of Western Canada and New and Naked Land. I first met Ron through the historian Rae Fleming, then a graduate student at the University of Saskatchewan, working on a thesis on Sir William Mackenzie (1849–1923), the “railway king” whose Canadian Northern line funded my grandfather’s first expedition to the Qu’Appelle.5 Thanks to this contact, I asked Ron to write the foreword to the catalogue of Western Sunlight.

Reiterating a point made elsewhere in his writings on the subject, Rees contrasted Jefferys’ innovative handling of “the brilliant prairie light and the shimmer and sparkle of wolf willow and poplar” with the manner in which “studio-bound British painters converted the prairie into landscapes that looked as much like Suffolk as western Canada.”6 It was Ron, not incidentally, who introduced me to what we both consider to be the best book ever written about the Canadian west, the American novelist Wallace Stegner’s incomparable Wolf Willow, his memoir of growing up in the arid southwest corner of Saskatchewan, in the semi-fictional town of Whitemud (i.e., Eastend), on the banks of the silty Milk River, and in the cedarn shadow of the Cypress Hills.

The blue-green blur of sage-brush and wolf willow in the foreground of Western Sunlight helped me to connect Stegner’s vivid recollections of his Canadian boyhood with Jefferys’ own nearly contemporaneous discovery, in paint and words, of Saskatchewan’s light and air and space, which continued to inspire the expatriate writer/ teacher until his untimely death in the early 1990s.

Ron Rees also made me look harder at the work of the Lumsden-born Illingworth Kerr, providing an address that led to my first contact with one of the then-living masters of the Qu’Appelle landscape. Kerr, as it turned out, had not only met Jefferys, while studying at the Ontario College of Art in the early 1920s, but had thereafter been captivated by his prairie canvases. His particular favourite was Western Sunlight, which, as the subtitle indicates, depicts Last Mountain Lake, a long, shallow, horn-shaped tributary northwest of Lumsden. Born in this farming town in 1905, Kerr had left this beloved home place in 1927 to study at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. “Perhaps I did not realize,” Kerr had written in 1980, with reference to Jefferys’ A Prairie Trail and Western Sunlight, “the impressionist influence at the time; it was so truly Canadian, and Western.... ŒAh, lovely stuff to paint,’ Jefferys said when I spoke appreciatively about the wolf willow—and how many times in the long years since when I painted wolf willow did those words repeat themselves.”7

I had tried to locate the site of this painting during the course of my researches for the 1983 expedition, tentatively fixing its locale near where the railway skirts the shore, toward the lake’s south-western tip, where it debouches into the Arm River. My inability to be more precise planted in the back of my mind a determination to try again. The commission to co-curate Qu’Appelle: Tales of Two Valleys provided the opportunity to do so. The following report is the result of this call-and-answer quest.

At the reception following the opening of the Jefferys exhibition at the Mendel, two artists of around my own age approached me and introduced themselves as Greg Hardy and David Alexander. To my surprise and delight, both of these landscape painters expressed their excitement at finally being able to see, on the walls of their local gallery, works that previously they’d only studied in reproduction, mostly in grainy black-and-white. The “real thing,” they ensured me, was “a revelation.” Next day, I visited Greg at his studio and there purchased my own first Qu’Appelle piece, a charcoal drawing dated 1983. As he explained, this was part of a suite of landscapes produced during one of his terms as visiting instructor at the Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts, which then occupied the former tuberculosis hospital at Fort San. What I failed to realize at the time was that the “central” Qu’Appelle that Hardy and Alexander—and, before them, James Henderson, Augustus Kenderdine, Robert Hurley, Ernest Luthi, Ruth Pawson, and Mashel Teitelbaum, among so many others—had limned was a different one, geographically, from the more westerly valley that had attracted Jefferys, Kerr, and another, contemporaneous lover of Last Mountain Lake, the painter/ illustrator/ writer/ naturalist Robert D. Symons (1898–1973). Nor could I have known, at this intermediate stage in my own immersion, how many other valleys-within-the-valley there are, nor how many artists had striven to capture its elusive essence.

Hardy’s and Alexander’s celebrations of the Qu’Appelle compelled a belated look at a landscape that I should have examined in more detail while curating the Jefferys show. In the somewhat hung-over wake of the opening, Rae Fleming, my host in Saskatoon, suggested a car trip to the valley, via highway 11, the main link between Saskatoon and Regina. Vividly do I recall this trek: the sky was blazing-blue clear but—as I kept noticing as I jumped out to take snapshots—the air was pungent with smoke from forest fires burning far to the north. Because it was a drought year—are there any others in the west?—the poplar-girded sloughs were ringed with a fauvist palette of rubies, rusts, and taupes, graduating to chalky alkaline crusts at the brim resembling early ice and snow; what little moisture remained in the ovoid saltpan basins was as richly and as strangely tinted as the water in an abandoned tailings pond. Ron Rees’s coaching had taught me to detect, in this gently undular planisphere, a species of man-scape called parkland. And parks indeed these desertified oases were, neatly ploughshare-combed to the edge, shrubs planted just so. Practical landscaping, but human-shaped scenery nonetheless, at once pleasing to the gaze and troublesome. A picture framed by a car window. Manure pong blending with far-off fire smell, a crepitous, locust-winged dryness in the air. Inevitable, the unfolding of another, uglier scenario. Murmers in the wind: the Colin Thatcher murder trial. Maggie Siggins’s Revenge of the Land: A Century of Greed, Tragedy, and Murder on a Saskatchewan Farm (1991), set near the Qu’Appelle, already working its slow way out of the rain-starved soil like bones that resurface in a mortgaged springtime grainfield.

A side-trip along 733 through Dilke to the western shore of Last Mountain Lake: Rae striding into the miniature surf in his briefs, shrieking at the chill, scaring into tumultuous flight a flock of shocking-white, yellow-billed pelicans....8 Pelicans? What were they doing here? I thought they were tropical birds! Little, as usual, did I know.

Then it was due south again to Lumsden. En route, I yelled at Rae to stop the car, so I could get out to photograph a small coulee which so closely resembled that of A Prairie Storm that I couldn’t help feeling—hoping—that this was the source of the painting that had sent me on this quest. The light was almost the same (cloud shadows on slope-shoulders, a thunderstorm brewing), the lie of the land said: yes. I snapped my pics, then jumped back into the car. (Where, now, in my welter of dusty, unidentified slides the evidence might lie is beyond retrieval.)

Soon, another of those sudden plunges from level to lowland. We were in search of the grain elevators and false-front general stores featured in Illingworth Kerr’s hallmark canvases—and also of a meal and a beer. My memory here gets cloudy: all I can recall is that, after a prowl up and down the main street and an inspection of the desolate-looking train station, we drove east and descended into the valley, possibly down 35, the road to Fort Qu’Appelle. Whatever our route, what I recall is the startling sight of a hang-glider launching forth from the steep scarp to soar buzzard-like over the sun-flaked lake. Never seen anything like it before. Icarus!

Flying home from Saskatoon, I pressed my forehead against the window-pane, straining my eyes through the mid-air haze in hopes of glimpsing the brown-green gash of the valley to the south of the parti-coloured checkerboard/ quiltwork of farm fields drawn and quartered by blacktop and dirt roads. How, I wondered then and wonder every time I fly east-west or west-east, could painters not be captivated by this quasi-abstract crazy-quilt patterning—the artificial construct of surveyors, land-agents, bureaucrats, engineers, and paving pirates, rendered a hard reality by work, weather, and the daily grind? Illingworth Kerr had grasped this vast schema’s potential as a living colour-field canvas in a 1971–73 oil entitled Flatlands—a work that could not have been conceived before the aviation era.

An opportunity to return to the Qu’Appelle did not present itself until the late 1990s, when I was invited to co-curate the exhibition that would be called Qu’Appelle: Tales of Two Valleys, the subtitle of which is explained in Dan Ring’s essay for this book. (The exorbitant costs of air-travel in this country, compounded by cutbacks to passenger rail service, militate against the best intentions of cultural nationalists who preach the gospel of “unity-through-awareness,” but are unable, for financial reasons, to practice it. How can we get to know our land if we can’t afford to see and experience it? One of the reasons that the Qu’Appelle remains “hidden” is its distance from “major”—that is, central-Canadian—population centres; in tourism terms, it’s “off the map”—no gambling casinos, no theme parks, no big resort hotels—except for those who can drive to it.) The principal occasion for my western trip of 1999 was to document two walk-works by the peripatetic English artist Hamish Fulton, commissioned by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, in Lethbridge, his chosen routes being a stretch of the Milk River from Aden Bridge to the Montana border and back, then a shorter shank of the Red Deer River in Dinosaur Provincial Park.9 For Hamish—no stranger to western Canada—this was something of a sentimental journey; the English still entertain romantic notions about “the Great West” and “the wilds,” as illustrated by the pilgrimage he made, in 1985, at the behest of the Mendel Gallery, to the Lake Ajawaan cabin (in Prince Albert National Park) of his boyhood hero and inspiration, Grey Owl (a.k.a. Archie Belaney).10

While in Lethbridge, in between Hamish’s walks, I was fortunate enough to introduce him to Allan Harding MacKay, who had taken the bus from Banff to attend the launch, at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, of Source/Derivations, a book that begins with Allan’s 1982 installation at this same gallery (the catalogue of which was entitled A Book of Not Knowing When We Are Going to Die Or Grow Up...).

The second leg of our three-week, five-thousand-kilometre journey was to take place in the Qu’Appelle, but before we drove east I took advantage of an introduction from the Glenbow’s senior curator of Canadian art, Catharine Mastin, to Peter and Shirley Savage, who had donated a huge collection of prints—mostly British and Canadian—to the museum in 1995. Among the works they held back, a selection of which they generously laid out for me on their sunlit kitchen table, were a number of wood-engravings by a senior Saskatchewan artist of whom I, shamefully, had virtually no knowledge, MacGregor Hone. When the Savages informed me that “Mac” was based in Lumsden, with his ceramicist wife Beth, I made a note to contact them “someday.”

Another feature of my Calgary visit—this time facilitated by Dan Ring—was the privilege of inspecting the extraordinary collection of Saskatchewan landscape paintings assembled by a delightfully eccentric oil-and-gas entrepreneur and railway heritage preservationist named Jim Lanigan, originally from Regina. Jim’s brother, Dennis, a prominent Saskatoon oral and maxillofacial surgeon, shares his obsession with art-collecting, only Dennis’s passion is the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement that followed in the wake of Daniel Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, William Morris, et al. Jim’s art-collecting habit can be tracked back precisely to 21 June 1974, when he was running a consulting firm in Toronto (1972–77). Galvanized by news that a painting by Sir William Cornelius Van Horne (1843–1915), the U.S.-born, Montreal-based railway baron, was on sale at Waddington’s auction house, this third-generation member of a CPR family11 successfully bade for the dark, Whistler-esque Japanese Fête (1893). (Suggested opening bid: $1,000; knock-down price, $175.) He still hangs it today, above an eight-foot section of 1883 CPR Krupp 56-pound steel rail.

As Jim tells the tale, his first awareness of the existence of Canadian art had come “some time in the late 1960s” through the mail-slot of his family home in Regina, in the form of Weekend Magazine, a lamentably long-gone newspaper supplement. What sparked his teenaged imagination was an article about the newly established McMichael Gallery, in the north-of-Toronto rural village of Kleinburg. His interest lay dormant, however, until the fateful auction, shortly after which Ralph McMeeken, a fellow employee of the energy-industry consulting firm that had brought Jim to Toronto, convinced him to check out the stirring stuff hanging on the plastered barn-board walls of this same institution. Jim’s first impression of the Group of Seven works displayed there was not positive: as he phrases it in retrospect, “all these garish paintings with these squiggly strokes.” But he visited the gallery’s bookstore, where he collected an armload of catalogues and reference materials about these unfamiliar artists. He read them voraciously and was inspired to visit the gallery again the following weekend. “Bob,” Jim self-deprecatingly explained in a New Year’s (2002) phone conversation, “you can’t imagine how those paintings improved over the course of a week!” Thanks to this revelation—in his words, “a pivotal life event”—Jim started to become interested in the Group of Seven and their “central-Canadian” contemporaries, seeking them out not only at the McMichael but also at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Then, during monthly trips to Ottawa (where, for a time, he was responsible for his company’s business development), he made frequent visits to the Canadian wing of the old National Gallery of Canada, then housed in a cramped, leaky 1960s office building on Elgin Street. In these three key galleries began Jim Lanigan’s art education, and he credits these experiences with helping him earn this extramural bachelor’s degree in connoisseurship. Jim is, in other words, that increasingly rare phenomenon: a genuine amateur. That is (as the OED defines this eighteenth-century term), “One who loves, is fond of, has a taste for, . . .” (from the Latin, amo).

On visiting his native Regina during Christmas 1975, Jim decided to “slip down” (his words) to the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery to “see if they had any Group of Seven works in their collection.” Indeed they did, but what “grabbed” him most was a canvas entitled Ross’s Ranch, Ravenscrag, by a painter previously unknown to him, one Illingworth Kerr (1905–1989), who, he’d later learn, could lay some legitimate claim to being “Saskatchewan’s first native-born artist.” The sight of this Group-of-Sevenish yet ineluctably Western work galvanized Lanigan, reminding him of his own prairie roots and showing him that his home turf had been painted, and painted well, by artists whose names were less familiar to him, then, than those on business documents. Here began his quest—fuelled by his determination to “look into Saskatchewan art”—to seek out works by such painters as James Henderson, Inglis Sheldon-Williams, Gus Kenderdine, and Henry Metzger, to name but a few. This search would result, over the course of the next three decades, in the formation of the single most significant private collection of art by early and mid-twentieth-century Saskatchewan artists. The hunt began with yet another auction: after moving to Edmonton in 1977, Lanigan received a phone call from his mother, Mary, informing him of a sale at Brown’s Auction Rooms in Regina, on 21 November 1977, from which—again because there were few knowledgeable bidders—he was able to acquire well-documented pictures by Henderson, Sheldon-Williams, and Mildred Valley Thornton. Henderson’s Winter, Qu’Appelle Valley (the sketch for the NGC’s Afternoon in the Coulee, dated c. 1925) would become the core of his very private and personal suburban-Calgary art gallery. He had seen the work in the catalogue of the Mendel’s 1969 Henderson retrospective,12 and instinctively sensed what he describes as a “feel,” not only for the subject but also for its principal interpreter.13

As my first inspection of the wall-stacked canvases and sketch panels housed in Lanigan’s home revealed, the Qu’Appelle was this avid collector’s primary focus. Asked to “source” his obsession, Jim replies by citing a passage in Dennis Lanigan’s introductory essay to the 2000 exhibition in Toronto of his private collection of pictures and artefacts by members of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements: “My brother...has very different interests from mine, and his collection focuses on early western Canadian, in particular Saskatchewan artists. In fact, it is a family joke that my brother collects art to recapture his roots, while I collect to escape mine.” Jim “comes home” to the valley every night.14

Although he hopes some day to augment his holdings with major western works by Sheldon-Williams, Edmund Morris, and C.W. Jefferys (which rarely come on the market), Lanigan remains especially dedicated to the Qu’Appelle landscapes and Native portraits of Henderson and Kenderdine, both of whom he considers to be unfairly judged and/ or neglected by the “eastern art establishment”—as illustrated by the fact that neither of these key figures has been honoured with a full-scale, curatorially rigorous retrospective, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue.15 The problem, he believes, is partly rooted in the paucity of references to them in the standard histories of Canadian art and to the reproduction of only a few of their works in any format—and those, infrequently—a factor that militates against any real appreciation of their considerable range, not only of subject matter but of styles and approaches.

If anything, Lanigan argues, Kenderdine and Henderson, in particular, have been devaluated and marginalized since their heydays in the 1920s–30s, when they claimed a small measure of national attention. As evidence, he cites the references to Henderson in the four major surveys of Canadian painting published between the 1920s and the 1970s. First, in his The Fine Arts in Canada (1925), Canadian Magazine editor Newton MacTavish reproduced a Henderson portrait of a Blackfoot chief, in the collection of Norman MacKenzie K.C. (1869–1936). No doubt this nod was in recognition of the painter’s inclusion in the National Gallery of Canada-organized Canadian pavilion at the British Empire Exhibitions held at Wembley (London) in 1924 and 1925—the first significant international exposure accorded to a Saskatchewan artist. However, MacTavish provided no commentary about Henderson, whose work was selected to symbolize the pre-settlement Wild West.

James Henderson, born in Glasgow, has, for over thirty years, been painting in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan. He is one of the pioneer painters of the West, and has divided his attention between Indian subjects and the western landscape. Mr. Henderson’s happiest efforts are those in which he paints a vivid landscape with incidents of robust frontier life. A capable and conservative painter, who studied in Glasgow and London before settling in Fort Qu’Appelle in 1910 [sic], his work is well and favourably known throughout the West.16

Next, William Colgate, in Canadian Art: Its Origin and Development (foreword by C.W. Jefferys):

Another artist whose work is well and favourably known in the West is James Henderson, who for more than thirty years has been painting in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan. One of the pioneer painters of Western Canada, he has divided his attention between Indian subjects and the local terrain. His happiest efforts are those in which he paints a vivid landscape with incidents of rude frontier life. His AFTERNOON IN THE COULEE, with its glow of late sunlight on the hill beyond the snow-covered woodland, is a true and well-handled piece of work. ...He is a capable and conservative executant who follows the traditional school of British painting.17

Damning with faint praise? In the background of such a qualified estimation is the take-over of Canadian art and art criticism by the Group of Seven and their robust, but British-born, “nationalist” aesthetic. Henderson may have been a friend and some-time sketching-companion of Group founding member A.Y. Jackson, but Jackson seems never to have visited the valley, despite his admiration for C.W. Jefferys’ treatments of its topography. The Group’s absence from the scene had as negative an effect on central Canada’s “reception” of the Qu’Appelle as a nationally recognizable site as did the preference of the postwar Regina-based modernist painting movement, first, for Emma Lake as a painting place, and, secondly, for abstraction over realism.

Cursory as were Robson’s and Colgate’s assessments of Henderson (and the nascent Western-Canadian School), they were generous, in Jim Lanigan’s view, in comparison to the narrowed perspective of their successor, J. Russell Harper, as expressed in his 1966 survey of painting in Canada, which reads in toto:

Henderson, a Scot, settled in the Qu’Appelle Valley in 1916, sometimes painting Indian portraits, and at other times winter landscapes always [sic] with sunlight on the snow and as an inevitable focal point a red sleigh by a stream winding through a broad prairie valley.18

In rebuttal of this generalization, Jim disgustedly snorts, “Just because there’s a red sleigh in three or four sketches and canvases, Harper, who should have known better, decided that it’s Œubiquitous,’ and that Henderson never painted any season other than winter. What about spring, summer and fall?” Harper, Jim reminds me, drew his “evidence” solely from Henderson’s 1931 oil, Near Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, purchased by the Edmonton Art Gallery in 1934. “Henderson,” Lanigan counters, “painted the valley in all its seasons and all of its moods.”.

Lanigan’s high regard for Henderson and Kenderdine, and also for such epigones as Father Henry Metzger (1876–1949) and Ernest Luthi (1906–1983), is shared by fellow collectors John and Ethelene Gareau, to whom Jim introduced me during a June 2001 research trip to Calgary. John Gareau—like Lanigan, an oilman by vocation, an art lover and history buff by avocation—is particularly proud of his undated (c. 1930) Metzger portrait of Chief Mato-in-ga-ka, also transliterated as Matore Tchanka and translated as Jumping Bear. The Alsace-born, Paris-trained Metzger was a Roman Catholic priest who was ordained in 1901 and, at the instigation of Monsignor Pascal, Bishop of Prince Albert, emigrated to Canada in 1909. Settling at St. Peter’s Colony near Kronau, on the Arcola-Moose Mountain section of the CPR, he built a rectory and grotto and resumed painting, though as a respite from his religious duties rather than as the profession he had once intended to pursue.19 Another prized possession of the Gareaus is one of Henderson’s most important later Qu’Appelle canvases, Portrait of Sioux Indian (Chief Standing Buffalo), which was included in A Century of Canadian Art, mounted by London’s Tate Gallery in 1938.

Asked to give the rough date on which he first saw the Qu’Appelle, Jim Lanigan thinks back:

When I was a little boy—this was probably about 1950–51—my uncle Rob Stuttard drove his family and me to Lumsden: my first recollection of being in the Valley. When you grow up on the flat Regina Plains, where there’s nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles, the Qu’Appelle Valley forms a true oasis in a very flat and treeless land. This trip to Lumsden was my first exposure to the Valley, and I’ve never forgotten how “comfortable” I felt when I was there. I felt as though I belonged.... Subsequently, our family used to spend every summer at B-Say-Ta Beach, just outside Fort Qu’Appelle, so my affinity to—and love for—the Valley was re-enforced during those visits....

Years later, in 1974, Jim jumped when a prime parcel of land not far from where he’d spent those idyllic summers came up for sale. “This coulee,” he explains,

was a favourite spot for high-school, church and boy-scout weiner-roasts, and, to tell the truth, a hangout for Regina teenagers to drink beer. I became aware of its availability while I was living in Toronto and hating it. I was able to make a deal to buy that property to provide an anchor in my life and a place I could always could come back to.... It encompasses eighty-eight acres, eighteen to twenty tipi rings, a stone Indian effigy on the flatlands, a buffalo jump, a wonderful coulee, where the brook babbles in among the rocks, and two ranges of hills, not to mention a wealth of native wildflowers and trees—crocuses in the spring, tiger lilies (Saskatchewan’s provincial flower), Saskatoon and chokecherry bushes, white and black birch trees, and a very great view overlooking the valley and the river toward Craven. Mysteriously and eerily, when the prairie breezes are just right, you can “hear voices on the wind.” It was this property that inspired Jim to begin collecting early-Saskatchewan art “that depicted the land as viewed through the eyes of the pioneers or pertained to Saskatchewan Indian history.”

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