Who Calls? A Qu’Appelle Quest

—Robert Stacey

“Et in Arcadia ego”—inscription of a painting by Guercino (1590–1666) (“Even in Arcadia there am I.”)

Et in Arcadia Ego—title of a Qu’Appelle canvas by Dorothy Knowles (1983)

“Everyone has a spiritual home on earth. Mine is the Qu’Appelle Valley.”

—Illingworth Kerr

The Qu’Appelle always takes you by surprise. Interesting landscapes—those that call to you, whether or not you’re prepared to listen—tend to do that. This is especially true of Arcadian landscapes—ones with echoes and reflections.

By its very toponym the Qu’Appelle smacks on the map a searching question—by extension, the one so famously posed by Northrop Frye: “where is here?” Behind which, the name reverberates: “who?” Who calls? Who is here? Here is where, the Qu’Appelle answers, if you listen hard enough. Mysteriously, maddeningly, it withholds the other—the who?—clue. Approaching this geographical enigma, we assume the questor role: it’s we who have to seek and find.

You may be driving from the south or north. You may be driving the minor highways that connect the Saskatchewan capital of Regina with such valley villages and towns as Regina Beach, Lumsden, Craven, Fort Qu’Appelle, Lebret, Katepwa Beach, and Tantallon. Whatever your route, the first time you see the valley, this sudden declivity—from tawny, ironing-board-smooth peneplain to green-brown serpentine ravine with glittery lakes and a twisted watercourse snaking through—is as unexpected as it is a visual and climatic “relief.”

Not that the former ocean-bottom that encircles the glacier-carved, rush-thick river-that-calls lacks variety: its reputation for unrelieved tedium lies in the jaded eye of the beholder, or, rather, lies to it, for the shortgrass and tallgrass prairies are, in geographic and cultural reality, as varied as the observer cares to notice. But however unheralded the expanses traversed by the dead-straight, east-west Trans-Canada Highway and its iron precursor, the Canadian Pacific Railway, may be, the Qu’Appelle is another story, celebrated in art and verse as a verdant demi-paradise amid drought and wheat-rust, compounded farm debt and Western alienation, and yet largely unknown, even within its own native province.

Like all valleys worthy of the name, this valley is, in a number of senses, hidden. Furthermore, unlike the Great Plains stretching away in every direction, the Qu’Appelle is a sound-box: it resounds. It resonates. Qu’Appelle: kâ-têpwêwi-sîpiy. “Who calls? Calling River.” The Métis and Cree names ricochet off one another, like voices bouncing from the ruckled hills, shuddering out over moon-orbed waters. Cries and whispers carolled from a doomed lover’s canoe or a loon’s lunatic yodel. Echo: ergo, summer. Pauline Johnson, call home!

In their introductory texts for this book, Trevor Herriot and Dan Ring have ventured into autobiographical territory in such a way that I feel licensed to tell how I, a central-Canadian art historian without authentic western credentials, could stake some kind of personal claim on this “suspect” terrain. For decades before I ever set eyes on the Qu’Appelle—first via Highway 10 out of Regina and Balgonie, then down 20 from Saskatoon—in the early and mid-1980s, I was wholly ignorant of the place and its history, even though I spent most of my benighted adolescence in view of it, as it glowered at me over my shrugging teenaged shoulder. I would tell it as it happened, chronologically, according to my own eye- and ear-witnessing, rather than through second-hand factoids about who, what and when, where and why.

Locus solus: a nondescript suburban Toronto house on whose drab living-room wall hung a large, dark canvas depicting the Prairie Storm of its title. The locale of this brooding thunder-scape was unknown and of no concern to me until the mid-1970s. The artist was my grandfather, the English-born Canadian landscape painter and historical illustrator, C.W. Jefferys (1869–1951), who, as I’ll reveal in due course, can be truly accredited as the first paint-poet of the Qu’Appelle (not that I knew it, then).

I have a shamefaced confession to make here. My mother inherited the picture as part of her share of her father’s estate, divided among the four sisters through the drawing of lots in Jefferys’ barn studio behind his early-19th-century brick house on Yonge Street north of Toronto. Peggy was not happy with her luck that day, having hoped to snare another, brighter work, depicting western Saskatchewan’s Battle River Valley.

My earliest recollection of this consolation prize is a shameful episode: my sister, Callie, and I used it as target practice for the tossing of tomato-stakes. I can still recall the popping sound as the sharpened spears ripped through the mould-spotted warp and woof of the rotting linen. What did we know? It was just an old, ugly picture.

In atonement, Cal in the early 1970s rescued the by-then rolled-up scroll of cracked and chipping paint from the dank basement and paid for its restoration by the estimable June Bramall, of Oakville, Ontario. The “Jefferys job” was one of the most formidable challenges this renowned art conservator had faced.1 My sister’s recovery of this lost work in some way paralleled my own belated re-discovery of my long-dead grandfather and his trek to the Qu’Appelle—the inspiration for that now-cleaned canvas.

I discovered the actual subject of the painting—as opposed to some generic prairie setting—only after I had been commissioned to guest-curate a Jefferys retrospective for the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, on the campus of Kingston, Ontario’s Queen’s University (which in 1931 had awarded the artist a doctor of laws degree for his services to art and history, the first such honour to be granted by a Canadian higher-learning institution to a living, working painter). During the course of my researches for this show, which opened in November 1976, I traveled to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa to examine another of Jefferys’ western landscapes, then in off-site warehoused storage: Western Sunlight. This work had been reproduced in J. Russell Harper’s ground-breaking History of Canadian Art, published in advance of Canada’s centennial in 1966, and had been included by Dennis Reid in the NGC-organized The Canadian Landscape in Art, shown in Peking and Shanghai—the first exhibition of twentieth-century western painting to be mounted in China since the Communist revolution of 1949.

Again, like Harper himself, and undoubtedly most of his readers, I was then unaware of the specific setting of the work. Delving into such sources as the exhibition record, curatorial files at the NGC and the Art Gallery of Ontario, published criticism and biographical information (most notably, William Colgate’s 1945 Ryerson Press monograph on the artist), and Jefferys’ own diaries and manuscript writings (then in my mother’s care, and later donated by the Jefferys Estate to the research library of the Art Gallery of Ontario), I was able to identify the locale only as south-central Saskatchewan. However, the small array of western canvases and oil-on-panel sketches that I’d been able to assemble for the show looked nothing like the monotonously flat steppe that I’d crossed with my parents by car in the summer of 1974. Where might I find the undulating, sensuously curvaceous setting celebrated by my grandfather? My ignorance of Saskatchewan painting, and of western Canadian art in general, forestalled my placing these works within a broader, more representative context of interpretations of a province far more varied than it is given credit for being in the geographically challenged Rest Of Canada.

My curiosity piqued by the positive reception to the 1976 Jefferys show, and, in particular, to favourable reaction to the rarely shown and even less frequently reproduced prairie pictures, in 1983 I applied—successfully—to the Royal Canadian Geographical Society for a research grant, my proposal being to conduct an extensive field trip, visiting as many of Jefferys’ painting and sketching sites in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan as could be fitted into a fortnight. Renting a car in Calgary, my companion Maggie (editor/ driver/ comrade) and I worked our way gradually eastward. We began by seeking the objectives of Jefferys’ far-ranging excursion of 1924 (undertaken to give him a taste of the cattle-ranch and Indian country of the foothills near Morley on the Bow River northwest of Calgary; to sketch buffalo at Wainwright; and to tour the key battle-sites of the Louis Riel-led Northwest Rebellion of 1885, on the eve of the abortive rising’s unheralded fiftieth anniversary). This meandering motel pilgrimage opened my eyes to very different terrain than I had seen during the Trans-Canada trek of a decade earlier. What I’d not realized, until first glimpsing the sinuous declivities and fenceless, semi-desertified rangelands of the Bow River at Crowfoot’s Crossing, southeast of Calgary, is that the landscape is a living sculpture, hewn and moulded by rivers and streams and by the glaciers that carved their courses. I recognized the setting from snapshots and sketches in the Jefferys archive, but these had not prepared me for the expansiveness of the vistas or the subtlety of the palette, limited though it was by a spring drought in what, only later, would I learn was the serially parched Palliser Triangle.

Exhilarated by the sombre beauty of the Bow, we decided on a side-excursion due north to another, more famous tourist-draw which, as it happened, Jefferys had somehow managed to miss: the Red Deer River valley at Drumheller. Here, too, we were taken by the kind of surprise that shortly thereafter would catch our breath on suddenly plunging over the rim of the Qu’Appelle. After miles and miles of dead-straight two-lane tarmac and tabletop level, a hard-braked descent into another world—in this case, the surrealistic boneyard of the Badlands.

Eastward, just across the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, lay our next destination: the broader, much more verdant, valley of the Battle River, subject of the 1930 canvas (based on a watercolour of 1924) that my mother had hoped to draw as her lot. Its differences in form, hue, and vegetation from the gnarled and gulch-like valleys of the Bow and the Red Deer taught another lesson in topographic variance. Threaded by a shallow, switch-backed stream, the lush bottomlands spread out in a wide arc, as if the drier tablelands above had opened themselves up to embrace the edenic garden below.

The Battle, as it turned out, was a good introduction to the next map-point on our itinerary, the Qu’Appelle Valley. Again, as with the Bow and the Red Deer, nothing prepares you for the abrupt, almost breath-taking transition as the highway suddenly swerves and swoops down to the plain-beneath-the-plain. This introduction to the earthly paradise that had inspired my grandfather’s first important canvases over seven decades earlier remains with me as a moment of transition not only in geography but in my awareness of it. (Nor do I forget the jolt when Maggie impetuously pumped the peddle down a muddy side-road which turned out to be a cattle-fenced dead end, hound-dogs howling at our tires as a Robert Altman cast of superannuated cowboys squinted at us, spat ’baccy quids, and disgustedly shook their heads: tourists! They called off the dogs, and we escaped back up the valley.)

Our next night—if I recall correctly—was spent in a seedy old motel at Regina Beach, one of the Saskatchewan capital’s favoured summer resorts, at the tail-end of Last Mountain Lake. We were kept awake till near-dawn by a bad country-rock band’s thumpings, but it was a treat to be on the road and in a mood for fresh adventures. Years later, a James Henderson beach-scene would bring back memories of that sunny day’s mindless yet unforgotten pleasures.

Although my grasp of it was woefully incomplete, this open landscape enclosed within a landscape convinced me, there and then, to gather together all my findings and photographs and to propose an exhibition to the Mendel Gallery in Saskatoon—the logical place for such an undertaking, it seemed, despite the valley’s closer proximity to the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. Not that either gallery possessed—as I had been shocked to discover while curating the 1976 retrospective—a single western work by this pioneer delineator of the Canadian prairies.

On my return to Toronto, I dispatched an exploratory letter to the Mendel’s new director, Allan Harding MacKay, which led to an invitation to visit the city, show some slides, and make my pitch. This time, again for research purposes, I elected to fly to Winnipeg (birthplace of my grandmother, Clara Jefferys, née West, who had married the artist in 1906. Then I’d take the train to Saskatoon, as my grandfather had done—via, however, the more northerly-routed Canadian Northern Railway—during his initial visit in 1910, at the behest of his then employer, the Canadian Courier, an illustrated paper for which he was covering Sir Wilfred Laurier’s last federal election campaign.

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