Skip to content

Les Anderson’s tales

The first of Rossland REAL Food’s sustainable conversation series featured Les Anderson’s fascinating tales of his childhood in the remote north of Saskatchewan with no power and a nearly complete reliance on the family garden, foraging, and trading with the local Cree.
6712NewS.160.20110216144244.LesAndersonsmall_20110217
Rossland News Reporter Les Anderson

The first of Rossland REAL Food’s sustainable conversation series featured Les Anderson’s fascinating tales of his childhood in the remote north of Saskatchewan with no power and a nearly complete reliance on the family garden, foraging, and trading with the local Cree.

Before Anderson was born, his father landed a job as a game warden in northern Saskatchewan near Lake Athabasca. The pay was minimal but the job was important, carrying mail, messages, and medicine far out on the traplines.

“Back in those days, the dutiful wife followed the husband,” Anderson said, so they flew in to a new life in a little log house with only the basic staples - such as salt, sugar, flour, and pork - flown in twice each year.

“There was no initiation. They just dropped them off in the middle of nowhere, no radios, nothing, and they were gone,” he said.

“I was born in 1940 in this little cabin, no nurses, no doctors,” Anderson said. “In those days the kids grew up very quickly. Parents didn’t tell the kids to run out and play. You helped the parents, that’s just the way it was.”

“When I was four years old and my brother was six, we were already out in the garden planting, weeding, picking the stuff. When I was six, we were out shooting squirrels, partridges, grouse. By the time I was eight, I knew how to process food.”

“You had to can everything,” he said, “even if it was 100 degrees outside, you had to load up the stove with wood and get those boilers going.”

The value of resources took on a sharp meaning. “You never wasted salt or sugar. If you had a cake, you didn’t put sugar in it because that was part of fruit for the winter.”

Paraffin wax was needed for many things, including fresh tomatoes which Anderson said can be kept fresh if they aren’t washed and are waxed.

Canning jars were like “precious diamonds” and breaking one was punishable by the strap, “just so it was embedded in your mind: That was your life.”

By necessity, the family worked hard on a big garden and stored the seeds of plants they grew.

“We learned very young which vegetables you could plant first, which were subject to freezing, and which were better if they were touched by the frost,” he said.

“The winters were very long and very cold. By comparison, he said, “around here [in Rossland], you get long summers. You can grow all the food you need here. In fact, some crops, you could grow two in a year. There’s no reason that anyone should starve to death in this country.”

“My parents learned very quickly how to store food with no electricity or fridges,” he continued. They discovered the value of a deep root cellar the first year when they observed frost reaching depths of eight feet or more. They used sand, grass, and sawdust to insulate their root crops. When temperatures dipped below -50, hot rocks were brought downstairs to ward off the deep chill.

Anderson said. “It was a process of harsh learning in a harsh environment that we had accepted as not harsh. When your life depends on this stuff, you learn very quickly what works and what doesn’t.”

“Our counters and windows were full of plants,” he recalled. “We’d have them hanging off the ceiling with string, soup cans and everything, that’s what we used.”

The roots of tomato transplants were treated carefully. Cauliflower transplants were put out early in holes dug among tall grasses to give shade. Along the same lines (but in later years and hotter climes) Anderson allowed weeds to grow among his beans to keep them cooler.

Other tips kept flying in: Potatoes were kept dry in the ground with deep furrows and straw in the rows. Peas were planted early and beans late. For a spring harvest, they left carrots in the ground all winter under a layer of dry grass. Beets can take a frost but must thaw during the day. And onions were kept well away from beans.

“It’s a learning process, what vegetables you can grow together,” he said.

Everything was carefully rationed. “We’d be hungry, and there’d be a big bag of beans in the pantry, but we couldn’t eat them because that had to be stretched out,” he recalled.

If the supply plane was late coming, “we ate porridge in every fashion you can think of: cakes, cookies, mixed with eggs. After that it was whatever Dad could shoot.”

“We’d eat whatever we could to survive,” he continued, from wild carrots and all manner of berries to “squirrels, little birds, anything to add flavour.”

“‘Oh boy, squirrel soup,’ we’d say, and there’d be a fight over who got the last bowl. Now you could be guaranteed the government would come in and take the kids away if you fed them squirrel soup.”

Worse than a late plane, “some years, because of weather, the gardens wouldn’t grow,” Anderson said.

If you depend on your garden, but it won’t be sufficient to carry you through the winter, what do you do? “You start storing up meat,” he said. “And the people who knew how to store meat were the natives, so that’s who we turned to.”

Stay tuned for part two of this three part series.