A Prairie Memoir: The Life and Times of James Clinkskill (review)

I like James Clinkskill. He is warm, funny, and hard-working! Emigrating from Glasgow at age twenty-eight in 1882 to Battleford, then Saskatoon via Manitoba, Clinkskill made a life for himself as a pioneer, merchant, and politician. These memoirs (covering 1882-1912) were written in 1917, the same year in which his doughty wife died at age sixty and within a year of the death of his only son and namesake in the Battle of the Somme. Clinkskill's family plays little part in his memoirs, appearing only at times when his ability to provide - for a wife whose trousseau is looted in the North-West Rebellion before she (in mourning for her mother at the time of her wedding) gets a chance to wear it, for a new baby out for the first time on the trail in a snowstorm - is challenged. Their absence, however, seems due more to his sense of privacy (he explains his editing of a third party's letter on that ground) than to an overweening ego.

Some will be drawn to Clinkskill's memoirs by his position in politics in the early days of what is now Saskatchewan. Indeed, more than a third of the book is labelled as being devoted to that topic, taking in the years of 1866 to 1899. Thankfully, however, the naming of this section would seem to be more a conceit of the editor's than a heading by which Clinkskill organized his life. There are very few descriptions of political machinations. I rather think they bored Clinkskill as much as they do most of us. Instead, there is a sense of politics as being one of the necessary tools for 'developing' the 'Great Lone Land' (163), a task that Clinkskill clearly relished. Also, a task that he did not question: To him, First Nations and Metis were impediments or allies, according to how well-assimilated they had been to the values of the would-be developers. He seems rather puzzled about how they could be so different from the ones he was used to from James Fennimore Cooper.

The memoirs trail off at the end into afterthought sketches. This is a common problem in memoirs of this type, in this case ending just five years shy of the time of writing. Invariably there has not been sufficient time to obtain perspective on experiences too recent, a truth that historians struggle with regularly. The material where there is perspective, however, is nothing short of excellent. Clinkskill's description of his experience in the North-West Rebellion gave me a better understanding of that dispute than has anything else I have ever read. Common experience of threatened settlers was his main theme. This emphasis is no doubt due to Clinkskill's stated intention to stick to what he remembered, because he did not have the proper documents to hand. By focusing on the fear and struggle in Battleford, he provides us with an immediate understanding of pioneer psychology. After great loss of property, most just got back to their various employments: 'The land was there as before, the opportunities for advancement unimpaired, and, full of hope, they started life over again.'

The other great gift that this memoir gave me was a picture of the origins of a common mindset prairie dwellers do not share with Canadians from more populated areas. There are jokes that go, 'You know you're an Albertan if you would drive a hundred miles for a cup of coffee,' etc. Mary Percy Jackson told me how funny a Metis friend of hers thought it was that twenty-five miles was considered a long hike in the army unit he had just joined. He was laughing to her about it as he set off to run fifty miles to a dance. That distance becomes unnoticed when it is just a standard fact of life is clear from Clinkskill...