Sarah Binks

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The great source of materil for the Student of Sarah Binks is, of course, the Binksian Collection in the provincial Archives of Saskatchewan. This, together with the letters of Mathilda, have been the supplies upon which all other students have hitherto drawn. But much inference has been published as fact. Many of the details of Sarah's life are still vague and hare still to be filled in. There is however, a great wealth of material still unturned and unexploited around Willows, Sarah's birthplace. The Author has not hesitated to sake use of this material where it could be published.It has been the aim of the Author at all tines to give a deeper, truer meaning to the poetic heritage which belongs to Sarah, the unspoiled child of the soil. Sarah's lyrical poetry, small as it is in bulk, ranks among the rarest treasures of Canadian literature. The poems which have been Included in thiswork are most of them well known, but no apology need be made for their repetition. Quite apart from their intrinsic beauty, they are significant in that they are expressions of facts and events in her life. Sarah, more than most poets, seizes upon the trivial, or what to lesser souls would appear trivial, incident and experience, for example the loss of Ole's ear by a duck, as an occasion for a lyrical outburst of pulsating beauty. These poems can only bo understood within the context of Sarah's life, and free use has therefore been made of them. Ho one has ever wanted to copyright any of Sarah's poems, and thay have therefore been quoted at length � wholly, partly, or Just simply quoted.In addition to the field work done in and around Willows the Author has made a special journey to Quorum, Sask., at which place Mrs. Steve Grizzlykick, (Mathilda) was interviewed, and to Vertigo, Manitoba, where Mrs Pete Catalo was questioned concerning
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0le. Although the actual field data obtained la these investigations can not be published, they have been of much value giving the atmosphere and in interpreting the scene around Willows and Quagmire during and immediately preceding the time when Sarah wrote WASHOUT ON THE LINE.The Author is greatly indebted to the Editor of THE HORSE-BREEDERS GAZETTE for the opportunity of going through his files, and also, when ha *&s out to lunch, his desk. Much interesting information was available here.In the case of the Editor of SWINE AND KINE no files had been kept, but permission was given to interview the secretary and later on to take her out to the local dance. The information here was exceptionally good.The Author in particular wishes to express his indebtedness to the Quagmire halting and Brewing Company for much of the material embodied in this book, and to the Dominion Distillers, Limited, who so kindly read the proofs.The Burrs, Carman, Manitoba1945Paul Hiebert
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CHAPTER I CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE,A plain shaft of composition stone with the simple inscription;HERE LIES SARAH BINKSmarks the last resting place of the Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan,Below the inscription at the base of the shaft in smaller letters iscarved the motto; ALONE, and above it in larger type:THIS MONUMENT WAS ERRECTED BY THE CITIZENS OF THE THE MUNICIPALITY OF NORTH WILLOWS AND WAS UNVEILED ON JULY 1st, 1931 BYTHE HON. AGUSTUS X. WINDHEAVER IN THE PRESENCE OF THE REEVE AND COUNCIL .Here fellows the names of the reeve and councillors together withthe names of a number of outstanding statesmen of the day. Truly afitting tribute to so great a woman. And it is no less a tribute tothe Province of Saskatchewan that on the occasion of the unveilingof this monument the register of names at the Commercial House atWillows should be at the same time the roster of the greatest ofSaskatchewans sons. The Hon. A.E.Windheaver writes of that occasionin a letter* to his committee;"It was hot as hell, and we wanted to make the 4.46 and could have arranged for a hot-box to hold it for half an hour, but it was no use. We stuck it until every-body was through. I think I was wise to leave out the tariff in my speech. This Sarah seems to be something of a tin god around here."Something of a god! The tribute of a great statesman to a greatartist and a great woman.*Private letter, now in possession of the Author;
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2Half way between Oak. Bluff and Quagmire in Saskatchewan lies the little town of North Willows. Its public buildings are unpretentious but pure in architectural style. A post office, two general stores, Charley Wong's resturant and billiard parlor, three United churches,the Commercial House, (Lib.), the Clarendon Hotel, (Cons.), a drug store, a consolidated school, and eighteen filling stations, make up the east side of Railroad Avenue, its chief commercial street. On the west side Railway Avenue is taken up by the depot, the lumber yard and four elevators. At right--angles to Railway Avenue runs Post Office Street, so called because the post office was on this street before the last provincial election. It is, however, generally known simply as the Correction Line.Business in Willows is not what it used to be. The Board of Trade meets every Thursday night above Charley Wong's, and the younger set of the town is beginning to give up auction bridge in favor of contract, but in spite of these signs of progress there has been little real growth for several years. The town is now in what is known as the dry belt. Once it boasted seven elevators; one was torn down and two were destroyed by fire and have not beer rebuilt. But Willows has little need for commercial greatness. It lives in its glorious past, andto its shrine every year come hundreds who pause for a brief momentat the Clarendon Hotel or the Commercial House, or buy gasoline at the Sarah Pilling Station.*If we follow Post Office Street, or the Correction Line due east for half a mile to where it corrects we come to Willow View Cemetary where Sarah Binks' monument stands. Prom a distance it appears to rise in lonely grandeur. But if we follow Post Office street duewest for a mile and a quarter from the town, we come to the North____Since this was written a further memorial to Sarah Binks hasbeen errected by the Board of Trade in the form of a highway marker"Welcome to Willows, the home of Sarah Binks. Speed limit15 miles per hour. This means you."
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3East Quarter of Section 37, Township 21, Range 9, West, the home of Sarah Binks herself. Little remains of the old homestead. The houseitself has been torn down by souvenir hunters, one of the barns leans drunkenly and the other is about to fall. Gophers play on the site of the little corral where Sarah kept the calf, wild roses grow where once were beans and potatoes. In the coulee, now dry, that ran behind the house, a meadowlark has built its nest. It may have been that Sarah, with the prophetic eye of the poetess, was to visualise this scene when, years later, she wrote those famous lines, now inscribed in bronze over the gateway of St Midgets, entitled, ODE TO A DESERTED FARM.How changed and bleak the meadows lie And overgrown with hay, The fields of oats and barley Where the binder twined its way!With doors ajar the cottage stands Deserted on the hill � No welcome bark, no thudding hoof, And the voice of the pig is still.The west was still the West in the days when Jacob and AgatheaBinks first homesteaded the N.E. 1/4Sec. 37 Township 21. R9, W. , To theeast lay Oak Bluff, the end of the steel. To the west stretched theboundless prairies of the North West Territories, in which, to quoteSarah's own words, "The hand of man hath never trod". Here was the homeof the coyote and the gopher, the antelope still flaunted his tail orlack of tail to the western wind, and the pensive mosquito wanderedunafraid. A region rich in historical interests and traditions, of tales of Indian fights with their squaws, of squaws with the Mounted Police. Willows was then Wallows, and the very name, Oak Bluff, wasderived from an old Indian word, or combination of words, indicating that at that spot the white man had been frightened, or, to use the
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4Indian term, "bluffed" at a conference between Chief Buffalo Chip and Colonel MacSqueamish, the outcome being described by the chief in the Cree dialect as being "oke", waning very good, or excellent.Into this free and untrammeled country care Jacob Binks and his wife Agathea, (nee Agathea Thurnow), the parents of Sarah. It is not known exactly from where they came, but from a report of a conversation in front of the poet office, and from the fact that Sarah was often wont to refer to herself proudly as a daughter of the Old South, it is now generally accepted that they came from South Dakota. Beyond this fact we know little of the Binks antecedents. The Thurnows, however, are said to have traced their family back to Confederation. The parish records in Kidddykodiac in New Brunswick show that a daughter Agathea was born to one Abram Turnip and that the Turnips later moved to South Dakota. The name Turnip may have been Americanised to Thurnip and later to Thurnow.Prosperity smiled upon Jacob and Agathea Binks. The original sod house of the homesteader was replaced by a more pretentious frame building faced with best quality tar paper and having an outside stairs leading to the guest room over the kitchen roof. One entered the "lean-to" or antechamber before reaching the main body of the house and living quarters. This antechamber served the purpose of receiving and storage room. In it was kept the fuel, the churn the harnesses undergoing repair, and here the chickens were plucked, the eggs collected, and here slept Rover, the dog, and Ole, the hired man. Through the antechamber one passed into the kitchen and from there into the parlor which in turn led into the bedrooms.The birthplace of Sarah has been described as having been furnished with some taste. Around the walls of the parlor were hung in
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5pairs the ancestral portraits, Jacob and Agathea Binks in bevelled glass and gilt frames occupied the south wall. A crayon enlargement of grandfather Thadeus T. Thurnow together with a black and white steel engraving of a prize sheep, which bore a remarkable resemblance to the old gentleman, occupied the north wall. The gaze of all four was thoughtfully concentrated upon the Quebec heater which stood in the mathematical centre of the room. This heater, when glowing with fire, not only served the purpose of heating the room, but acted during the night as a species of navigating light from the bedrooms to the outdoors via the kitchen when the occasion required. The keynote of severely artistic, almost geometrical simplicity, marked the arrangement of the three chairs and sideboard which completed the appointments.The parlor was used only on great occasions, Rover and Ole were never allowed to use this room unless we except the one occasion when, according to Drt Taj Mahal, who claims to have examined the floor, the former made a complete circuit of the freshly painted surface, paused for a moment at one of the chairs and departed through the north window.The kitchen too, was not without its artistic touches, but here a lighter and more imaginative motif prevails, the influence of the Thurnows to which Sarah's artistic and imaginative qualities may always he refered. Two calendars in particular mark the aesthetic discrimination of the home. One shows a vessel in full sail in dangerous proximity to the Eddystone Light, and the other, of more idyllic theme,shows in an orchard a young woman of beautiful proportions offering a cherry to a young man of her acquaintance. One of these calendars
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6is said by experts to be an original, (Both are preserved in the Binksian collection.) But quite apart from the cultural influence which these two great pictures must have had upon the susceptible mind of the young Sarah, they bear a great significance in that they enable us to fix with considerable certainty the dates of several of her early poems. Professor Tweed has called attention to the fact that the date of April 1st bears the entry "caff", and that t' is refers to the date on which Sarah's pet calf was born and that thosepoignant lines of CALF could not have been written before this dateand were probably written soon after since it had not yet received a nameOh calf, that gamboled by my door, Who made me rich who now am poor, That licked my hand with milk bespread, Oh calf, calf! Art dead, art dead?Oh calf, I sit and languish, calf, With somber face, I cannot laugh, Can I forget thy playful bunts? Oh calf, calf, that loved me once!With mildewed optics, deathlike, still, My nights are damp, my days are chill, I weep again with doleful sniff, Oh calf, calf, so dead, so stiff.Sarah was the third or possibly the fourth child of Agathea and Jacob Binks. None of the other children survived their infancy, andl Agathea Binks either died or abdicated while Sarah was still a child. But there is no evidence that Sarah was lonesome. She seems to have loved solitude and although some of her later work, notably that of her early Post Regina period, displays a touch of the morbid whose origin psychologists could undoubtedly trace to her childhood, there seems to be no doubt that her early girlhood was spent like that of other children of her day. She was a happy and a healthy child. She assisted in the simple household chores of weeding the
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7garden, gathering the eggs, .and picking the potato hugs. Turing the summer months the little Sarah, her lunch pail under her arm, trudged the rile and a quarter to the one-roomed school at Willows. Her education was sporadic at, best, More often than not, especially as she grew older, she was obliged to stay at home and help around the farm, Moreover Jacob Binks was opposed to much education. "There aint no dam' sense in all this book-learning," was the frequent expression of his inner conviction but also his public policy, as a resuit of which he was elected and invariably re-elected to the School Board.But if Sarah's formal education was neglected, if her acquaintance with the great authors was a mere nodding acquaintance, she learned all the more from the big school of nature. Nature to her was something alive, and the life of the farm, wild as well as domestic, acquired in her eyes a character and a personality. The lowly blade of grass and the stately horse were equally objects of her sympathetic speculations. She understood the grasshoppers and held them in contempt , whereas the gophers , whose inclusion in the primordial curse had, according t Jacob Pinks, been omitted only through some oversight on the part of the Creator, were to Sarah a constant source* Miss Iguana Binks-Barkingwell, of St. Olafs-Down-the-Drain, Hants, Hurts, Harts,, England, who claims to be a distant kinswoman of Sarah Binks, has recently made a presentation to the Saskatchewan Zoological Society of a mounted collection of potato bugs from all parts of the Empire, to be known as the Binksian Collection. Br. Termite of Toronto has raised the question, and with it a storm of controversy, as to whether the so-called "young potato bugs" in this collection are not actually lady-bugs. It is unfortunate, in the Authors' opinion, that this controversy should have arisen over a collection of potato bugs which was originally conceived to do honor to a great poetess.
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8of humorous amusement. For the perennial calf she had a womanly affection and its stupidity enthralled her. She was keenly aware of the beauty of sky and field. She loved the hot sunlight of the afternoon and the feel of the wind on her cheek. One needs only to read MY GARDEN or THE, BUG to realize how deep is Sarah's sympathetic understanding of nature:MY GARDENA little blade of grass I see, Its banner waving wild and free, And I wonder if in time to come 'Twill be a great big onion; We cannot tell, we do not know, For oft we reap and didn't sow; We plant the hairy coconut With hope serene and sturdy, but We cannot tell, for who can say We plant the oat and reap the hay, We sow the apple, reap the worm, We tread the worm and reap the turn.Too much, too much for us this thought, With much too much exertion fraught, In faith we get the garden" dug, - And what do we reap - we reap the bug, In goodly faith we plant the seeds -Tomorrow worn we reap the weeds.THE BUG.In a little nook, a nooklet, There beside a babbling brooklet, Sits a little bug, a beetle, Browsing in a little volume, Reading in a brand new booklet, Studying the spinal column, learning where to put his needle, Get me with his little hooklet.
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But not only is Sarah's understanding of nature a sympathetic onebut her love for the animal life is deep and abiding. One need only recall THF GOOSE, or THF APPLE, or the ever popular SONG TO THE COW,songs which Bishop Puddy* of Bingo-Bingoland places in the very firstrankTHE GOOSEThe goose, a noisome bird to chatter, But handsome on a garnished platter, A loathsome brute to toil among, Put caught and killed and cooked and hung, Before a crackling fire, A songster to admire.The APPLEToday as I an apple mulched A worm I fain did bite in twain, 'Twas curled up in its little world Where it in peace had lain; So ruthlessly did I disturb, The little worm, helpless, infirm, Yet no remorse did shake my soul, No pricks of conscience make me squirm.SONG TO THE COWI'll take no cow that fails to sing, Or throstle with its horn, Her milk must stimulate like tea, Her tail stretch to infinity, And her nose be plush-like and warm, Amorous of optic, mild but quick To perceive where the grass is pale, A rhomboid snout, a mellow lick, And a breath like ale � These attributes in a cow I deem, Are the best to be had and win my esteem."Amorous of optic, .. breath like ale! What imagery! It is in lines like these," says Mss Rosalind Drool, "with their haunting cadence that Miss Binks expresses the great soul of Saskatchewan. One wonders how she does it."* Rev Beckus Puddy - "A comparative Study of the Literature of Saskatchewan with that of Easter Island." - The Sunday Sleep, Vol I., No. 1
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10CHAPTER IIOLE.One may trace many influences which affected Sarah's work, influences great and small which touched her here and there; Ole, Rover,William Greenglow, Henry Welkin, Grandfather Thurnow, strong, masculine influences which affected her outlook, touching her mind, and leaving their light and sometimes their shadow upon her poetry. Put to Ole, cheerful, hardworking Ole, big of heart and feet, must go the honor of having been the first to put the young Sarah upon the path of poesy. It is significant, even symbolical, that just as years ago on the morning after Dominion Day, Ole himself was traced for miles across the alkali flirts that lie north of Willows, 30 today one traces his splendid footprints across the dazzling pages of Saskatchewan literature.Ole's other name is not known, or if it ever was known it has been forgotten. He answered simply to the name of Ole. When, on the rare occasions a more formal address became necessary as when the extra mail order catalogue arrived, it became, Ole, c/o J. Binks. Professor Bedfellow has suggested that the name Ole may be a diminutiveof Olafur or perhaps of Oleander, but to Ole, no diminutive can possiblyapply. He was above all a big man such as the West is fond of producing. His feet found their way with difficulty through the trousers of his store suit, his shoulders were of gnarled oak, and his two hands swung at his sides like slabs of teak. He was noted for his great strength. He could haul the stoneboat with its two full -water barrels from the coulee to the house, and when, as sometimes happened a horse would straddle the barbed wire fence, he would assist itfrom its predicament by lifting one end or another as the circumstances required. He had an equine playfulness and would toss

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