Years of pioneers weren't so easy

No one today can even begin to imagine the astonishing hardships early settlers endured.

Yet their stories of human tragedy and moral triumph are the nucleus of the world premiere of Pioneer Years: 1895-1914 Monday at St. Albert’s Arden Theatre.

Adapted from Barry Broadfoot's book, an oral history of the same title, Seacoast Theatre Centre has created an eight-actor collage piece that approaches the immigration theme from each individual's point of view.

“These are the true stories of people who survived and broke the land and it's told in their own words,” says the Vancouver-based Seacoast's artistic director Scott Swan.

Anyone that was part of the Edmonton theatre scene in 1975 might remember Swan as a visionary actor/director who founded Northern Light Theatre along with Alan Lysell and Angela and Merrilyn Gann. The two Gann sisters are still part of Seacoast's stable of artists.

Located in the Edmonton Art Gallery's auditorium, Northern Light began as a lunch-hour theatre producing one-act plays. The core company of 14 artists produced classics, comedies, musicals and new works including Broadfoot's huge hit Ten Lost Years.

Although Swan left for the Lennoxville Festival in 1981 and eventually settled in Vancouver, he always kept a foot in the local door as guest instructor at the Victoria School of Performing Arts. “There's something about the clarity and purity of the prairies and its stories that draws me,” he explains.

Swan is a strong admirer of Broadfoot's best-known oral histories. Broadfoot, a West Coast journalist, believed there was more to history than the writings of academics, generals and industrialists. He felt the common man's viewpoint was overlooked in a bid to re-write history.

Suddenly in the spring of 1972, he chucked the Vancouver Sun after working there for 17 years as a reporter/editor. “I came in, I hung up my coat, took the cover off my typewriter and looked out at the newsroom. Suddenly it looked like a Russian tractor factory,” he told Sun columnist Denny Boyd years later.

With no visible means of support he piled into his Volkswagen with a typewriter and tape recorder and set off across the country in search of untold stories from the past. Many were collected in beer parlours as shared camaraderie over drinks easily led to conversations with strangers.

Using a direct talk-and-tape interview method, Broadfoot wrote only his subjects' personal words. As a result, their stories are completely untainted by a writer's interpretation.

Ten Lost Years, a Depression account, was the first oral history Seacoast adapted, and the response was incredible with many people coming up after the show to share their story. “One Ukrainian man told us how there was no food in his family. His mother would spread jam on his finger but he wasn't allowed to lick it off until he got to school. That way others would think he had eaten. He was standing there, tears rolling down his face. He'd been hanging on to the story for 50 years.”

Instead Pioneer Years explores the massive immigration influx from the United Kingdom and Eastern Europe. Some were escaping oppressive homeland conditions. Others read the misleading pamphlets the Canadian Pacific Railway distributed to attract settlers.

“They described babbling brooks and catching trout for breakfast in a pond. A myth was created. Some people expecting a new life arrived with Persian carpets and china, nothing to help them survive the cold winters and harsh conditions. Some died. Some went back. Most stayed.”

“It's incredible the part the country has played in finding the true human essence — not what people thought they were or should be, but what they could be.”

Swan also added that Pioneer Years' nine-stop tour in Alberta was nearly kyboshed. Due to cutbacks, some presenters were unable to pay fees. But at the 11th hour the Sturgeon Valley Athletic Club offered $10,000 in sponsorship. “Without them our theatre would have been put in a huge hole.”

And for Scott, it is this kind of intervention that best epitomizes the generous help-your-neighbour legacy of our early settlers.