UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Creating Young Citizens:

Education in the Borderlands of Alberta and Montana: 1895-1914

by

Susan Kwiatkowski

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

SEPTEMBER, 2009

© SUSAN KWIATKOWSKI 2009 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et Canada Archives Canada

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1*1 Canada iii

Abstract

This thesis compares rural education in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century

Alberta and Montana in an effort to define how Canadian and American identities were created. It employs the dual concept of social and political borderlands to explore national differences and similarities as both the province and state sought to educate diverse children to be good citizens. Governments on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel created organizational and attendance regulations, mandated curricula, and implemented supervisory roles. Experiences at the grassroots level indicated that settlers created schools before governments established a presence in rural areas. The rural schoolhouses on both sides of the national border were a meeting-ground for children, one where they learned social differences based on ethnicity, gender, and age. Memoirs indicated that the education children received attempted to create citizens by imposing strong discipline, developing a respect for authority, and by making the schoolhouse a place with strong community ties. The schoolyard brought rural children together within the natural environment. The target of government regulations contradicted the lived reality of borderland children. It was where children played and learned a sense of place and linked their schoolroom lessons to the environment.

in iv

Acknowledgements

Everywhere I went in Alberta and Montana my research questions were answered

with a great deal of enthusiasm. Of course, my travel would not have been possible

without the Thesis Travel Grant provided by Research Services at the University of

Calgary and the financial assistance provided by the Department of History and the

Faculty of Graduate Studies throughout my graduate work. I wish to acknowledge the

assistance of the staff at the Provincial Archives of Alberta; the Marias Museum in

Shelby, Montana; the Cardston Courthouse Museum and Archives; the Glenbow

Museum and Archives; and the Montana Historical Society Research Center. Farley

Wuth, of the Pincher Creek and District Historical Society in Pincher Creek, Alberta

went above and beyond in assisting my research, as did Gil Jordon and his team of

volunteers at the Northwest Montana Historical Society Museum at Central School in

Kalispell, Montana. Their encouragement and advice kept me on track.

I would never have started this project without the prompting and encouragement

of Betsy Jameson. Her patience has led me to believe in myself and my work. Similarly,

the quiet support of R. Douglas Francis assisted me in pursuing this project to

completion. I also thank Dr. Tamara Seiler and Dr. Max Foran for their thoughtful input

and suggestions. Most of all, I wish to acknowledge the unflagging support of my husband, Marv. He travelled with me, helped me gather documents, critiqued my writing, and made me think about biases and anger when I thought about sunshine and roses. I could not have accomplished this without him.

iv V

Dedication

To the children who never had a chance, to those who were indifferent to the chance, and to all those who never even knew there was a chance.

With love to my husband Marv and our son Kris: Thank you for believing in me and agreeing that the chance was worth taking.

v VI

Table of Contents

Approval Page ii Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv Dedication v Table of Contents vi Epigraph vii

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1 - Locating the Borderland: Situating Children and Education in Montana and Alberta 8

CHAPTER 2 - "Ready for School before School Was Ready for Them": Building Schools from the Top Down and from the Grass Roots 35

CHAPTER 3 - The Meeting-Ground of Children: The Rural Schoolhouse as Social Borderland 73

CHAPTER 4 - The Environment as Classroom: The Social Borderland Extended 117

CONCLUSION 159

BIBLIOGRAPHY 164

APPENDIX A: Statistics Of Attendance By Standard/Grade For Alberta Pubic Schools, 1905-1913 182

APPENDIX B: Third And Fourth Grade Attendance At Central School, Kalispell, Montana 1895-1896 183

APPENDIX C: Eighth Grade School Register - Central School, 1901-02, Teacher: Cecil Clapp. Pupils Who Left School Before The Close Of The School Year 184

APPENDIX D: Characteristics Of The Children Of The Second Grade, 1901-1902.... 185

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Epigraph

A strong influence in making Canadian citizens of the strangers who are coming to join us, is that of the public school. In the schools their children are learning to speak and read English. The English language will open to them Canadian books and newspapers, in reading which they will come to think and feel as Canadians do. But, fortunately, school life exerts a much more immediate and powerful influence upon the children of foreigners, namely, the influence of association. The classroom and the playground are the meeting-place of children of all nationalities, where those who are strangers to Canada quickly pick up Canadian habits of speech and manner.

D.M. Duncan, A History of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, Gage's 20th Century Series (Toronto: W.J. Gage & Co. Limited, 1903), 119-120.

Soon after we arrived back at school the assembly began. I remember the speech this real honest-to-goodness Yankee, the Superintendent, made. He spoke warmly and simply of the great achievements of these young people, especially the few who had been born in the Old Country. This was the category in which my sister and I belonged; perhaps that's why I remember his speech after all these many years. He pointed out how these foreign-born children had excelled to the point where one of them was the Valedictorian. He spoke of the parents who had made a home in a new, strange land and had adapted so well, and of the sons and brothers who had gone off to fight for their adopted land. He made us feel very proud and important. The program progressed very well. My sister gave the valedictory speech in her clear, soft voice, without a trace of a foreign accent. Later, I sang my lullaby accompanied on the piano by my new friend Dorothy.

Sophia Trupin, Dakota Diaspora: Memoirs of a Jewish Homesteader (Berkeley: Alternative Press, 1984), 136-137.

Vll 1

INTRODUCTION

This thesis developed from my own desire to understand the differences between

Canadians and Americans, focusing on the history of childhood. Since children are future citizens, imperative to the growth and development of the nation-state, they are an obvious starting point in trying to locate differences. The borders that define nations claim children as citizens. Education is a place to explore divergence since it is a site where differences might be taught given the state's concern with educating children for citizenship. Montana became an American territory in 1864, while Alberta became a part of the North-West Territories in 1875. Montana attained statehood in 1889 and Alberta became a Canadian province in 1905. The years 1895 through 1914 were important in northern Montana and southern Alberta because they were a time when settlement grew substantially. The almost parallel transition from territories to province and state make

1895 to 1914 an ideal time to explore developing government policy and the reaction of incoming settlers. Since Alberta and Montana were responsible for their provincial and state educational policies, how they did so begins a comparison.

By focusing on the area around the international border or the borderland of the province and state, the importance of the forty-ninth parallel can be explored. Were there any significant differences between the education systems of Montana and Alberta? How did children remember their rural school experiences? How did children learn the appropriate national identity? Was it more important to train children to be industrious and law-abiding citizens than to focus on the symbols of the nation? Did the area 2 surrounding a border provide sufficient distance from the neighbouring nation to allow governments to enforce difference? Did the common prairie environment influence the educational experiences of western children on both sides of the border?

I use a borderland methodology to approach this study of childhood and education. The political border of the forty-ninth parallel separated the two nations. The approach takes advantage of the notion that political borders are where "nations are in fact made and unmade."1 Focusing on the areas surrounding the border, or the borderland, explores whether the political border controlled nationhood. The mobility of people might have caused the national boundaries to be less significant in lived experience.

I juxtapose to the political borderland the concept of social borderlands. A social borderland is a common ground or meeting place.2 Rural schoolhouses are described in this way because children intimately met their peers and their teachers in these small structures. Both nations used the social borderlands as places to create ideal citizens from diverse groups of children, diverse in gender, ethnicity, and background. Did schools help children find common national identities, or did difference predominate?

Borderlands are also areas that are less tangible. The place where ignorance meets knowledge is a borderland of change. The evolution from one state to another has

1 Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race. Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), xi. See also Beth LaDow, Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1. Elizabeth Jameson, "Dancing on the Rim, Tiptoeing through Minefields: Challenges and Promises of Borderlands", Pacific Historical Review 75:1 (Feb. 2006): 5. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), 19. 3 not been completed and so one stays within the transitional area or borderland until one is released or prepared to move forward. Children in the schoolhouse were in this zone, as were their teachers when they were trained in normal schools.

I had hoped to be able to use primary source documents like diaries and letters to give children voices in this study. I was unable to locate a sufficient number of these sources from both sides of the forty-ninth parallel. Consequently, I turned to memoirs, newspapers, and teachers' diaries which reflected the opinions of parents and children.

Class registers from rural schoolhouses were used to glean information about children that teachers considered important. Government documents, like the annual or biannual reports of the Departments of Education were used to define official policy. All of these sources provided windows into children's educational experiences during the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

This thesis is about children, education, and how children learned to associate themselves with place. There is no analysis of textbook content, though textbooks were important to education and linked government-mandated curriculum and the classroom.

However, in children's memoirs textbooks and elements of formal learning from textbooks were not the most important aspect of schooling remembered by those who attended rural school. The tension between government intention and lived experience was a common thread on both sides of the border.

Analyzing children's schoolroom experiences can allow the similarities and differences between Alberta and Montana to be exposed. Concentrating on the 4 experiences of settler children, those whose families removed from the eastern United

States and Canada, and those whose families emigrated from other nations and moved to

Montana and Alberta, means the focus is largely on white children. When possible, the experiences of children of other races have been inserted for comparative purposes. In some instances, gender also played a role in distinguishing the experiences of boys and girls.

No comparison of rural education in Alberta and Montana has yet been attempted.

This study is in no way definitive as there are comparative aspects of childhood like textbooks, race, class, mobility, and the pursuit of high education in the borderlands of province and state that require further study. Chapter One reviews the literature of borderland history, childhood history, and educational history in the context of Alberta and Montana, Canada, and the United States. It establishes a framework to explore how education and nationality operated for specific children in one period. It also locates the importance of studying children and childhood education within the myths that have come to define the Canadian and American nations concluding that only a borderland study can elucidate similarities and differences.

Chapter Two compares educational policy and rules and regulations as they were developed in Alberta and Montana. Governmental educational initiatives are compared first. Then the grassroots organization by parents and children is compared in the agricultural areas of southern Alberta and northern Montana. As formative as government policy was, it was often only words on paper. Government did not always 5 provide education to those children moving onto ranches and homesteads. Without knowing how the provincial and state governments focused policy on childhood education, it is impossible to see the growing importance placed on children and their roles in a developing society. It is also important to see that the local educational structures differed in light of the regulations.

Chapter Three focuses on the rural schoolhouse as a place where childhood was defined and shaped. The school became a "social borderland" where intimate interactions defined the remembered educational experiences. By a social borderland, I mean a place where children and teachers of different ages, genders, and ethnicities met and interacted. The schoolroom became a meeting-ground. The learning experience of each child was entwined with that of the other children, but at the same time separated.

The role of the teacher became elemental in the life of the child and in the function of the entire school. In northern Montana and southern Alberta discipline, morality training, the study of English, libraries, and community programmes were all part of the school experience. The state enforced measures to create citizens from the heterogeneous groups of children in each rural schoolhouse. General similarities outweigh the differences within the rural schoolrooms of Alberta and Montana, but some differences existed nonetheless.

Chapter Four moves the focus from the interior of the schoolhouse to the exterior, to the schoolyard and the natural environment. The schoolyard had two meanings, one

3 Jameson, "Dancing on the Rim," 5. 6 which was naturally occurring, the other part of government intervention. Children remembered more about their interaction with the natural environment than they did any other aspect of their rural education. Despite some differences in government regulations and initiatives, experiences within the schoolyard were similar on both sides of the forty- ninth parallel.

This thesis stops before the war years because 1914 to 1918 brought about even greater changes in rural education. Successful harvests during the war years, as well as emphasis on increasing agricultural acreages changed the schools and school systems.

Increasing Canadian patriotism during the war and the contentious issue of American neutrality during the earlier war years influenced schoolroom experiences. After World

War I, consolidation of rural schools became an important attribute of government intervention in rural schooling that led to many rural school closures.

I focus on southern Alberta from Fort Macleod to Cardston and Medicine Hat. In

Montana, I focus largely on the north central part of the state and part of northwestern

Montana, in the Kalispell-Whitefish areas. This study then does not centre solely on prairie and plains areas, but also on the mountainous regions of northwestern Montana and southwestern Alberta.

Historians have not studied how the border mattered in the citizenship lessons children learned in rural schools in the Alberta-Montana borderlands. Comparing the province and state provides the opportunity to see difference and sameness between the educational strategies of two nations' Wests in their formative stages. By instilling 7 appropriate meaning into behaviour, language, authority, and the environment education became less a matter of understanding the symbols of nation, and more about acting in accordance with the social values learned within the schoolhouse and the community.

The forty-ninth parallel as a marker of nationhood dimmed in light of children's shared experiences. In the shadow of the political line of demarcation, children's experiences revealed similarities and frayed the meaning of nationhood. 8

CHAPTER 1 - Locating the Borderland: Situating Children and Education in Montana and Alberta

Montana is the only American state with which Alberta shares a border. Since the formation of the Montana Alberta Bilateral Advisory Council in 1985, Alberta and

Montana have identified common interests in transportation, the environment, agricultural, and energy issues leading to a significant strengthening of the bond between province and state. In 1998, "Alberta and Montana signed an agreement to provide cross- border schooling of grade one through twelve for students living along the border."1 This accord made the area around the border a place of shared educational experience for the children of two nations. By making education a shared responsibility, the land surrounding the forty-ninth parallel becomes a place where "nations are in fact made and unmade."2 The historiographic context for a comparative history of education in the borderlands is established by comparing national myths, the historiography of Alberta and Montana, the history of childhood in the North American West, borderlands historiography, and how education has been interpreted in view of some of the more recent borderlands historiography.

The histories of both Canada and the United States have usually emphasized how each country claimed its respective West through legislation and land surveys. For the

United States, keeping the British above the forty-ninth parallel and completing the

' Government of Alberta, International, Intergovernmental and Aboriginal Relations, Montana-Alberta Relations. (August, 2007), www.international.alberta.ca/documents/Montana-2007.pdf (2009/03/21). zSheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), xi. See also Beth LaDow, Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1. 9 national vision of "Manifest Destiny" made the border important. Canadian historians saw the border more as a way of isolating themselves from their neighbour to the south, separating their nation from what was perceived as a more violent and disorderly

American West.3 Historians from both countries emphasized an east-to-west settlement pattern, implying that the border stopped north-south migrations. Canadian historians, however, have tended to include Canada's European roots as an important element of its east-west association.4 The power of the forty-ninth parallel to divide two nations and two different people was established.

The national stories, however, do not investigate how nations attempted to make

"a people" or citizens out of the individuals living within their defined boundaries.

Eminent historian Frederick Jackson Turner felt that the frontier created a "composite nationality for the American people" turning immigrants of non-English stock into a mixed race with English speech, a veritable melting pot of commonality.5 Canada has been referred to as a mosaic because immigrants were able to maintain their cultural traits

3 For a good discussion of this difference see Elizabeth Jameson and Jeremy Mouat, "Telling Differences: The Forty-Ninth Parallel and Historiographies of the West and Nation," Pacific Historical Review 75:2 (May 2006): 183-188. See also, George F.G. Stanley, "Western Canada and the Frontier Thesis", Canadian Historical Association, Report of the Annual Meeting, 1940: 105-114. American historians have long dwelt on the frontier thesis of Fredrick Jackson Turner. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in History, Frontier and Section: Three Essays by Frederick Jackson Turner (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 60-75. Turner originally publicized this thesis with an address at a meeting of the American Historical Association, in Chicago, July 12, 1893. Canadian historians have debated the "metropolitanism" of Harold Innis and J.M.S. Careless. Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade In Canada, (originally published in 1930) is termed the "definitive economic history" of Canada by historian Arthur J. Ray, introduction to The Fur Trade in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), v. J.M.S. Careless, "Frontierism, Metropolitanism and Canadian History, Canadian Historical Review 35 (March 1954): 1-21. For a discussion of Innis and Careless versus Fredrick Jackson Turner, see especially R. Douglas Francis, "Turner versus Innis: Two Mythic Wests," in One West. Two Myths II eds. C.L. Higham and Robert Thacker (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), 15-28. 5 Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", 75-76. 10

"within the context of Canadian citizenship." More recently, the similarity between the "melting pot" and "mosaic" images was pointed out. The terms were used to define ideals. Each nation desired to describe itself as inclusive.7

The intersections among politics, education, and territorial development have been clarified by historians of the West. Frederick Jackson Turner mentioned the building of schoolhouses as an important aspect of the western frontier. This was echoed in part by American Earl Pomeroy who contended that westward movement transferred eastern ideas and institutions to the West. American migrants in particular wanted what they had in the East in their new homes. Turner believed that frontier schools forged a new American identity, while Pomeroy believed that old eastern ideas and values were transported west. Canadian historian George F.G. Stanley would have agreed with Pomeroy for he wrote: "No individual is able to cut himself off from his past experience for it is part of himself; and so the pioneer, when transplanted from the Old

World to the New, or from east to west, invariably endeavors to reproduce that which he already knows, to build according to a familiar plan."10 Canadian historian of childhood,

Neil Sutherland also contended that as Canadians moved into the "empty West and into the growing cities and suburbs, they took their school with them....and increased their

6 Howard Palmer, '"Mosaic versus Melting Pot?': Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada and the United States," in A Passion for Identity: An Introduction to Canadian Studies, eds. Eli Mandel and David Taras, (Scarborough: Nelson Canada, 1988), 83. Tamara Palmer Seiler, "Melting Pot and Mosaic: Images and Realities," in Canada and the United States: Differences that Count, ed. David M. Thomas, Second Edition, (Peterborough and New York: Broadview Press, 2000), 114. 8 Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", 74. Earl Pomeroy, "Toward a Reorientation of Western History: Continuity and Environment," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41:4 (Mar. 1955): 579. Stanley, "Western Canada and the Frontier Thesis", 106. 11

commitment to the formal education of their youngsters."11 Education then became a

major component of civilization in newly settled areas.

Montana historians have not delved extensively into the history of children or

rural education. Montana: The Magazine of Western History has published some

articles, but they have usually dealt with educational officials.12 Historian Joseph Kinsey

Howard described Montana's homesteaders as "well educated and reasonably cultured"

and claimed that "hundreds had been teachers". His study, however, focused on

economic progress and then agricultural abandonment. Howard provided no descriptions

of homesteading families and their educational goals for their children. K. Ross Toole

similarly followed Montana's economic development and the state's environment, but

never touched upon the accommodation made by government or local pioneers in relation

to education.14 Published in 1976, the ground-breaking Montana: A History of Two

Centuries by Michael P. Malone and Richard B. Roeder credited the Montana state

government for providing schools for the large numbers of children coming to Montana

during the agricultural boom. Both the original version and the 1991 revised edition

11 Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus, (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978) 155. 12 S.W. Park, "The First School in Montana," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 5:1 (1966): 187- 189. Patricia Dean, "Children in Montana," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 34:1 (Winter 1984): 36-45. W.J. Beall, "Bozeman's First Schools," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 7:1 (1966): 304-311. Sarah R. Herndon, "The Pioneer Public School of Montana," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 5:1(1966): 198-199. Historical Landscapes. "Rural Schoolhouses in Montana," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 35:3 (Summer 1985): 79-81. Alice Cowan Coleman, "Miss Jacoby: 19th Century Educator, 20th Century Guardian of Excellence," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 28:2 (April 1978): 36-49. Mary Hyland Currier, "Montana School Teacher," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 25:1 (Jan 1975): 22-31. Dorothy M. Johnson,"School Days, School Days, Good Old Rubber Hose Days," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 26:1 (January 1976): 52-59. 13Joseph Kinsey Howard, Montana High, Wide, and Handsome (1943; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), 193. 14 K. Ross Toole, Montana: An Uncommon Land (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), especially chapter 11, "The Honyocker". 12 included a chapter on social and cultural development which contained an outline of the state government's attempts to provide appropriate educational opportunities to

Montana's children. Even the later edition did not delve into the interplay between government and local school activities.15

Alberta's educational history has been studied, but never from the view of children. Two collections of articles were produced in 1979 and 1986, which included articles on Alberta's educational history in the context of the history of education in the

Canadian West. Entire sections on teachers, curriculum, and textbooks expanded the study of education from an institutional view. The struggles of Native people and immigrants to attain education, while maintaining their self-identity were also examined.

Nick Kach and Kas Mazurek's Exploring Our Educational Past focused on Alberta's divergent educational history, studying such topics as conflict, opportunity, equality, and attempts to find an educational vision for Alberta educators. Howard and Tamara Palmer put Alberta's educational history into the context of the province's homesteading period concluding that "schools were usually a high priority for settlers who had come West hoping for a better life for their children." A glimpse into the schoolroom was included, which illuminated the problems of teachers and pupils. The immigrant experience was also elucidated with regard to learning the English language and the government's

Michael P. Malone and Richard B. Roeder, Montana A History of Two Centuries (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1976), especially chapter 10 and chapter 14 and Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang, Montana: A History of Two Centuries (1976; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), chapter 10 and 14. 13 expectation of Anglo-conformity. More recently, Amy von Heyking traced the treatment of the United States in English-Canadian school texts from 1900 to 1965 to reveal how Canadian identity was affected by the changing images of America taught to school children. None of theses works, however, made education initiatives during

Alberta's homesteading period a primary focus. No comparison with Montana's educational system was attempted, despite the geographic link and the parallel growth of their agricultural societies. Children's voices are rarely heard in these studies, nor is the changing definition of childhood taken into consideration. Thus no study has contrasted lived experience with governmental agendas, or the ways that rural education served the project of regional identity and national citizenship.

National histories or state and provincial histories do not address whether Alberta and Montana shared their frontier experience. This can only be seen in the context of borderland studies. Historians Walter Sage and Paul Sharp described the line of national demarcation as porous and showed parallels and intersections between the history of

Canada and the United States.18 Working from this idea, current borderlands historians

David C. Jones, Nancy M. Sheehan, and Robert M. Stamp, introduction to Shaping the Schools of the Canadian West (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Liminited, 1979), v. J. Donald Wilson, "Introduction: Schools in the West," in Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Educational History, eds. Nancy M. Sheehan, J. Donald Wilson, and David C. Jones (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Limited, 1986), 2. Kas Mazurek and Nick Kach, "Introduction: Is There a History of Education in Alberta?," in Exploring Our Educational Past (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Limited, 1992), 9. Howard Palmer and Tamara Palmer, Alberta: A New History (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1990), 112-113. Amy von Heyking, "Talking About Americans: The Image of the United States in English-Canadian Schools, 1900-1965," History of Education Quarterly 46:3 (Fall 2006): 383. 18 Walter N. Sage, "Some Aspects of the Frontier in Canadian History," Canadian Historical Association, Report of the Annual Meeting 7:1(1928): 62. Walter N. Sage, "Geographical and Cultural Aspects of the Five Canadas," Canadian Historical Association, Report of the Annual Meeting 16:1 (1937): 28. Paul Sharp, "When Our West Moved North," American Historical Review 55 (1950): 286-287. Paul Sharp, Whoop-Up Country: The Canadian-American West, 1865-1885 (1955; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 3. 14 point to the search for economic opportunity, easy access to land, and seeking safety from the law as some of the primary reasons for north-south migrations across the forty- ninth parallel. Beth LaDow showed that in the Saskatchewan-Montana border area, geography was a more important element in shaping community than was nationality.

The shared environment and close communication between people of either side of the border muddied identity.19 Michel Hogue's study of the cross-border movement of the

Cree showed the negotiation of borderland space by the Native peoples as elemental to their survival. Sarah Carter offered a comparison of race and gender on either side of the border to conclude that the location of similarities and differences stratified the national stories, but was essential to understanding Canadian and American use of the same continent. Some of these movements undermined the federal governments' nationalistic intentions in defining the border, while others worked in conjunction with government policy. Studying the border between the American Northwest and the

Canadian Southwest, Ken Coates and John Findlay concluded that both national regions

19 See LaDow, Medicine Line, 120. See also the articles in Part One, The Permeable Border, in Parallel Destinies: Canadian-American Relations West of the Rockies, eds. John M. Findlay and Ken S. Coates (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2002), 31-151, which focused on the permeability of the Canada-US border between British Columbia, Canada and the American Pacific Northwest. More recently, see The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forty-ninth Parallel, ed. Sterling Evans (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), especially Part III and Part V. 20 Michel Hogue, "Disputing the Medicine Line: The Plains Cree and the Canadian-American Border, 1876-85," in One West, Two Myths: A Comparative Reader, eds. Carol Higham and Robert Thacker (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004), 101-102. 1 Sarah Carter, "Transnational Perspectives on the History of Great Plains Women: Gender, Race, Nations, and the Forty-ninth Parallel," in One West. Two Myths II: Essays on Comparison, eds. Carol Higham and Robert Thacker (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), 109. 15 shared a past and did not develop in isolation from each other despite the existence of a

77 borderline.

Two recent borderland history volumes have expanded on the view of a shared past. Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus invite women's historians to think beyond the forty-ninth parallel when exploring women's experiences in Canada and the United

States. Just as women's history added new perspectives to the national stories, exploring the similarities and the differences of women's experiences in either nation can challenge the meaning of nationalism and the importance of the border. The collection edited by

Sterling Evans The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests offers a variety of perspectives on the importance or unimportance of the forty-ninth parallel in addressing

"the environment, aboriginal history, frontier interactions and comparisons, gender history, agricultural and labour relations, various aspects of the borderlands as a region of 74 refuge, and its history of natural resource use and conservation."

While all of these works and volumes offer a wide variety of research and conclusions about the importance or unimportance of the borderland region of western

North America, none contained an article invoking childhood history, education in the border area, or on educating children for citizenship. Elliott West briefly mentioned the role families played in settling the Canadian and American Wests and the importance of 22 John M. Findlay and Ken S. Coates, Parallel Destinies, xvii. 23 Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus, eds., Introduction to One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2006), xxv. See also Sheila McManus, "Unsettled Pasts, Unsettling Borders: Women, Wests, Nations," in One Step Over the Line, eds. Jameson and McManus, 43. /4Sterling Evans, Preface to Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests, xvii. See also the collection of essays in One West. Two Myths: A Comparative Reader, eds. Carol Higham and Robert Thacker (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004). 16 formal education in promoting a literate populace. He further contended that

"patriotism, identity with the state" was the overarching element of cultural transference. Without a comparative study of children and education in the borderlands, however, these contentions are unsubstantiated.

The history of childhood was largely ignored until the 1960s. Children were not considered actors in the building of nations and so their presence was not seen as important to historical development. This changed with the publication of Centuries of

Childhood: A Social History of Family Life in which French historian Philippe Aries showed how children's places within the contexts of the family and society changed over time and how childhood gradually came to be recognized or treated as a separate stage in human development. By the seventeenth century, wealthy and middle-class French citizens surrounded their children with a growing feeling of sentiment. Class and gender played a part in how children were viewed. Aries pointed to an increased interest in schooling for the elite as one of the reasons that childhood became recognized as a separate stage of life.2

Elliott West, "Against the Grain: State-Making, Cultures, and Geography in the American West," in One West. Two Myths, eds. Higham and Thacker, 16.

26 Philippe Aries, Century of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 413. To see the uses made of Aries' concepts in early America see John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York : Oxford University Press, 1970), 182-188. For a discussion of children and family in the American colony of Plymouth in which the author discusses the roles of families and the community in educating the young, see particularly Chapter 6, and the third part entitled "Themes of Individual Development." Philip J. Greven Jr., in his work on child- rearing concepts indicated that before the mid-nineteenth century, education was thought of in terms of religious and moral training or character formation rather than as a form of scholarly training, or as a means of suppressing autonomy of children. See Philip J. Greven Jr., Child-Rearing Concepts: Historical Sources, 1628-1861 (Ithasca, 111: F.E. Peacock, 1973), 1. 17

Early works on childhood showed that the role of children in the family and society changed over time. Childhood and adolescence are social constructions. The categories of class, race, and gender changed the experiences of children, but so did the historical time period, as well as place. By the middle of the eighteenth century, wealthy parents perceived their children as "innocent, malleable, and fragile creatures who needed to be sheltered from contamination." By the middle of the nineteenth century these ideas had become accepted by the middle class as normal, with children spending more time within the family home and undergoing longer periods of formal schooling. Childhood became less defined by children's biological difference from adults, but more as a time of mental development when children were learning to think like adults.27

Children's roles and experiences in cities and towns were different from those of children in rural homesteading areas, where their labour was an essential contribution to the family economy, or in mining and lumber camps. Religious background, race, parental and cultural expectation, population density, and parental success or failure played influential roles in the experiences of children. The ability to attend school, the importance placed on education within the family, the structure and organization of an

Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). See especially the Prologue, 1-5. See also, Elliott West, Growing Up With the Country (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1989), 161. Elliott West made a strong case that class was the determining factor in how children were raised and educated in the mining West. Although formal schooling was largely non-existent, parents and especially mothers of both the wealthy and working-class used cherished books and cheap periodicals to provide instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Elliott West, "Beyond Baby Doe: Child Rearing on the Mining Frontier", in The Women's West, eds. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 188-89. Elliott West further elucidated the experiences of children in mining town schoolhouses in Elliott West, "Heathens and Angels: Childhood in the Rocky Mountain Mining Towns", Western Historical Quarterly 14:2 (Apr. 1983): 153. 18 educational institution, the proficiency of the teacher, and the content of the material given to children during their attendance in schools made a difference in what children were able to garner from their educations.

Describing his educational experiences while living in southwestern

Saskatchewan in the early 1900s, author Wallace Stegner wrote:

I have felt myself entitled to ask whether my needs and my education were not ludicrously out of phase. Not because I was educated for the past instead of the future—most education trains us for the past, as most preparation for war readies us for the war just over—but because I was educated for the wrong place. Education tried, inadequately and hopelessly, to make a European of me.

Stegner, his mother, and his brother had immigrated to Canada from the United States in

1914, joining his father in Eastend, Saskatchewan. The family later returned to the

United States, first to Great Falls, Montana, and then to Utah. Looking back on the education he received while living in Canada, Stegner felt that he had not received an adequate education, particularly in history, to relate himself to his home in Canada.

Stegner felt the British focus of his Canadian education had ill prepared him to be a

Canadian, or even North American.

Although Stegner's experiences took place in Saskatchewan, the educational differences that he reflected upon are indicative of what borderland historian Sheila

McManus termed "a key nation-making strategy for nineteenth century nation-states, an assimilationist scheme that could be applied to aboriginal children as easily as to

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow (1955; reprint, New Caledonia: Penguin Books, 2000), 24. 19 immigrant children."30 McManus demonstrated that in the nineteenth century the

Montana-Alberta borderland was not exceptionally racially diversified, but was enormously ethnically diverse. Government policy defined difference and population censuses recorded these categories. Native children living on either side of the border were educated in reserve or reservation day schools or boarding schools.31 Although children of mixed Native and white heritage attended school with white children in northern Montana, some white settlers negatively commented upon difference in their memoirs. White children maintained friendly, but distant relationships with these racially mixed children while sharing the classroom space of the rural school. McManus claimed that the rural school became a point of contact where national differences were taught, racial and gender differences were noted and learned, and where children were educated to relate to the place where they were growing up. Isolating the Native population from the influx of white settlers had far more impact at a local and personal level than it did in influencing national identities.33

McManus' conclusion was based on only one Montana woman's memories and through analysis of government policy and government-defined curriculum. Children could clearly distinguish difference among their peers, but it does not mean that they were unable to overcome difference. Claire Berard, who attended school in eastern

30 McManus, The Line Which Separates, 103. 31 In Canada, the agreed upon term when referring to Native peoples is Aboriginal or First Nations, while in the United States Native peoples are generally referred to as American Indians. To avoid having to use all of these terms each time I refer to Native peoples on either side of the international border, I will use the term "Native" when referring to Canadian Aboriginals or American Indians. 32 McManus, The Line Which Separates, 159-160. 33 Ibid., 178. 20

Montana after 1905, recalled that she and a part-Indian classmate cooperated to fetch water for the school each morning. They rode the teacher's horse to the spring and then worked together to kill a rattlesnake coiled on a fence post above the spring.34 Lucy

Armstrong, who attended Montana's Culbertson School after 1898, recalled that there were more Native pupils than white. Having been surrounded by Natives and mixed- bloods all of her life, Lucy was not bothered at all, "since she could talk better 'Indian' than English" when she started school. Difference may have had a personal impact, but not always a negative connotation.

In relation to childhood, however, historians are agreed that education was increasingly used to define a period of life separate from infancy and adulthood. The increasing number of years that children were expected to undertake formal schooling and the increasing belief that the educational institution was to be used to instil common beliefs and modes of behaviour appropriate to the country's dominant culture came to distinguish childhood from adulthood.36 Increasing industrialization and the need to protect children from the negative effects of social upheaval and societal transformations

Gladys Mullet Kauffman, As I Remember... Stories of Eastern Montana's Pioneers, Vol. II (Helena, Montana: Sweetgrass Books, 2006), 56. 35 Gladys Mullet Kauffman, As I Remember... Stories of Eastern Montana's Pioneers, Vol. I (Helena, Montana: Sweetgrass Books, 2006), 5. 36 White supremacy and the desire of the dominant culture to enforce school segregation was described by Timothy J. Stanley in his article on public school segregation in Victoria in 1922-23 where attempts to remove the Chinese children from the general public school population resulted in strikes and prolonged community building for British Columbia's Chinese inhabitants. Timothy J. Stanley, "White Supremacy, Chinese Schooling, and School Segregation in Victoria: The Case of the Chinese Students' Strike, 1922- 1923", in Histories of Canadian Children and Youth, eds. Nancy Janovicek and Joy Parr (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2003), 126-143. For added discussion of the role of education in developing the nation in relation to Japan in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, see Brian Piatt, "Japanese Childhood, Modern Childhood: The Nation-State, the School, and 19,h-Century Globalization." Journal of Social History 38:4 (Summer 2005): 965-985. 21 drove parents and governments to consider the schoolroom as a haven, a way of protecting children from overcrowded streets and dangerous occupations.

Among historians of childhood in the western regions of Canada and the United

States, there is some disagreement as to how important formal and informal schooling was to parents, children, and government educators. American historian Elliott West, in his work on childhood in the American West in the 1870s and 1880s, said that western education was regarded as important for instilling moral values and developing orderly societies, not just for individual fulfillment. Despite the undeveloped nature of the country into which settlers located, and the work associated with this overwhelming task,

"parents taught their sons and daughters fundamentals of reading, mathematics, and other subjects." Canadian scholar Ian E. Davey agrees with West's assertion adding that this formal study was combined with the work expected of children.39 Linda Peavy and

Ursula Smith argued that eastern and mid-western emigrants to the American West viewed education as a necessary part of their children's development.40 Lessons were taught during day-to-day activities in order to support and pass on the morals and values

Nancy Janovicek wrote that agricultural families in Ontario viewed education as a way of providing alternate occupations for the children since farms were not large enough to provide each child with their own farmland and over-dividing the land could endanger the livelihood of the family: "Education allowed families another means of securing the social status of the family." Nancy Janovicek, "Introduction to Part 4: Schools for the Nation, 1850-1923" in Histories of Canadian Children and Youth, eds. Janovicek and Parr, 107. The use made of children's labour can be see in Bettina Bradbury, "Social, Economic, and Cultural Origins of Contemporary Families", in Families: Changing Trends in Canada, Fourth Edition, ed. Maureen Baker (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2001), 86-87. For a view of the need for children's labour to support agricultural and mill families in the American South see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, et. al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 52-57. 38 West, Growing Up With the Country, 179. 39 The link between schooling and work in Upper Canada is made by Ian E. Davey, "The Rhythm of Work and the Rhythm of School", in Histories of Canadian Children and Youth, eds. Janovicek and Parr, 108- 121. 40 Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, Frontier Children (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 115. 22 that parents themselves carried from their own childhoods. Whether this is true in the

Canadian West still remains to be studied.

Native peoples and immigrant families reacted to formal education differently.

Racial and cultural distinctiveness altered the perception of government education. In both Canada and the United States, Native peoples perceived federal and missionary schooling as detrimental to Native identity. These schools were designed to civilize

Native children and to accelerate Native assimilation into white society.41 Recent scholarship on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel has shown that "Indians often molded the boarding school experience to meet the unique needs of their own culture."42

American scholar Michael C. Coleman concluded that children educated in boarding schools could emerge as cultural brokers for their elders and tribes when they returned home.43 Canadian E. Brian Titley concurred with this belief concluding that the new

Native identity forged by Industrial Schools created kinship and leadership training for

Native people later fighting for Native rights.44

Similarly, some immigrant families viewed formal educational institutions as a threat to their culture. English language training clearly marked government education as

See E. Brian Titley, "Red Deer Indian Industrial School: A Case Study in the History of Native Education" in Exploring Our Educational Past: Schooling in the North-West Territories and Alberta, eds. Nick Kach and Kas Mazurek (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Limited, 1992), 55-72. Margaret Connell Szasz, "American Indians and Outsiders: A Crucial Dialogue of the Columbian Quincentenary," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 42:4 (Autumn 1992): 58. 4/ Szasz; 58. 43 Michael C. Coleman, "Motivations of Indian Children at Missionary and U.S. Government Schools," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 40:1 (Winter 1990): 45. E. Brian Titley, "Indian Industrial Schools in Western Canada", in Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Educational History, eds. Nancy M. Sheehan, J. Donald Wilson, David C. Jones (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Ltd., 1986), 150. 23 assimilationist. In Canada, debate has continued on whether education was used for assimilationist purposes or can simply be termed a form of multicultural policy.4 Not all immigrants were against educating their children to North American ways, though. In the case of some immigrants, "assimilation was also part of parental desires for a better life for their children." 7 Selma Berrol's work on American urban immigrant children concluded that some immigrant children "welcomed Americanization, even against their parents' wishes; yet many more did not." The multiplicities of children's experiences are the lessons to be drawn from these arguments and are important contentious issues to keep in mind in any cross-border comparison.

Although historians continue to debate assimilationist policy, in his memoir of homesteading in western Kansas, Sod and Stubble, John Ise showed that his father Henry,

45 For the perspective of immigrants on their Canadian education on the Prairies, see Stella M. Hryniuk and Neil G. McDonald, "The Schooling Experience of Ukrainians in Manitoba, 1896-1916" in Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Educational History, eds. Sheehan, et. al., 155-173 and Clinton O. White, "Education Among German Catholic Settlers in Saskatchewan, 1903-1918: A Reinterpretation" in Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Educational History, eds. Nancy M. Sheehan, et. al., 175-192. See also Manoly R. Lupul, "The Schools and French-and Ukrainian-Language Claims in Alberta to 1918", in Exploring Our Educational Past, eds Kach and Mazurek, 73-91 and Cornelius J. Jaenen, "Ruthenian Schools in Western Canada, 1897-1919", in Shaping the Schools of the Canadian West, eds. David C. Jones, Nancy M. Sheehan, and Robert M. Stamp (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Limited, 1979), 39-58. 46 Paul Axelrod, "Historical Writing and Canadian Education from the 1970s to the 1900s," History of Education Quarterly 36:1 (Spring 1996): 30. This debate revolved around David C. Jones who offered a sympathetic treatment of assimilationism and assimilationist reformers at the turn of the century in his article: David C. Jones, "So Petty, so 'Middle Europe,' So Foreign - Ruthenians and Canadianization," History of Education Review 16 (1987): 13-30 and Bill Maciejko who accused Jones of creating and enforcing myths about western Ruthenian settlers. Bill Maciejko, "Ethnicity, Myth, and History in Western Canada: The Case of David C. Jones and the 'Ruthenians'," History of Education Review 18 (1989): 57- 65. Additional arguments and responses in History of Education Review 19 (1990): 54-6, 56-9. 47 John W. Bennett and Seena B. Kohl, Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890-1915 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 103. Serbian immigrants in Montana's mining communities saw education as necessary to their children's ability to fit into their new home and to attain American citizenship. See Anna Zellick, '"We all intermingled': The Childhood Memories of South Slavic Immigrants in Red Lodge and Bearcreek, Montana, 1904-1943", Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 44:3 (Summer 1994), 40. 4sSelma Berrol, "Immigrant Children at School, 1880-1940: A Child's Eye View", in Small Worlds: Children & Adolescents in America, 1850-1950, eds. Elliott West and Paula Petrik (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 42-60. See especially 59-60. Berrol concluded that we should accept the multiplicity of children's experiences despite the commonality of the public school. 24 a German immigrant, had learned through his own life experiences that "it was easier to live in a new country if one readily embraced its ways instead of clinging to old ones."49 To Henry Ise, learning English or how American institutions functioned was a requirement for survival and success in the new country in which he had come to live. At the same time, Norwegian immigrant to Alberta Ellenor Ranghild Merriken remembered that her mother always addressed her children in Norwegian, so as not to let her children forget their mother tongue.50 Desire for inclusion in a new country clashed with or ran parallel with the need to identify with the culture of origin. Merriken, her siblings, and father learned English and assimilated, while Merricken's mother remained isolated on the homestead and became responsible for maintaining the older culture. The role that

Merricken's mother played can also be seen as one of cultural preservation while transmitting the family's cultural roots to the children, a common role for immigrant women in both countries.

In her work on North Dakota children in the 1890s and early 1900s, Elizabeth

Hampsten showed a far darker view of the children in that state. She contended that

"settlement children" viewed school simply as an escape from backbreaking work, a way of gaining the company of other children, or of receiving attention from teachers,

John Ise, Sod and Stubble, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 361. Slavic immigrant Mike Dimich, who received a fifth grade education in Yugoslavia before immigrating to Montana, went to night school upon settling in Red Lodge to learn English. His son Danny recalled that knowing English led to his father's successfully completing his American citizenship requirements and made him a leader in the Serbian community. Zellick, '"We all intermingled', 36. 50 Ellenor Ranghild Merriken, Looking for Country: A Norwegian Immigrant's Alberta Memoir (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999), 73. 25 sympathetic attention they often did not receive at home.51 Hampsten's study showed that despite state government aspirations for educating the young to become good citizens, children had their own ideas about what school was for and why it was a desirable part of their lives.52

Receiving an education was also a way for an older child to escape from farm work altogether. Angelo Tomalino, who grew up in Montana in the early twentieth century confessed "that he looked upon school as more or less of a picnic, a vacation from hoeing corn or potatoes or similar work." Children who completed their rural country school program could apply for temporary teaching permits and begin teaching in rural schools themselves.54 Hampsten and Canadian historian Neil Sutherland also showed that prairie children viewed school as an escape from back-breaking work or a

51 Elizabeth Hampsten, Settler's Children (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 35. This type of attention can be viewed as a continuation of the "benign neglect" that Lillian Schlissel viewed as an essential part of childhood on the Overland Trail in the 1840s and 1850s. Lillian Schlissel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (1982; reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 49. However, Schlissel also provides evidence that mothers on the frontier sacrificed their time and energy to provide an education for their daughters. See Lillian Schlissel, "Mothers and Daughters on the Western Frontier", Frontiers, 4:2 No. 2, 1978: 32. Sophie Trupin, a Jewish immigrant to North Dakota described the schoolhouse as "peaceful, orderly, congenial" because of the unhappiness that she and her siblings endured while their parents openly disagreed about living on the homestead. Sophie Trupin, Dakota Diaspora: Memoirs of a Jewish Homesteader (Berkeley, California: Alternative Press, 1984), 52. As a child of Scandinavian immigrants to North Dakota, Aagot Raaen related that she and her siblings pursued a higher education in order that they could be qualified for higher paying jobs. While taking turns going to school, working out, or staying on the homestead to help their mother, Aagot, Kjersti, and Tosten Raaen assisted their mother by ensuring that the interest was paid on a loan their father had taken on the homestead, so their mother and sickly younger sister would continue to have a place to live. At the same time, they were working to make their "own dreams come true." Aagot Raaen, Grass of the Earth: Immigrant Life in the Dakota Country (Northfield, Minnesota: Norwegian-American Historical Association , 1950), especially 136-137. 53 Kauffman, As I Remember, Vol. II, 27. 54 Hampsten, Settler's Children, 35. See also Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2005), especially Chapter 4. Author Agnes Smedley described her own experiences as a schoolteacher in New Mexico, despite leaving her Colorado mining camp grammar school before finishing the eighth grade in her semi-autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth, (Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1973), 117-127. 26 way of leaving the farm indefinitely. Their conclusions, however, contradict that of

Elliott West who had shown in the earlier time period that children learned from their work and their parents' training, although the difference can be explained since West's work had been restricted racially and ethnically. Aside from Sutherland, Canadian historians of education have not done research on children's reasons for pursuing education, preferring instead to focus on government efforts to educate the young.

Additionally, an area of childhood and education that has not received as much attention is that of children exerting their own efforts at formal learning. The concept of being "self-taught" is one that is particularly relevant to childhood education in the

West.57 Not all parents believed in the importance of formal education since day-to-day work on the frontier was essential to survival and required the efforts of the entire family to accomplish. Nancy Smith Hollenbeck, who grew up in North Dakota in the early twentieth century attended school for several three month terms, but was never placed in

Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society, 206-07. Although Sutherland agrees with Hampsten's assessment on the public school as an escape for farm children, he also points out: "That investigations of prairie schooling showed that perhaps thousands of immigrant children 'at a time when their bright, young minds might be moulded' were 'drudges for helpless or short-sighted parents, or for greedy employers.'" See also Sandra L. Rollings-Magnusson who wrote that like women's labour, children's labour on the family farm on the Canadian Prairies has never been recognized as essential to the survival of homesteaders. Sandra L. Rollings-Magnusson, "Heavy Burdens on Small Shoulders: The Invisible Labour of Children in Anglo Pioneer Farming Families on the Western Canadian Prairies, 1871- 1913" (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2003), 8-10 or Sandra L. Rollings-Magnusson, Heavy Burdens on Small Shoulders: The Labour of Pioneer Children on the Canadian Prairies (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2009), x. See also Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women. Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940 (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 20-21. 56 West, Growing Up With the Country, xix. West restricted his study to white, native-born Americans moving west, omitting the experiences of Natives, Hispanics, and for the most part European and Asia immigrants. 57 The concept of being "self-taught" was used by Heather Andrea Williams to describe the African American response to education and learning during slavery and after being declared free. Williams rejected the idea of Afro-American passivity in relation to education. She showed their efforts to learn and create educational opportunities for themselves despite state and local government regulations that forbade their becoming formally educated. Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 1. 27 a grade, moving along at her own pace with the assistance of her teachers. She remembered learning her multiplication table on her fingers while riding a sulky plow.58

For Anne Ellis, who grew up in mining camps in Colorado, books were her greatest teacher. In her memoir she wrote: "The greatest influence in my life has been books, good books, bad books, and indifferent ones." As a young girl, Ellis borrowed books from miners, using them to occupy her mind and remembering them as her friends.59

In an agricultural settlement, being self-taught sometimes meant learning about life as one experienced it. This point was poignantly expressed by Margaret Bell in her childhood autobiography when she spoke of being responsible for her sisters when her step-father left them alone for extended periods of time: "I might not have gone to school, but I had to solve more problems than most children. There was nobody to go to for help when Hedge left us alone, and I had to try everything until I found a way that would work." ° Margaret Bell and frontier children like her found themselves struggling to learn outside of the schoolroom because their own survival depended upon doing so.

For them, the entire world was a school. The efforts of Western Canadian children to attend school was casually dismissed by Canadian Sandra Rollings-Magnusson who claimed that few children attended school in the early years due to lack of schools, the weather, or distance from schools. Rollings-Magnusson view is contradicted by this

58 Gladys Mullet Kauffman, As I Remember. Vol. I, 139. 59 Anne Ellis, The Life of an Ordinary Woman (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 122. Originally published: (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1929). 60 Margaret Bell, When Montana and I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 114. 1 Rollings-Magnusson, Heavy Burdens on Small Shoulders, note 4, 147. 28 thesis. Historians in Montana have not tackled the question of children's educational initiatives.

Increasingly, research has illustrated the school as a Canadian or American institution providing a social function.62 Younger children who were unable to participate fully in farm work and who could be constantly underfoot, particularly during the busy summer season, were sometimes sent to school for their own protection. Getting settled on a new frontier required an extreme amount of work, and families could not afford the manpower to provide babysitting. School became a safe haven in which to place these younger offspring, creating a "custodial function of schooling". Montana attendance statistics show that between 1868 and 1883 the school age was between four and twenty-one.64 This age range was changed to eight and fourteen in 1883.65 Emma

Slack attended public school in Missoula, Montana, in the early 1870s at the age of four, despite teachers' and parents' objections that children of such a tender age held back learning of the entire school because of their lack of attentiveness.66 The official School

Ordinance of Canada's North-West Territories passed by the Territorial Government in

62 J. Donald Wilson, Robert M. Stamp, and Louis-Philippe Audet, eds., Canadian Education: A History (Scarborough, Ont: Prentice-Hall of Canada, Ltd., 1970), vii-viii. See also Paul Axelrod, "Historical Writing and Canadian Education from the 1970s to the 1900s," History of Education Quarterly 36:1 (Spring 1996): 19-38. Prior to 1970, studies of education were generally a discussion of structure and regulations promoted by government. See Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization" for such a structure of Montana educational history. 63 Geraldine Joncich Clifford, "Home and School in 19th Century America: Some Personal-Hi story Reports from the United States," History of Education Quarterly 18:1 (Spring 1978): 17. 64 E. A. Carleton, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Fifth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Montana, 1898 (Helena, Montana: Independent Publishing Company, State Printers and Binders, 1899), 5. 65 Emmet J. Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization 1864-1930" (PhD Diss., The Catholic University of America, 1931), 54. 66 Clifford, "Home and School in 19th Century America", 18. 29

1901, defined "school aged" as "children between the ages of five and sixteen." It further defined children between the ages of four and six as eligible for kindergarten classes, although the Alberta government kept no statistics on kindergarten classes between 1905 and 1913.67

Government regulations were also a reason to list students too young to attend school in the district census, just to qualify for a school. In eastern Montana, Meta

Hafele recalled that her younger sister, Gertrude, and another child from the district were enrolled in school despite being under age. While these youngsters attended, their teacher allowed them to take naps "because they were so little and got so tired."

Having such small ones out of the house and no longer underfoot would have also assisted parents harried with the work of homesteading.

The belief that parents always wanted their children educated has also been contentious. About formal schooling and the efforts of Euro-American parents to establish and support schools within the vicinity of their homes Elliott West contended that: "No part of frontier life illustrated better the frustrations of adults who hoped to transplant their mother culture; none showed more clearly their perseverance and their children's receptiveness to their efforts."69 The attempts parents' made to provide schooling for their children were generally well received by their children, and the

67 Territorial Government, "Office Consolidation of The School Ordinance, The School Assessment Ordinance and The School Grants Ordinance" (Regina: John A. Reid, Government Printer, 1905), 9 and 39. 68 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. I, 76. 69 West, Growing Up With the Country, 180. It should be noted that Elliott West's study was written only about white American-born emigrants into the American West. Consequently, assimilation was not an issue in his study since it would not have been a concern of the parents and children he researched. See West, Growing Up With the Country, xix. 30 institution of the school became an important element of life. Elizabeth Hampsten, however, viewed the parent-child relationship as harsh and control-oriented, with the desires of the child rarely taken into account. Consequently, she concluded that in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in North Dakota, education was simply not

70 valued by parents and was regarded as a mere distraction from work.

The societal benefits of schoolhouse training and the professionalization of education have also been areas of study. In Canada and the United States, the growth of teachers' associations, the increased demand for an educated workforce, and the intrusion of government in families with the introduction of laws for mandatory attendance have 71 been investigated. On either side of the forty-ninth parallel, urban-centered social reformers worried about the effects of urbanization, industrialization, and high mortality rates of children; educators and school officials based policy and curriculum on what they felt were important means of transforming the shortcomings of society. Children were to be taught how to deal with new social realities wrought by change.

Due to these new ideas, Canadian historians of education have attempted to redefine the development of schools by looking at the "causes" for their development.

Hampsten, Settlers' Children. 40. 71 Geraldine Joncich Clifford, "Saints, Sinners, and People: A Position Paper on the Historiography of American Education," History of Education Quarterly 15:3 (Autumn 1975): 257-272. Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society. 21. Chad Gaffield, "Children's Lives and Academic Achievement in Canada and the United States," Comparative Education Review 38:1 (Feb. 1994): 44-53. 72 Richard Allen, the noted historian of the social gospel movement, identified the emergence of the Social Gospel as an essential element of change for all reform movements of the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries. Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914-28 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 4. Geraldine Joncich Clifford, "Education: Its History and Historiography," Review of Research in Education Vol. 4 (1976): 214. For Montana see Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang, Montana: A History of Two Centuries (1976; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 360. 31

Children who had previously been in the schools strictly as a backdrop to the government and the educators' desires to instil national beliefs, were later shown as recipients of social training.73 Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century reform movements transformed educational institutions in Canada through the inclusion of health restrictions, new ideas on temperance, and the addition of courses that prepared children for their practical work lives once their school days were over. Citizenship training using social ideals and regional concerns became paramount in Canada, but were also being addressed by America reformers. Canadian Neil Sutherland clearly showed that reform ideas crossed the political border, and his work is unparalleled in American scholarship.7 While the social benefits of education have been studied, the schoolhouse as a social borderland or meeting-ground is a new concept that requires further study.

Comparing education in southern Alberta and northern Montana can show the difference and similarity between government initiatives to educate citizens and the lived experience of parents and children in the rural borderland.

Alison Prentice, The School Promoters: Education and Social Class in Mid-Nineteenth Century Upper Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Steward, 1977), 182-183. Nancy M. Sheehan, "Indoctrination: Moral Education in the Early Prairie School House", in Shaping the Schools of the Canadian West, eds. Jones, Sheehan, and Stamp, 222. For a more recent study, see Amy von Heyking, Creating Citizens: History and Identity in Alberta's Schools, 1905-1980 in which she examines "how Albertans have interpreted themselves and their world through history and social studies curricula and texts from 1905 to 1980." Amy von Heyking, Creating Citizens: History and Identity in Alberta's Schools, 1905-1980 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), 5. 74 Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society, 26 and especially Chapter 13. Although a Canadian study focusing primarily in urban Ontario schools, Sutherland does illustrate how the ideas used for reform in Ontario schools were based on the combined ideas of American and Canadian reformers since several American health and welfare societies met in Toronto between 1886 and 1900. See also Thomas D. Isern and R. Bruce Shepard, "Duty-Free: An Introduction to the Practice of Regional History along the Forty- ninth Parallel" in The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forth-ninth Parallel, ed. Sterling Evans (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), xxix, where the authors write: ".. .the border never constituted a blockade to scholars, any more than it did to bootleggers. The border stopped nothing intellectual." 32

The development of New Education was one such movement, particularly in

Alberta. The combined influence of the Country Life Movement and the new social realities based on increasing agricultural development in the West provided the impetus for governments to insist that specialized subjects be added to the school curriculum.

Nature Study and school gardening were two curriculum subjects meant to tie rural students to their environments, but also to keep children interested in agricultural pursuits. Montana's historians have not delved into the evolution of the New

Education. Historians on both sides of the border agree, however, that many uses were made of educational institutions. The multiplicity of experiences evident when education and schools are viewed through the lenses of race, class, and place altered the school as an educational institution to a multi-layered training ground for citizenship.

Educational studies focusing on the West have also revealed a scarcity of qualified teachers and governmental attempts to lure or educate teachers to fill the demand.77 Despite government efforts, however, in 1910, one Alberta official defined

Jeffery Taylor, Fashioning Farmers: Ideology, Agricultural Knowledge and the Manitoba Farm Movement, 1890-1925 (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1994), 1. See also Nick Kach, "The Emergence of Progressive Education in Alberta," in Exploring Our Educational Past, eds. Kach and Mazurek, 149-154. Also, Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 101. David C. Jones, '"There is Some Power About the Land': The Western Agrarian Press and Country Life Ideology," in The Prairie West: Historical Readings, eds. R. Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer, (Edmonton: Pica Pica Press, 1995), 455- 474. Ann M. Keppel, "The Myth of Agrarianism in Rural Educational Reform, 1890-1914," History of Education Quarterly 2:2 (June 1962): 101. John Herd Thompson, The Harvests of War: The Prairie West, 1914-1918 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), 16. Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 290. Marilyn Barber, "Canadianization Through the Schools of the Prairie Provinces Before World War I: The Attitudes and Aims of the English-Speaking Majority," in Ethic Canadians: Culture and Education, ed. Martin L. Kovacs (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1978), 282. Manfred Prokop, "Canadianization oflmmigrant Children: Role of the Rural Elementary School in Alberta, 1900-1930," in Alberta History 37:2 (Spring 1989): 2. Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft, 205. Patrick J. Harrigan, "The Development of a Corps of Public School Teachers in Canada, 1870-1980," History of Education Quarterly 32:4 (Winter 1992): 500-502. Robert S. Patterson, "History of Teacher 33 the rural school problem as: "The difficulty of securing a teacher, and when secured, the difficulty of keeping him.. .the frequent necessity of engaging permit teachers whose qualifications are almost poor."78 Montana's 1906 Superintendent of Public Instruction echoed the sentiments of the Alberta official: "Terms are short, the teachers often inexperienced, and the district poor."79 Teacher preparation, lack of adherence to qualification standards, salaries, and teacher organization are issues that surrounded the severe teacher shortage in the Canadian and American West, and especially Alberta and

Montana.80

The mandate of the Montana Alberta Bilateral Advisory Council makes it clear that Alberta and Montana share much more than just a border. By studying Alberta's and

Montana's educational systems in isolation, similarities and differences between the

Alberta and Montana experience have not been addressed. Making further inquiry into

Education in Alberta," in Shaping the Schools of the Canadian West, eds. Jones, et. al., 192. Although set in British Columbia, David C. Jones echoes the problems on the prairies and shows teacher training and availability was a regional problem. David C. Jones, "Creating Rural-Minded Teachers: The British Columbia Experience, 1914-1924," in Shaping the Schools of the Canadian West, eds. Jones, et. al., 155. For the American or Montana perspective see Kathleen Underwood, "Schoolmarms on the Upper Missouri," Great Plains Quarterly 11 (Fall 1991): 225-233. "Miss Jacoby: 19,h Century Educator, 20th Century Guardian of Excellence," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 28:2 (April 1978): 36-49. Although set in an earlier time period, Polly Welts Kaufman traces the movement of eastern women into the Midwest in the period before the Civil War, showing that financial need and lack of family ties encouraged women to go west to teach. Polly Welts Kaufman, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), xxi-xxii. 7 D.A. McKerricher, Lethbridge Inspectorate, Province of Alberta. Department of Education Annual Report, 1906 (Edmonton: Jas. E. Richards, Government Printer, 1907), 64. W.E. Harmon, Superintendent Public Instruction, Ninth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction Of the State of Montana, 1906 (Helena, Montana: Independent Publishing Company,1906), 10. It is also important to note that in Montana single women homesteaders and married women homesteaders also took teaching positions to aid in their survival while the homestead was being proved- up. See Seena B. Kohl '"Well I have lived in Montana almost a week and like it fine': Letters from the Davis Homestead, 1910-1926", Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 51:3 (2001): 38-39. Mary Hyland Currier, "Montana School Teacher", Montana: The Magazine of Western History. 25:1 (Jan. 1975): 22-31. Mabel Lux, "Honyockers of Harlem" Montana: The Magazine of Western History. 13:4 (Sept. 1963): 10. For an account of a married rural Montana school teacher in the 1920s, who supports herself and her children by teaching see Nedra Sterry, When the Meadowlark Sings: The Story of a Montana Family (Helena: Riverbend Publishing, 2003). 34

the school experiences of children in rural schools in the border area of Alberta and

Montana will provide a meaningful view of the intent of borderland education.

By comparing government regulations and local action in relation to education,

some conclusions about the differences between Canadian and American approaches to

childhood and citizenship may be revealed. Including the voices of children who experienced rural school education during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries will decentre the history of education from the institutional analysis that has largely defined it. Most importantly, comparing education in Alberta and Montana during the early settlement period provides a unique opportunity to view the difference between growing political agendas and the local lived experience. Studying borderland education to see what difference the border made may reveal citizenship values not previously seen as important. It may also shed light on the implication of the 1998 agreement for shared grade one to grade twelve education in the area surrounding the

Alberta-Montana border. 35

CHAPTER 2 - "Ready for School before School Was Ready for Them": Building Schools from the Top Down and from the Grass Roots

In describing the development of the Alberta-Montana border region, historian

Paul Sharp claimed: "Thus two societies, differing from each other in fundamental aspects, emerged on the northern Great Plains. Westerners, whether Canadians or

Americans, built institutions only slightly influenced by the environment around them.

National differences prevailed over the sameness of physical environment."' Schools were one of the institutions Sharp said were equally demanded on both sides of the forty- ninth parallel, and his conclusions were partly right. By the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries, schools and structured learning opportunities on both sides of the border were fundamentally identical. Government rules and regulations that had existed since territorial days remained virtually unchanged. There were, however, natural differences in the treatment of religion and language in the two school systems. Alberta regulated the use of the French language and legislated religious instruction, while

Montana provided no financial support to parochial schools and allowed only English instruction. Despite regulations, schools were organized and created at the community level often before government assistance was received because fundamental education was considered important.

In 1896, when Sir Wilfrid Laurier was elected prime minister, Ottawa's National

Policy focused on promoting population growth in Canada's West. Clifford Sifton, the

1 Paul F. Sharp, Whoop-Up Country: The Canadian-American West, 1865-1885 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), 206. 36 new Minister of the Interior, began an aggressive advertising campaign in Europe and the United States to attract farmers into the North-West. Between 1891 and 1911, it has been estimated that the Canadian West received about half of the immigration from abroad and much of the migration internal to Canada, growing from 250,000 white, non- aboriginal people to nearly 2 million.2 The Canadian Pacific Railway desired an industrious western population in order to move raw materials and goods between the

West and the East of Canada, and the government relied on new settlers to increase the

English-speaking, white populations in the area.

Some immigrants coming into the North-West were non-English speakers, as

Europeans immigrated into western Canada. Despite their lack of fluency in English, their farming experience took precedence over language in determining their eligibility as desirable settlers. At the same time, the presence of the North West Mounted Police

2 J.L. Finlay and D.N. Sprague, The Structure of Canadian History. Third Edition (Ontario: Prentice-Hall Canada Inc., 1989), 252. There are differing opinions as to whether gender and 'whiteness' or language and religion were the most important factors in determining Canada's immigration policy. See Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race. Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 135-136 for reflections on gender and 'whiteness' being of primary concern for immigration selection, or Howard Palmer and Tamara Palmer, Alberta: A New History (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1990), 65-74, and especially Chapter 4 which places language and religion in the forefront of Canada's immigration strategy. John Herd Thompson wrote that Canada immigration policy during this time period was more concerned with providing cheap labour for railroads and industry than it was with procuring homesteaders for the West. Maintaining Canada's "Britishness" and "Anglo-Saxon" roots were underlying expectations, however, evident in discriminatory hiring practices and ethnocentric statements in the press. John Herd Thompson, Forging the Prairie West (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 1998), 75-77. In part, Gerald Friesen agreed with Thompson, claiming that before 1905 Canada's immigration policy was quite open, but after 1905 recruitment and advertising was centred largely in Britain in order to attract immigrants that would maintain Canada's "Britishness". However, as demands for labour increased after 1910, particularly for railway construction, immigration policy stopped differentiating and wanted simply to provide men for industry. Friesen went on to show that immigration into the Prairie Provinces was composed of a polyglot of experience from a multitude of countries. Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), Chapter 11, 242- 273. 37 provided a form of security to the North-West Territories. Their presence maintaind some semblance of order, but was also a representation of the power that Ottawa held over this jurisdiction. In 1905, the North-West Territories was divided into two provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, which joined Canadian Confederation in that year.

Immigrants to Alberta after 1896 came largely from Ontario, Britain, and the

United States. American immigrants made up 22 percent of Alberta's population by

1911, second only to those from Ontario, and a larger number than those migrating from

Britain. Many of the American immigrants to southern Alberta can be further defined as repatriated Canadians or European immigrants to the United States.5 Despite previous national affiliations, the three groups of immigrants came to find common ground in their economic desires, political affiliations, and social institutions, including schools and a common language.6 The question of what to do with immigrants coming from Europe, whose first language was not English, was overcome by the definition of English as

Alberta's primary language within the public school system. The use of English by all

Native children in government-run Native schools was also compulsory.7

4 Palmer and Palmer, Alberta: A New History. 82-83. 5 Beth LaDow, The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 84. A short analysis of the 1906 southern Alberta census for District 18(Alberta), Subdistricts #9, 28, and 34, (Subdivision 34 includes the town of Cardston) shows that of 614 people for which census data was analyzed, 220 indicated that their birthplace was in the United States, 291 were from other Canadian provinces, eighty-one were from Great Britain, and only twenty-two people were from other European nations. Further evaluation shows that some families with parents born in Canada had children born in the United States, or parents born in one Canadian province had children born in one or two different Canadian provinces. Alberta Family Histories Society, 1906 Alberta Census, http://www.afhs.ab.ca/data/census/1906/alberta/18/index.html. 6 Palmer and Palmer, Alberta: A New History, 79. 7Ibid.,101 and 113. 38

Attracting a substantial Euro-Canadian and Euro-American population into the

Canadian and American West was important largely for economic reasons, but can also be viewed as a way for Canada and the United States to gain sovereignty over an area each country had defined as part of itself. According to Gerald Friesen, the "dry rangeland of the southwest which extended from the Cypress Hills to the foothills of the

Rocky Mountains" was one of four areas in the Territories in which a substantial population began to develop. This area also maintained a close affiliation with Fort

Benton, Montana, due to the closer proximity of trade goods, shared ranching interests, and simple geographic location and similarity.

The population increase in this area was attributed to the arrival of a group of

American Latter Day Saints from Utah to Lee's Creek, in 1887. Fleeing anti-Mormon persecution in the United States, Ora Card and a group of forty families came to Canada in search of tolerance. The acceptability of group settlement in Canada further encouraged Latter Day Saints' leaders to look north for sanctuary.9 John Taylor, the head of the Latter Day Saints' church was himself a British subject having previously lived in

Upper Canada. He understood and admired British and Canadian laws and wanted the immigrants to show loyalty to Canadian institutions.10 Other than the Latter Day Saints'

Friesen, The Canadian Prairies. 221-222. 9 Leonard J. Arrington, "Historical Roots of the Mormon Settlement in Southern Alberta," in The Mormon Presence in Canada, eds. Brigham Y. Card, Herbert C. Northcott, John E. Foster, Howard Palmer, and George K. Jarvis (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 1990), 3-4. 10 Ibid., 15-16. 39 settlement and despite Ottawa's attempts to settle the North West, however, population increased slowly.11

Similarly, Montana's population grew in part due to the movement of Canadians across the forty-ninth parallel. In 1910, The Shelby News detailed the history of Shelby, and environs by noting:

When the wheat grower passed over the broad and fair prairies of the vicinity, he reasoned and no doubt correctly too, that a country that produced such a liberal coating of native grasses would, if given an opportunity, give returns equally liberal in wheat and other cereals. Many too, came from the vast Canadian wheat fields and could see no special difference either in soil or climate between the two districts living so nearly together and separated by 1 9

nothing but an imaginary line...

This account shows that Canadian immigrants were moving into the Shelby area in order to take advantage of available land in the American West. It also gives credence to the continued porous quality of the forty-ninth parallel.

During this same time period, Montana also developed as a territory and state.

Montana Territory was created in May, 1864, with the passage of the Organic Act.

Montana's economic development was centered on mining, with the state's population increasing or decreasing depending on the status of the mining industry. Gold, silver, and copper mining occurred largely in the western and especially the southwestern portions of the state. To provide food for the miners and for the Native populations living on reservations, a ranching industry developed, using the free ranges in the north and east of the state for pasturage. Despite these developments, Montana's population remained

11 Friesen, The Canadian Prairies. 221-222. 12 The Shelby News. April 22, 1910. relatively small reaching 20,595 persons by 1870. It took another ten years for

Montana's population to double to 39,159.14

Montana officials did focus some of their actions on establishing public education, taking their direction from the Organic Act which allocated two sections of land in each township for the establishment of a school fund. Montana Territorial

Governor Sidney K. Edgerton addressed the Territorial Council in 1864, admonishing his council to assist him in taking action towards educational regulation:

Hundreds of children are now in the Territory, which a wise legislation will not permit to grow up in ignorance; for, in a free government like ours, where public measures are submitted to the judgment of the people, it is of the highest importance that the people should be so educated as to understand the bearing of public measures. .. .Children are in one sense, the property of the public, and it is one of the highest and most solemn duties of the State to furnish ample provision for their education.15

In December of 1864, the Territorial Council passed Council Bill No. 38, "An Act establishing a Common School System for the Territory of Montana." This included provisions mandating that public land sale profits were to go into a school fund to be divided equally among school districts in the territory, that gave county commissioners the right to levy an annual tax of one mill on all taxable property to be used for establishing and maintaining common schools, and that all fines levied for breaches of

Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang, Montana: A History of Two Centuries. (1976; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 68. 14 1880, "Census Records of Montana," http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mtyellow/censusl880/census- list.htm. 15 As quoted in Emmet J. Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization 1864-1930" (PhD Diss., The Catholic University of America, 1931), 4-5. Riley quotes Edgerton's address from Montana Post, December 24, 1864. In part, Edgerton's speech is also quoted in Malone, et. al, Montana, 358. See also "Governor Edgerton's First Message to the First Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Montana", in Montana: The Magazine of Western History 3:1 (1966): 345-346. 41 the penal law in the Territory were to be placed into the yearly school fund. It also created local school district trustee positions to oversee school buildings and to hire teachers.

In 1865, Thomas J. Dimsdale was appointed Montana's first Superintendent of

Public Instruction to act as organizer and overseer of Montana's public school system.

Unfortunately, the position was not officially recognized by the legislature and no

I 7 monetary arrangements were made for its support. Nevertheless, Edgerton had drawn direct links among education, children, the development of Montana, and the responsibility of government to provide proper educational opportunities for its children.

With Montana's admission into the Union in 1889, the state was given control over sections sixteen and thirty-six in each township reserved for the purposes of schools.18

Until Montana was able to sell or lease these school lands, money to support the school system still could not be realized despite the state's control. Consequently, population increase was a very important issue with regard to school support. In 1890, the first census after statehood established Montana's population at 132,159, distributed over sixteen counties.19 Montana's most phenomenal population increase occurred after 1909,

Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 5-6. 17 Ibid., 10-11. Thomas J. Dimsdale was an English-born schoolteacher who ran a private school in Virginia City. He was also editor of Montana's first newspaper, Montana Post. Riley surmises that Dimsdale did serve Montana as Superintendent of Public Instruction, but that he did not leave any type of written record of his activities while serving in this capacity. Dimsdale also did not produce a report of the state of the territory's educational system. This could be because he died in 1866. See also Malone, et. al., Montana, 89-90. 18 Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 61. 19 1890, U.S. Census of Population and Housing, "Montana Counties in 1890 Total Population," University of Virginia Library, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/php/start.php?year=V1890. 42 when the federal government increased the land allocated for a homestead from 160 acres to 320 acres to accommodate the dry conditions on the Plains.

Education had been in the forefront of Albertans' concerns, as well. Before

Alberta attained provincial status, the territory was brought under the jurisdiction of the government in Ottawa with the passage of the North-West Territories Act of 1875. This act guaranteed denominational institutions and the use of both English and French in the territory.20 The federally appointed North-West Council passed its first school ordinance in 1884, introducing a dual-confessional system of schools as the basis for formal schooling. This measure respected the rights of the large numbers of French-speaking inhabitants in the North-West by providing for separate schools and maintaining their language rights. As Neil G. McDonald has noted: "This ordinance forfeited full control of education to the churches."21

In contrast, the United States maintained a separation between church and state from its founding. The founding fathers were led by theology, but considered God and

99 religion items for private thought and "not fit subjects for government." During the nineteenth century, however, challenges to this idea were made by those worried about the consequences to America of increased Catholic immigration. The firm belief in separation of church and state in the United States has been linked to Protestant

Finlay and Sprague, The Structures of Canadian History. 252. 21 Neil G. McDonald, "David J. Goggin: Promoter of National Schools," in Shaping the Schools of the Canadian West, eds. David C. Jones, Nancy M. Sheehan, and Robert M. Stamp (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Limited, 1979), 14. 22 Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2007), 75. 43 arguments during the mid-nineteenth century against providing public funding to parochial schools. It was believed that since America's common schools were essentially

Protestant, complete with Bible readings and prayers, to support parochial schools would threaten the common schools, an essential American institution created for the good of the people. In order to win this argument, Protestant Americans insisted on adhering to the argument of separation of church and state, which is guaranteed in the Bill of

Rights.23 At the same time, American supporters of common school education structured instruction to reflect the dominant culture of white, English, Protestantism, a policy that

Montana also followed during this time period.

Increasing population in Canada's North-West Territories altered its language and religious demographics. Supported by English Protestant immigrants from Ontario and

Britain, Premier F.W.G. Haultain wrested control of schooling away from the churches beginning in 1891 by establishing an Executive Committee to "centralize and secularize" the educational system. David Goggin, a professional educator from Ontario, was appointed Superintendent of Education for the North-West Territories to implement

23 Ibid., 135-136. 24 David Boers, History of American Education: Primer (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007), 18-19. Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 90. The use of religion in rural schools in Montana became apparent when researching in Kalispell's Central School. I located what appeared to be a dictated composition dated Wednesday, Dec. 20, 1899. It was written by Marion and it began, "There were shepherds in the field watching their flocks at night. An angel appeared then. "Fear not. For I bring you good tiding." Central School Class Register, 1897-1898 - Class B, 3rd Grade - Teacher Fannie Spurch, Kalispell, Montana, BOX Tag # 2004.009.002, Museum at Central School. Henceforth MCS. Marion's composition may have been a singular effort and this issue requires further research. Nancy M. Sheehan has shown that a moral and value based education in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Alberta was not debated, but simply accepted as normal. Children, teachers, and parents were expected to follow Judeo-Christian teachings. This meant accepting misfortune, being thankful for God's blessings, and following the golden rule. See Nancy M. Sheehan, "Indoctrination: Moral Education in the Early Prairie School House," in Shaping the Schools of the Canadian West, eds. Jones, Sheehan, and Stamp, 222-235, especially 223. 44

Haultain's plans for a government-organized and government-run school system that would provide a standardized education to all children. For Haultain, a standardized education was a key element in promoting national unity, and a national or common school system was the key agency for this form of education. Here we see education and politics in contention. The needs of the children in the area were not a direct priority for those interested in bringing education to the North-West Territories, but rather policy and procedure were focused to maintain the religious and language status quo prevalent in eastern Canada.25

Locating the North-West Territories as part of the Canadian landscape and creating a link with the Dominion was part of the formative desire of the North-West

Council. The tradition which North-West educators wished to institutionalize, however, was not based on reading, writing, and arithmetic; language took center stage in the

North-West Council's plans. With the increase of settlers from Ontario and Britain, "the

English language was the instrument of forging a new, united Canadian community; and the public school was the institution by which Anglo-conformity would be imposed."26

Unity of the country was to be enforced through the English language. The policy reflected the divisiveness of language in Canada. The struggles of the eastern Canadian

McDonald, "David J. Goggin", 15-17. Manoly R. Lupul, "Educational Crisis in the New Dominion to 1917", in Canadian Education: A History, eds. J. Donald Wilson, Robert M. Stamp, and Louis-Philippe Audet (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall of Canada, Ltd., 1970), 278-281. Amy von Heyking, Creating Citizens: History and Identity in Alberta's Schools, 1905-1980 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), 9. 26 Palmer and Palmer, Alberta. 68. 45 governments to wrest power from French Quebec politicians is evident in the development of the school systems of Alberta.

Prior to the formation of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan from the

North-West Territories there was debate as to whether or not to allow Catholic schools or religious instruction within the jurisdiction of the common or national school system. A compromise was reached which provided that the provinces would maintain control over education, that separate schools could continue to be a part of the national school system in provinces that had a sufficient French population to warrant it, and that religious instruction could be provided in any school in the province for one half hour at the end of the school day, from 3:30p.m. to 4:00p.m. provided the parents of the children requested

no it. If the parents of any child objected, then that child could withdraw. This put an end to the question of whether or not to allow separate schools and eventually led to the establishment of sixteen Catholic public school districts in Alberta.29

Language and religious differences were not of primary concern within

Montana's school system. During Montana's territorial days, race and colour issues caused controversy. After the end of the American Civil War in 1865, migrants from

This debate mimics what was referred to as the Manitoba School Question between 1888 and 1890. In Manitoba, French Catholics lost their right to schools supported by public taxation with the passage of the Manitoba School Act of 1890. The British and Protestant majority wrested this privilege away from the Catholic-French minority to have Manitoba follow the lead of Ontario in creating a national school system, which supported English as the only language of instruction, with limited rights to religious exercises. W.L. Morton, Manitoba: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961), 234-250. 28 W.S. Fielding, "The North-West Education Question: A Compromise Reached by the Government, An Efficient Public School System for the New Provinces," 75.518/526, Box 1, Provincial Archives of Alberta. Hereafter PAA. 29 Simone Forget, "Beauvais School A Collected and Living History" (Masters' Thesis, The University of Lethbridge, 2003), 15. 46 southern and northern states came to Montana. Due to the country's upheaval dealing with Reconstruction, Montana was left largely to its own devices and it was the political division of voters between Democrats and Republicans based on war-time northern or southern sympathies that prohibited Montana's early legislatures from creating responsible and effective social institutions. This included the growth and development of the school system, which despite its design for inclusion, as Emmett J. Riley noted:

"embraced little more than half the children of school age enumerated in the census

in returns."

The Montana School Law of 1872 completely defined the common school education system. It provided for rules and regulations for the Superintendent, the county commissioners, the school trustees, the teachers, and the pupils. This act even went so far as to provide that any person could be eligible for the office of county superintendent regardless of sex. It is estimated that between 1872 and 1889, the total number of school- age children in the Territory increased from 3,517 to 36,803, while enrolment increased from 50 to 67 per cent. Montana residents were embracing the school system and ensuring their children's attendance in district schools.

The Montana School Law of 1872 also provided that children of African descent were to be educated in separate schools, if there were ten or more black children in a district, and in a separate school or any other manner, in the event that there were fewer

Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 10. Riley does not delve into the question of why Montana's schools had such a poor record of reaching qualified students during the period from 1864 to 1872. 31 Ibid., 52. 47 than ten children. Their education, however, was to fall under the same rules and regulations as applied to white children. The Biennial Superintendent's reports from

1896 through to 1920 made no direct mention of African American children. The 1890 census lists forty-three female pupils of colour and forty-eight male pupils of colour attending common schools in Montana, the majority of whom were in Silver Bow and

Lewis and Clark counties located in the southwestern portion of the state. Silver Bow and Lewis and Clark counties were urban in nature, since they included the cities of

Helena and Butte. All children of colour were decreed by law to be allowed to attend public school, since the 1883 Compulsory Education law provided that "no child shall be refused admission to any public school on account of race or color."34 This would have included African American children, mixed race children, and children of oriental descent.

An unsettling newspaper article from The Shelby News in 1912 can shed some light on the absence of African American children in rural schools: "Another fact in connection with the ownership of the farms which the bulletin makes is that practically all are owned by native whites. Only 50 non-whites other than Indians own farms in the state, according to the bulletin, and of that 50 but 29 are negoes." Shelby was located in

Choteau County which bordered Alberta. By 1910, the Montana census counted 138

il Ibid., 30-33. See also Malone, et al., Montana. 85. 33 1890, U.S. Census of Population and Housing, "Montana Counties in 1890 Total Population," University of Virginia Library, http://fisher.lib.Virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/php/start.php?year=Vl 890. 34 Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 56. 35 "A White Man's Country," The Shelby News, Friday, Jan. 26, 1912. 48

African-Americans between the ages of six and fourteen attending school in the state.

Only five of these students lived in counties that bordered the forty-ninth parallel.36

The attendance of African Americans in a small Montana rural school would probably have elicited the same reaction that Era Bell Thompson noted of her school experiences after her family moved to North Dakota from Iowa, in 1914:

Now, suddenly, without warning, here were two studies in brown, not quite like the pictures in the geography or funny papers, but near enough to be identified. They were the first bona fide Negro children she [teacher] or the pupils had ever seen. We left our wraps and overshoes in the cloakroom and, still stiff with cold, joined the other children by the big tin drum which surrounded the stove. Every eye was upon us. One or two little girls snickered; a boy pushed another against me and grinned. Miss Breen rang a little handbell, and the eighteen children marched reluctantly to their seats. Summoning Harry and me to her desk, she plied us with questions—questions far from educational lines, questions about our parents, what they did in Des Moines, where they were born, about the South. She questioned us until my mouth began to quiver, and I had to blink hard to keep back the tears. Finally she led me to an empty seat in the fourth grade section and took Harry to the sixth grade on the opposite side of the room. The two middle rows were filled with disappointed fifth graders who felt left out of this new thing that was happening to them and the community.. .Long before four o'clock I had had enough school.37

The obvious difference of skin colour made Era Bell and her brother Harry conspicuous.

Thompson, however, went on to describe her school experiences, illustrating that some children did overcome the difference and expressed friendship, while others did not. The

36 1910, U.S. Census of Population and Housing, "Montana Counties in 1910 Total Population," University of Virginia Library, http://fisher.lib.Virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/php/start.php?year=V1910. 37 Era Bell Thompson, American Daughter. (1946 and 1967; reprint, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986), 32-3. 49 presence of black students in rural Montana schools would have been rare, but

no definitely did occur.

Rules and regulations defined schools and education in both Alberta and Montana during their territorial days, and into their state and provincial days. The government took control of how schools were to be run and organized. Montanans generally agreed with taxation in support of schools. Only those living long distances from schools objected because their children would not benefit. Article XI of the State Constitution was dedicated to education and required the state to "establish and maintain a general, uniform, and thorough system of public, free common schools."39 Section 5 of this

Article defined school-age children as those between the ages of six and twenty-one residing in any school district. It stated funding would be received only if a free public school was maintained for at least six months a year. Parochial schools were not to receive state or county funding from any source, and religion should never be a requirement of admission into public school nor be taught in public school. Teachers were regulated and while temporary teaching certificates were available to qualified

Malone, et al. indicate that a significant African American population existed in Montana during the height of the gold frontier. Malone, et al., Montana. 349-350. This is further supported by Christian McMillen, who used census data to establish relationships and occupations of African Americans living in Butte City in Deer Lodge County and Ft. Benton in Choteau County. McMillen was also able to establish that two of the four children of the Dodgestons, an African American family living in Deer Lodge County, "attended school within the census year." Christian McMillen, "Border State Terror and the Genesis of the African-American Community in Deer Lodge and Choteau Counties, Montana, 1870-1890," The Journal of Negro History 79:2 (Spring 1994): 212-247, especially 221. Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 43. According to David Tyack and Thomas James, the idea of public education became so encrypted into the minds of nineteenth century America that as constitutions were written for the new states allowed into the Union, "they borrowed models of schooling from the North." Tyack and James further indicate that of the seven state constitutions written from 1881-1900, they contained an average of 14.0 education provisions, while those written from 1841-1860 had only included as average of 6.3. David Tyack and Thomas James, "State Government and American Public Education: Exploring the "Primeval Forest," History of Education Quarterly 26:1 (Spring 1986): 59. 50 people, those graduating from the State Normal School of Montana would qualify for state diplomas and life diplomas. The Office of State Superintendent of Public

Instruction was also an elected position within the State government. In 1895, the State

Board of Education was placed at the head of the school system with power and control over the various state educational institutions. This new school law added increasing regulations to the office of the Superintendent of Schools, as well to that of Country

Superintendent with regard to increased reporting procedures to the Superintendent of

Schools, and then to the State Legislature. Regulations pertaining to teaching certificates were also tightened. The Compulsory Education Law in force since 1883 was altered to provide for truant officers in areas with a population of 2000 or more. The new School

Law of 1895 further emphasized that all children were to be taught in the English i 40 language.

In Alberta, A.C. Rutherford, the first Premier of the new province of Alberta, retained the portfolio of Minister of Education establishing one of his government's priorities. The Deputy Minister, D.S. Mackenzie, reported in 1906 in the first annual school report of the province that:

For some time after The Alberta Act came into effect considerable attention was necessarily devoted to the organization of the department; but by adopting in the main many of the regulations and administrative precedents established by the Territorial Department of Education, the new department was able to

Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 62-90. 51

avoid any serious interruption in its work in the transition from territorial to provincial institutions.

All schools, whether public or sectarian, were to follow the same regulations as set out by the Department of Education's School Ordinance. This Ordinance defined the roles and outlined the duties and responsibility of the trustees, the ratepayers, the teachers, and the pupils. It also provided regulations that the Department of Education must follow in rural and village school districts, and those for urban school districts. Fees were not to be charged, English was to be the language of instruction, although a course in French could be provided by any school in the province if there were sufficient numbers of French- speaking children to warrant it, school holidays and hours of operation were defined, and the regulations regarding religious instruction were reiterated. Like the regulation of compulsory attendance in Montana, Alberta also made provision for children between the ages of seven to twelve to be sent to school for at least sixteen weeks in each year, at least eight of which must be consecutive. Continuing the policy of the North-West

Executive Council, the province was divided into inspectorates and the appointed inspector was to scrutinize each school in his jurisdiction at least once per year. Both

Alberta and Montana placed education into the forefront of governmental organization.

41 Province of Alberta. Department of Education Annual Report 1906, (Edmonton: Jas. E. Richards, Government Printer, 1907), 11. Henceforth AR. 42 The School Ordinance was a consolidation of the following regulations that had been established by the government of the North West Territory: The School Ordinance Chapter 29 of 1901 and Amendments, The School Assessment Ordinance, Chapter 30 of 1901 and Amendments, and The School Grants Ordinance, Chapter 31 and Amendments. These were consolidated in 1904 and were accepted as the standard School Ordinance in the new province of Alberta, 74.1, File #249 PAA. 52

Both worked to create educational institutions which were seen as profitable investments for their future development.

At the same time, social change and a growing social concern for the youngest members of both nations created the reality that education quickly became a requirement in most children's lives.43 Due to rapid change caused by industrialization and urbanization, continuing westward settlement of both Canada and the United States, and periods of economic depression, reformers reacted to what they termed "the crisis of the family." During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries there was an increasing public belief that the family unit was in danger. The family unit was defined in the middle-class ideal of a "nuclear family" consisting of a husband, wife, and their dependent children. Consequently, efforts were made to assist the family in meeting social expectations, to define the role of "father" as breadwinner, "mother" as domestic, and "childhood" as a time of school, apportioning daily roles and duties according to gender. Behaviour outside of these definitions was considered delinquent and in need of fixing.44

Consequently, children seen as physically different or abnormal were removed from the home and placed in institutions run by government. Alberta sent its deaf, dumb, and mute children to Winnipeg, Manitoba's Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, just as it had during the Territorial period. Earnest effort was made to educate and assist these

43 Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Childhood on the Farm: Work. Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 61. 4 Cynthia R. Comacchio, The Infinite Bonds of Family: Domesticity in Canada, 1850-1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 3-11. Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006), Chapter 8, especially 184. 53 children "for their subsequent duties and responsibilities as citizens."45 By order of the

Montana Legislature, the State Board of Education built and maintained a State School for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind beginning in 1894. Here deaf and blind children, along with those having learning disabilities, were taught reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Blind children were also taught music. Girls were taught household skills, while undertaking household duties in support of the institution, while boys did chores like wood-cutting in addition to required academic pursuits. Despite their disabilities, handicapped children were still expected to "conduct themselves in accordance with the principles of morality and the usages of society."46 Government also intervened in the lives of children requiring reform due to incorrigible behaviour. Alberta sent these children to a Reformatory in Portage la Prairie in Manitoba, while Montana maintained a

State Reform School in Miles City. In both countries, even disabled and deviant children were to be educated to state-mandated social norms.

For children enrolled in public schools, government adopted mandatory attendance laws. As early as 1875, Territorial Governor B.F. Potts called for compulsory attendance laws because "where they exist there is a decrease in poverty and crime, and marriages augmented."47 Potts was drawing a link between attaining an education,

45 AR 1906.18. 46 J.A. Tillinghast, Superintendent, State School for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind, Third Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. State of Montana, 1894 (Helena, Montana: State Publishing Company, State Printers and Binders, 1895), 231-32. Henceforth BRS. 47 As quoted in Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 53. Riley quotes the Governor's Message delivered to the Eighth Legislative Assembly, 1874, 13-15. 54 improving society, and assisting nuclear families. In 1883, the Montana School Law was changed to mandate:

That every parent, guardian, or other person in the Territory of Montana, having control of any child or children between the ages of eight and fourteen years, shall be required to send such child or children to a public school, or a private school, taught by a competent instructor, for a period of at least twelve weeks in each year, six of which time shall be consecutive, unless such child or children are excused from such attendance by the board of trustees of the school district in which such parent, guardian, or person having control of such child or children resides.48

Removing children from the home and placing them into the space of a school ascribed to individuals between the ages of eight and fourteen the status of "child". It also made parents or guardians responsible for ensuring that children between these ages were provided with an education.

For Alberta, the regulations were similar. Article 144 of the 1901 School

Ordinance charged that:

Every parent, guardian or other person resident in a school district having charge of any child or children between the ages of seven and twelve inclusive shall be required to send such child or children to school for a period of at least sixteen weeks in each year at least eight weeks of which time shall be consecutive; and every parent, guardian or other person who does not provide that every such child under his care shall attend school or be otherwise educated shall be subject to the penalties herein provided.4

The North-West Territories and later the province of Alberta ascribed the status of

"child" to youngsters between the ages of seven and twelve. Parents were made

48 Ibid., 54. 49 The School Ordinance, 39-40. It should be noted that this compulsory attendance law adopted by the government of the North-West Territory is equal to that passed in Ontario in 1871 which read that "all children between the ages of seven and twelve were to attend school for a minimum of four months a year." Alison Prentice, The School Promoters: Education and Social Class in Mid-Nineteenth Century Upper Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Steward Limited, 1977), 139. 55 responsible for educating their children and penalties were in place for non­ compliance. In both Alberta and Montana, rural school trustees were to report cases of truancy to district superintendents or inspectors.

Before schools arrived as "public" institutions, parents were making provision for their children to be educated. Although governments made provision for schools and education in both Montana and Alberta, organization of public schools was a local affair requiring the support of district settlers and parents and often accomplished long before the government felt it necessary to become involved in educational matters. Ultimately, educating children was the goal of the community when it took up the organization of a school. The Latter Day Saints community that grew up along Lee's Creek, in Canada's

North-West Territories beginning in June, 1887, organized a school term to be taught in

September, 1887. The first classes were held in various homes and were conducted by

Jane Woolf, a young girl of only fourteen. Local history indicated that she conducted the school with "a firm hand". As the community of Cardston grew and developed, increasingly larger log buildings were constructed for use as schools. It was not until

1894 that the "Cardston School District No. 457 was organized under the control of the government of the North West Territories." ! Community desire to provide youngsters

Fourth BRS, 1896. 7-8. The School Ordinance, 40-41. The difference in defined school age between Montana and Alberta can be explained by Montana's large mining concerns that utilized child labour within the industry and the desire of the Department of Education to control or eliminate this dependence. In Alberta, agriculture was fast replacing ranching as the dominant industry. The labour of children, particularly boys over the age of 12, was required if families were to be successful homesteaders. 1 Cardston and District Historical Society, Chief Mountain Country: A History of Cardston and District (Cardston: Cardston and District Historical Society, 1978), 49. Jane Eliza Woolf Bates and Zina Alberta Woolf Hickman, Founding of Cardston and Vicinity (1960; reprinted, n.p., published privately by Charles 56 with basic literacy was important in the progress of a new settlement, and it was not atypical in rural schools for the teacher to be a young, local girl.

Even before Montana was organized into a territory, Lucia Darling wrote of her arrival in the town of Bannock with her family in 1863, where they found only rude accommodations and no school. She found, however, a desire among the inhabitants to provide education for the children. Darling wrote: "There were few families there and the parents were anxious to have their children in school." With the assistance of her uncle, she opened the first school in Bannock in October, 1863, in a room in her family's home, sometimes touted as the first school in Montana. Dale Eunson, whose family arrived on the Montana frontier in 1910, remembered how his mother reasoned with, argued with, and out-waited their neighbours' obstinacy when attempting to gain enough signatures on a petition to get a school district recognized. Eunson wrote:

Papa saddled up Sam, and Mamma took off with her petition and me on the saddle behind her.. .She bulldozed the indifferent homesteaders into signing her paper. Chris Gullard, of course, was with her. Selma was twelve, and Manda, who was fifteen, might even be able to attend school occasionally when she was not needed to cook and keep house for her father and brothers. The Torpens, with four, signed eagerly, but the others were childless and most of them not yet CO committed to remaining in Montana.

Ursenback, 1974), 54. Bates and Hickman wrote that Brother Ora Card, the leader of the Lee's Creek LDS community, dictated that only those children eleven years of age and younger were to be taught in this makeshift school. Jane Woolf designed the classroom program which included reading, writing, arithmetic, diagramming sentences, and map work. 52 S.W. Park, "The First School in Montana," Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 5:1 (1966): 191-192. In an article entitled "Education in Montana: A Brief History", Dr. Merrill Burlingame, a college historian at Montana State College, wrote that the first recorded school in Montana was held in 1862 at Fort Owen in the Bitterroot. Pupils were Indian and half-breed children of the employees of Fort Owen. "John Owen, the proprietor of the trading post, bore the cost of the school and took an active interest in its progress." Burlingame called the school in Bannock the "first school for white children." Vertical File - Education-History (1), MHS. 53 Dale Eunson, Up on the Rim (Helena, Montana: Riverbend Publishing, 2002), 57. 57

Eunson's mother was even able to get the signature of the neighbourhood recluse simply by sitting on his front porch and loudly explaining to her son Dale that as one of God's children their neighbour would see the necessity of signing a petition that would "start a school in the wilderness."54 Easiest to convince were those settlers who had young children, but those who had older off-spring, those who had no children or those who were single needed extra cajoling in order to see the necessity of a school and the benefits it would have within the community.

Eunson's episode is also significant because his mother, like many other women in newly settled areas, was "instrumental in the re-creation of community institutions."5

Motives for organizing a school were many and often newcomers found that their children "were ready for school before school was ready for them."5 Mrs. Eunson's reason for starting a public school was simple. She no longer had the time to provide her son with structured lessons since her labour was increasingly required on their homestead.57 Mary Mercer, whose family arrived in southern Alberta from Ohio in 1910, remembered that her mother and the other homestead women made the establishment of a

Ibid., 59. See also Gladys Mullet Kauffman, As I Remember... Stories of Eastern Montana's Pioneers. Vol. I (Helena: Sweetgrass Books, 2006), 5. Kathryn Adam, "Laura, Ma, Mary, Carrie, and Grace: Western Women as Portrayed by Laura Ingalls Wilder," in The Women's West, eds. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 102. See also Lillian Schlissel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 149. Nanci Langford, Politics. Pitchforks, and Pickle Jars: 75 Years of Organized Farm Women in Alberta (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises, Ltd., 1997), 34, 59. Anna Feldman describes the sacrifices Jewish women made and the Jewish custom that made opening a school and providing their children an education as an important element of Jewish settlements in Saskatchewan. Anna Feldman, '"A Woman of Valour Who Can Find?': Jewish Saskatchewan Women in Two Rural Settings, 1882-1939," in "Other" Voices: Historical Essays on Saskatchewan Women, eds. David DeBrou and Aileen Moffatt (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1995), 66, especially footnote 34. 56 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II, 243. 57 Eunson, Up on the Rim. 56. 58

Sunday School their first community project. They felt that the children could be provided with an education, while having parents and children assemble on a Sunday would provide proof to the Methodist Church that their community warranted the establishment of an official congregation.59 Whether for academic or religious reasons, the desire for their children to receive formal education was the foremost reason why parents took the initiative to organize schools.

Going to a public or private institution, however, was not the only education that children received. For children who grew up in a traditional family, often one parent or both would attempt to ensure that their children became literate by providing some type of formal study. Sometimes an older sibling provided young children with lessons when a formal school was unavailable. Just as Dale Eunson's mother had been teaching him structured lessons to ensure he received an education, the Ranghild family used the isolation of the winter months on their Alberta homestead as a time to provide their children with learning opportunities. Ellenor Ranghild Merriken wrote in her memoirs:

Our education had been neglected during the summer and now we had to make up for it. Papa supervised our reading and arithmetic. Mama was responsible for our religious training. We studied Bible history and catechism until we could recite them by heart... . We dug into the old trunk for additional subject matter. Here we found a veritable gold mine of information and the basis of our education. There was fiction and fairy tales, ancient history, literature, poetry and political speeches; in fact, most everything. Geography lessons were most interesting. My parents took turns to describe the different countries we happened to be studying and often told of real experiences they had in some

The Sunday School has been used since the late 1790s as a means of introducing discipline and structure into the lives of the young when formal or public schools did not exist and "represented one of the first attempts to rein in young people's lives." See Mintz, Huck's Raft. 90. 59 Interview, Mary Mercer, Strathmore, March 15, 1976, Eliane Silverman Fonds, 81.279.53A, PPA. 59

of these places.60

Claire Berard was taught to read and do simple math by her older brother. Finding great enjoyment in reading, and obviously being furnished with reading material, Claire could read at a grade six level when she finally started to attend school.61

Not all children were as fortunate as Eunson, Merriken, or Berard. For Margaret

Bell living on a homestead outside Great Falls, Montana, schooling began at the age of six and lasted only six weeks. Since her mother was sickly, with three young children to look after, and her father usually in Great Falls working at odd jobs or gambling,

Margaret had to take responsibility for feeding the stock, performing domestic chores, and assisting with child-care.62 There was no time for schooling in Margaret's day-to­ day existence. Her parents were concentrated on survival and did not have the time, or perhaps the education or inclination, to provide a structured education for their daughter, despite the presence of an educational institution.

Children, who had some education and could read, relied on available reading material to provide learning, but also entertainment and mentoring. In Montana, the

Bidwells remembered: "When anyone got a new book, it was shared by the whole community, passed from family to family to family, read aloud in the evening by the light of kerosene lamps."63 The availability of books and periodicals increased with the

Ellenor Ranghild Merriken, Looking for Country: A Norwegian Immigrant's Alberta Memoir (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999), 73. 61 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II. 57. 62 Margaret Bell, When Montana and I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 81-84. 63 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II, 153. 60 growth of the publishing industry and families moving into the West found that getting reading material became easier.

For youngsters living in the borderland between knowledge and ignorance, where schools were scarce or non-existent, books could open the road to self-identity, provide shelter in times of turbulence, or teach life lessons unavailable during the trials and tribulations of day-to-day living. For Eva Scabad, reading aloud from a German newspaper when the girls and women gathered to sew provided a strong sense of community and fellowship based on gender, as well as a means to retain her mother- tongue.66 Despite the love of reading and the time children liked to devote to this pastime, they were often "spared from it" since chores, play, and school took them away from reading for pleasure.

Even with a Mandatory Attendance Law, in 1894, Montana Superintendent of

Public Instruction E. A. Steele complained that: "The law relating to this subject has been inoperative from the time of its adoption."68 Again in 1896, Steele wrote: "Our statistics show that during the last year there have been 3162 children, 8 to 14 years of age, who have not attended school either public or private." Steele felt the trustees were

Elliott West, Growing up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 180. 65 Gloria Anzaldua, a woman who grew up in the Texas-Mexico borderland, struggling with issues of race, culture, and self-identity wrote, "Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar." Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), 19. bb Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. I, 20. 61 Gerald Friesen, "William Lewis Morton," Heritage of the Great Plains 23:1 (1990): 21. 68 Third BRS, 1894,260. 61 accountable for these poor statistics because they were not enforcing the truancy laws.69 In Alberta's first report of the Department of Education, statistics showed that of

24,254 enrolled in public school in 1905, average daily attendance was only 13,375 pupils. A.C. Rutherford, Minister of Education explained this statistic by writing:

"Owing to the fact that many families move from one place to another, especially during the first year's residence in the province, it is impossible to obtain accurate data regarding the regularity or percentage of attendance. From the statistics found elsewhere in this report it would appear that the general average for the year 1906 was about 51%."™

Officials believed that children who attended school irregularly or not at all became discouraged. When they did attend their age generally put them behind those who were younger.

For many youngsters, work or day-to-day responsibilities precluded their attending school, despite regulations which insisted children must receive instruction.

Margaret Bell was able to register for school in Lethbridge, Alberta at the age of twelve.

Until then, she had only six weeks of formal education at the age of six. Between those years, Margaret's life had been consumed with domestic chores, as well as ranch chores.

She was excited to finally get some schooling, but noted in her biography that: "Bread making and washing were old stuff to me, but ironing and going to school were new.

Ironing I soon got the knack of, but school! I was almost speechless with embarrassment and would often say, 'No, Ma'am' when the teacher asked me a question, whether I knew

69 Fourth BRS. 1896, 7-8. 70 AR. 1906,12-13. 62 the answer or not."71 At twelve, Margaret would have been studying the same lessons as the five and six year-olds in the first grade. Despite her desire to learn she seems to have felt acutely self-conscious about not having been in school before. Her experiences support the words of education promoters.

Statistically the concerns of government officials were warranted. Although children were being registered in record numbers due to the influx of immigrants to

Alberta and Montana, average daily attendance continued to lag behind. This appeared to have been worse in Alberta than in Montana. In 1905, Alberta's daily attendance was

13,375 of 24,254 children registered, or 55 percent. In 1913, of the 79,909 children

77 registered, daily average attendance was only 38,460, or 48 percent. In Montana, in

1907 average daily attendance was 34,699 of 50,516 pupils enrolled or almost 69 percent.

In 1912, enrolment had grown to 68,335 with 49,330 children attending daily, or 72 percent These statistics are not outside the bounds of the legal requirements of sixteen weeks attendance in Alberta, or twelve weeks attendance in Montana, but a month-by- month analysis of registration versus attendance would be helpful and is grounds for further study. The lower attendance numbers in Alberta can be explained since the majority of the population lived on homesteads where children's labour was essential. In

Montana, many children lived in urban areas where school attendance was more rigidly enforced. Older children, usually boys, were often only in school between mid-

71 Bell, When Montana and I Were Young, 156. 72 These statistics were accumulated from the Department of Education Annual Reports between 1905 and 1913. They show a dramatic decrease in the number of pupils attending school after standard five or grade six. (See Appendix A) 73 Growth of Schools Chart, Twelfth BRS, 1912,5-6. 63

November and mid-April due to the need for their agricultural labour during planting and harvesting seasons.

The erratic nature of school attendance was evident in the teacher's register for the fourth grade of Central School in Kalispell, Montana, from January to June, 1895.

Although Kalispell was somewhat urban in nature and Central School was a graded school, it becomes evident from these register entries that labour and attendance patterns which were exhibited in other agricultural areas continued in Montana despite more stringent government regulations.(See Appendix B)7 Seven of the twenty-one students in this grade stopped attending classes by mid-April. Furthermore, age and gender did not preclude children from having to work. Gregory Duffy, age ten, Helen Forbes, age fifteen, Martin Johnson, age fourteen, Laura Ouelette, age fifteen, Jesse Thompson, age nine, Ida Weightmann, age ten, and Annie Zeller, age thirteen, all left school in April.

Ida's departure was explained by her having been promoted. Only when Martin Johnson left was it noted that he had withdrawn from school. The other children simply did not return to complete the term. As in other parts of the West, when the planting work began, it would have taken the labour of the entire family to complete and this might explain why Gregory, Helen, Laura, Jesse, and Annie left school. Similar patterns are seen when analyzing the attendance patterns from the Fishburn School Registers between 1911 and

1913 in the Pincher Creek, Alberta area; children over the age of twelve frequently,

/4 Central School Class Register, 1895-1896 - 3rd and 4th Grades - Teacher Marie Ferguson, MCS, Kalispell, Montana, BOX Tag # 2004.009.002. 64 missed school in June, August, September, and October.75 Farm work during planting and harvesting seasons made children's labour essential to the family's agricultural endeavours. The work that children did was vital to the survival of the family on farms and homesteads.7

The abdication of education for work was clearly evident in the list of students kept by teacher Cecil Clapp in 1901-02 for eighth-grade students in Kalispell's Central

School (See Appendix C). Of fourteen students who left before the close of the school year, six students, ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-one, left school to go to work.

Five students left school before taking their eighth-grade examinations, making them ineligible for high school. Mabrl[sic] Hubbard had to have passed her eighth-grade examinations to receive a Third Class Teaching certificate to teach her district school.

Clapp's entries, however, also show the determination of young adults to receive an education. In 1883, Montana redefined mandatory ages of attendance to those between eight and fourteen years of age. The students in this school show their determination to receive an education by being over the maximum age of attendance. Mable Richards, age sixteen, and Alice Manning, age eighteen, left school because they reportedly found the

Fishburn School District #311 Fonds, Daily Register For August 1911-October 1913, Accession # 989.264.04, Pincher Creek and District Historical Society Archives. Steven Mintz wrote that "The frontier could not have been settled without children's labor." Children did jobs as far ranging as food procurement, harvest work, to egg gathering; all essential to the survival of a farm family. See Mintz, Huck's Raft. 150. Also, Sandra L. Rollings-Magnusson wrote that like women's labour, children's labour on the family farm on the Canadian Prairies has never been recognized as essential to the survival of homesteaders. Sandra L. Rollings-Magnusson, "Heavy Burdens on Small Shoulders: The Invisible Labour of Children in Anglo Pioneer Farming Families on the Western Canadian Prairies, 1871-1913" (Ph.D. diss., University of Alberta, 2003), 8-10 or Sandra L. Rollings-Magnusson, Heavy Burdens on Small Shoulders: The Labour of Pioneer Children on the Canadian Prairies (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2009), x. Neil Sutherland also cites parental need for children's labour as a reason children missed school. Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), 159. 65 work too difficult. (See Appendix C) Had their attendance been spotty? Had they simply fallen too far behind to be able to continue working on their studies? Although the fate of these pupils is difficult to know, it becomes apparent from this one group of children that going to work played a role in their decision to abandon their formal schooling.

Staunch determination to get an education was also exhibited by some children.

In the early 1900s, Walton Baker remembered boarding at a neighbour's and doing ranch work to pay for his keep. On school days he had to milk fourteen cows before leaving for school. One day, despite dropping temperatures he rode five miles to the schoolhouse only to have no one else arrive for the school day. He then had to ride the five miles back to the ranch.77 Baker's experience was indicative of a serious desire for formal schooling, but showed that children's labour was necessary for families to succeed in developing agricultural areas.

Clapp's register also showed that mobility of the populace was a reason that children left school. Three students, Addie Hunter, Clara Gould, and Rosa Pieper, all moved away from the Kalispell area. Pieper went to Helena, but Hunter left school to go to Seattle. In 1906, Alberta's Premier and Minister of Education had indicated that mobility was one of the prime reasons why attendance statistics were difficult to obtain.78

The mobility of the people of Kalispell can be explained by Kalispell's location on the route James J. Hill used to build his Great Northern Railroad, which reached Seattle in

77 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II. 110. 78 AR. 1906,12-13. 66

1893.79 By 1904, however, the Great Northern had finalized the move of its roundhouse and storage sheds from Kalispell to Whitefish, Montana. Kalispell became a

on town at the end of a branch line instead of a main line. Due to this move, workers lost their jobs and may have left the area.

Despite the necessity of their labour, many childhood reminiscences were quite explicit about experiences with learning, crediting parents with providing the opportunities in the face of extreme adversity. Don Gibson remembered that when he was five in Dawson County, Montana, in 1907 or 1908, there was no school organized so his father "built a little one-room cabin in their yard, hired a teacher at his own expense, and sent his children to school." Gibson and his siblings attended their private school for two years until the High Point School was built in their district.81 Frank Hasty remembered there was no school when he and his family began homesteading on

"Poverty Flats" in eastern Montana in 1909 or 1910. Frank and four other children attended school in a little shack for two three-month terms before there was enough money in the district to build a school. Walton Baker, whose family moved to Montana from Canada, had little opportunity to receive an education. His father could not get a school started in the district because there were not enough children to meet government

Malone, et al, Montana. 184. 80 Dorothy M. Johnson, When You and I Were Young. Whitefish (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1997), 13. 81 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II, 81. 82 Ibid., 102. 67 regulations. In the late 1890s, his parents boarded children from other families in order to meet the required number and held several three-month terms.83

In Alberta, too, children were taught in an organized fashion at the request of parents. In 1884, in Pincher Creek, in southern Alberta, community leaders hired a local settler, Arthur Edgar Cox, to teach school in a log cabin located near the creek. There were not enough students to receive a full government grant, so the school was run on a subscription basis. At the time, there was no prescribed curriculum, so Cox had to work out what was best for his pupils. In Medicine Hat, where an official school district was not formed until 1886, but where a town began to form after the arrival of the railroad in

1883, "a voluntary school had operated in the community, located first in the Methodist

Church building, and later, in the rough wooden structure put up by the Presbyterians on

Main Street."85

Children who were given the opportunity to attend school did so in whatever building was available or those specifically designated as schoolhouses. Educators had touted space, lighting, and ventilation as important elements of school buildings since the

1850s.86 Beginning in 1906, Alberta's Department of Education mandated that each student was to be allotted fifteen feet of floor space and 200 cubic feet of air space within the general dimensions of the school building; windows were to be placed on the pupil's

83 Ibid., 110. It should be noted that "ten census children between the ages of six and twenty-one years" were required in order to form a school district. "School districts how formed" The Shelby News. March 15, 1912. 84 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages: Recollections of Education in the Pincher Creek Area (Pincher Creek: Gorman & Gorman, 1992), 15, 184. *" LJ. Roy Wilson, "Children, Teachers, and Schools in Early Medicine Hat", Alberta History 32:3 (Summer 1984): 15. Prentice, The School Promoters, 97. 68 left and should have sills, a storm sash, and light-coloured curtains. Provision was made for supplying sufficient heat and ventilation. Desks could be single or double, but a separate desk had to be provided for the teacher. Blackboard space was to take up at least sixty square feet of room space behind the teacher's desk and on the right wall where no

on windows were located.

Montana's laws and regulations did not specifically define the dimensions of the school building, believing school trustees would provide what was best for the children.

In 1901, however, Superintendent of Public Instruction E.A. Carleton recommended the creation of the position of State Architect, to ensure that proper care and consideration be taken to provide the most up-to-date and health-conscious school facilities. I strongly urge the passage of a law providing for a state architect who shall have charge of the construction of all school buildings in the State. School houses have been built and will continue to be built, unless legislation be had without the slightest regard to heating, lighting or ventilating. The health, and often the lives even, of the pupils are put in jeopardy as a result.88

Providing an appropriate structure which met comfort, health, and safety concerns illustrated the anxiety of officials for their young charges, but also reflected the social reorientation of childhood which had occurred beginning in the late-nineteenth century.

These specific details for construction and space allocation attested to the influence of

8/ AR 1906, 68. 88 Sixth BRS 1901. 16. In 1919, the State Department of Health and Public Instruction took over the responsibility for ensuring that one-room schoolhouses were built to provide the best accommodations for children's education. Simplicity of design and an emphasis on providing adequate lighting and heating were stressed. See Kingston Heath, "A Dying Heritage: One-Room Schools of Gallatin County, Montana," Perspctives in Vernacular Architecture 1:1 (1982): 207. 69 social reformers on government regulators, reformers themselves influenced by notions of childhood being touted in Canada, the United States, Britain, and Europe.89

The desires of school promoters to be viewed as progressive and to be a part of nation-building, however, is further evident with the focus upon building material used to erect a schoolhouse. The newspaper of Flathead County, Montana, The Inter Lake, published a School Edition in 1896 and outlined the progress made by the county's educational institutions. It described the ascent from a rough log cabin with low ceiling and a single small window, to a more spacious log cabin with more windows and higher ceiling, and then to an elegant frame structure with cupola and bell, "all within a decade."9 In newly established towns along the Great Northern Railway in Montana, schoolhouses were often built of brick to impress travelers and encourage homesteaders to settle in the area.91

Between 1905 and 1910, Alberta's government statistics included information on the materials from which schools were built. Frame schools were by far the most common, with brick and stone schools built only in the wealthiest districts, usually urban centres.92 In 1907, the Deputy Minister of Education of Alberta wrote:

The reports of our inspectors indicate a gratifying improvement in the quality of our school buildings, in the provision for the health and comfort of our children, as well as for their intellectual advancement. The old log

8 Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society, ix. Boers, History of American Education. 50. 90 "The evolution of the log school house," School Edition, The Inter Lake. Vol. 8, Kalispell, Flathead County, Montana, Friday, November 20, 1896. The same story that ran in The Inter Lake was also part of the County Superintendent's report to the Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1896. N. T. Conklin, Flathead County Superintendent, BRS. 1896, 27. 91 "Rural Schoolhouses in Montana," Montana:The Magazine of Western History. 35:3 (Summer 1985): 80. 92 AR 1905, AR 1906. AR 1907. AR 1908. AR 1909. AR 1910. 70

school house is gradually disappearing from our province and is being replaced by the more comfortable and commodious—if less picturesque—structure of frame or brick. While the number of school houses reported upon by our inspectors has increased during the past two years from 410 to 628, the number of log schools found among these has decreased from 58 to 49.93

The log structure was considered a simple beginning, and the move to a frame structure was symbolic of the maturation of the school system. In south-eastern Alberta and north­ eastern Montana, where trees were scarce, a frame structure with clapboard siding was most commonly erected. The erection of a schoolhouse represented progress as it brought social institutions and "civilization" to land previously occupied by Native peoples. It also assisted in government policy which advocated western land settlement.

The erection of a schoolhouse was often a community event. Once Dale Eunson's mother's petition for a school district was approved by the county, and forty-five dollars a month allotted to the district for a teacher, Mrs. Eunson again convinced her neighbours to take immediate action to erect the schoolhouse. In late October, a raising bee was held and in three days the structure was completed. The community then held a box social to raise funds for the pot-bellied stove which had been ordered, but had not yet arrived.

Classes began the following week, when the new schoolteacher arrived.

AR,1907,18. It should also be noted that in 1910, when statistics on structure material stopped being accumulated, the number of log structures had again increased to 56, from a low of 44 in 1908. AR 1910. 22. Eunson, Up on the Rim.116-119. A box social can also be referred to as a "basket social" and was a common means of community fundraising. In this context, they were events organized by the teacher and other ladies in the community to raise funds for the school, outside of the usual county or local tax dollars which schools receive as yearly allocations. Funds raised were used to purchase equipment for the school, like a piano or an organ, as well as to assist in providing costumes and props for the annual Christmas pageant or small Christmas gifts for all of the children that attended the school. See Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 46. See also Ponde-Toole Extension Homemakers 71

The erection of school buildings in rural districts was frequently commented upon in the annual reports of the Department of Education in Alberta. In 1909, D.A.

McKerricher, Inspector for the Lethbridge School District noted:

The school buildings recently built or in course of erection are, in most cases, much better structures than those erected in the earlier years, the improvement being due, doubtless, to the intelligence of the incoming settlers and to the growing faith in the future of Alberta. In the rural schools generally care is taken in the preparing of plans to follow out the recommendations of the department in arranging for lighting, ventilation, seating, etc., though occasionally serious blunders are made through carelessness or want of advice.

In 1910, Inspector McKerricher was so concerned that he believed that building plans should be submitted and approved by the Department of Education to ensure that the correct type of structure was built. His annual report indicated: "It would seem to be advisable either to insist on the adoption of a plan recommended by the department or to require school boards to submit the plan of their proposed school to the department for approval." This recommendation must have been adopted by the Department of

Education because on December 23, 1914, after finalizing plans for the erection of a schoolhouse, the minute book of the Park View School District No. 2965 noted: "Must receive approval from Minister of Education for all of the above." The Alberta

Club, Grime Grit and Gumption: Early History of South Marias (Shelby, MT: The Shelby Promoter, 1976), 106, M978.612 Pon, MHS. 95 AR 1909. 51. %AR,1910, 63. 97 Minute book, Park View School District No. 2965, 997.08.01, Pincher Creek and District Historical Society. 72

Department of Education had decided to regulate the enthusiasm of the homesteaders in order to ensure department regulations were followed.98

Contrary to Paul Sharp, national affiliation made little difference in local education. The educational regulations in Alberta and Montana differed little.

Difference was discernible in relation to religion, language, and race. Alberta legislated that religious instruction could be a part of the school day; while Montana forbade teaching religion in school. Where there was demand, Alberta allowed French language instruction, while Montana allowed only English languge instruction. Montana wrote explicit regulations for the education of African American children, while Alberta did not mention race within its public school regulations. These differences reflected the wider national issues in each country. Still, despite regulations, pioneers had to take personal responsibility for ensuring that educational opportunities were available for their youngsters. They did so, on both sides of the border.

It should be noted that schools did not always stay in the place where they were initially built. As homesteaders came and went, schools were moved so as to always remain in the most central location for the pupils who could attend or to ensure easy accessibility as surrounding land become fenced. Pincher Creek and District School Division #29, Unfolding the Pages, 57, 164, 129. Bess Stone, "My Life", 4. SC1475, MHS. Ponde-Toole Extension Homemakers Club, Grime Grit and Gumption, 64. 73

CHAPTER 3 - The Meeting-Ground of Children: The Rural Schoolhouse as Social Borderland

After interviewing alumna from Glendive High School in northeastern Montana during a 1965 school reunion, Gladys Kauffman summed up the experience by writing:

"The general impression received from chats with alumni is that it is not so much the building, but what goes on within its walls that determines the quality of education and the effect upon the lives of the students."1 Regulations did not determine children's memories. Schoolroom activities and social relations within the school were important elements of childhood memories and were fundamental aspects of learning. What did children most remember about their schooldays? What do those memories tell us about citizenship and the efforts of both states to teach appropriate conduct and regional identity? In the schoolhouse children met, socialized, and learned. Learning good behaviour, a respect for authority, and creating ties with the surrounding community were the most important citizenship lessons that children took from their rural schooldays.

Personal interactions were combined with discipline, morality training, classroom routine, standardized textbooks, schoolroom libraries, and community entertainments to shape children from diverse backgrounds into individuals with a common set of ideas and ideals. The schoolroom became a social borderland, a meeting-ground of children.

Social borderlands are described as places "where diverse people come together or mingle." They have further been defined as ever-present "wherever two or more

1 Gladys Mullet Kauffman, As I Remember.. .Stories of Eastern Montana's Pioneers Vol. II (Helena: Sweetgrass Books, 2006), 337. 74 cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy." The schoolhouse was a borderland of social interaction, a place where children of both sexes and diverse ethnicities met adults who were influential in their development, a place where children learned what their social roles were expected to be, and a place where children learned about "place." Gender, race, and language affected how children and teachers perceived these relationships.

Arguably, when the space for social interaction was a rural one- or two-room schoolhouse, the relationships encountered during the educational process were magnified.

The interior spaces of one-room rural schoolhouses were largely similar and inscribed age, gender, and authority in their geography. Children entered the front of the building, first going into a coat room, where outdoor clothing and their lunches were stored. The teacher's desk was seen toward the rear, often placed on an elevated space.

The rear wall was dedicated to the teacher's blackboard. The designation of this space reinforced the teacher's authority. Two rows of single- or double-seated desks were placed so the smallest children sat in the front rows, nearer the teacher's desk, while older, larger children occupied those toward the rear. Sometimes seat allocation was determined by gender: girls sat on one side of the room while boys sat on the other. A

2 Elizabeth Jameson, "Dancing on the Rim, Tiptoeing through Minefields: Challenges and Promises of Borderlands", Pacific Historical Review 75:1 (Feb. 2006): 5. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), 19. 75 pot-bellied stove; windows on the left or right wall and shelves or a storage case for the school library were also essentials. With regard to decoration in a rural school, students at the Utopia school in Alberta's Pincher Creek Inspectorate remembered "the beautiful decorations drawn by the teachers on the top of the blackboards as a border with the alphabet in small and capital letters." The pictures on the borders would be changed with the season, tulips in spring and autumn leaves in the fall.3 Some schools also contained a globe, flags, and maps.

This presents a fairly idyllic picture and seems to bring purpose to the old adage:

"A place for everything and everything in its place." Space allocation within the schoolroom was a necessary element of functionality, but was also significant in giving pupils the impression that they were in a congenial place, like "home" as opposed to an institution. Those who attended Lee #469 in the Pincher Creek area remembered "the family atmosphere" of their school.5 Since the school was also the place for community gatherings, like box socials, dances, and church services, children were provided with continuity between home, social activity, and knowledge about appropriate behaviour in relation to local citizenship. The multiple roles of the schoolroom made the schoolhouse a borderland between school, family, church, neighbours, and community.

Not everyone remembered their schoolrooms as pleasantly. One student recalled that the schoolhouse thermometer read only forty degrees Fahrenheit when he arrived one

3 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages: Recollections of Education in the Pincher Creek Area (Pincher Creek: Gorman & Gorman, 1992), 22. Kingston Heath, "A Dying Heritage: One-Room Schools of Gallatin County, Montana," Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 1:1 (1982): 207. Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 129. 76 winter day, even with a good fire going. In her diary, one teacher wrote: "All lovely at school, but we have had hard work to keep warm. It began to grow cold just after daylight and has grown worse all day."7 In southern Alberta, Crook School #520 students remembered getting the strap and that the older boys were bullies. They further recalled that the smell of woollen mittens drying near the heater was not as bad as the

Q schoolhouse smelling of "wild onions eaten on the way to school". When starting school in 1910 near Allard, Montana, Ferol Halvorsen remembered having to bring her own desk which consisted of a "keg, cut down to accommodate" and a little rocking chair brought from home. The blackboard was a buggy top and the teacher used a packing crate and a kitchen chair as a desk.9 A Montana teacher, who taught from 1904 to 1924, recalled that: "If anybody sniffled they got the pot-bellied stove going red hot, sprinkled powered sulphur on top and everybody started to cough and gag. All the bugs and microbes thus vanished. Water was brought in from a creek in an enamelled[sic] bucket and a tin dipper was used by all." Water was a commodity shared by everyone equally, just like the germs and bugs.

The interior of the schoolhouse simply set the scene for the true work to be performed within a rural school. Pupils between the ages of six and twenty-one could be present at any one time. Public schooling in Montana initially consisted of eight

6 Dale Eunson, Up on the Rim (Helena, Montana: Riverbend Publishing, 2002), 141. There is also evidence that the severity of Montana winters caused schools to be suspended from December to late spring. See Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, Frontier Children (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 125. 7 Idora Z. Smith Guthrie Diaries, MC201 Box#2, Folder 2/6, Montana Historical Society. Henceforth MHS. 8 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 72. Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II, 339. 10 Clipping, No date/no newspaper, from Vertical files, Teachers, MHS. 77 standards, later changed to twelve grades when a new course of study was developed in 1906. In Alberta, the same held true. A system of eight standards was used from the territorial period until 1912, when the twelve-year grading system was instituted. This meant that a single teacher was responsible for teaching children of all ages and grades at the same time. A great deal of interaction among children of different ages and stages of study occurred, but this also required a teacher with the ability to maintain organized chaos to ensure that all children were receiving the appropriate instruction. One Montana woman recounted: "Kids who were faster learners than others would be 'put ahead' and were assigned to read or do arithmetic with the more advanced children. 'Skipping' grades was the custom."11 Some Alberta pupils found the diversity of grades and subjects taught inspiring, learning extra information from listening to the lectures for the more advanced grades.12

In the social borderland of the schoolhou.se, the teacher was the government's representative assigned to the task of enforcing language and national affiliation.

Teachers had to be leaders, exuding confidence and developing trust. Interviewed in

1963 about her teaching experiences in West Butte, Montana, in the early-twentieth century, May G. Clark remembered she arrived at her first school and found a new frame shack, containing no furnishings:

It contained a long table and two long benches for the pupils and a small table for the teacher. The floor was covered with fresh sawdust and shavings.

11 Clipping, No date/no newspaper, from Vertical files, Teachers, MHS. 12 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages. 33. Anne Woywitka, "Golden Rule Days," Alberta History 46:2 (Spring 1998): 12. 78

There was a framed board about three feet by six standing against the wall with a partly used can of black paint and a used paint brush on the floor beside it. There was a heating stove, but only one joint of pipe. The girls walked to a nearby coulee and found that the rest of the stove pipe had blown into the coulee, so the children all went after it. With the pipe assembled, the two Clark boys got the stove set up. This was quite a job for 14-year old boys. Then the broom and pail arrived. The boys carried water and helped the girls get the sawdust and shavings swept up and put in the stove for future kindling. The mothers had sent towels so the girls washed the two windows. There was no clock and none of us had a watch but we ate when we were tired and hungry —then went back to work till we had the place in shape to hold school. The second day of school someone sent a clock and it stood on my table. I wound it at the end of each day.13

Clark and her pupils formed an immediate bond of understanding when they arrived for school and found the accommodations lacking. The children were willing participants in readying the schoolhouse for their own occupation, and Clark organized the necessary work according to age and gender.

Although the bond between teacher and pupil was definitely important, qualified teachers were needed to maintain control. The quality of education that children received was dependent on the quality of the teacher, or as one school official noted, "As the teacher, so the school."14 The first teachers in the U.S. West had often been young eastern women who went west for a variety of reasons that included a lack of teaching jobs in the East, the desire to attain monetary self-sufficiency, and the belief that God was providing an outlet for their training. Teaching was also one of the few respectable

Corlie F. Dunster, "Early Day Pioneer Schools in Toole County", The Shelby Promoter and Tribune. July 9, 1964. 14 E. A. Carleton, Sixth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction 1901 (Helena, Montana: State Publishing Company, State Printers and Binders, 1901), 7. Henceforth BRS. 15 Polly Welts Kaufman, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), xxi- xxii. For a description of women teachers in the form of missionaries in the American Southwest, see 79 occupations open to women in the period from the 1850s to the 1890s. Educators used maternalist thinking to link women and children, believing their gender made young women ideal for the job of teaching. Teaching was regarded as preparation for women's traditional roles as mothers and housewives; work that women could do with minimal qualifications, and for which they could expect lower pay.16 Teachers were in high demand during the settlement period due to the rapid population growth and the increasing numbers of schools starting in rural areas, but female teachers found their own reasons for taking advantage of this opportunity.

Two things brought Margaret May Frank Shaw to Cardston, North-West

Territories after graduating from Ontario Normal School, in 1899. In her memoirs she wrote that "they were as short of teachers, as the east had an oversupply. The salary would be four hundred and eighty dollars per year, which sounded like riches, after the

1 7

Ontario rates." Mary Hyland had taught school in Minnesota, but gave up her teaching career when she married in 1900. When she and her husband migrated to Montana in

Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), particularly Chapter 3. Nancy M. Sheehan, "Women and Education in Alberta: The Rhetoric and the Reality," in Exploring Our Educational Past, eds. Nick Kach & Kas Mazurek (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Limited, 1992), 119. Using a life-course approach, Kathleen Underwood determines that the timing of women's move into teaching has to be seen in relation to "life's crucial events" like when young women left school or when and if they decided to marry. Teaching should be viewed from the context of "family responsibilities." Kathleen Underwood, "The Pace of Their Own Lives: Teacher Training and the Life Course of Western Women," Pacific Historical Review 35:4 (Nov. 1986): 515. Men also went west to teach. Nova Scotia educator George Chipman left his home in the east in what has been described as "a steady exodus of Maritime teachers to the prairies." See Ian MacPherson, ed. "George Chipman, Educator," Alberta History 26:4 (Autumn 1978): 32. 17 Margaret May Frank Shaw, "Autobiography of Margaret May Frank Shaw," May 12, 1964, D920,S535, Glenbow Museum and Archives. 80

1914, she resumed teaching in order to have a steady source of income. From 1910 to 1912, Maggie Davis and her husband Dennis left their Montana homestead during the school year and moved to Carter, northeast of Great Falls. Maggie taught in the four- room schoolhouse in the growing community, while her husband worked for neighbours.19

Becoming a teacher in the West could also be the accomplishment of a personal dream. For Montana resident Bess Stone, the idea of teaching had been something she had long contemplated. After completing three years of high school and taking the teacher's examination for a third grade certificate in 1908, she applied for and was rewarded with a teaching position at the Ross Fork School, six miles from Moore,

Montana. Recognizing her own weaknesses, she wrote: "I enjoyed that term of school very much, but have often wondered what kind of courage instilled (sic) me to go into that school room with no teacher training, no experience, in fact, with little more than a sheer love for teaching."20

In Montana, women who filed on homesteads in their own name provided education to children in their area. Remuneration could assist in their survival.21 Maggie

Mary Hyland Currier, "Montana School Teacher," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 25:1 (January 1975): 24. Seena B. Kohl, '"Well I have lived in Montana almost a week and like it fine': Letters from the Davis Homestead, 1910-1926," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 51:3 (Autumn 2001): 38. 20 Bess Stone, "My Life", SC1475, MHS. 21 See Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II, 4, 29, 194, 243. Also, Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. I. 45, 97, 302. See also, Mabel Lux, "Honyockers of Harlem Scissorbills of Zurich: A Personal Account of the Harsh Challenges Met by Homesteaders Who Answered Jim Hill's Siren Call," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 13:4 (Sept. 1963): 10. Government regulations did not allow young, single women to file on homesteads in Canada. Under the terms of the Dominion Lands Act of 1872, only men who were at least twenty-one years old or the heads of households, including widowed or divorced women were able to 81

Porter began proving up on her homestead while teaching west of Sidney. In 1910, while studying for her teacher's examinations, Alida Swenson taught three children in her claim shack because there was no school in the district. In 1911-1912, she taught the

Hilger School, commuting eight or ten miles from her claim. In 1913, Glen Fritsch attended summer school in teacher Mary Ashworth's claim shack because the district had no school. Emma Miller who homesteaded in Thirteen Mile Valley in 1910, was prevailed upon to teach a three-month term for fifteen school age children.22 If these women had not been in the area, or had not agreed to provide lessons, children in these districts would not have received formal instruction.

Educators in both Montana and Alberta, worried that continued growth in the number of schools, particularly in rural districts, would lead to a severe shortage of teachers. E.A. Steele, Superintendent of Public Instruction felt that the only way to prepare teachers for Montana was to have them educated in Montana. The 1893 legislature approved building a teacher training facility or Normal School in Dillon.

When commenting on the construction progress of the Dillon facility Steele wrote: "Let us educate them at home and thus build up another educational center within our grand

Commonwealth."24 In Canada's North-West Territories, normal school training had been offered as part of the high school curriculum in Moosomin and Regina Union High

file for a homestead in Canada. See Catherine A. Cavanaugh, ""No Place For a Woman": Engendering Western Canadian Settlement," Western Historical Quarterly 27:4 (Winter 1997): 504-505. 22 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. 1.97. 302. Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II, 4, 29. 23 For Alberta: AR 1906. 12 and 15: AR 1907. 17 and 51; AR 1909. 14: AR 1910. 64: AR 1912, 61; AR 1913. 11. For Montana: BRS 1898. 10; BRS 1906, 6, 10, and 19; BRS 1908, 5 24 BRS 1896. 12. 82

Schools since 1890, but in Alberta's first year as a province the Department of

Education officially established a Normal School in Calgary.25 In a four-month term,

Normal School students were trained to be teachers. By educating teachers for the place

in which they were to work, educators provided important details as to government

structure, state or provincial history and geography, as well as aspects of day-to-day life

within Alberta and Montana that were different or unusual from other places. The

teacher training facilities were transition zones where young teachers were trained to take

on their roles in rural schoolhouses.

Montana educators "made do" with local candidates and teachers from the eastern

United States, while Alberta's Department of Education recruited teachers from Great

Britain.26 Minister of Education A. C. Rutherford believed British teachers would help

maintain the British heritage of Alberta. Montana had based its public school system on

the common school model in the rest of the United States. This movement focused on

creating good citizens based on moral training, to uphold the values of Anglo-American,

Protestant, white, upper-class males. Montana's educational regulators chose to adopt

this model. In 1894, E. A. Steere, Superintendent of Public Instruction, wrote: "Laws for

Bernal E. Walker, "The High School Program in Alberta during the Territorial Period, 1889-1905", in Shaping the Schools of the Canadian West, eds. David C. Jones, Nancy M. Sheehan, and Robert M. Stamp (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Limited, 1979), 213. Province of Alberta. Department of Education Annual Report. 1906, (Edmonton: Jas. E. Richards, Government Printer, 1907), 12. Henceforth AR, lb AR 1906, 15, AR 1909. 14. The 1913 Annual Report made mention of a "Hands Across the Seas" movement. Alberta teachers were provided with the opportunity to "visit places of interest in Great Britain and other parts of the Old World." The program subsidized the travel and accommodation expenses while providing teachers the opportunity to vacation in Britain. Plans were also underway to purchase a residence in London to provide accommodation for teachers taking advantage of a teaching exchange program. See AR 1913, 19. 7 David Boers, History of American Education (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007), 18. See also Elliott West, Growing Up With the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 188. 83 the government of our schools should be intelligible, concise, consistent, free from narrowness of every kind, above prejudice, and above all, patriotic and christian. They should be so framed, that their provisions will be in entire harmony with each other, and all built into a solid structure of fairness, justice and wisdom." Consequently, Montana educators saw their public schools as a nation-building tool advocating a shared culture, separate and distinct from European influence. This affirms the national differences that Paul Sharp asserted.

In the classroom, these policies of nationalism or affiliation meant that for newcomers, learning English was an important element of education on both sides of the border. The important exception was the provision for French instruction in Alberta, but there were few Francophone settlers in the southern Alberta borderlands. One Alberta woman remembered not knowing a word of English, like many others in her school. Her first lessons involved singing, "Scotch songs, and all the Irish songs. And of course you had to sing 'God Save the King,' all for learning English." This differed from the memory of Mrs. Andreas Kalmbach who related moving to a largely German-speaking community when she first arrived in Montana, making the transition of an immigrant family much easier. Her children, however, needed to attend school for a whole year to learn English before being able to start first grade.31 Comparing the statement of the

Alberta woman with those of Mrs. Kalmbach, it is easy to recognize anger in the former,

28 E. A. Steere, Third BRS 1894. 257. 29 Boers, History of American Education. 31. TQ As quoted in Eliane Silverman, The Last Best West: Women on the Alberta Frontier. 1880-1930 (Calgary: Fifth House Publishers, 1998), 51-52. Kauffman, As I Re member... Vol. I. 92. 84 not for having had to learn a new language, but for having the language framed in the tenets of "Britishness". A newcomers' country of origin would have made a difference in their attitudes, however, since "educational authorities usually found that

Scandinavians and most Germans were receptive to the school, but that settlers from central and eastern Europe" were less likely to agree with educating their children in general or having them educated in English at all.32 These types of generalizations are a reflection of the bias that immigrant children faced within the walls of the rural schoolhouse.

The convictions of school officials, however, were contradicted by the Benes family, Czech immigrants in Montana, who refused to have their children learn

"American" until their children started school. Mrs. Benes' friends and neighbours attempted to convince her that she was doing her children an injustice by not ensuring they knew the language before beginning school. Mrs. Benes spoke broken, heavily- accented English and she thought that teaching her children English would result in her bad habits being passed on to them, making it more difficult for her children to learn

English later. Mrs. Benes was firm in her conviction, but conferred with the local schoolteacher. The schoolteacher agreed and Mrs. Benes was proud that her children learned proper "American" in only one year at school.33 Mrs. Benes equated learning

English to citizenship. The Alberta woman equated learning English to being British,

Robert M. Stamp, "Education and the Economic and Social Milieu: The English-Canadian Scene from the 1870's to 1914," in Canadian Education: A History, eds. J. Donald Wilson, Robert M. Stamp and Louis-Phipippe Audet (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall of Canada, 1970), 304. 33 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II, 297. 85 and not to being Canadian. In both cases, verbal English on both sides of the border was the same, but the connotations differed.

Not speaking English in a public school on either side of the border placed schoolchildren in an uncomfortable position where communication was very difficult.

Alienation from the other children was not easy for immigrant children, even when attending a school with other immigrants if none of the children spoke the same language.34 For Lily Scott, a Finnish immigrant, simply asking to be excused to relieve herself required the translation of another girl in her class who was also of Finnish descent.35 Some students remembered that the language barrier was especially difficult for younger children. Unable to communicate and fearful of approaching the classroom authoritarian, youngsters left "puddles under desks."3

Learning English was often the first step in learning new cultural traits.37 In the

MacLeod Inspectorate of southern Alberta, inspector Joseph Morgan noted:

The problem of dealing with foreign children in our schools demands special qualifications on the part of our teachers. In the first place the pupils must be taught the English language and in the second place a wholesome knowledge

Silverman, The Last Best West. 51. 35 Interview, Lily Scott, Canmore, February 1, 1976, Eliane Silverman Fonds, 81.279.33 Provincial Archives of Alberta. Henceforth PAA. Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 153. Although this was mentioned for the Chapel Rock #3663 school, only established in 1920,1 include it as an example of how immigrant children would have had difficulties in school before they learned English. 37 Marilyn Barber, "Canadianization Through the Schools of the Prairie Provinces Before World War I: The Attitudes and Aims of the English-Speaking Majority," in Ethnic Canadians: Culture and Education, ed. Martin L. Kovacs (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1978), 283. Selma Berrol, "Immigrant Children at School, 1880-1940: A Child's Eye View," in Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America. 1850-1950. eds. Elliott West and Paula Petrik, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 54. Sophie Trupin, a Russian Jewish immigrant who grew up in North Dakota wrote that she was pleased to learn a new language in school. "I was learning a new language and meeting children from different cultures." Learning English, and choosing an English name were the first steps in becoming Americanized Sophie Trupin, Dakota Diaspora: Memoirs of a Jewish Homesteader (Berkeley, California: Alternative Press, 1984), 51,76, and 107. 86

and appreciation of British institutions must be inculcated. In the case of pupils of European parentage the first difficulty is the greater. In the case of those from the south there is a latent antipathy to anything British. In either case the teacher needs knowledge of the best methods to pursue and tact in their application. These must be acquired through special training at our Normal School or through experience.

Though teachers on both sides of the border were challenged to assimilate immigrant children, Inspector Morgan's concerns about American children's antipathy to British institutions was not matched in Montana by concern about Canadian youngsters. From its inception, Alberta's school system was infused with quarrels about language and national affiliation that could make the job of the rural schoolteacher difficult. The

MacLeod inspector's reference to language was related to non-English speaking immigrants from Europe, particularly Ukrainians who had immigrated to Alberta in large numbers. Finding teachers qualified to teach students who could not speak English was a challenge for government officials. They believed that using English exclusively in the classroom was the best option, but finding a qualified teacher who could speak English and Ukrainian or German was difficult.39 The Alberta government was so concerned with educating non-English speakers that in 1906 it created the office of Supervisor of

Schools for Foreigners to assist in creating schools in districts largely settled by non-

English speakers, but also to locate appropriate teachers for these schools.40

With regard to language, one French-Canadian teacher, teaching in a French district, had used a system which showed innovation and met with success. She began by

38 Jos. Morgan, AR 1911, 74. 39 G.E. Ellis, AR 1906, 53. See also Robert S. Patterson, "History of Teacher Education in Alberta," in Shaping the Schools of the Canadian West, 199-200. Robert Fletcher, Supervisor of Foreign Schools, AR 1907, 57-58. 87 having one "English only" day in her classroom so that she and the children spoke only

English from the time of their arrival until their departure. The teacher assisted during recess and lunch breaks to provide English words. Gradually the number of "English only" days was increased, so that in two months the only language spoken was English.41

These French-speaking children learned to speak English as a group and as a requirement for schooling. At the same time, by instituting an "all day" policy the teacher enforced

English as something that was part of regular, day-to-day conduct.

The experience of Native children in industrial schools was indicative of how language instruction was an essential element of citizenship training. One Alberta Native woman, whose mother had been forced to attend a mission school recalled:

My mother, she was about four years old, about the first one there, and stayed about fourteen years. But she had only two grades or three. The first years you go in, you do A grade: that's hardly anything you learn. The next year is B, then C, then grade 1. They're just teaching you English, I guess.. .You weren't allowed to talk Cree in front of the nuns; they don't understand. Outside you could, but not in front of the nuns.42

For this woman's mother, the indoors was a borderland where religious and national authority forbade speaking Cree. Regulations forbade Native children attending these schools to speak their Native language. To do so brought punishment. Natives in

Alberta and Montana attended church-run residential schools the primary goal of which was to create English-speaking Christian farmers.43

41 G.E. Ellis, AR 1906, 53. 42 Silverman, The Last Best West, 51. 43 E. Brian Titley, "Indian Industrial Schools in Western Canada", in Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Educational History, eds. Nancy M. Sheehan, J. Donald Wilson, and David C. Jones (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Limited, 1986), 133. Robert J. Bigart, "Editor's Introduction," Zealous in All Virtues: 88

In Montana, a greater unity of purpose was expressed by W.G. Eggleston, editor of The Press in Helena, addressing 1902 Normal School graduates in Dillon:

I want my children to have light. I want the light turned into every corner of their minds. I want all other children to have the same light, and just as much of it, because I want my children to live in a true republic, under a just government; and that is not a true republic in which light is shut off from a majority or even from a minority of the children; in which hundreds of thousands of future citizens are growing up with dark corners in their minds. For do not forget that the man with a dark corner in his mind is far more dangerous to society than he is to himself.44 Eggleston's speech resounded with patriotism, but a single-mindedness of purpose was evident. Children were to be provided with an education to reinforce a belief in democracy, fair treatment, and justice for all. The language difficulties encountered by new immigrants and Natives were simply ignored or it was just an obvious expectation that all children would learn English since regulations indicated that all schools must be taught in the English language. At the same time, the lack of controversy over language left the Montana rural school teacher less distracted by debate, but implied that learning

English was essential to being American. Ann Skocilich Pentilla, who grew up in Butte,

Montana could not speak "American" when she started school, but she still held her first teacher in high esteem despite the failing grades she received and having to re-do the standard in the summer months. Teachers in Montana still taught their immigrant charges English, but the historical language controversy that had plagued Canada and

Alberta simply did not manifest in the same manner in Montana.

Documents of Worship and Culture Change. St. Ignatius Mission. Montana. 1890-1894 (Pablo, Montana: Salish Kootenai College Press, 2007), 8. 44 W.G. Eggleston, "Let the Children Have Light", BRS 1902, 117-118. 45 As quoted in Peavy and Smith, Frontier Children, 126, 128. 89

In Alberta, national differences created confrontation even among English speakers. While the report of Alberta Inspector Joseph Morgan had been largely concerned with the challenges of teaching the English language, he had also pointed to

"those from the south" being apathetic "to anything British". He was referring to

American immigrants who were living in his district. Attending a rural school near

Carstairs, Alberta, in 1910, Annie McCool's husband remembered that he was the only

Canadian in his classroom. A contentious community issue arose when the American children wanted to put up an American flag or tried to bully McCool into saying he was an American.4 Although the American and Canadian children shared the same language, difference was detectable because of previous cultural training.

Southern Alberta's Macleod district also contained a large Latter Day Saint (LDS) settlement around Cardston, immigrants from the United States, marked by their religious difference. Protest did ensue against American Mormons, often led by the various

Protestant churches. The Canadian public was cautious of these Americans because of the continued fear of American annexation plots. They were also apprehensive that

Latter Day Saints would continue polygamous practices in Canada for which they had been jailed in the United States. Although the public perception considered Latter Day

Saints ethnic outsiders until the 1920s, government policy gave them no leniency.47

46 Interview, Annie McCool, Calgary, May 4, 1976, Eliane Silverman Fonds, 81.279.72-79 PAA. 47 Howard Palmer, "Polygamy and Progress: The Reactions to Mormons in Canada, 1887-1923," in The Mormon Presence in Canada, eds. Brigham Y. Card, Herbert C. Northcott, John E. Foster, Howard Palmer, and George K. Jarvis (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 1990), 122-123. 90

Taken from a child's perspective, the emphasis on "Britishness" and

"Canadianism" in their new Alberta schools would have been a confusing contradiction for children who had received previous schooling in the United States. The comment of inspector Morgan simply reflected the public outcry, and was not indicative of the policies of the North-West Territories or Alberta. McCool's recollections showed that despite linguistic commonality, ideas of national affiliation were contentious within schools where people from various nations gathered.

The public schoolroom was often less controversial. The diary of Frederick J.

Conn, a teacher in Carlstadt, near Medicine Hat, Alberta invoked a picture of calm and regularity to the school day. His 1913 diary entries summed up his teaching work almost exclusively with "School again." On May 19, Conn mentioned that a "gang red[sic]" had gone missing from the school, but offered no explanations or accusations, only "don't know whether taken purposely or not." On December 5, Conn indicated he "gave the children a phonograph concert this afternoon", but made no mention of their reactions.

On December 22, preparations were obviously underway for a celebration, for Conn allowed the children to use spare moments to decorate the schoolroom.48 Conn's calmness gives the impression that his work did not occupy an important part of his day.

It might also suggest that he had such ultimate control over his students that they would never dare to exhibit behaviour that bore mention or an opinion worth commenting upon.

If read in isolation, Conn's diary reinforces the belief in peace, order, and good

Frederick J. Conn, Diary, M252.NA2927, Glenbow Museum and Archives. 91 government so often reflected upon by Canadian historians when discussing western

Canadian settlement. It also provides some detail about the things which occupied children in the rural classroom.

Conn's diary entries contrasted with those of Idora Z. Smith Guthrie who taught in various Montana rural schools in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.49

On June 21, 1898, Guthrie was teaching in Georgetown and noted: "All about as usual at school only I scolded Mabel Brown and tonight her mother came out and gave me goudy[sic]. I gave her about as good as she sent." The next day she wrote: "A little more quiet today. I will quell them yet if I can only hold out."50 Teaching in Stearn in

1902, Guthrie's writing provided a glimpse into the life of a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, and also into the activity of the children on an average school day. On

September 18 she wrote: "Eighteen scholars today. I have had to lay the law down some. I am very tired and about discouraged." The next day she commented: "All at school today and the devil to pay. I never saw such contrary mules in my life."51 Despite the difficulty she encountered in the classroom, and the fatigue of which she often complained after a particularly trying day, Guthrie seemed to enjoy her work and the children. She faced the challenges of teaching with determination, but from Guthrie's

The richness of Idora Z. Smith Guthrie's diaries, as opposed to those of Frederick Conn can be explained by what Elizabeth Jameson has seen as a focus of women on the details of everyday life. She has written that historical documents left by women are focused on "details of work, family survival, and relationships." See Elizabeth Jameson, "Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West," in The Women's West, eds. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 161. However, Conn's diary may simply be a reflection of his own unique style of writing. 50 Idora Z. Smith Guthrie Diaries, MC201 Box#2, Folder 2/3, MHS. 51 Ibid,, MC201, Box#2, Folder 2/5, MHS. 92 diaries it is obvious that a one-room schoolhouse could be an unruly place where teachers faced a multitude of disciplinary challenges. Guthrie's classrooms, however, could also reinforce the descriptions of the American West as a more violent or disorderly west, or of children's testing a female teacher more than a male teacher.The contrast between the impressive orderliness suggested by Conn's diary and Guthrie's entries could reflect differences of gender, personality, or nationality, but determining the wider significance of these contrasts would require much more research.

Idora Guthrie's diaries provide insight into schoolroom activity and the relationships that could develop among teachers and students. In the fall of 1903, when teaching at Stearn, Guthrie mentioned that her pupils had started a petition to present to the trustees to allow Guthrie a holiday on the day after Thanksgiving and that the school should not have to make up the day. Guthrie would not be returning from a holiday until the day after Thanksgiving, which meant a required day of school would be missed. The trustees denied the children their petition. A replacement day was scheduled the following Saturday. Guthrie commented: "They are pretty provoked but they will

en live." Although the children would have profited from the petition by not having to attend school on Saturday, simply the act of organizing a petition illustrates the two-way relationship that teacher and students could develop in a small rural school. This episode also illustrates the three-way power relationship among trustees, teachers, and pupils, which encouraged an understanding of authority. Despite a congenial teacher-pupil

Ibid., MC201, Box#2, Folder 2/6, MHS. 93

relationship in the social borderland, both teachers and pupils were still answerable to

the local school trustees. The activities of schoolchildren as they learned life's lessons

would have been lost if teachers like Idora Guthrie and Frederick Conn had not written

down their impressions of the rural classroom.

One of the difficulties of writing childhood history is the absence of children's

voices in most historical sources. Adult memoirs written years after are often the only

traces we have of what a rural schoolhouse was like for children. Here again, teachers

can provide some insight. Like Idora Guthrie's diary entries that showed rambunctious

behaviour that tried her patience, or a growing awareness of societal regulations,

teachers' comments about children can give some insight into the thought processes of

children's learning. In some cases, this detail can be gleaned from a class register. In

1900, Gertrude Storer who taught in Kalispell, Montana's Central School, wrote explicit

comments in the daily programme section of her class register. She outlined her

impressions of the children in her second grade class.

Her comments indicate that the children presented a multitude of concerns for her.

(See Appendix D) She wrote of absenteeism, behaviour, morality, aptitude, and

scholastic achievement. Her primary concern related to her ability to discipline

effectively and how to coax the children into paying attention to their studies. Storer's

concerns were all relevant to the conviction that the public school was the foremost

method of creating citizens from the young. They emphasized the schoolroom as a social borderland or training ground for appropriate social behaviour. 94

She described children as mischievous but pleasant, pleasant and obedient, inattentive, listless, peculiar but bright, bashful, easily influenced, quick and bright, frail, and ambitious. These are obviously comments from a teacher who observed the children in her charge and who wanted to see those same children succeed even if it meant exerting discipline. Those students who did not have Americanized names, like

Andy Nortome, Frieda Peterson, and Peter Peterson were described as deaf or hard of hearing. Their lack of English comprehension may have made it difficult for these students to know when they were being addressed. This difficulty may have led to

Andy's leaving school in the spring. For Earle Barnhouse, however, Storer makes special effort to inform her successor of her impressions.54 Initially, she had written only: "Dull, incapable, peculiar" but on a separate sheet of paper, perhaps written later, Storer explained her concern regarding this boy:

Earle Barnhouse: He came to me in the winter. He had attended school before in the country and whatever he had been taught he evidently had failed to learn. He knew nothing of numbers and but very little of words. I do not understand the child. I have failed to arouse him. What I try to teach affects him not. Whatever mind he has is not wakened but[sic] my presentation of truths. What time I gave personally to him is used in the first steps of learning. Physically he appears strong enough. I have not examined his eyes and ear (sic) to test their power. I think however his

5i Central School Class Register, 1900-1901 - 2nd Grade - Teacher E. Gertrude Storer, Box Tag # 2004.009.002, Item #22, Museum at Central School. 54 Ibid. With the adoption of a course of study in 1899, the Department of Education also adopted a new School Register which included a section for a Report to Successor. Teachers were directed to make entries into this section in order that "showing, definitely, the standing or grade of every pupil and even the page in the course of study to which the class has advanced, and where, ordinarily, the class should commence the next term." so that work in the next term could commence where it had left off the previous term. This was particularly important in rural schools since terms were often only three to six months, and a different teacher was usually engaged from term to term. Course of Study for the Common Schools of Montana, (Helena, Montana: Independent Publishing Company, 1899), 14-15, S 372.19 P96C 1899, MHS. 95

learning is poor. On the play ground he is inclined to be mean and rough. Has been a source of worry to me.55

These words reflected the frustration Storer felt after trying to teach and train a single child whom she found severely lacking in previous education and in proper behaviour.

Her assessment can stand as evidence that despite government regulations outlining how teachers and pupils should behave inside the classroom, there were some instances in which even the most caring teacher could simply not reach a pupil through personal attention or the prescribed curriculum. They may also have reflected the problems immigrant children faced and their hostile or passive aggressive responses.

Storer's comments on behaviour and morality reflected the social concern of educators to train moral and ethical children. Canadian and American educators in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries focused on teaching children appropriate modes of behaviour by the example of the young, moral schoolteacher, through the curriculum, and by reinforcement.5 The responsibilities of the pupil were clearly outlined by the Department of Education for all students in Alberta:

Every pupil registered in any school shall be required: To attend regularly and punctually and in case of absence or tardiness to give to the teacher either orally or in writing a reasonable excuse therefore; to be provided with the authorized text books and other school requisites; to be clean and tidy in person and clothes; to be diligent in studies, kind and courteous to class-mates, and obedient and respectful to the teacher; to conform to the rules of the school and submit to such discipline as would be exercised by a kind, firm[,] and judicious parent. All pupils shall be responsible to the teacher for their conduct on the

35 Central School Class Register, 1900-1901 - 2nd Grade - Teacher E. Gertrude Storer. 56 Nancy M. Sheehan, "Indoctrination: Moral Education in the Early Prairie School House" in Shaping the Schools of the Canadian West, 223. Emmet J. Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization 1864-1930" (PhD Diss., The Catholic University of America, 1931), 35. See also Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country. 201. 96

school premises, and also for their behaviour on the way to and from school unless accompanied by one of their parents or guardians or some person appointed by them.57

Similarly, the 1872 Montana School Law provided that pupils were to "comply with the regulations of the government of the schools, to pursue the required courses of study and

CO to submit to the authority of the teachers." The duty of schoolchildren was to behave in a decent manner, to learn their lessons, and to respect the authority of the teacher.

Citizenship training is clearly evident in these expectations.

The duties of the teacher followed similar guidelines. Although teachers were given some responsibility for assisting in the maintenance of the school structure by reporting problems to the trustees, their first responsibility was to teach the courses as outlined by the course of study and then to maintain order and discipline so that teaching and learning could go forward. Consequently, learning the school curricula went hand- in-hand with learning appropriate behaviour.

Aside from reading, writing, and arithmetic, the curriculum for schools in

Canada's North-West Territories also included the study of ethics. Beginning in the first standard, pupils were to be taught fear and respect for God, parents, and people in positions of authority; avoidance of profane language; self-control and manliness. By the

v Regulation 21 & 22, AR 1906, 71. 58 Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 34. 59 Territorial Government, "Office Consolidation of The School Ordinance, The School Assessment Ordinance and The School Grants Ordinance," (Regina, 1905), 42-43. Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 35. 97 fifth standard, ethics included the "duty of doing to others as we would be done by" and "loyalty to Queen and Country."60

The subject of ethics as outlined in the course of study defined the three most important aspects of Alberta's education system. First, the adherence to authority would have created an acceptance in children from the earliest age of the importance of "peace, order and good government." Second, self-control meant that pupils could assist authority by behaving in a way that avoided conflict. Third, teaching "manliness" assumed that all of the children within the schoolroom were male, and that masculinity was the standard for proper behaviour. Thus, government officials were relating gender to school attendance and citizenship. This ethics training was evidence of an increased concern by professionals for identifying gender deviance.61 Authorities noted that: "All school work should convince the child of the advantages of order and government.

School training is essentially a training for citizenship." 2 By 1912, morality training was still undertaken. During the later time period, however, training to be a good citizen was pursued through more academic and practical methods.

Programme Of Studies for the Protestant Schools of the North-West Territories, 96.150 SE, PAA. It should be noted that between 1905 and 1913, there was a dramatic decrease in the number of students attending public school from standard V and standard VI. (See Appendix V) Since most students left school between these two standards, the Department of Education knew that their focus on ethics and morality had to be placed early in the child's educational life in order to create the kind of citizens officials felt necessary for the growth and development of their province. Montana officials kept statistics by county, ascertaining the financial position of each school district's value. More research must be done to gather attendance statistics on Montana, which could provide a good point of comparison to determine whether the state was able to keep pupils in school for longer periods of time. 61 Julia Grant, "A "Real Boy" and not a Sissy: Gender, Childhood, and Masculinity, 1890-1940," Journal of Social History 37:4 (Summer 2004): 830. oz Course of Study, AR 1912, 103. 98

Up until 1899, Montana had no course of study. When officially written in that year it provided that: "Morals and manners, patriotism[,] and the principles of good government are to be constantly taught throughout the school life of the child." Aside from reading, language, and numbers, the subject of physiology was taught from the second standard and entailed such topics as the parts of the body and their function, appropriate food that should be eaten to maintain a healthy body, and the evils of alcohol.

This was designed to direct children to become healthy and moral individuals, and the importance of avoiding vices which would harm their physical body.63 Only in the eighth standard, already part of High School, did the course of study include a civics course which was to teach children the structure and role of government in the United

States and Montana. Physiology was a prelude to civics and teachers were to include the basic behaviours expected of healthy people in the United States and Montana.64

Montana's focus on healthy bodies and temperance were similar to arguments and curricula focus in other parts of the United States. Historical research has shown that this subject may have been included in the curriculum, but was not always taught within the classroom. Other aspects of health, like physical exercises, were generally the cornerstone of physiology teaching.

Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2000), 42. American scholar Jonathan Zimmerman has indicated that teachers, parents, county superintendents, and temperance organization like the Women's Christian Temperance Union differed in their opinions of how effective temperance education was in the classroom, or how such instruction should be delivered. Jonathan Zimmerman, "The Dilemma of Miss Jolly: Scientific Temperance and Teacher Professionalism: 1881-1904," History of Education Quarterly 34:4 (Winter 1994): 415. 64 Course of Study for the Common Schools of Montana, 1899, 115-117. Zimmerman, "The Dilemma of Miss Jolly", 416. 99

The daily programme of teachers from Central School in Kalispell, Montana indicated that physiology itself was not part of the curriculum in 1900 or 1901, but some teachers did include exercise as a part of their regular school day. Storer noted in her daily programme that from 9:50 to 10:00 each forenoon, physical exercise was to be undertaken. Furthermore, she wrote: "In the afternoon session I almost always had some physical exercises. As gymnastics or marching." Central School was a town school where great distances did not separate all children's homes from their schoolhouse.

Some rural school children recalled that since they walked or rode to school each morning, their school day did not include a physical education program.66

Opening exercises which were also a regular part of the daily programme may have consisted of breathing exercises as described by Montana rural school pupil Dale

Eunson. His teacher, Miss Freeman, began each morning with breathing exercises, which involved taking deep breaths, holding for several seconds, and then releasing them.

The six rural children who attended Eunson's school could find no reason for these exercises and made fun of Miss Freeman for including them. Eunson's reminiscence showed that just because teachers and governments felt something was important, pupils did not always share their enthusiasm.

Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 161. 67 Central School Class Register, 1900-1901 - 2nd Grade - Teacher E. Gertrude Storer, Museum at Central School, Kalispell, Montana, Box Tag # 2004.009.002, Item #22. Central School Class Register, 1900 - Grade 4B - Teacher Maude Kimmerly, Museum at Central School, Kalispell, Montana, Box Tag # 2004.009.002, Item #25. 68 Eunson, Up on the Rim, 127. Despite the lessons and time devoted to teaching children appropriate behaviour, either to maintain order or to enforce citizenship values, memoirs clearly indicated that mischief was a chief occupation of children during their school days.

Some adults remembered dunking the braids of some unsuspecting girl into their ink wells, putting mice and snakes in the teacher's desk, and creating classroom havoc by putting shotgun shells into the stove. Some pranks had more serious results. As an

April Fool's Day joke, two boys in Cardston, Alberta stuffed the school's chimney with rags, hoping that the resulting smoke would force a school closure and an extra holiday.

70

The prank went undetected, the rags caught fire, and the school burned to the ground.

Montana teacher Idora Guthrie wrote that her students whispered and played, fought with her to get their own way, or were noisy and full of mischief. She also noted that a boy named Lloyd Nett had his feelings "killed", but the next day one of the trustees came to the school to give her a "jacking up abut Roy Oliver's hurting Lloyd Nett."

Guthrie ended this diary entry with the statement: "I am mad as the Nett'sfsic] are 71 always picking on him." Guthrie knew more than she was willing to tell the trustee, but she was not impartial on this issue.

Equating good behaviour and respect for their peers and their teachers as a responsibility of citizenship, taught children on both sides of the border acceptable

Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 65, 95. See also Pincher Creek Historical Society, "prairie grass to mountain pass": History of the Pioneers of Pincher Creek and District, (Pincher Creek: Pincher Creek Historical Society, 1981), 699. 0 Chief Mountain Country: A history of Cardston and District (Cardston: Cardston and District Historical Society, 1978), 47. 71 Idora Z. Smith Guthrie Diaries, MC201 Box2, Folder 2/5, MHS. 101 conduct. When lessons were not learned in this manner, when children misbehaved, or when mischief went too far, then discipline was enforced through corporal punishment. In a rural schoolhouse, discipline was a constant concern because of the number of children that could be in school and because of the varied ages of the students.

It must be remembered that some of the teachers were only sixteen or seventeen years of age and older pupils, especially strong farm boys, could be the same age or older.72 A teacher's job was to keep order despite these difficulties. Initially, a show of force was often used and children learned quickly that bad behaviour resulted in physical punishment.

Students from Twin Butte, Alberta remembered that discipline was quite strict. In their school, a leather strap was hung in an obvious location "so that all the teacher had to do was point at it and order was restored." Students from the Mountain View school, south of Cardston, recalled that their teacher, Mrs. Mostyn kept order in her room with the aid of a "shampock", a rhinocerous hide strap.7 Describing her early-twentieth century Montana school experiences, author Dorothy M. Johnson called them "Good Old

Rubber Hose Days" because "third- and fourth-grade teachers wielded a piece of rubber

In Montana, Maude (Smith) Ritchey recalled that after passing the required examinations and receiving a teaching certificate she refused to teach in her local schoolhouse. "The boys attending were too big—fifteen and sixteen years old. She was only seventeen herself, and she just didn't feel that she could handle them." Kauffman, As I Remember.. .Vol. II. 352. 73 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages. 35. Although written about experiences in the 1960s, Mary-Ann Kirby wrote that her disciplinary experiences occurred largely in the Hutterite church on the Fairholme colony in Manitoba. School-age children took naps each afternoon in the colony church and inappropriate behaviour such as giggling or talking, was swiftly met with "a whack" from the leather strap of the supervisor. See Mary-Ann Kirby, I Am Hutterite (Prince Albert, Saskachewan: Polka Dot Press, 2007), 77-78. 74 Chief Mountain Country. 70. hose". Harry Ronald Hinton, of the Pincher Creek School District, wrote: "One of our teachers was W.A. Ross. He too kept discipline by the free use of the strap. I should know, for during his tenure of teaching he gave five strappings [sic] and I received three of them." In hindsight Hinton admitted he deserved the punishments for infractions like making his desk partner laugh or playing hookey.7

Surprisingly, few memoirs mentioned violent punishments like severe beatings, lending credence to American historian Elliott West's claim that "spanking students was permissible", but extreme acts of violence could result in a teacher's being dismissed by the school trustees.77 Idora Guthrie provided some insight as to how children were disciplined in a rural schoolhouse. Early in her teaching career while at Dutch Hill in

1899, she noted: "All well with the school in general but Marian Akins and I had a bout and I had my hands full for a time and in the end made her keep her place." Later that evening Marian's father threatened to have Guthrie arrested. She must have learned that her discipline was best delivered swiftly for on Dec. 10, 1903, Guthrie noted in her diary: "I have been a little cross in school today. I cuffed J.D. good for making a face."

The next spring she noted: "A little trouble with J.D. I gave him a good whipping in the

7Q p.m." These incidents with J.D. did not result in any parental visits. She occasionally named other children as troublemakers and she expressed relief when these children were

Dorothy M. Johnson, "School Days, School Days, Good Old Rubber Hose Days", Montana: The Magazine of Western History 26:1 (January 1976): 53. Harry Ronald Hinton, "prairie grass to mountain pass", 71. 77 West, Growing Up With the Country, 203. 78 Idora Z. Smith Guthrie Diaries, MC201 Box2, Folder 2/4, MHS. 79 Ibid., MC201 Box2 Folder 2/6, MHS. 103 out of school and not causing distress for her or the other children.80 For the most part, however, Guthrie scolded, shuffled seats, and maintained a fast-paced teaching style to keep the children too busy for mischief. Alberta teacher George Chipman attributed the rambunctious behaviour of his charges to a lack of parental discipline enforced at home. He created order in his classroom with "the introduction of a bit of a carriage tug", either threatening to use or using the piece of rein to enforce order. He claimed the children understood the device's disciplinary implication in only a week.81

Other forms of punishment mentioned by pupils and teachers were: keeping children in the classroom during recess, making boys share a seat with a girl, and simply

on shaming children into behaving. Some parents reinforced the teacher's authority by maintaining the same disciplinary expectations. On the South Marias, in Montana, students recalled that there were few problems in school because of this double discipline, adding that if they did not admit to what they had done in school, there was always someone to give an account of what had occurred. These childhood reminiscences also counter the contention of George Chipman that poor behaviour in

w Ibid., MC201, Box2, Folder 2/3 and MC201, Box2, Folder 2/4, MHS. 81 George Chipman, "George Chipman, Educator," ed. Ian MacPherson Alberta History 26:4 (Autumn 1978): 35. Author and former teacher Gabrielle Roy described a case of shaming in her novel based on Roy's teaching experiences in Saskatchewan. She delivered a quiet lecture to one of her older student's describing how juvenile his actions have been and the embarrassment he would feel if Roy had to explain to an inspector or a trustee that one of her older pupils had behaved so childishly. Gabrielle Roy, Children of My Heart, trans. Alan Brown (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, Inc., 2000), 114-116. 83 Ponde-Toole Extension Homemakers Club, Grime Grit and Gumption: Early History of South Marias (Shelby, MT: The Shelby Promoter, 1976), 105. M978.612 Pon, MHS. Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages. 35. Alice Cowan Coleman, "Miss Jacoby: 19th Century Educator, 20th Century Guardian of Excellence," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 28:2 (April 1978): 41. school was due to lack of parental discipline. Students on both sides of the border remembered that if they received the strap at school, they would be disciplined again if their parents heard of their transgressions.

Even with the poor furnishings, the cold, the difficulties of being in close confinement, the ethics training, and the disciplinary challenges parents sent their children to school to learn the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Schooling took on new meaning in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, as parents attributed value to academic learning.84 As one Montana woman intoned to the teacher when retrieving her children from school, "Miz Hyland, I want you to learn 'em."85 In both

Montana and Alberta, teaching relied heavily on textbooks. Although in later years governments dictated what books were to be used to teach the course of study, in earlier years, teachers used what was available, focusing their teaching on reading, writing, and arithmetic. Textbooks became the most important items used in the classroom because other resources were scarce, educational theories focused learning on textbooks, and because of the scarcity of qualified teachers.8 When Jane Woolf wrote of her preparations for the first school-term in Cardston, Alberta, she indicated: "Books were scarce. A few had been brought from Utah and some found in Lethbridge."87 Similarly,

Chad Gaffield, "Children's Lives and Academic Achievement in Canada and the United States," Comparative Education Review 38:1 (February 1994): 46. Currier, "Montana School Teacher", 23. 8 Sheehan, "Indoctrination", 230. 87 Jane Eliza Woolf Bates and Zina Alberta Woolf Hickman, Founding of Cardston and Vicinity (1960; reprinted, n.p., published privately by Charles Ursenback, 1974), 54. 105 when Montana teacher May G. Clark described her first classroom in West Butte, she included a description of the textbooks available:

I had brought along in my overloaded valise a set of old eighth grade books for Montana Schools.. .The pupils had brought a set of fifth grade books for Montana, a Canadian primer, a first grade reader from King County, Wash., two sets of school books from Grant County, Ky., and seventh and eighth grade books from Lethbridge, Alta. I also had a McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader, a book I had never mastered. We did not get proper books.. .till late in August.88

In the borderland, teachers and children made do with the books available to them.

Mobility made it possible for children to be taught from books not necessarily written for the nation in which they lived. In the area surrounding the forty-ninth parallel, the schoolroom could be representative of neither country's desired educational results.

In territorial Montana, textbooks were provided by parents or purchased by school trustees on the recommendation of the county superintendent. The Montana Legislature did debate providing free textbooks for children. By 1897, ninety-two districts representing one-third of all Montana students voted to provide their children with free

on textbooks. Full control of the choice of textbooks was left up to the Territorial

Superintendent of Public Instruction and the territorial legislature did establish uniformity in 1881. As May Clark has already pointed out, however, not all schools were opened with the recommended textbooks or a course of study.

May G. Clark, Toole County, Montana, History Vertical Files, MHS. See also S.W. Park, "The First School in Montana", Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 5:1 (1966): 192. 89 E. A. Carleton, BRS 1898, 15. 90 George Lubick, "Cornelius Hedges: Frontier Educator", Montana: The Magazine ofWestern History, 28:2 (April 1978): 29. 106

In Montana, dissatisfaction with the incongruity between the textbooks and the course of study resulted in a Textbook Commission being struck in 1907. This commission took five years to analyze and select appropriate textbooks, so that by 1912 uniformity did exist. These selections also provided for the creation of an updated course of study that matched the textbooks. Pupils could then move from one Montana county

09 to another and be assured that their books would still be valid. This measure was to provide uniformity to the curriculum being taught in all Montana schools. It was also hoped that by providing free textbooks and promoting textbook uniformity that rural schools would be able to allocate their taxes and state education allocation to maintaining more regular school terms. Montana educators had complained that rural districts usually kept a school term of only three to four months due to the cost. The state government took action in order to overcome the attendance problems in rural areas and to provide for stricter controls of school terms, although the Montana Board of Education did not no provide free textbooks to all students until 1917.

91 The work of the Textbook Commission was slowed by submissions by the Billings Typographical Union, Great Falls Typographical Union, Montana Federation of Labour, Organized Labor of the State of Montana, Central Labor Council of Anaconda, Helena Trades and Labor Council, Butte Allied Printing Trades Council, Silver Bow Trades and Labor Council, and Central Trades and Labor Council of Missoula requesting that the commission select books published by publishers who were unionized. Their argument was that it was inappropriate to use books published in shops without union labour. The unions of Montana were unanimous in urging the commission to use their "best endeavors to the end that the children of the union workingmen of Montana shall have the right to study textbooks that have been manufactured by union labor and that proof be furnished that they are union made...", State Textbook Commission, RS 115, Vol. 1, MHS. Since the majority of newcomers to Montana from 1907-1912 were homesteaders, and not unionized labour it was perhaps an unfair argument made by unions largely representing workers in the publishing, printing, or mining industries. Whether the use of books published by union labour concerned homesteaders requires further study. 92 W.E. Harmon, BRS 1912, 36. 93 Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 130. In Alberta, the Minister of Education had already invoked the use of approved textbooks by 1903 and local school trustees were mandated by the School Ordinance to provide only those texts that were authorized by the department.94 In 1908, the Alberta

Department of Education began providing each child with an Alexandra Reader. This book was the only reader authorized for use in Alberta and Saskatchewan and was provided to the pupil, not to the school.

Each pupil in actual attendance receives a reader upon admission to the school and subsequently upon being promoted to a higher standard; and the reader so received becomes the absolute property of the pupil. He is thus privileged to retain his set of readers as a souvenir of his schooldays; while at the same time the objections frequently urged from a sanitary standpoint are eliminated.

Students could use the books in school and at home. However, it should be noted that in memoirs adults recalled little of their work in government-regulated textbooks.

Rural school libraries appeared to be more memorable. In both Alberta and

Montana regulations stipulated that a percentage of the school allotment received from the government had to be spent on library books. The books had to be selected from a specific list provided by the Department of Education, and schools were authorized to maintain their library as a community lending library.9 As one Montana Superintendent

Territorial Government, School Ordinance, 27. 95 D.S. MacKenzie, AR 1908. 15. It should also be noted that a public hearing was held in conjunction with the government's implementation of the Alexandra Readers. It was reported that objections had been raised because the Alexandra Readers had been printed and bound in the United States, but they had been made in union shops. It was reported that the work done by the American Book Company in regards to the Alexandra Readers could not be done in Canada because the cost of paper, printing, and binding was more expensive in Toronto than in New York or Boston. "American Book Company Has No Interest In Morang Company," The Regina Leader, March 11, 1908. 96 Regulations Of The Department Of Education, AR 1906, 72. wrote: "When Evangeline, The Deserted Village, The Ancient Mariner, Enoch

Arden, Ruskin's King of the Golden River, and many other classics of equal value can be bought for a nickel apiece, there is little excuse for any district not supplying an abundance of the best reading matter."97 Frontier teacher George Chipman praised the

Alberta Department of Education for providing the means to place a number of books

"for children, and even some of their elders" into the small, rural schoolhouses.98

A school library did not just provide supplementary reading to the children, but gave the whole community the opportunity to read. Adults who had been pupils in schools along Montana's South Marias recalled: "The school library was usually small but contained good books and a few current magazines. Pupils were encouraged to read them and they were circulated among the families so all could benefit from the literature." Lee Nickol who attended the Omholt school in northern Montana, in 1913 recalled: "Our reading was taken from the classics and I still remember much of it."99 In

Cardston, Alberta, after a fire destroyed the community public school, The Lethbridge

Herald reported: "The greatest loss, at least one that will take years to replace, through the destruction of the old schoolbuilding by fire, was the school library. The local trustees had devoted all the government grant for this purpose until Cardston had one of the best in the south."100 The cross-border influence of books is clearly evident in the recollections of those who attended Alberta's Robert Kerr school in the Pincher Creek

97 E. A. Carleton, BRS 1898, 19. Chipman, "George Chipman, Educator," 38. 99 Ponde-Toole Extension Homemakers Club, Grime Grit and Gumption, 105, 109. 100 "School Library Presentation," Lethbridge Herald, Dec. 11, 1916, as quoted in Chief Mountain Country, 47. area: "Every spring the students made a beeline for the big 'lake' across the road to try some rafting along the style of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.101 Small schoolhouse libraries linked the schoolroom and learning with the community, but at the same time

Huck Finn and The Ancient Mariner crossed the border to create a cultural borderland.

While communities benefited from the small school libraries, teachers and trustees made provision for the collection of books. One Montana educator opined that:

"Next to the influence exerted by a mother and an exemplary teacher I consider a good book."102 Teachers provided trustees with recommendations as to which titles to obtain.

i riQ

Trustees discussed what books to purchase and then provided the funding. In Stearns,

Montana, Idora Guthrie involved her pupils in maintaining the library. In her diary she noted: "The children helped me number and mark the new library books and also the old ones this p.m."104 Teachers took the time to read to their pupils from the books that the libraries held. For some children, these memories were especially relevant, and the titles left a lasting impression. Appropriate children's literature during this time period consisted of adventure stories, historical novels, and morality tales; types of reading from which children could learn important life lessons. The books also reinforced classroom discipline and morality training.

Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 32. 102 E.A. Steere, Superintendent of Public Instruction, BRS 1896, 16. 103 Fishburn SD#113 Cash Book, Jan. 8, 1909, Trustees approve $6.15 for Library Books. 989.264.01 Pincher Creek and District Historical Society. 104 Idora Z. Smith Guthrie Diaries, MHS, MC201 Box#2, Folder 2/6. 105 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 23. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 61. Sheehan, "Indoctrination", 223. 110

While the libraries contributed to the socialization of schoolroom and community, the schoolhouse became a social borderland for the whole community as the site of special events to which the community was invited. Socials were held periodically to raise money to purchase equipment for the school, or for holiday events. School memoirs most often referred to Christmas pageants. These events were not regulated by the governments on either side of the border; they were undertaken by teachers and students and assumed the Christianity of the dominant culture. Although these events were highly spoken of by former pupils of rural schools, pageants enforced power relationships and difference within the social borderland. Not all children would have felt comfortable with the meaning of the celebration.106 Children of other beliefs or cultures would have felt uncomfortable during the preparations and might have felt excluded from the celebrations. Anne Woywitka, born in Alberta of Ukrainian immigrant parents, recalled that the preparation and celebration of Christmas in her school taught her "that not all people lived by the same rules." Her family was Christian, and celebrated Christmas, but did so on January 7, Ukrainian Christmas and not

December 25.! 7 Diversity provided the opportunity to learn, but could just as easily make difference seem like something wrong. The social borderland could separate pupils from each other through its efforts to provide common celebrations.

Non-Christian children may have reacted to Christmas celebrations like Sophie Trupin. Coming from a Jewish family and living in North Dakota in 1910 or 1911 she wrote in her memoir: "The two rooms were festooned with Santas and holly and huge cutouts of green fir trees. Every day we were singing special songs.. .1 must hasten to add not all. My sister and I sat silent." Trupin, Dakota Diaspora. 77. 107 Woywitka, "Golden Rule Days," 12-13. Ill

The concerts took months to prepare and each child in the school was given a part to play or recite, and the school was decorated appropriately. The entire district was invited to the school to watch the proceedings. Newspapers made special mention of holiday pageants, describing the children's involvement and making note of the outstanding job done by the teachers in organizing the events.108 When outlining what she viewed as rules for rural Montana schoolteachers, former teacher Gen McCracken wrote that putting on school programs for community entertainment at Christmas and other holidays was very important. Furthermore, a teacher's ability was often judged by the Christmas program which she was able to produce.109 This was supported by May

Trumper, Superintendent of Schools for Montana's Flathead County, who wrote:

An effort has been made to try to have the teachers become a part of the community in which they work, in the belief that this will do more than any other agency, especially in rural districts to strengthen the work of the school. Community gatherings in the school buildings under the authority of the trustees are encouraged, for the reason that most neighbors [sic] need to meet more frequently, to know one another better, to learn to treat with proper respect th[e]ir school building, and to look upon their school as the very center and life of their community.11

In Carlstadt, in southern Alberta, teacher Frederick J. Conn provided time in the school day for his charges to decorate the schoolroom on Dec. 22, 1913.ni Idora Guthrie wrote on Dec. 24, 1902 that she too was involved in a Christmas project: "We had some lessons this a.m. Ate lunch and then went through the program. Then the people came to

See Macleod Gazette. "School Examinations", Dec. 28, 1894, "Public School Concert", Dec. 21, 1900, "School Entertainment", Dec. 7, 1905. The Shelby Times, "Thanksgiving Entertainment, Nov. 29, 1900. 109 Ponde-Toole Extension Homemakers Club, Grime Grit and Gumption, 104. II May Trumper, County Superintendent Flathead County, BRS 1912, 64. III Frederick J. Conn, Diary, M252.NA2927, Glenbow Museum and Archives. 112 trim the school-house and set the tree. We decorated the tree and put on what things were there.. .Everything went off well at the tree. Someone put on a pig's tail for me as a joke."112

Former students from the Gladstone Valley School in Alberta remembered the rural school teacher as the key to district social activities, with the teacher putting much of her spare time into planning and organizing the Christmas concert. Lunch hours and recesses were used for rehearsals as the pageant day drew near.113 Often parents offered assistance with the erection of a stage or the sewing of costumes. With fondness, adults also remembered the gifts, candy, or fruit they received from Santa Claus at the end of the Christmas pageant.114 The importance of these events in children's eyes was enhanced by the community effort put forth to produce them and by the recognition performances received from appreciative audiences.

The emphasis on celebrating a Christian holiday like Christmas in a public school upheld the foundation of Christianity in American public schools despite the presumed separation of Church and state. It also went outside the boundary of Alberta's religious compromise that stipulated that religion could only be a subject of study for the last half- hour of the school day.115 In truth, the programme for the Christmas celebration was not

nz Idora Z. Smith Guthrie Diaries, MC201 Box2, Folder 2/5, MHS. 113 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 24, 31, 37, 46,111. Chief Mountain Country, 52. Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 46, 107. Woywitka, "Golden Rule Days," 13-14. 115 W.S. Fielding, "The North-West Education Question: A Compromise Reached by the Government, An Efficient Public School System for the New Provinces", 75.518/526, Box 1, PAA. 113 always religious in nature. In December of 1905, the Macleod Gazette reported the following programme for the school entertainment.

1. Selection by Orchestra. 2. The address of welcome by Laurence Hicks was very short and appropriate for the occasion. 3. Greeting to the Kind. This song was greatly enjoyed. 4. The action song by Ten Little Daisies was a feature of the evening and the "wee ones" created much amusement by their cuteness and in acting their parts in this song. 5. Recitation, "Alberta," by Russell Whipple, was highly appropriate at this time and he delivered in a very appreciative manner. 6. The "Japanese Love Song" was acted to perfection by Gussie Gardiner, who appeared in the costume of a Japanese maiden and that the effort caught the fancy of the audience is proven by the recalling of the little lady for a second selection. 7. The "Flag Drill" by sixteen girls was excellent and drew the heartiest rounds of applause. The entertainment closed with "God Save the King".116

Some of the children's recitations expressed patriotism, but the programme did provide a diverse offering. Regardless of the program or the inclination to hold the event before a

Christian holiday, school concerts can be viewed as a way to involve the school and the children in the community while at the same time have the community take pride and ownership of its children. These events also represented the efforts of the cultural majority to enforce assimilation within the social borderland.

Whether or not a school put on a Christmas program depended on when a school term was taught. Not all schools were taught in the winter months since inclement weather sometimes made it impossible for children to safely attend. Some schools held only three-month terms once or twice a year, depending on the money available or if a

"School Entertainment", Macleod Gazette, December 7, 1905. 114 teacher could be hired. Consequently, the same type of entertainment could be offered to the parents and community at Halloween, Thanksgiving, or simply at the end of any school term. These activities increased the social relevance of the school, reflected the values of the dominant culture, and broadened the importance of the social borderland in the development of citizens.

Not all visitors to schoolhouses were as welcomed as the community during special entertainments. Inspectors and superintendents were sometimes regarded as intruders and caused a great deal of stress for teachers and pupils. In Alberta, government-appointed district inspectors were required to visit each school in their district once or twice per year. In Montana, publicly elected county superintendents undertook these visits. In both cases, however, the representative of the Department of

Education visited schools to assess the quality of the instruction, whether government building and curriculum regulations were being followed, and to assist teachers or school trustees with any problems.

One group of former Alberta pupils recalled that "inspectors' visits put the Fear of

God" in the teachers, who in turn warned their students to be on their best behaviour.

Another group remembered their teachers' anxiety when the inspectors' first order of business was to scrutinize the timetable and plan book. A third group felt that the inspector "struck terror into the hearts of the teacher and pupils alike with his superior and arrogant manner."117 One Montana pupil regarded his "spelling down" of the whole

Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 25, 55,164. 115 school during the county superintendent's visit as one of his most memorable

i i o triumphs. Idora Guthrie found the visit of an official difficult for she wrote: "Miss

Fullerton staid[sic] at school until nearly eleven. She is canvassing for re-election. This has been a hard day in school. I am very tired."119

Montana's county superintendents provided a more supportive role to school trustees and teachers, while Alberta's school inspectors took on an authoritative role. In

Montana, the county superintendents' visits were to assist and provide encouragement for the rural school teacher and to report to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction the quality of schools, equipment, and instruction.120 In Alberta, Department of Education authorities based a school's standing on one or two yearly visits. District inspectors graded the school buildings, equipment, grounds, and instruction based on government standards. The grade which a school received was part of the equation determining the financial grant a district would receive for the coming year. Impressing a district inspector in Alberta could reap financial rewards for the school and for the district's children because of the inspection's tie to an annual legislative grant.

118 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. I, 95. 119 Idora Z. Smith Guthrie Diaries, MC201 Box#2, Folder 2/5, MHS. 120 Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization", 29-31. See also Coleman, "Miss Jacoby", 44. 121 AR 1906, 62-66. See also "Inspector's Report", J. Hewyell, School District of Berrydale #409, June 15, 1898, M2768, Glenbow Museum and Archives and "Department of Education Inspection of School Instructions and Grading Table", Edmonton, September 10, 1914, 79.334 Box 22, File 415, PAA. In 1913, the Montana Legislature adopted a grading process for rural school, too. The position of "inspector of rural schools" was created and a "Standard School" plan created. County superintendents graded each of the rural schools in their district based on building, equipment, grounds, community activities, and the school in general. Schools that recorded grades between 90 and 100 were rated as A; 75-90, B; 60-75, C; 45-60, D; and below 45, E. Schools receiving a grade of B or better received a nameplate bearing the words, "Standard School", meaning that they had met requirements. In 1914, only three schools in Flathead, and two in Chouteau County were standardized. BRS 1914, 8-9. 116

On both sides of the forty-ninth parallel, the one- or two-room schoolhouses were a constructed environment with far more commonalities than differences. The biggest difference between Montana's and Alberta's rural schools was the political and financial ramifications of the county superintendents and the inspectors. In Alberta, enforcement was an important part of an Alberta school inspector's job, while in

Montana superintendents had a less authoritative role. In Alberta and Montana, the rural schoolhouse was a social borderland where community involvement and community events shaped children to take their place within their agricultural society. Alberta's and

Montana's children found similar conditions within their district schoolhouse. Power relations were apparent from the geography of the classroom, in the discipline that was enforced through ethics training, and physical punishment. Teachers were expected to enforce this discipline, while parents were also invested with imparting lessons of self- control and orderliness. Language training was used to introduce children to their initial citizenship lessons. Governments regulated library books and textbooks similarly, but within proximity of the political border the availability of books was limited. Books of any kind were used to teach children and could cross the cultural boundaries of the political border. 117

CHAPTER 4 - The Environment as Classroom: The Social Borderland Extended

I grew up in an environment far removed from Alberta or Montana, on the lower north shore of the St. Lawrence River. It is surrounded by water on the east and forest on the west, north, and south. My brothers, sister, and I spent long summer days on the beaches, picked blueberries and cranberries, fished, and in winter slid down huge snow- piles. The natural environment was an important part of who we were, and like Wallace

Stegner on the Saskatchewan prairie, we, too, were "sensuous little savages". Like

Stegner, my surroundings were my playground and workplace;2 a borderland between

"savagery and civilization".3

Just as the natural environment was important to my siblings and me, it was also important to the children of Alberta and Montana. Between 1896 and 1914, the educational experiences of children in northern Montana and southern Alberta also included interaction with the natural landscape. Onto the blank slate of the prairie, communities built schoolhouses surrounded by nature. Into an agricultural world largely dictated by the forces of nature, governments introduced schoolhouse measures to ensure that children learned about their environment. These measures were difficult to enforce

1 Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow: A History. A Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1955; reprinted, New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 25. Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 256. 3 Frederick Jackson Turner termed the frontier the "meeting point between savagery and civilization." I use these terms here as the line where my siblings and I felt a freedom from the constraints of our parents' discipline. We knew how far we could wander and remain safe, and enjoyed a sense of freedom from rules and regulations meant to guide our steps into adulthood and citizenship. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in History, Frontier and Section: Three Essays by Frederick Jackson Turner (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 60. Turner originally publicized this thesis with an address at a meeting of the American Historical Association, in Chicago, July 12, 1893. 118 and contradicted children's lived reality. During the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries schooling forced children outdoors: the outside environment linked home to school. It presented dangers, acted as playground, was a site for social interaction, and citizenship training. The schoolyard became a social borderland or social zone where children of different genders, ages, and origins came together and mingled.

Government attempted to control environmental space by introducing fencing regulations and instruction in nature study and gardening. On both sides of the border, these measures were expected to manage children while providing a structured means of introducing schoolchildren to their natural environment.

Regardless of when children traveled to Alberta and Montana, they were aware of their new surroundings. The outer environment was of interest to them, and as Lillian

Schlissel has suggested, their view was often different from that of their parents. Leaving their place of birth may have been traumatic or even fatal for some children, but it was often a great adventure. Euro-American children on the Overland Trail in the 1860s and

1870s explored their surroundings, while wagons and oxcarts moved ahead of them.6 In

1863, arriving outside Bannock, Idaho Territory, a group of travelers could not disagree when a small boy exclaimed that: "Bangup is a humbug." While the boy voiced his

4 Gloria Anzaldiia, Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999),19. Anzaldua describes a social borderland as a space "wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy." Elizabeth Jameson described a social borderland as a place "where diverse people come together or mingle." Elizabeth Jameson, "Dancing on the Rim, Tiptoeing through Minefields: Challenges and Promises of Borderlands", Pacific Historical Review, 75:1 (Feb. 2006), 5. Lillian Schlissel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (Schocken Books: New York, 2004), 36. 6 Ruth Barnes Moynihan, "Children and Young People on the Overland Trail", Western Historical Quarterly 6 (1975), 280. 119 disappointment, the adults saw the possibilities offered by the mining industry already taking over the valley.7 In 1887, fourteen-year-old Maryanne Caswell wrote her grandmother that she had found her first prairie crocus. After leaving the train in Moose

Jaw, North-West Territories and travelling by oxcart to her family's Saskatchewan homestead, Caswell described the flowers and their earthy odour, but she concluded:

"Mother was not so delighted as we were."8 Remembering the view from her train window, while travelling on the narrow gauge railroad to Lethbridge, in 1887, Ada

Louise Hinton recalled seeing "the brown prairie and flat land with no trees for many miles". She took pleasure in the prairie crocus that a fellow traveler brought her during one of their stops.9 In 1910, travelling on the Northern Pacific Railroad from Wisconsin to Billings, Montana, Dale Eunson only saw "snow streaking out of the dark" when looking out the window of his train car.10

Similarly, parents and children had varying opinions about the trips that could take children as many as seven miles to school each day. Johanna Schoening, who homesteaded near Pincher Creek, wrote of how her boys took a cart and a single horse five miles to school in Pincher Creek and the devastating day in 1915 when her fifteen- year-old son Ernest was brought home dead.

I have often on a morning watched them start for school, and sent a prayer up to our Heavenly Father to bring them safely back to me. But if anybody

7 As quoted in S.W. Park, "The First School in Montana", Montana: The Magazine of Western History. 5:1 (1966): 189. Maryanne Caswell, Pioneer Girl (1964; reprinted, Toronto: Tundra Books, 2001) 12. 9 Ada Louise Kemmis, "prairie grass to mountain pass": History of the Pioneers of Pincher Creek and District (Pincher Creek: Pincher Creek Historical Society, 1981), 84. 10 Dale Eunson, Up on the Rim (Helena, Montana: Riverbend Publishing, 2002), 14. thinks that it was all sunshine in all those years, I tell you it was not. I have seen days that if that ground had opened before me, I would gladly jumped out of sight and the hardest and bitterest day of all was when they brought my poor boy Ernest home dead.11

Similarly, while attending the Bryan's Plains school in Montana in 1902, eleven-year-old

Frances M. Kelly was thrown when his horse shied, and his foot caught in the stirrup.

The horse panicked and bolted, dragging Frances and breaking his leg. His teacher eventually rescued Frances and summoned his parents, but the damage to Frances' leg

1 7 was so extensive that it required amputation. Ernest's death and Frances Kelly's injury illustrate how vulnerable children were to their environment when travelling to school.

These are extreme examples; in general the trip to school posed little peril. Most 1 -7 children walked, came in wagons, buggies, on stoneboats, or rode horseback.

Sometimes their parents or neighbours brought them. Marie Pecher remembered starting school in Montana in 1917, short of her fifth birthday. The first year, her mother walked the mile and a half to school with her, even carrying her through snow drifts in the winter. When she was older, Marie rode horseback.14 Lulu Quick and her brother Gail hiked four and a half miles to the Lost Creek School beginning in 1913. They made a game of the trek: seeing something shiny in the distance one or the other would describe what they thought the item might be and the first one to reach it could keep it. Most often

11 Grandma Schoening's Diary, "prairie grass to mountain pass", 378-79. See also page 376. Schoening does not disclose the cause of her son's death. 12 Gladys Mullet Kauffman, As I Remember...Stories of Eastern Montana's Pioneers Vol. II (Helena: Sweetgrass Books, 2006), 395. 13 A "stoneboat" is a flat-board with runners, like sled runners, hitched to a horse. It was used by western pioneers for transportation or hauling. 14 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II, 284. it turned out to be something useless, like a discarded tin can, but it helped pass the time during their travel to school.15

Rural children near Pincher Creek also walked or rode horseback. Those who attended Robert Kerr #878 recalled their daily ride to and from school as boring, but also that "the more adventuresome or foolhardy would sometimes wrestle on horseback."16 F.

Lynch-Staunton, long-time rancher in the Pincher Creek area wrote that he and his sister were driven to school by buggy in 1911 when he was six, but thereafter they rode their ponies. They "used to meet with other mounted kids on the way and had great fun."17

Traveling long distances for an education speaks volumes about the importance placed on schooling by parents, and the influence of government regulations that enforced mandatory attendance. Going to school influenced what Elliott West has called the

"independent, self-motivated, confident, even brash personalities" of children on the western frontier.

Traveling in groups could lessen the boredom of the miles, but could also be a safety measure. Wild animals of all kinds roamed the prairie and mountain areas of northern Montana and southern Alberta. Wolves, coyotes, bears, snakes, and even range cattle could all be natural predators. Claire Berard remembered having to be vigilant each day on her walk to school in north-eastern Montana around 1905. Rattlesnakes

15 Ibid., 304. 16 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages: Recollections of Education in the Pincher Creek Area (Pincher Creek: Gorman & Gorman, 1992), 32. F. Lynch-Staunton, Greener Pastures: The Memoirs of F. Lynch-Staunton (Edmonton: The Jasper Printing Group Ltd., 1987), 1. 18 West, Growing Up with the Country. 252. 122 were a constant threat, so Claire always carried a long stick. On one occasion she encountered a rattler which she was able to kill with her stick. On a different occasion, while hauling water for the classroom, she and a classmate met a rattlesnake coiled on top of a post close to the watering hole. They disposed of that snake, as well.19 Henry

Jensen, the son of Danish immigrants, remembered stopping to investigate some calves on the range while making the three-mile journey to his rural school in 1914. The cows chased him, but he escaped by jumping a fence. He returned home, only to be sent off again by his mother, with the instruction to "follow the fence lines." The Biron children who attended the school in Beaver Mines, Alberta around 1917 took a short cut to school one day and saw a large black bear. They ran home and told their father.

Although he went back with a loaded rifle, the bear had moved on, but thereafter the rule

0 1 was that "no more short cuts were allowed." Children showed an incredible amount of forethought and practicality when dealing with the dangers the natural environment posed.

While wild animals could be encountered on the way to school, children who traveled by buggy or horseback relied heavily on their horses. Riding horses was an everyday part of work and entertainment for rural children, but domesticated horses could also pose a threat. Parents attempted to alleviate the hazard by providing children with docile, well-trained animals. Early pupils at southern Alberta's Robert Kerr School #878

Kauffman, As I Remember.. .Vol. II. 56. 0 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II. 246. 1 Severin Biron, "prairie grass to mountain pass", 262. recalled that often older horses were passed from family to family to take younger children to school, which could confuse the horse. "On one such occasion, old Tootsie' decided she should take her charges home[,] which was fine except that she wanted to take them to the wrong home."22 Those who attended the Gladstone Valley school recalled that a "school pony" could be "quite stubborn about going to school but would beat a 'hasty retreat' home to supper and their own barn."23 Similarly, in Montana, Joe

Holling and his two siblings shared the back of one old mare to the Kinney School on

Deer Creek beginning in 1893, while Hazel Winkler and her sisters loaded themselves, their lunch buckets, and a bale of hay for their horse onto a stoneboat each morning to go to the Winkler School between 1910 and 1914.24

Reliable horses also protected children from the mercurial weather, particularly during the winter months. Blizzards and extreme cold often closed schools, but these same hazards could appear while children were in school, miles from home. Delbert

Green and his siblings attended Montana's Pierce school in 1911, two and one-half miles from home. Delbert drove a horse and sleigh across the prairie to attend, but one winter day a severe storm blew up as they started back home. Being unable to drive reliably in the wind and heavy snow, Delbert tied the lines together and gave "old Gyp his head."

The horse took the children safely home. Children at Gladstone Valley School near

Pincher Creek also believed their parents knew that their "trusted mounts" could be relied

22 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages. 32. 23 Ibid., 110-111. 24 Gladys Mullet Kauffman, As I Remember... Stories of Eastern Montana's Pioneers Vol. I (Helena: Sweetgrass Books, 2006), 179. Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II, 106. 25 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. I. 158-159. upon to bring their children home safely if a blizzard found the children between

school and home.

Despite the reliability of school ponies, winter blizzards were the greatest danger

school children faced. Children were kept home when the weather was bad in the

mornings or could find themselves stranded at the schoolhouse if a blizzard blew up

during the school day. While teaching a four-month term at Dutch Hill in Montana, Idora

Z. Smith Guthrie noted in her diary on January 8, 1900, "Not many at school. It was a

little blustering this A.M." Harry Green recalled that several times after 1911, he and

his siblings were unable to get home at all because the weather had become too severe

during the day.

Otherwise, parents and family members made valiant efforts to retrieve children

from their rural schoolhouses during bad weather. James and Margaret Bidwell,

remembered one morning in 1913, when the winter weather was quite balmy. They went

to school without wearing winter clothing. No problems occurred on the journey to

school, but the situation soon changed:

During the day one of our sudden blizzards struck, and temperatures began to drop. Mr. Bidwell and the hired man made ready to go get the children from school, piling plenty of warm blankets in the wagon. By that time the blizzard had reduced visibility to almost zero, but they hitched the team to the wagon and by following the fence they were able to find the schoolhouse. Only then did they realize that in the blowing and whirling snow they had put the blankets into one wagon and hitched the team to the wagon that stood next to it! The Bidwell children were the only ones to get

Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 111. 27 Idora Z. Smith Guthrie Diaries, MC201 Box#2, Folder 2/4, Montana Historical Society. Henceforth MHS. 28 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. I, 159. 125

home that night. All the others stayed at the schoolhouse.29

The Bidwell's blizzard story ended happily, but their tale bears a striking resemblance to a prairie storm commonly referred to as "The School Children's Blizzard" of January 12,

1888. Approximately one hundred children were found dead in the fields of the Dakota and Nebraska prairie after a particularly severe blizzard. All were attempting to reach home from school.30

In southern Alberta, school terms were mandated by law as "year round" and the number of days that a school was in session was part of the calculation used to determine

"5 1 a school's government grant. Bad weather, however, could close schools. In the 1909

Fishburn School register, teacher Claudette Clarke noted that there was no school the first week of January because it was "Too cold or stormy". Bad weather continued, for on

Wednesday, January 13 and Thursday, January 14 she again noted "Stormy" in the attendance columns. On Friday January 15, only one student attended. Thereafter, attendance improved.32 As one student from the Pincher Creek area recalled: "One rule seemed to be, if the temperature was 24 below with no wind we could go but, if there was a wind and the temperature was 18 below, we stayed home." Students from Robert

Kerr #878 recalled that storms and cold were constant concerns because of the distances

29 Kauffman, As I Remember... Vol. II, 152. For evidence of children lost in a blizzard and then rescued in southern Saskatchewan see David C. Jones, Empire of Dust: Settling and Abandoning the Prairie Dry Belt (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002), 45. 30 David Laskin, The Children's Blizzard (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 269. 31 Province of Alberta. Department of Education Annual Report 1906 (Edmonton: Jas. E. Richards, Government Printer, 1907), 63. Henceforth AR. 32 Fishburn SD #311 Fonds, Daily Register for 1909, Accession #989.264.03, Pincher Creek & District Historical Society Archives. See also Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 29. Frank Austin and Myra (Austin) Harshman, "prairie grass to mountain pass", 7. pupils traveled, so occasionally parents did come to the schoolhouse to collect children before or during a storm. Wallace Stegner wrote that a blizzard rescue was a

"shared and successfully passed trial" that helped to blend a "village into a community."35

Not all school terms were held in the winter, of course. Parents enforced their own regulations on school attendance, particularly during harvest and during the winter months. These rules kept parents in control of their children's lives. In Montana, some schools were only open for three-month terms running from October to December or

March to May, particularly in the territorial or early statehood years, so as to avoid the worst that winter had to offer. In 1914, the first school term in southern Alberta's Willow

Valley #3200 school was "held in the summer when the weather was nice."36 In 1906

Alberta, the average number of teaching days "upon which schools were open" in rural areas was 164.01, 38.4 days fewer than in urban areas.

The ongoing redefinition of childhood was reflected in parental actions like rescuing youngsters from school during a blizzard or keeping children home when the weather was bad. Keeping children out of school to help with the planting or harvest work contradicted these new social beliefs, but were enforced due to the need to survive in primitive agricultural conditions. New urban middle-class child rearing practices

Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 33. Stegner, Wolf Willow, 262. Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 148. AR 1906,13. espoused treating children "with greater affection, respect, and sensitivity" Since the 1870s, the belief that children were to be nurtured rather than physically beaten into adulthood had become popular. This meant that parents and teachers had to aid children's mental, moral, and physical development.39 But, middle-class childhood ideology did not translate to the prairie environment. In her study on North Dakota settlement children, Elizabeth Hampsten, pointed out that "children were intended to be an asset to farming, not the other way around." A move to a newly developing rural area

"for" the children often caused youngsters severe hardship. The contradiction between ideology and reality reflected the quandary that pioneer families faced in trying to survive and do the best for their children.

Alberta and Montana governments, however, do appear to have been influenced by new child raising ideologies. Regulations stipulated that children were to be provided with two recess breaks each day, one in the forenoon and one in the afternoon, as well as one and one-half hours for lunch.41 Free time provided children with the opportunity for physical activity, which officials felt was essential to learning. Thus, the playground was where children engaged in what Neil Sutherland has termed the "Culture of

38 West, Growing Up with the Country. 253. Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), 18. 0 Elizabeth Hampsten, Settler's Children (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 10. 41 The School Ordinance, Chapter 29, 37, 74.1, File #249, Provincial Archives of Alberta. Henceforth PAA. J. Riley, "Development of the Montana State Educational Organization 1864-1930" (PhD diss., The Catholic University of America, 1931), 34. 42 E. A. Carleton, Superintendent Public Instruction, Sixth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. State of Montana, 1901 (Helena, Montana: State Publishing Company, State Printers and Binders, 1901), 18. Henceforth BRS. J.W. Brown, Macleod Inspectorate, AR 1910. 55. 128

Childhood."43 Sutherland believed that because of their difference from adults, children located themselves based on their similarity to other children or learned ways to behave based on their close interactions. Although this culture was linked to all aspects of children's lives, in a rural setting the often-unsupervised atmosphere of the schoolyard was where children learned communication with their peers, played games, formed relationships and groups, encountered bullying, and explored their natural surroundings.

The schoolyard was an extension of the social borderland into the natural environment and can be seen as a site of informal learning.4 Lessons learned from peers were also important for the development of citizenship. At the same time, the schoolyard became the borderland between the discipline of the schoolroom and the freedom or danger experienced on the journey to school.

Schoolyards vary in urban and rural settings, but in the North-West Territories and Alberta, schoolyards were expected to be fenced, were to contain barns for the stabling of children's horses, as well as separate privies for girls and boys. In an urban area like Calgary, schoolyards were easily distinguishable because as one Calgary booster

43 Neil Sutherland, Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 221. See especially Chapter 10 "Children in the Culture of Childhood". Sutherland claimed that the culture of childhood "structured the lives of children throughout their waking hours and may have affected their dreams as well." and "children had to come to terms with a culture passed on directly from one generation of children to the next." 44 I take the idea of an area of informal learning from an article by Paul Theobald, "Country School Curriculum and Governance: The One-Room School Experience in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest," American Journal of Education, 101: 2 (Feb. 1993): 117. Theobald terms the school yard an area of "informal or "hidden" curriculum." 45 The School Ordinance, Chapter 29, 11. noted: "each school occupies one block of land bounded by four streets." In rural areas, without fencing, the schoolyard was indistinguishable from the rest of the land on which the schoolhouse was built. Fencing the schoolyard controlled the movement of children during school hours. Southern Alberta rural school inspectors commented in their reports on whether school trustees had provided appropriate schoolyards. In the newly settled areas, money was stretched to provide a schoolhouse, a teacher, and regular curricular lessons. In more established areas, inspectors indicated that school grounds were improved and fences were built. Crop failures were one reason given for school grounds being left undefined and unaltered.47

Not until 1893, did the Montana state legislature provide that separate privies should be provided in all schoolyards, but no regulations were ever made for stabling or fencing. County superintendents, however, also mentioned the regrettable lack of attention paid to school grounds.48 In Montana, spending tax dollars to delineate a separate space for schoolyard play was not regulated, but did occur. While teaching in

Stearns, Idora Guthrie wrote of trouble in her school after telling her students "they must not leave the school ground or throw stones." Guthrie disciplined her students, and they

I. McLachlan and E. Heydon, "Governing Seventy-Five Thousand," Western Standard Illustrated Weekly. Souvenir Edition (Calgary: Calgary Women's Press Club, 12 June 1913), Pam# 305.409712 C151, Glenbow Museum and Archives. Henceforth GMA. 47 Inspector J.W. Brown, Medicine Hat Inspectorate, AR 1906, 41; AR 1907, 51; AR 1908, 52; AR 1910, 54; D.A. McKerricher, Lethbridge Inspectorate, AR 1909, 52; AR 1910, 65; AR 1911, 68; J. Morgan, Lethbridge Inspectorate, AR 1913, 92. C, Sansom, Macleod, Macleod Inspectorate, AR 1913. 95. 48 Fannie Spurck-Macaulay, Flathead County Superintendent, BRS 1902, 392; Nellie R. Brown, Teton County Superintendent, BRS 1912, 84. 130

were angered by her interference in their fun. In both Alberta and Montana,

schoolyard equipment as we know it today was not provided.

Whether or not a schoolyard was defined, however, mattered little to children.

Recess and lunch hours were usually periods of fun and freedom. Activities involved

exploring or playing in the natural environment. In Alberta, those who attended Robert

Kerr #878 in the Pincher Creek area recalled: "Every spring the students made a beeline

for the big 'lake' across the road to try some rafting along the style of Huck Finn and

Tom Sawyer. Those at Park View #2965, so named because of its proximity to Waterton

Lakes National Park, had fun playing hide-and-seek in amongst the trees in their

schoolyard. At Twin Butte #988 pupils recalled that they played around the coulee just

west of their school. Each spring the coulee would be in full flood, and the students

"would 'play' as close to the water as possible without getting wet."5 Those attending

Seddon School District #2224 near Cardston, Alberta remembered "[fjishing or

swimming in Tough Creek" as the major forms of entertainment during the noon break.51

In Montana, Angelo Tomalino and his brother, who attended Burns Creek School beginning in 1905, liked to go wading in the creek by their school. "There would be

water snakes and frogs and other creatures to make their 'field trip' even more interesting, and sometimes they'd get so interested they'd forget to think of the time."

The boys had to quickly put their shoes and socks back on to reach school before the

4y Mora Z. Smith Guthrie Diaries, MC201 Box#2, Folder 2/6, MHS 50 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 32, 44-45, 34. 51 Cardston Historical Society, Chief Mountain Country: A History of Cardston and District (Cardston: Cardston and District Historical Society, 1978), 80. 131

bell.52 Mrs. Lee Jones, who attended school in Havre, Montana after 1893, recalled

that these intermissions were used for walks into the surrounding hills to collect wild

flowers.53 Charlie Myers, who attended the Higgins school east of Fowler in 1910, remembered that he and his friends would sometimes snare gophers during the noon hour, and emulated the work of the homesteaders around them by "harness [ing] them, branding] them and rac[ing] them." For these children the schoolyard environment

offered opportunity for informal learning through exploration and play. Chores could not call them back, only the ringing of the school bell that signaled the resumption of their formal learning. The liberty children felt during their breaks was different from the order, discipline, and challenge of classroom work and the physical labour of children's chores at home. Therefore, the environment surrounding the schoolroom acted as a borderland between restriction and freedom, a place where schoolchildren learned to relate themselves to their western setting.

Some schoolyard experiences included memories of more organized games being played. In southern Alberta and northern Montana pum-pum-pullaway, prisoners base, tag, run-sheep-run, crack-the-whip, fox and geese, and anti-I-over were remembered as favorites. These games required little or no equipment aside from a ball or sock.

Kauffman, As I Remember.. .Vol. II, 26. 5 Earl Bronson interview with Mrs. Lee Jones, Havre Daily News, Feb. 16, 1968. Ponde-Toole Extension Homemakers Club, Grime Grit and Gumption: Early History of South Marias (Shelby, MT: The Shelby Promoter, 1976), 64. M978.612 Pon, MHS. 5 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 32; Mary McHarg, "History of rural schools of Big Rock, Cameron Coulee and Black Diamond Schools", 4, M3644, GMA; Gretta R. Leavitt, "The Glenwood School," 1984, 12, M8106, GMA; Clipping, No date/no newspaper, from Vertical files, MHS; "Willow Rounds was First School on the Marias River" The Shelby Promoter and Tribune of Shelby, Thursday, July 9, 1964, Vertical Files, MHS; Earl Bronson, "First Schools Here Described", Havre American historian Elliott West has said that childhood games were an important part of children's transition into the West because, like an old friend, they offered stability and tradition to children uprooted from their homes.56 Canadian historian Neil Sutherland described games as an important element of the culture of childhood, one that promoted socialization and friendship or rivalry, particularly in the area of the schoolyard.57

Team sports, like baseball, football, and soccer, were also schoolyard favorites.

One elderly Alberta woman remembered that at her school a baseball was "made of yarn ripped from stockings, wound tightly and sewed securely so it wouldn't unravel." A bat

CO was a favorite stick of firewood and lunches were eaten while waiting for a turn at bat.

Pupils of the Mountain View school, situated fourteen miles southwest of Cardston,

Alberta recalled that playground equipment was homemade and its production was a community effort: Recreation in the early days was often carried on with simple home-made equipment. Balls were made of string which was wound round and round and through and through and tied to make them more secure. These balls provided many happy hours for the little folk —however, a real ballgame was a bit different — after a few innings the string gradually unraveled[sic] and that was the end of that game! The bats were shaped from pine poles which were brought down from the mountains. This "job" furnished the men and boys with many hours of "useful whittling".59

Daily News, Feb. 16, 1968; Victor Peterson, "The Burton School", Newspaper Unknown, Teton County, Vertical Files, MHS. See also Patricia Dean, "Children in Montana", Montana: The Magazine of Western History. 34:1 (Winter 1984): 41; Elliott West, Growing Up in Twentieth Century America: A History and Reference Guide (Westport, Conneticut: Greenwood Press, 1996), 21-22. ^ West, Growing Up with the Country, 108-109. 57 Sutherland, Growing Up, 233 58 McHarg, "History of rural schools," 4. 59 Cardston Historical Society, Chief Mountain Country. 68. Mary Ellen Pettigrew, who taught in Montana's Willow Rounds School in 1902-

1903, remembered that the schoolyard contained no playground equipment, but baseball was popular entertainment for the children. There was no mention of girls and boys playing in separate games, however, so gender cooperation in the interest of sport was an important aspect of rural schooling. From these games, children learned cooperation with their peers. Not all rural schools, however, had enough students to allow for such organized games, adding to the importance of independent exploration and simple, less team-oriented games. The space of the schoolyard borderland provided a place where children practiced their citizenship skills through the games they played.

In winter, the weather could challenge children's desires to go outdoors during their breaks. Snow and cold, and a schoolhouse stove that provided a minimal amount of heat were deterrents to outdoor activities. Having appropriate clothing was necessary.

May G. Clark, the first teacher of the O'Loughlin School in northern Montana in 1904, recalled that in winter her students "wore warm stockings, overshoes, scarfs[sic], caps and warm coats." During milder weather, students in Alberta and Montana had snowball fights, played "fox and geese", slid down snowdrifts or skated.63 Gretta Leavitt wrote of the Glenwood School that "three decades of children enjoyed the enormous

"Willow Rounds was First School on the Marias River" The Shelby Promoter and Tribune of Shelby. Thursday, July 9, 1964. 1 George Chipman makes note that in one of his early schools, the girls were as good as the boys at playing football, even when it came to the heavy checking. See Ian MacPherson, ed., "George Chipman, Educator", Alberta History 26:4 (Autumn 1978): 38. 62 May G. Clark, Echoes from the Prairies: History on North Toole County (Shelby Montana: The Shelby Promoter, 1976), 124. 978.612 Ec41 c.2, MHS. 63 McHarg, "History of rural schools," 4; Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages, 23-24, 34, 44, 134 snow drifts that accumulated eastward of the board fence and the trees that marked the western boundary of the school lot. Not only did they provide excellent sled runs, they had the potential of being sculpted into elaborate systems of tunnels and hideouts."64

Teaching in Stearns, Montana in November, 1903, Idora Guthrie noted in her diary that:

"In the p.m. I made the boys stay out until they got the snow off and marke[d] six tardy."65 After 1903, a lake in close proximity to Twin Butte School in southern Alberta, provided lunch hour skating fun until the school bell called the children back. Problems arose when the school bell was not heard and the teacher had to retrieve the children.66

Despite harsh winter conditions and long trips to school and back, children still challenged their environment by playing outdoors in winter.

Native students in federally funded western Industrial Schools also played games on the grounds surrounding their schools. The idea behind games in Industrial Schools, however, was completely assimilative in nature. In Alberta, Native students were encouraged to play cricket, baseball, soccer, marbles, and skittles.67 Inspectors of Native schools observed that games played at Industrial Schools were "thoroughly and distinctly white." In 1889, one official observed that their efforts were undertaken with "Anglo-

Saxon vigour" and that "[f]rom all their recreation Indianism is excluded."68 Despite the

64 Leavitt, "The Glenwood School," 11. 65 Idora Z. Smith Guthrie Diaries, MC201 Box#2, Folder 2/6, MHS. 66 Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages. 34 67 E. Brian Titley, "Indian Industrial Schools in Western Canada," in Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Educational History, eds. Nancy M. Sheehan, J. Donald Wilson, David C. Jones (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Ltd., 1986), 142. 68 J. A. Macrae as quoted in Titley, "Indian Industrial Schools in Western Canada" in Schools in the West. 142. Originally quoted from Walter J. Wasylow, "History of Battleford Industrial School for Indians" (M. Ed. Thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 1972), 306-308. insidious intention, Alberta s Native children appear to have responded

enthusiastically to these activities. At Montana's St. Ignatius' Mission on the Flathead

Reservation, it was noted by Reverend Hubert A. Post, in 1893, that Native boys initially

played baseball with reluctance due to the hardness of the ball, but grew enthusiastic over

time. They also eagerly played football, but had to be coached in restraint while kicking

the rubber ball. Marbles was a favorite that proved they were "true Americans". Boys

were allowed to shoot arrows with bows they had made themselves, but also engaged in

games with which the reverend was unfamiliar like throwing "Montana Spears", "black

man", and "hunting ball". He did not mention the girls' outdoor pursuits.69

From comments made by inspectors and teachers, however, not all schoolyard

activity was accepted as "normal" or as simply a part of children's culture. For some

students, schoolyard activity was remembered negatively. After inspecting school

districts in the central Alberta Wetaskiwin Inspectorate, G. Fred McNally found that

children in his district were often lacking in knowledge of games. Inspector McNally had

observed of his "foreign schools" that repression of a spirit so natural to children was

detrimental to the children, as well as their ability to learn within the more formal setting

of the school.70 McNally's statement reflected the belief of the urban middle-class

reformers that children were entitled to a childhood free from work, dedicated to

Rev. Hubert A. Post, "A Model Indian Mission: St. Ignatius' Mission, Flathead Reserve, Montana, 1854-1893" in Zealous in All Virtues: Documents ofWorship and Culture Change. St. Ignatius Mission, Montana. 1890-1894, ed. Robert J. Bigart (Pablo, Montana: Salish Kootenai College Press, 2007), 255. /u G. Fred McNally, Wetaskiwin Inspectorate Report, 79.334, Box 26, File # 571, PAA. 136

education and play.71 It is obvious, however, that all children in Alberta were not

living the idealized vision of childhood advocated by reformers. Observations like

McNally's were not made by local superintendents in Montana, despite the presence of

large numbers of immigrants who came to Montana from 1900 to 1920.72

Not all teachers supervised children during recesses and lunch, so schoolyard

activity could be unruly, erratic, and cruel. The borderland of the schoolyard was also

where children learned about difference, and how difference could be exploited to make

some children feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. At Burns Creek School in Montana

during the early 1900's Angelo Tomalino recounted that: "The big boys were BIG and

many of them uncouth." Angelo's brother became the victim of the big boys' 'fun' when he was roped and dragged around the yard, stopping only when Slim Graves came to the rescue. Mrs. Lee Jones of Havre, Montana recalled that: "The only organized play was that directed by the playground leader who happened to be the top bully."74 Gertrude

Storer, a teacher in Kalispell, Montana's Central School, referred to the playground behaviour of her student Earle Barnhouse as "mean and rough." Attending Beaver

Mines School, in Alberta, the French-speaking Biron children recalled that "the other children were not too friendly". For about a week they went hungry during the noon- hour because their lunches were stolen and they were unable to communicate in English.

71 Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 152. 72 Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang, Montana: A History of Two Centuries, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 243. Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II, 26. 74 Earl Bronson interview with Mrs. Lee Jones, Havre Daily News, Feb. 16, 1968. 75 Central School Class Register, 1900-1901 - 2na Grade - Teacher E. Gertrude Storer, Box Tag # 2004.009.002, Item #22, Museum at Central School. Henceforth MCS. 137

Once the teacher identified the situation, she put a stop to the bullying. Edith

Maxwell, first teacher at the Hillsboro #2881 School in the Pincher Creek Inspectorate in

1912, remembered that:

One of the students, Russell, came to school with new bib overalls, so the kids stripped him of his overalls and put them on the front two legs of a quiet old horse that someone rode to school. They made a sign and placed on the horses ears ("Russell"). They then called her out to see. She recalled, she couldn't help but laugh, but had to really get after those kids.77

Although Maxwell's story can be seen as humorous, Russell must not have remembered

the event in the same light. When starting school in 1911, F. Lynch-Staunton recalled

that in the schoolyard he learned to fight and often returned home "a battered little boy".

Over his protests, his mother insisted on his dressing neatly for school everyday, while all

the other children simply wore overalls.78 Lynch-Staunton's appearance was different

from his fellow scholar's and it caused him to be singled out with taunts that he obviously

answered physically.

Bullies interrupted or controlled the activity of the schoolyards in some schools, but verbal abuse could be just as hurtful. In his study of three mostly-urban

neighbourhoods in Halifax, Toronto, and Vancouver, Neil Sutherland concluded that:

"Children settled most of their differences verbally," through words directed at difference

and words that were meant to wound.79 Would rural children have behaved in this

Severin Biron, "prairie grass to mountain pass", 262. Pincher Creek and District School Division, #29, Unfolding the Pages. 178. Lynch-Staunton. Greener Pastures. 1. Sutherland, Growing Up. 250. 138 manner? Elsie McDowall Bailey, whose family came to the Pincher Creek area in

1907, remembered her social experiences in her rural schoolyard:

We were snobbish and cruel, excluding from close friendship neighbour children who had dirty necks and were scared of cows, making no allowances for the Welsh boy's pronunciation, which made him a figure of fun for us.. .in my first year at school two sisters my age used to whisper things, especially in the outside privy, which I can remember only the quality of, black and rotten, full of hatred and venom even when they spoke of their own mother whom we saw sometimes in church, a woman dark and on

miserable-looking.

Similarly, Montanan Margaret Bell wrote of being called a "hayseed" by the big boys at her school. Initially, she had considered this a compliment since she was "rather proud of her ability in a hay field", but when all of the other children laughed she knew the term Q 1 was not meant to be complementary. The community of the schoolyard could be a place where children judged each other, and where nastiness and power could make some children take control while others had to fight for their own identity.

The schoolyard was also a borderland where the training of the classroom could be quickly eliminated if teachers were not held to some kind of supervisory duty during recesses and lunch hours. Parents, inspectors, and teachers saw danger for girls in the schoolyard if the behaviour of the boys was not held in check. One rural Alberta inspector complained of the lack of supervision in the schoolyard. His words speak to the training in discipline and morality that children were to be receiving in school and parental desire that this training be enforced in the schoolyard: Elsie McDowall Bailey, An Unknown Depth of Light. A Memoir of Time and Place: Elsie's Story (Pincher Creek: Windymere Foundation, 2007), 46. 1 Margaret Bell, When Montana and I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 158. Cases have been reported of boys conducting themselves most improperly in the presence of little girls on the playground. Then there is the noon intermission in rural schools where teachers go to a nearby house for lunch leaving the children to riot undisturbed for probably an hour and a half. Parents realize more than they ever did the way certain truths are presented to children decides to a great extent whether they shall grow up clean in mind and body or otherwise. A smudge on a child's mind can never be wiped off. What use for mothers to be vigilance itself at home when the work of years is undone in an hour at school, where the roughest and the gentlest of both sexes mingle for a considerable time each day without any oversight whatever! Would it be too much to insist that the teachers of such schools thoroughly supervise the outdoor conduct of the pupils? Eternal vigilance is the price but would it not be worth while?

Although sexual exploration does appear to have been part of schoolyard behaviour, according to historian Pamela Riney-Kehrberg's study of rural children in the American

Midwest between 1870 and 1920, it was rarely mentioned in the sources left by children.

However, the same ponds, lakes, swamps, hills, and pathways that children made use of to play as youngsters could become rendezvous places for the older children to meet

on away from the prying eyes of their younger classmates and the teacher.

Despite the socialization and interaction children undertook in the schoolyard, the

Alberta and Montana Departments of Education attempted to incorporate the informal learning environment into formal education. Nature study was part of the curriculum on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel, part of a movement to make children aware of their environment so they would respect it, and also an attempt to educate children for the land. With the influx of farmers to both Alberta and Montana, particularly after 1905,

8 J.W. Brown, Macleod Inspectorate, AR 1910, 55. 83 Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2005), 83. Neil Sutherland also points to sexual awareness as a part of school and schoolyard reminiscences, particularly for older children. Sutherland, Growing Up, 234. promoters of education and rural development felt nature study would assist governments in their efforts to keep farmers on the land.

The Nature Study movement was part of the general reform atmosphere permeating ideas on children's education at the turn of the century, and can be considered an off-shoot of the Country Life Movement. The Nature Study movement was particularly strong in the United States after 1895, and became part of a North American trend.84 It advocated a "hands-on," observational science study in rural schools by taking nature walks and identifying species. Interest in nature study is usually attributed to

Liberty Hyde Bailey, founder and head of the Cornell University College of Agriculture in New York. Bailey was a botanist and teacher who felt that rural youth could greatly benefit by studying the natural world around them. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Bailey as chair of the National Commission on Country Life in 1908.85 It is important to note that the nature study programme at Cornell "was inaugurated as a direct aid to better methods of agriculture in New York State" because of the number of rural people the charities of New York City had to aid during the agricultural depression between 1891 and 1893.86 After 1896, a multitude of articles and observations were

Jeffery Taylor, Fashioning Farmers: Ideology. Agricultural Knowledge and the Manitoba Farm Movement, 1890-1925 (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1994), 44. 85 4-H & Extension Pioneer The National 4-H Hall of Fame, "Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858 - 1954)," A 4-H Centennial Project of the National Association of Extension 4-H Agents, http://www.nae4ha.Org/hof/lhbailey.html# According to Neil Sutherland, Loring W. Bailey a professor at the University of New Brunswick, began teaching a Nature Study course to teachers at the Maritime Summer School of Science, established in 1887, "encouraging them to try practical activities in geography and scientific temperance and to conduct field studies of local plants, animals, and minerals." Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society, 160. Anna Botsford Comstock, Handbook of Nature Study for Teachers and Parents, 22nd Edition (Ithaca, New York: Comstock Publishing Company, 1931), v. written about nature study, particularly in the journal The Elementary School

Teacher.87 All of these articles encouraged teachers to combine nature study with their usual curriculum in order to add an aspect of science to their students' study. Taught correctly, students would engage in science in their own schoolyards.

Canada's North-West Territories 1899 course of study included only secondary studies of geography in standard I and II that provided an introduction to thinking about the earth, direction and boundaries, particularly in relation to the North-West Territories.

Geography became progressively more inclusive, but always related students back to where they lived. In 1906, after Alberta became a province, the Department of

Education introduced a new course of study defining nature study as a way:

To interest pupils in nature, to train them in habits of careful observation and clear expression, and to lead them to acquire useful knowledge, are important aims in teaching this subject. The pupil must study the plant, the animal and the soil rather than book descriptions of them. He may consult books after he had made his observations. The study of plant life should be emphasized in spring, though not restricted to that season. on This study should be connected with language, drawing and geography.

87 Francis W. Parker, "Syllabus on the Course of Study," The Elementary School Teacher and Course of Study 2:4 (Dec 1901): 261-263; Wilbur S. Jackman, "Nature Study for the Grades," The Elementary School Teacher 3:5 (Jan 1903): 326-329; Wilbur S. Jackman, "True Nature Study," The Elementary School Teacher 4:10 (June 1904): 673-678; LB. Myers, "A History of the Teaching of nature in the Elementary and Secondary Schools of the United States," The Elementary School Teacher 6:5 (Jan 1906): 258-264; Walter J. Kenyon, "A Revision of the Rudiments as concerning Nature-Study," The Elementary School Teacher 7:6 (Feb 1907): 316-322; Ira B. Myers, "Field-Work and Nature-Study, Part II. The Pedagogical Aspect," The Elementary School Teacher 8:6 (Feb 1908): 316-326; Ira B. Myers, "Field-Work and Nature- Study, Part I. The Pedagogical Aspect," The Elementary School Teacher 8:5 (Jan 1908): 225-232; Ira Benton Myers, "The Evolution of Aim and Method in the Teaching of Nature-Study in the Common Schools of the United States," The Elementary School Teacher 11:4 (Dec 1910): 205-213. See also, John M. Coulter, "Nature Study and Intellectual Culture," Science 4:99 (Nov 1896): 740-744; Wilbur S. Jackman, "Pedagogics of Nature Study," The Course of Study 1:1 (July 1900): 33-34. 88 Programme of Studies for the Protestant Schools of the North-West Territories, 96.150 SE, PAA. 89 Appendix C, AR 1906, 86. Nature study was to provide awareness of students' surroundings to support the burgeoning desire to combine farming with new scientific techniques that made agriculture possible on dry prairie land.90

Similarly in Montana, the 1899 course of study included nature study as a part of the curriculum. In the first year, nature study involved observational techniques "to look at plants, animals, distance and measures, parts of the body. Do comparative work with animals, birds, flowers, and trees." The second year included "students bringing] their own leaf samples to class." By the fifth and sixth year, Montana's children were including classification and chemical analysis in their nature study courses. l By 1906,

Montana's course of study had been altered to provide nature study instruction only in grades one through four and instruction in agriculture beginning in grade five.

Although the curriculum prescribed that nature study was taught, it is unclear whether activity in rural schoolrooms and schoolyards mirrored educators' enthusiasm for the subject. In 1907, the Inspector of Alberta's Medicine Hat School Inspectorate summed up the teaching of nature study by observing: "The study of nature has in some instances not received that prominence the importance of the subject demands, owing mainly to the failure of the teachers to realize the elasticity of the prescribed limit in this

New "dry-farming" techniques are advertised in both Alberta and Montana as an important aspect of aiding farmers to be successful. See John Herd Thompson, Forging the Prairie West (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998), 78; Howard Palmer and Tamara Palmer, Alberta: A New History (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1990), 122; Malone, et. al., Montana, 236-237. See also stories on irrigation and dry land farming in The River Press, Fort Benton, MT, Dec. 26, 1906; "For the Dry Farmer", The Shelby News, June 10, 1910; "Dry Farming Practice in Montana", The Shelby News, April 22, 1910. 91 Course of Study for the Common Schools of Montana. Helena, (Montana: Independent Publishing Company, 1899), S 372.19 P96C 1899, MHS. 92 Course of Study, BRS 1906,13-19. 143 subject." Many southern Alberta inspectors continued to complain of the failure of teachers to engage students in nature study.94 One Alberta teacher, however, provided evidence that children were engaged in the study of nature. In a programme of work for a term of summer school for the week of July 14 (approximately 1910), the following notations were made:

Monday, July 14 - PM - A practical lesson on plants using radish in bloom. Tuesday, July 15 - PM - Nature work continued - using the shepherds purse. Wed. July 16 - PM - Nature work - Study of one of the Rose family and how to detect a member of the family. Thursday, July 17 - PM - A class trip into the field near the school - naming plants and animals met with. Friday, July 18 - PM - Nature work - The chickweed and one of The Rose family. Saturday, July 19 - PM - Nature Study.95

The class trip was undertaken into the schoolyard late in the afternoon when students would be tired. The schoolyard changed from an area of informal learning to a place that aided and enhanced the formal study of the classroom.

In Montana, focus on nature study was not evident in local superintendents' reports. However, nature study was consistently a graded subject in the registers from

Kalispell's Central School.96 In the 1900-1901 school year, Gertrude Storer's second

93 J.W. Brown, AR 1907, 52. 94 D.A. McKerricher, Lethbridge Inspectorate, AR 1910, 65; Jos. Morgan, Macleod Inspectorate, AR 1911. 76; Jos. Morgan, Macleod Inspectorate, AR 1912, 61. 95 Programme of Work, 79.334, Box 23, File # 480, PAA. 96 Central School Class Register, Second Grade, 1901-02, Teacher Mrs. Edna M. Knapp, Box Tag # 2004.009.003, Item #5 MCS; Central School Class Register, Grade 4 West, 1901-1902, Teacher Miss Angelique Truchot, Box Tag # 2004.009.003, Item #8, MCS. Central School Class Register, Grade 2 West, 1901-1902, Jessie Hall, Box Tag # 2004.009.003, Item#4,MCS; Central School Class Register, Fifth Grade grade class daily programme showed that she held nature talks each afternoon from

2:00 until 2:15. Storer further noted that plants, animals, and minerals were discussed.97

In 1901-1902, Jessie Hall noted the following for her second grade nature work:

"Animals, Few Spring Flowers. The bean with its life. Hiawatha read and Nature work

no

taken by paper cutting with it." Hall's notes show that she combined nature study with

reading, hand-work for small motor skills, and observation of the outdoors. Within the

class registers of Mrs. Geddes, teacher of the first-primary Central B class in 1901-1902

and Caroline Hornby teacher of third-grade Central in 1901-1902, there were dried

pressed leaves. Teaching third-grade primary in 1900-1901, Alice Pomeroy saved a

pink rosebud in her daily register.100 It must be kept in mind that Central School was

located within a larger town and was on the west side of the Rocky Mountains and should

not be taken as representative of all Montana schools. Whether pupils brought the leaves

and flower to the teachers or the teachers gathered the plant life as examples cannot be

determined; however, since gathering samples was part the children's nature study

lessons, perhaps the teachers saved the best of the examples.

Central, 1902-1903, Effie B. James, Untagged box, #11, MCS; Central School Class Register, 4th Grade West, 1902-03, A. Caroline Hornby, Untagged box, Item #10, MCS. 97 Central School Class Register, 1900-1901 - 2nd Grade - Teacher E. Gertrude Storer, Box Tag #2004.009.002, Item #22, MCS. 98 Central School Class Register, Grade 2 West, 1901-1902, Jessie Hall, Box Tag # 2004.009.003, Item #4, MCS. 99 Central School Class Register, First Primary Central B, 1901-1902, Mrs. Geddes, Box Tag #2004.009.003, Item #1, MCS. Central School Class Register, Third Grade Central, 1901-1902, Miss Caroline Hornby, Box Tag #2004.009.003, Item #6, MCS. 100 Central School Class Register, Third Grade Primary, 1900-1901, Alice Pomeroy, Box Tag #2004.009.002, Item #24, MCS. School gardening was tied to nature study to provide children with agricultural experience and was combined with up-to-date scientific techniques.

Educators also felt that school gardening could teach essential citizenship values like respect for private property, co-operation, and consideration for the rights of others. Like the schoolroom lessons of discipline and morality, school gardens were to be used as an element of social control and to promote middle-class values. It was expected that through school gardening rural children could be channelled into farming.101

In Canada, school gardening was advocated as a viable form of manual training as a result of the Macdonald-Robertson Movement. James Wilson Robertson, Dominion

Commissioner of Agriculture and Dairying, had already been active in the Nature Study movement in Ontario because he believed that this practical study would be more beneficial to rural school students than the study of Greek or Latin. The philanthropist

Sir William Macdonald met Robertson and the two realized they shared the same concerns over rural depopulation and the disintegration of the rural quality of life, two of the main concerns of the Country Life Movement. They established the Macdonald

Rural School Fund in order to provide rural schools with funding to introduce school gardening programs. Eventually, Macdonald and Robertson negotiated with provincial departments of education, rather than just agricultural schools, in order to give the school gardening program a wide educational base.103 According to Neil Sutherland, "school

101 Edwinna von Baeyer, Rhetoric and Roses: A History of Canadian Gardening, 1900-1930 (Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry&Whiteside, 1984), 45-46. 102 Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society,!81. 103 von Baeyer, Rhetoric and Roses, 40. gardening was a blend of three separate educational ideas: nature study, manual training for rural pupils, and agricultural education for elementary pupils."104 Students engaged in school gardening would learn about their environments, the farming profession, and they would receive modern training that they could put into practice once they left school and engaged in agriculture.

In her textbook, Handbook of Nature-Study For Teachers and Parents, American nature study advocate Anna Botsford Comstock, wrote that school gardens were simply an offshoot of the nature study program created by Liberty Hyde Bailey.105 Articles in the American journal, The Elementary School Teacher, highlighted the success of school gardening programs in urban areas promoting civic improvement, while impressing upon children the "scientific principles of plant-raising."106 In Cleveland, Ohio, garden work was divided to provide cooperation among "normal, defective, and delinquent" children to improve the look and purposefulness of the schoolyard. Furthermore, the school garden afforded students practical lessons in nature study, "physical and commercial

1 07 geography, and botany." O.J. Kern, Superintendent of Schools for Winnebago County,

Illinois, wrote that it was essential to assist the country child by putting "the school into 108 agriculture." Kern pointed to Canada's Macdonald school gardens as an example of what could be done to assist the country child if American philanthropists would involve

104 Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society. 186. 105 Comstock, Handbook of Nature Study for Teachers and Parents, vi. 106 Susan B. Sipe, "School Gardening at the National Capital," The Elementary School Teacher 6:8 (Apr 1906): 417. 107 Louise Klein Miller, "School Gardens," The Elementary School Teacher 8:10 (June 1908): 577. 108 O.J. Kern, "What Form oflndustrial Training Is Most Practical and Best Suited to the Country Child?," The Elementary School Teacher 7:6, (Feb 1907): 325. themselves. He quoted one of the Macdonald Rural School Fund pamphlets to illustrate how school gardens could work in conjunction with regular schoolwork to enhance rural children's school experiences:

The work of the garden is recognized as a legitimate part of the school program, and is already interwoven with a considerable part of the other studies. The garden is becoming the outer classroom of the school, and its plots are its blackboards. The garden is not an innovation, or an excrescence, or an addendum, or a diversion. It is a happy field of expression, an organic part of the school in which boys and girls work among growing things and grow themselves in body and mind and spiritual outlook.109

School gardens provided children with a distraction from formal schooling, but could be given a vital part in meeting curriculum objectives. American and Canadian educators were in agreement that school gardens could play a role in educating rural children for the farm.

In Alberta, with the assistance of the Macdonald Rural School Fund and through the advocacy of the Alberta Department of Education, school gardens were seen as an essential part of rural education. In 1907, the inspector for the Medicine Hat Inspectorate in southeastern Alberta noted:

A considerable number of school grounds have been enlarged and fenced during the year. A step forward has been taken and we find not only flower beds, but vegetable gardens in some cases. Further advance may be made by experimenting with plots of grain and noting the effects of scientific soil culture.110

1U1U., ^Z-VJ. J.W. Brown, AR 1907, 51. By 1913, Alberta's new School Grants Act made special provision to provide addition funding to rural schools to encourage the teaching of agriculture and school gardening. Government officials in eastern and western Canada felt that rural farm children needed to be educated in the fundamentals of agriculture and in new scientific methods in order to engage "students and teachers in the essential activity of the land."112

After all, educating rural school children was not supposed to encourage pupils to leave the land, but rather to enhance the role of agriculture in the lives of rural children and teach the country school child scientific techniques and observational skills so essential to the modern farmer.

In Montana, school gardening was never officially part of the school curriculum and there is little evidence to suggest that school gardens were used as a nature study teaching aid in rural schools.113 There is some evidence, however, that school gardening was attempted in some Montana schools. In 1906, Fort Benton's The River Press announced that:

A movement is on foot to establish a school garden on the fair grounds this coming year. It is proposed to set apart a plot of ground and apportion it among the different grades. The pupils in the different grades under proper supervision would cultivate their plot and plant it to

111 AR 1913, 16. 11 David C. Jones, "Schools and Social Disintegration in the Alberta Dry Belt of the Twenties," in Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Educational History, ed. Nancy M. Sheehan, J. Donald Wilson, David C. Jones, (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Limited, 1986), 274. 113 In the Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of 1908, an extract from Montana's Arbor Day Manual indicates that school gardening is an important aspect of teaching soil conservation, soil preparation, and yield to children. With regard to school gardening, Montana's manual quotes the Arbor Day manuals of Illinois and North Dakota. This shows that the idea of tree planting is implemented and that Montana's Superintendent of Public Instruction approved of the idea of providing children with practical agricultural experience, but it does not provide sufficient evidence to say that school gardening was generally used in teaching in rural schools. different vegetables and grains. The city water would be furnished to irrigate with and the work would be in the nature of an experiment garden.114

Subsequent issues of The River Press did not comment on the success or failure of the

school garden, or whether it was really attempted. Also, in a commemorative calendar

created by Toole County residents in 1992, there is a photograph of the Minerva School

garden. This rural school was located east of Shelby, Montana, and the picture shows

three students, two girls and one boy, working in a small garden plot. The prairie

stretches on endlessly behind them, with no schoolyard fence in view. The three students

are smiling at the camera, but continue hoeing the dark soil.115 Was their garden a

success? Did the children enjoy working in the garden? Did the weather cooperate and

provide sufficient rainfall? These questions require further investigation and cannot be

answered, but there are hints. Montana rural school pupil Angelo Tomalino claimed he

was happy to go to school since the alternative of hoeing the family garden was hot

arduous work.11 Dominic and Frank Crisafulli's mother remembered that "as soon as they were old enough to know a vegetable from a weed" the boys were working in the family's gardens.117 It is difficult to believe that rural children, whose labour was already

so essential to the success of a homestead, would have enjoyed the experience of maintaining a school garden. Rural school children already toiled daily with chores before and after school.

"Chinook Opinion," The River Press. Fort Benton, Montana, Oct. 24, 1906. 115 1992 Toole School Treasures, in possession of the author, received from the Marias Museum in Shelby, Montana. 116 Kauffman, As I Remember...Vol. II, 27. 117 Ibid., 240. Even in Alberta, where school gardening was advocated by government officials and where school gardening was attempted, teachers were less-than-enthusiastic.

D.A. McKerricher, Inspector for the Lethbridge Inspectorate that encompassed most of southern Alberta reported: "Most of the teachers are unfamiliar with our conditions and no literature is easily available which deals with our peculiar forms of plant and animal life or with the methods of soil culture suited to conditions in the dry farming belt."118

Teacher W.D. McDougall remembered listening to a district agriculturalist talk about school gardens while attending a school conference. He believed that, like himself, most of the audience felt school gardens were a waste of time. McDougall's school was closed during July and August, "the months when a garden needs most attention. By September, what was not choked out by weeds had been eaten by rabbits and chipmunks."119

Alberta's growing season only ran from May to September. School gardens that were planted in April or May suffered from neglect after school terms ended in June. Despite school gardening's being part of the rural school curriculum teachers were not properly equipped to undertake it or were simply ambivalent about including school gardening in their daily programmes.

The minimal length of the growing season and environmental conditions would have been a significant factor in determining how or whether school gardening was implemented. Historian David C. Jones identified drought, hail, frost, gophers, and maggots as environmental factors contributing to the failure of school gardens in Alberta,

118 D.A. McKerricher, AR 1910, 65. 119 W.D. McDougall, "1914-1964, In and Out of Classroom," 44, 77.270 SE, 39, PAA. 151 factors that affected agricultural crops, too. Jones indicated that the use of school gardening in Alberta schools peaked by 1916, but had all but disappeared by 1921.121

Instead, the home garden, school fairs, and boys' and girls' club movements became more popular and led to school gardening's being dropped from the provincial rural school curriculum.122

It should be noted that some pupils in Alberta and Montana planted school gardens not as a way of integrating classroom learning with schoolyard activity, but for more subtle purposes. For Native children ensconced in Industrial Schools on either side of the forty-ninth parallel, gardening became part of the assimilationist program propagated by federal governments and the religious institutions. Gender training using agriculture and gardens was part of the program. Along with trades like shoemaking and blacksmithing, boys were usually taught agricultural concepts by working on school farms. The training of girls' centered on domestic activities and taking care of school gardens. Native children's agricultural activities were used to support the operation of the school, as well as to instil a work ethic, something that government and religious authorities believed aboriginal students lacked. For Native students, school gardening was part of their routine hard work, and although integrated into their program of study, was regarded by administrators as necessary to sustain the schools and as support for formal learning.

120 Jones, "School and Social Disintegration" in Schools of the West. 274-5. 121 Ibid., 274. 122 Jones, Empire of Dust, 182. von Baeyer, Rhetoric and Roses, 57-61. 123 Titley, "Indian Industrial Schools" in Schools in the West, 143; Peter Ronan, Flathead Indian Agent to CIA, August 5, 1893, ARCIA (1893), Zealous in All Virtues, 211. Another way in which governments attempted to formalize the schoolyard and its activities was by promoting Arbor Day as an official day dedicated to tree planting and arboriculture. Canada's North-West Territories Lieutenant Governor

Mackintosh proclaimed May 10 a public holiday throughout the Territories to be observed as Arbor Day.l24 The Macleod Gazette commented that planting trees would

"destroy the monotony of the landscape." The flatness of the land, and the general lack of trees and shrubbery, was considered uncharacteristic of land being promoted as fertile, agricultural land. In 1906, Inspector Brown of the Medicine Hat Inspectorate126 felt that tree planting could improve the condition of the school yard tremendously. He wrote:

Regarding the school grounds in rural districts, while many are fenced and have stables erected thereon little attempt has yet been made to improve or beautify them, but where such has been done credit may usually be given to some individual trustee or teacher. As an instance of what one energetic person has done, about six hundred shade trees are flourishing on the grounds of the Rathwell school situated about five miles from Macleod. On the other hand the city schools have made commendable efforts in this direction.127

124 "Arbor Day", Macleod Gazette, May 4, 1894. See also The School Ordinance, Chapter 29, 42-43, 74.1, File #249, PAA. 125 "Arbor Day", Macleod Gazette, May 11, 1894. A desire to alter the prairie landscape in the United States began earlier. In 1874, the US Congress passed the Timber Culture Act to provide 160 acres of land per homesteader for tree planting in the western states. It was believed that trees could reduce the severity of the prairie winter, increase the amount of rain in the region, and provide general usefulness. The act was repealed in 1891since tree claims were not very successful and often provided opportunity for land speculation. Serial Set Vol. No. 1623, Session Vol. No. 1 H.Rpt. 66 http://docs.newsbank.com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft id=info:sid/iw.newsbank.com:SERIAL&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_dat=10C07AEB18A 75EF0&svc_dat=Digital:ssetdoc&req_dat=0D69445761CF24E0 (accessed May 29, 2009) 126 This inspectorate encompassed most of southern Alberta. It included the territory extending from Saskatchewan on the east to British Columbia on the west; from the International Boundary on the south to township fourteen in the north. 127 J.W. Brown, AR 1906,41. 153

The mass of land known as the Medicine Hat Inspectorate was still largely unsettled in the eastern portion in 1906, but planting trees on the prairie was considered imperative for schoolyard improvement. Further west, the presence of trees was a natural occurrence.

Students were recruited to participate in the schoolyard beautification process.

The May 13, 1907 minutes of the School Trustees for the Pincher Creek School District

No. 121, outlined their desire to have children involved in tree planting: "The Sec'y was ordered to procure: 12 Carolina Poplars and 6 [Eleus?] from Brandon. He was also instructed to arrange with teachers to have the older pupils in the school set out about 18

Cottonwoods[,] each child to do all the work in connection with some particular tree."128

Planting trees provided future Albertans with shelter and shade where none had previously existed. Gretta R. Leavitt, a student in southern Alberta during the early twentieth century summed up what trees meant at her school: "All former residents who think of the old school see the shelterbelts and the big trees as part of the picture.. .trees

i on were valued as only bald prairie dwellers could value them." Alberta's prairie grassland environment was altered with the addition of trees. Clifford Sifton, the

Minister of the Interior in 1896, promoted prairie agriculture, as easy to plough due to a lack of trees. Now trees were required in order to define schoolyards as different from their surroundings.

Pincher Creek SD # 29 Minute Book, 1888-1908. May 13, 1907, M2017, Box 35, File 304, GMA. Leavitt, "The Glen wood School," 31. Montana displayed a similar connection to Arbor Day. On September 13,

1887, the third Tuesday in April was declared Arbor Day by the Territorial government of Montana. It was later changed to the second Tuesday in May. Although Arbor Day was directed at all residents of Montana, E. A. Steere, the Superintendent of Public

Instruction, wrote that the day was particularly directed at those "who teach in public schools." He wanted children to be directed and trained in thinking about tree planting and by having the day be practically observed, particularly in the country schools.

One of the most forbidding features of our country school houses is the absence of trees and shrubbery. Of course, this cheerless aspect cannot be wholly removed by planting a tree or two, or a dozen every Arbor Day, but something done and well persevered in, will soon relieve these school houses of their dreary and solitary appearance, will be defense [sic] against winds and storms in winter, as well as against fire and the hot sun in the summer; for in order to cultivate all that is good and noble in the children, we must make the school house attractive and lovely, a home for the cultivation of patriotism, honesty, industry, sobriety and purity.130

In 1895, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction published a pamphlet to direct teachers in their Arbor Day celebrations, offering suggestions of poems, prose, songs, and classroom work that could help pupils realize the importance of trees and plants so they could "obtain a deeper insight into and a greater love for the handiworks of

God." The Montana government believed that planting trees would make schoolhouses more attractive and give children an affiliation with growing things. Tree planting was a lesson in civic responsibility, and would show children that their actions would make a difference in Montana's future.

u E.A. Steere, BRS 1894, 248. ' E.A. Steere, BRS 1896,19-20. Teacher Idora Guthrie's diaries gave a small example of how Montana's children participated in Arbor Day. Teaching in Pitcher, on May 7, 1897, she noted:

"We went through our pieces this AM and then I let the girls go to the woods for pine, while the boys and I [went] for a tree. Mr. Babcock helped us get a fine one." While teaching in Stearns on May 10, 1904, Guthrie wrote: "All very well at school. We had a little Arbour[sic] Day work and selected some work for the last day. The children cleaned the schoolyard." Getting a tree and planting a tree was obviously easier at a school where trees grew nearby. On the prairie, where trees only grew along rivers and streams, it would have been more difficult to include the practical work of tree planting in an Arbor Day celebration.

Tree planting and Arbor Day were not always undertaken or celebrated, but can be seen as formative in the construction of identity during the homestead period.

Canadian historian R. Douglas Francis wrote that the identity of the Canadian West has undergone several constructs. Individuals and governments initially saw the West as a wilderness with restorative powers. Then it became a mecca for agriculture, supporting the "myth of the farmer" and requiring transformation into a garden. Tree planting and nature study were part of this phase. Finally, abuse of the land became a necessity as the

1 ^9 drive for profit overtook the garden. In 1894, Superintendent of Public Instruction

E.A. Steere voiced a similar need to reconstruct Montana's identity:

R. Douglas Francis, "Regionalism, Landscape, and Identity in the Prairie West," in Challenging Frontier: The Canadian West, eds. Lorry Felske and Beverly Rasporich (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004), 40. We have outgrown the idea of the "Great American Desert that we heard so much about a generation ago. The man who said that the great plains of the West were like the infernal regions, in that they only lacked water and good society to make them desirable places of residences, was mistaken only in part. For unlike hades, both water and good society have been and are being brought to our great State.

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, boosters and promoters for homesteading supported the idea that the arid landscape of southern Alberta and northern

Montana could be civilized from its barren ranching identity. An agricultural mentality and hard work would transform the prairie wilderness into a garden.

Tree planting in the schoolyards identified schools as gardens, too. Children were the "plants" that required nurturing. Just as new child-rearing ideas were having an impact on the relationship between parents and children, these same ideas were being applied to education. Sociologist Xiaobei Chen has written that the language used by urban Child Saving reformers to describe children during the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries promoted the idea that nurturing gardens was equated with nurturing children. "The gardening imagery worked well to concretize the thought that human beings, particularly children, could be induced to behave in certain ways, just like plants could be trained to stand straight, to trail, or to blossom profusely through nurturing when

Steere, BRS 1894. 250. The use of the term "Great American Desert" became common with the reports of explorers and travelers in the West. In 1878, Major John Wesley Powell authored the Powell Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. He recommended that land distribution under the Homestead Act of 1862 needed to be amended for the most arid areas of the American West. The size of homesteads needed to be increased to 2560 acres, including irrigable and water-fronted pasturage lands. Powell's recommendations were not enacted, although the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 did recognize the need for additional lands to be granted to homesteaders in these more arid areas. 320 acre farms were granted under the provision of this act. See Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1931), 152-153 and 419-422. On the transformation required from Great American Desert to garden, see Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 338. they were young." 4 Children were regarded as "plants to be moulded", and intervention into their education and quality of life were important results of social reform. Tree planting, school gardening, and nature study were all aspects of education influenced by the ideas of social reform and were elemental to Alberta's and Montana's attempts to define themselves as "a Garden of Eden."

Within the frayed fabric of the forty-ninth parallel, the extended social borderland of the schoolyard provided lessons similar to those learned within the classroom. In the natural environment of the schoolyard children learned gender differences due to the provision of separate privies for girls and boys, as well as by the vigilance of officials to keep the sexes apart. Bullies could make the schoolyard an uncomfortable place.

Differences in language, age, and size separated children in some cases. Verbal abuse or practical jokes demeaned those considered dissimilar. On both sides of the national boundary, the diversity of the schoolyard could be overcome when organized games or the danger of the environment brought children together.

Government initiatives like schoolyard fencing and the study of nature were similarly introduced in both Alberta and Montana. Inspectors in Alberta enforced these schemes with more success than did superintendents in Montana. Alberta's inspectors made every effort to influence teachers to provide school gardening programs, while in

Montana gardening was rarely undertaken. Even with enforcement, school gardening was not popular in Alberta's rural schools. As in the schoolroom, Alberta's appointed

Xiaobei Chen, ""Cultivating Children as You Would Valuable Plants:" The Gardening Governmentality of Child Saving, Toronto, Canada, 1880s-1920s." Journal of Historical Sociology 16:4 (Dec 2003): 467. inspectors provided the momentum for government regulations, but practice on the ground undermined them.

The experiences of rural school children in their natural environment and the schoolyard reinforces Wallace Stegner's statement that, "The classrooms tied us to the past, the school yard to the present and future."135 In the outer environment and the schoolyard children learned a sense of place, of individuality, and of citizenship.

Stegner's tie to the western environment did not stem from his classroom experiences.

His childhood memories returned with the smell of the wolf willow shrub. For

Stegner, for the children of Alberta and Montana, and for me, the environment linked the past with the future, and connected centuries of childhood.

Stegner, Wolf Willow, 290. Ibid., 18-19. CONCLUSION

A comparison of rural education and children's experiences in the borderland of

Alberta and Montana shows that there are more similarities than differences, despite the

presence of a national boundary. Most of the differences are related to government

policy and reflect national concerns. Alberta's educational system was created with

religious and language accommodation built in. Both the provincial and state

governments based their educational systems on a fundamental belief in English

Protestantism. The expectation was that in order to create ideal citizens, children from

diverse backgrounds had to adapt to this dominant culture. English was the language of

instruction in both Alberta and Montana. In Alberta, children could be educated in

French if there was community demand. Montana did not allow religious instruction,

while Alberta's children could receive religious instruction in public school in the last

half hour of the school day. However, research indicated that Montana's children were

exposed to some Christian teachings in public school as a part of regular school

instruction.

Montana wrote segregationist law into their school system as late at 1872, but

overturned their prejudicial laws against African Americans earlier than was done

elsewhere in the United States. Alberta regulations did not mention skin colour at all. In both province and state, Native peoples were segregated. Aboriginal children were educated in residential or day schools on the reserves or reservations. These schools were run by religious organizations and were designed to create brown-skinned model citizen farmers and farmers' wives.

The biggest difference between Alberta's and Montana's educational systems was enforcement. Alberta's inspectors were male, government-appointed employees. Their visits were feared by teachers and pupils alike. They graded the facilities, the teacher's capabilities, and the knowledge of the children. A rural school's funding depended on the inspector's evaluation. Inspector's reports were an important research resource because of their detailed descriptions of local school conditions. Montana's district superintendents were elected officials. They were local candidates, had usually been teachers, and were often women. Superintendents played a supportive role during their visits, offering advice on curricular and organizational matters. Superintendents rarely reported district conditions to Montana's Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Even with the differences in regulatory enforcement, those educated in small rural schools around the forty-ninth parallel recalled their schools similarly. They remembered their schools as community-oriented buildings. The community created them and maintained them. Where great distances separated neighbours and where children were expected to do their share of work on developing homesteads, schools were a meeting- ground. Children could engage with others that were living similar rural experiences.

In the schoolroom, space constraints and classroom organization enforced power relationships. Children on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel recalled episodes of discipline, being trained to act appropriately, and having to engage in communal activities. Learning to be a good citizen meant respecting authority. Teachers were the government's representatives, but could perform their duties only as well as their training or education allowed. None of my research indicated that history, geography, or other curriculum work was memorable to rural children, though they may have simply taken it for granted. In the Alberta-Montana borderland, schools operated with whatever textbooks were available. Textbooks provided by the teacher, books that the school trustees could afford, or books that children brought from home were often all that was used. This meant that the meaning of nation as defined in the government's course of study was not necessarily taught to rural school children. Reading was regarded as very important, and the books that were in school libraries were particularly remembered.

These books could and did cross the international boundaries. Alberta's children learned to be British, but played at Huck Finn. Montana's children read Evangeline and "The

Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner." At the grassroots level, education meant learning to read, to write, and to do basic arithmetic.

In northern Montana and southern Alberta, the natural environment was very significant in the memories of rural school children. Travelling to and from school and recess and lunch-hour play periods were the most remembered and influential memories of children's rural education. While the schoolroom was a meeting place, the schoolyard was a zone of personal interaction. Fights, feuds, bullying, games, discovery, exploration, and relationships were the focus of the schoolyard. Particularly in Alberta, government attempted to regulate schoolyard size by introducing fencing measures. Departments of Education in the province and state attempted to make the schoolyard a learning space by trying to introduce curriculum that engaged the natural environment.

Lack of money, lack of teacher training, or lack of interest stopped these measures from being fully established. The national agendas often led to shared experience that transcended nationality. Educators thought learning to play marbles made young boys into "good Canadians" or "real Americans." Children simply remembered playing marbles.

This study of a social borderland within a political borderland offers insight into how children associated themselves with place and with the country where they lived.

Education was an important element of rural children's lives, despite their need to work.

Even though the political border ran through the lives of northern Montana's and southern Alberta's children their schoolroom and schoolyard experiences were similar.

Creating model citizens meant enforcing similitude through discipline, authority, and

English instruction. The difference between Canadians and Americans is not as important as the recognition of the similarities that they share.

This borderland comparison does, however, provide glimpses of national differences within the lived experience of the social borderland of the rural school. The controversy over raising an American flag at a Canadian schoolhouse showed that training American children to be citizens of Canada required different approaches.

Despite political agendas, pupils' lived experiences emphasized social differences more 163 than national ones and demonstrated that in this period the borderland was a place of overriding similarity, as well as subtle difference. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Jonathan Zimmerman, (June, 2009) Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory, from Yale University Press at: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/zimmerman_small.pdf. (accessed May 16, 2009) APPENDIX A: Statistics Of Attendance By Standard/Grade For Alberta Pubic Schools, 1905-1913 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 Standardl, Part 1(1912 Grade 1) 6,544 7,659 9,163 11,565 13,929 17,276 18,866 22,911 25,630 Standardl, Part 2( 1912 Grade 2) 4,042 4,758 5,524 5,823 6,509 7,689 8,864 9,708 10,786 Standard 2 (1912 Grade 3) 4,719 5,480 6,226 6,929 7,619 8,976 10,291 9,736 10,860 Standard 3(1912 Grade 4) 4,519 5,352 6,649 7,032 7,778 9,392 10,338 7,837 9,105 Standard 4(1912 Grade 5) 2,529 3,099 3,777 4,613 5,298 6,180 6,744 5,521 6,469 Standard 5(1912 Grade 6) 1.316 1.675 2.115 2.511) 3.168 3.706 4.123 4.l)5l) 5.583 Standard 6(1912 Grade 7) 381 506 582 748 1.006 1.252 1.563 3.359 3.931 Standard 7(1912 Grade 8) 154 184 216 316 512 636 607 4,270 4,382 Standard 8(1912 Grade 9) 50 71 86 108 229 200 264 1,254 1,642 1912 Grade 10 600 710 1912 Grade 11 615 523 1912 Grade 12 274 288

Up to 90% of students are between Standard I and Standard IV. Less than 10% are Standard VI and above. Note the dramatic decrease in enrolment for students moving from Standard V to Standard VI. Source: Alberta Dept of Education Annual Reports, 1906, -1913. 183

APPENDIX B: Third And Fourth Grade Attendance At Central School, Kalispell, Montana 1895-1896

Name of Student Age Attendance Emery Bell Attended regularly from January to end of June Gregory Dully 1n0 Attended regularly irom January to April only Helen Forbes 15 Attended regularly irom January to April only Henry Grant 13 Attended regularly from January to end of June Mary Hodgson 15 Entered school mid-February, and then attended regularly to the end of June George Huebschmann 10 Attended regularly from January to mid-June. Larisa Huebschmann 14 Attended regularly from January to end of June. Martin Johnson 14 Attended regularly from January to April and then teacher noted that had withdrawn from school Will Mintzer 13 Attended regularly from January to end of June. Jesse McGee 11 Attended regularly irom January to end of June. Laura Ouelette 15 Attended regularly irom January to May only. George Strickland 11 Attended regularly from January to end of June. Katie Tucker 12 Attended regularly irom January to end oi June. Jesse Thompson 9 Attended regularly irom January to April only. Ray Truman 12 Attended regularly irom January to end oi June. Rosie Volk 12 Attended regularly irom January to end of June. Ida Weightmann 10 Attended regularly irom January to April only. Teacher noted that pupil had been promoted on April 1, 1895. Royal Knapp 11 Entered school in February and then attended regularly to end of June. Ella White 11 Entered school in February and then attended regularly to end of June. Christina White 12 Entered school in February and the attended regularly to end of June. Annie Zeller 13 Entered school in February with only sporadic attendance until the end of April only Source: Central School Class Register, 1895-1896 - 3ra and 4m Grades - Teacher Marie Ferguson, Kalispell, Montana, BOX Tag # 2004.009.002, Museum at Central School. APPENDIX C: Eighth Grade School Register - Central School, 1901-02, Teacher: Cecil Clapp. Pupils Who Left School Before The Close Of The School Year

# Age Name Date Left Reason Given 1 15 Magory Baily Sept. 6, 1901 Work 2 16 Clive Brown April 29, 1902 Suspended for rest of year. 3 12 Addie Hunter Oct. 4, 1901 Went to Seattle 4 16 Mable Richards Oct. 11, 1901 Work too difficult 5 Nellie Zeller Married Dec. 7, 1901 6 18 Mabrl[sic] Hubbard Feb. 27, 1902 Teaching District School 7 18 Alice Manning Dec. 11, 1901 Work too difficult 8 21 Chas. Guay Nov. 19, 1901 Work 9 15 Clara Gould Jan. 23, 1902 Moved 10 15 Effie Mayne March 28, 1902 Mak eyrs[sic] 11 15 Rosa Pieper Jan 13, 1902 Helena 12 19 Celma Day March 7, 1902 Work 13 18 Liva Hodgson March 1, 1902 Work 14 15 Will Baily April 25, 1902 Work Source: School Registers, Kalispell, Montana, Box Tag # 2004.009.003, Museum at Central School APPENDIX D: Characteristics Of The Children Of The Second Grade, 1901-1902

# Name Teacher's Comments Andy Of foreign parentage. Speaks indistinctly. Does not hear well 1 Nortome which retards his progress. Left school this spring. Donald A delicate sensitive boy. Bright and intelligent. Rather full of 2 Britian fun but always good in school. Old for the grade. Edna A rather pouty and deceitful child. Takes little interest, but 3 Reynolds has been demoted to grade and thereby discouraged. Claude Came two months. Good in numbers and spelling. Willing to 4 Tiffany obey. Quiet and bashful. Moved into the country. Melvin Very much like Claude, only older and more active and 5 Tiffany stronger in his work. Moved into country. 6 Lilla Ward Came but two days. Minnie Blose A sweet pleasant child. Always at work. Strong in the grade. 7 A little nervous. Anxious to succeed. Hazel A bright girl. Sometimes inclined to be listless. Old for the 8 Johnson grade. Emma Unassuming quiet and studious. Always attentive. Good in 9 Harsch the grade work. Galva Bardin A sunny pleasant child, bright and thorough in all her studies. 10 Easily disciplined. Age 7. Thomas A quiet boy. Old for the grade. Hides his interest, appears to 11 Fickle pout when he really is but studying. Strong in his study. Harry Mischievous, rather active fair in his class, reading poor. 12 Harmon Needs watching - Age 8. Myrtle La A boyish girl, cares little for books, whispers. Good in 13 Beau numbers - fair in other branches. Age 10. Thos. B. An overgrown bashful boy. Anxious to learn, sensitive to 14 Reed ridicule. Needs firmness and kindness. Age 9. Mattie A bright obediant[sic] child; very careful and painstaking. 15 Munker Sensitive. Easily won by kindness. Age 8 Cora Sebring Very nervous and excitable; bright in every thing. Reading 16 poor because nerves. John Sprint Good natured, but slow. Has not learned to study inclined to 17 laziness. Must be made to work. Not hard to deal with. Olive Van Frail and timid. Absent a great deal. Backward in her studies. 18 Wagner Cannot do the work this year. Orrin Young Shy mischievous. Nervous. Fair in his work a little inclined to 19 shirk. # Name Teacher's Comments Laura Sprint Bright, active, ambitious. Pleasant to teach. Good in all but 20 writing. Her position must be watched. Peter Peterson Frail, does not hear well. German family. Nervous bright. 21 Has a large generous nature. Interested in his studies. Ruth Stahl Exceptionally bright. A very strong character. Active mind 22 and quick. A good child. Remarkably developed mind. Earle Dull, incapable, peculiar. 23 Barnhouse Lucille Quiet but bright and eager to know. Pleasant and willing to 24 Stocking obey. Abstracted at times. Jo Peters Mischeivous[sic] and bad. Dislikes books. Grade quite easy 25 for him. Naturally very bright but careless. Bessie A spoiled child but very susceptible to kindness. Active and 26 Hopkins quick to learn. Younger than George. Zela Stoner A sweet-tempered gentle girl. Very bright and does well for 27 the time spent in the work. Amy Bucklin Scattering thoughts, inattention retard her progress. She must 28 be watched and urged to work. George Quiet and studious but inclined to slide along. Takes but little 29 Young interest. Bad on the school grounds. Walter A very peculiar child. Slow to learn, inclined to sullenness 30 Thompson or stubbornness. Very slow in everything. Fred Grant A good boy rather mischievous but easily disciplined. Apt 31 enough but not inclined to study hard. Frieda A rather frail, nervous child. Almost deaf. Likes to whisper 32 Peterson and idle. Good natured and obedient. Ellsworth A very bright child. Willing in everything polite and quiet. 33 Johnson Studies well. Very thorough. Fred Van Has been absent a great deal. Naturally bright and 34 Dyke industrious. A little encouragement is all he needs. Nellie A bright loving little girl. One of the sunbeams of school. 35 Mangusson Good in reading and fair in the others. Alvin A very nervous child. Inclined to boast. 36 Schoonover Willie Davis A boy full of wonder and curiosity. Always interested in the 37 outside world. A mischievous but pleasant boy. Edith Schaffer Is slow because of ill health and absence. Quick in numbers 38 and spelling. Inclined to whisper. # Name Teacher's Comments Owen Young for the grade. Sick a great deal. Naturally slow. 39 Smithers Very weak in the work. Must remain in same grade. Fannie A very bright girl. Anxious to learn. Strong in her work. 40 McFadden Willing to obey but full of fun and energy. Needs firmness. Grace Quiet but very bright, is good in school. Has been absent a 41 Hundley great deal. Is able for the work. Easy to teach. Raphael One of the problems of school. Sly and sullen. Would be 42 Bachant bad if he dared. Studies well. Firmness and sternness. 43 Ethel Pearson Moved to Minot, N.D. Charles Young for his age. Very bright tho[sic] careless. Needs 44 Clifford watching. Does good work. Appears abstracted and yet has his lesson. Gary Gilkey A pleasant and obedient child. Shy and bashful, but 45 pirthol[sic] has a good record in her[?] work. George Old for grade. Why he is so slow is strange; for he seems 46 Hopkins bright and capable. He studies hard. Rather wilful [sic]. Eddie Greg A problem. Inattentive. Listless. Absent a great deal. The 47 work is beyond him. Must be watched. Candace A peculiar child. Naturally bright but frail and nervous. An 48 Gilfillan obedient and willing child. George Good natured and willing. Rather backward in his studies 49 Halford especially in Reading and Writing. Full of practical knowledge. George A slow student. Was absent quite a while and the work is 50 Morris hard. Needs firmness with kindness. Clayton A quiet bashful boy. Knows much more than appears. 51 Coram Easily influenced. Leo Morris A mischievous boy. Rather play. Must be urged to work. 52 Absent quite a bit. Charles King A shy sensitive child. Has very poor eyes. Needs much 53 kindness and help. Easy to discipline. Olga Ross A medium good scholar. Rather inclined to slight her lesson. 54 Needs attention and yet easy to discipline. Charles A very quiet boy. Fair in his work. He seems to take but little 55 Knight interest. Very obedient. Ruth Getchill A bright thorough pupil. Indistinct in articulation, otherwise 56 a good reader. Likes to whisper. Ollie Collier Removed. Absent a great deal. A mischievous boy; bright 57 and quick Celia Moved away. A quiet bashful child studies well. 58 McGovern # Name Teacher's Comments Joseph Tucker A strange and peculiar character. Very much inclined be 59 tricky. Must firmly [bejdealt with. Hazel Woolf Demoted. Does good work at times but is very inattentive. 60 Incapable of much concentration. 61 Hale Woolf Demoted Hazel's twin brother. They are very much alike. Eddie Rhimes The youngest boy in school and a very bright one. His 62 numbers are behind and a little practice will bring them up. Source: Central School Class Register, 1900-1901 - 2na Grade - Teacher E. Gertrude Storer, Kalispell, Montana, Box Tag # 2004.009.002, Item #22, Museum at Central School.