Days Gone By

Days Gone By

Growing up in Canada

by Dan Van Koughnet of Dryden, ON

I am writing a story for the Small Farmer’s Journal magazine about myself. I have written stories about other people in the past.

I was born in 1956 in a log cabin way back in the woods. When I was young, we moved to my grandmother’s farm. My father never had a tractor, all the work was done by horse and mule power. I never went very far in school and I never had many friends my own age. I had older men for friends mostly. There were five types of older men that I associated with, farmers, trappers, lumberjacks, prospectors and muleskinners.

I used to sit in front of the radio on Saturday night and listen to Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette and all old style country singers. I loved to listen to Bill Monroe sing Mule Skinner Blues. The radio station played that song every day, three or four times a day on the radio. That was my favorite song because we had mules on our farm and I knew all the old muleskinners.

I was brought up in a different world than other kids were brought up in. I spent a lot of time with my father, uncles and retired men in the rest home or senior citizen home. From them I learned all about old style farming, trapping animals, cutting wood, panning for gold and mules. I went trapping with the old men, fishing, and hunting. I had lots of fun, but there was no school. We were on the farm and many of the old men helped out on the farm because they just wanted something to do. I learned how to plow a field with mules, disc, harrow, seed a crop and other farm work. I learned how to doctor mules and cure mules of all kinds of different illnesses with home cures. Many of these cures were bygone cures that farmers used back in the early part of the century and many young people didn’t know these things. Many of the things I learned from these old men were being forgot and lost in time. I knew all about trapping and old style farming methods. I learned how to plant a crop by animal power and mule drawn equipment. How to drive mules and handle them, shoe and harness them and cure them of illness. I learned how to jog in the brush with animals.

I used to listen to the old men and their stories about the old days and driving the mule teams and trapping in the forest. The old jackass prospectors would talk about finding gold. The amazing stories they could tell about wolves, bears, Indians, buffalo herds, cattle stampedes and the big cattle drives, cold winters, when they cut the big timber, building the highway, trapping trips and opening up the country for settlement. None of these old timers told a whopper of a tale. They didn’t exaggerate, they told the truth.

I started trapping and I bought a team of mules when I was 10 years old and started working for different farmers and loggers. When I was 17 I got a job on road construction on the muleskinner line. The road board only had so much money to maintain the road so they hired all these old men to repair the road. “Good morning Captain, Good morning shine, Do you need another muleskinner on your muleskinner line” was a song Bill Monroe sang and that was exactly what we were doing; driving mules just like the song Bill sang on the radio. The old men just loved it working with mules again, like they did years ago. We were repairing a road and the old men thought that it was just great. They were reliving the past, doing something that was a thing of the past.

Most of these men had nothing to do all day long and were lost in a world of loneliness and were basically forgotten men who society had just pushed aside. Many were sitting in a room by themselves spending most of the day by themselves and doing nothing. To have something to do meant so much to them. It made them so happy. Many of the old men couldn’t run modern machinery but they could drive mules and wagons. It was so much fun working with the old men and it was a paid holiday. I was a real muleskinner, it was fun; but it was work and it was not a soft job either. We worked 10 hours a day in the hot sun on a dusty road, five days a week. The old men never complained it was exactly what they wanted to do and they enjoyed it, and so did I. We worked for a month and finished the job.

I went back to the farm and started cutting grain with three mules and a binder. All the old men showed up to shock grain and then when the thrashing machine came, they all showed up to thrash land and plow the field. We must have had thirty teams of mules plowing the field with an old man walking behind the plow. In one day we had the field plowed and then everyone went home. No one took a cent. People helped other people back then and were willing to do a person a favor for nothing. They expected nothing in return; it was just the idea of helping someone. But there were rules too when one man did someone a favor usually people helped him too, when he needed help. No one was alone in their troubles in those days. He could always get help somewhere. Another thing, people fed people back in the early days so no one went hungry. If you needed shoes someone would be there with a pair.

We had a gathering at our farm. People used to come to the farm and bring musical instruments and food and we would have a dance and sing songs in the barn. Johnny Cash used to sing a song, you could hear us singing a country mile, and that was the way it was around the Van Koughnet Farm. There was lots of activity and lots of fun too! The work was hard but the fun made up for it. People used to drop in on the way home from town and visit for a while. In those days we had a barn dance every 2nd Saturday night in the summer.

Kids from the orphanage in Winnipeg used to come and stay for a week or two in the summer and experience farm life. The orphans really liked it and had lots of fun doing different things like milking cows, riding horses and mules, collecting eggs in the chicken house, fishing, swimming, hunting rabbits and grouse and squirrels. In the fall, we used to organize deer and moose hunting trips and later on when it got cooler, fur trapping trips in the forest.

In the winter, we would can meat from our fall hunting. We would can up about 600 jars of food like beans, peas, blueberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and blackberries. Also, we would make rosebud jam from boiled rosebuds picked in the fall. We used to pick the leaves off a tree and dry the leaves, put them in sacks and use it for what we call Indian Tea in the cold winter. Syrup was made from corn or birch trees, just like the maple syrup you buy in the store today. We had a root cellar under the house to keep vegetables in for the winter. Grain or wheat was always saved and made into flour. We bought very little at the store.

We were not making a lot of money off the farm so when extra jobs came along my father took them. There was a mechanical job fixing bulldozers, farm tractors and other farm machinery and road construction.

In the fall, I used to go trapping for a few months. When I was 19 I met an old trapper and he asked me if I wanted to go trapping. His name was Lorne Weaver. He was a professional trapper and woodsman. We went trapping. October 6th we went into the brush and took an old truck and went north of our farm about 100 miles. He had a cabin. When we got there we cut 50 cords of wood in two days. The next day we went moose hunting. Lorne shot a moose, so we cut it up and packed it back to camp, that was our meat. I learned a lot from Lorne; about the brush, animals, hunting, trapping and survival.

We were back in the brush until the end of February then we shoveled a road to the main road about 500 feet. The paper company plowed the main road to a logging camp 10 miles farther down the road. We loaded up all the fur and traps and headed to town. We sold all the fur for $50,000; that was $25,000 each! I went back to the farm.

The rest of the winter I worked around the farm. In spring I started plowing the field with the mules again. I stuck around the farm another eight years, then I left, I was twenty-seven.

There was no money to be made on a small farm, so I left and headed to the city for a few months. Those days were sad and lonely, I longed for life on the farm. I returned home in 1983 and started trapping again. Oh the ‘Good Ole Days!’