WE’RE celebrating the holidays with Harold F. Cruickshank—creator of those great Aces of the Western Front’s Hell Skies—Red Eagle, Sky Wolf, and Sky Devil. But this holiday season it’s going to be a down home Christmas featuring Cruickshank’s Pioneer Folk stories from the pages of Range Riders Western (1945-1952) on Mondays and Fridays; and Cruickshank’s own recollections of homesteading life from The Edmonton Journal’s The Third Column on Wednesdays.

The Edmonton Journal regularly set aside the third column on its editorial page for submissions from freelance writers, of which Cruickshank was an occasional contributor over the years. His columns frequently focused on his life growing up as a homesteader with his father and brother who had all immigrated from Scotland in 1905 to Barrhead, Canada along the famed Klondike Trail, just to the northwest of Fort Edmonton.

It’s Wednesday, so here’s another of Cruickshank’s Third Columns.

The Third Column

by Harold F. Cruickshank • Edmonton Journal, Edmonton, Canada • Tuesday, 28 April 1953

Footprints of the Pathfinders

WHEN early in this century we first set foot on the hinterland sod which was to be our future home, we felt a sharp glow of the warmth which attends justifiable pride in being among the first settlers to enter a new, untamed wilderness.

It was a wild brush-and-timber-studded country, whose first trails we opened up by widening and corduroying the clefts of survey lines. . . . But those clefts, faint slashings through the bush, some of them almost closed by second growth brush, told us the story of the earliest pioneers. They were “the sign” of those unsung heroes of the northwest, the early Dominion Land Surveyors, and their pack animals.

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A highlight of my first glimpse of our wilderness was, however, the standing teepee poles along high creek banks—the mark of the first folk to have set foot upon the wild sod. They told of the nomadic Cree Indian trappers who must have thrived in our country which still, in 1906, abounded in every species of wildlife, furred, feathered and antlered.

Along my own traplines—in timber or by the frozen, or bubbling creeks, and adjacent to the lakes—more than once I came across the sign of the Indian trappers, mouldering old deadfall trap-sets.

In the timbered zones one saw the scar of tree blazes which no doubt, years before, had marked the “trail” in to the carcass of a slain moose. At first, those axe signs startled one, for the forest belts seemed truly virgin and covered with leaf-mould and pine-needle carpets no feet had trod before.

First, then, were the Indian hunters and trappers, and then came those doughty men whom I have dubbed the “unsung heroes of our northwest—the Dominion Land Surveyors.

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I should like to pay tribute to those pioneer surveyors. We followed their surveyed line slashings often, and they meant much to us settlers in orienting ourselves, making it possible for us to establish our boundaries, and to start building the first dim trails.

It must have been a rugged life they led, through swamp and bushland, with many a treacherous creek and river to ford, or lake to circumnavigate, harassed the while by hordes of every known species of pestiferous insect.

On one occasion, while moose hunting, I and my companions had every good reason to remember the great work of the surveyors.

Many miles from our base camp, we were struck by a blizzard, and, without a compass were, technically, lost. The leader of our party decided to head for home but, in my opinion, was heading in an altogether wrong direction. We discussed the matter at some length; then all at once it dawned on me that we had just come across an old survey-line. We back-tracked to the line and followed it until at last we reached the mound and four square holes dug at a section corner by the survey party of years before.

I asked the leader of our party if he knew the approximate legal description of our base camp area. Fortunately, he did know it. On the inside of a cigarette box I drew a miniature of a township, and from a reading of the iron stake the surveyors had driven into the ground at the base of the section corner mound of clay, I was able to determine our position. Although our leader still had doubts, we set out in exactly the opposite direction to the one he had recommended, and in due time arrived at the little creek, close to our base cabin.

I thanked heaven for those old-time dominion land surveyors who had made our return possible.

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In my opinion, an opinion which, I am sure, is shared by many an old-time settler, the Dominion Land Surveyor, his chainman, and his cooks, well deserve a plaque or monument in their honor and memory. Their doughty, skillful, work, under trying conditions, contributed more than any other factor to progress and development here in Alberta in the past half-century or so.

It is true that some adventuresome settlers were in ahead of the surveyors, settling under “squatter’s rights,” but they were comparatively few in number, so to the surveyors must go the honor and acclaim of having made the first pioneer footprints on the land.