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—this time Cruickshank tells of his first Christmas homesteading.

The Third Column

by Harold F. Cruickshank • Edmonton Journal, Edmonton, Canada • Tuesday, 23 December 1952

Homestead Christmas

MY FIRST Christmas Day in the bush country was intensely cold. But let me begin with Christmas Eve. I had been at the home of our nearest neighbors for a week, doing chores during the absence of the men of the family in Edmonton. My father had joined the party. In fact it a was our team of horses which made that trip, then a long, cold one over inadequate trails—our team, and the neighbors’ sleigh.

I cut firewood, fed and watered the stock. These duties today might sound light, but then, they involved much effort. I had to cut a fresh hole in heavy creek ice each morning, for water for the stock. When the creek suddenly went dry, we had to melt snow for ail the stock, as the supply in the well was only sufficient for household requirements.

* * *

It was a time of homesickness for me; so far away from home, this first Christmas season in the wilds.

In the crisp, early dusk of Christmas Eve, as the skies were changing from their sharp claret, or plum shades to that steel-grayish purple which in winter precedes the cold, metallic blue of night. I had a scarcely finished my evening chores when I heard the musical jangle of sleigh bells and the screech and grind of sleigh runners.

The folk were indeed on schedule, and how I thrilled to it!

After taking over the team for stabling and care, I joined the happy group in the shack, where many gifts were being passed round.

As a boy of only thirteen, I could have been excused a bit of covetousness as I saw those gifts being handed out, with none for me. At last, though, one of the party, a man I had never previously met, a contractor in town who had just come out to be with his wife and daughter, took from his pocket an old dollar watch and gave it to me.

I was speechless. This was my very first watch and my only present on my first wilderness Christmas away from home. How I treasured that worn old timepiece!

Supper over, we were asked to sing some Christmas songs and hymns, and were invited to join our neighbors for Christmas dinner the following day.

Then came the time to hitch up and move back to our own shack.

Never did I see a more uninviting place—a colder shack! I can still remember the sight of its two small south windows, leering at the bush from either side of the wretched door.

A day or so later, I brought in a huge sack of Christmas mail for all the neighbors. and was severely kicked and cut up by the wild bronc I rode.

Out of the batch of mail there was one piece for me—a large and beautiful Christmas card from my mother overseas.

* * *

I was too busy for a time to pay much attention to this card, as I nursed my leg injury, and life indeed seemed very dreary as winter intensified.

Now and then, though, the sun would burst forth for a moment or so, and here and there on hillsides or in valleys one saw many beautiful Christmas cards—patches of sheer beauty: tinseled clumps of handsome birches, flanked by red willows, and backed by the inevitable and grandiose spruce belts. It was a glittering panorama, whose stage appearance was often all too brief.

Still, I treasured that lone Christmas card. A few years later, when the good news came that my mother and the other members of our large family were coming to join us, I hit upon a plan to use the lovely card as a greeting token. I went into a stand of fine, small, silvery dry spruce and selected four slender sticks for legs for a stand for the card. To the four which I had cut to size, or so I thought, I nailed the end of a dried-apple box, but to this, my first creation, my first attempt at carpentry, wobbled. I began to cut this leg and that until my original stand of about three feet in height, measured only about sixteen inches. I decided to call a halt, placing a chip under the too-short leg.

I cannot recall that my mother even noticed the effort on her arrival, but it was an expression of the Christmas spirit . . . a very sorry job indeed, but well intended.

Today in the clamor and glamor of the Christmas season, I often think that somewhere along the way we have slipped away from this spirit which first motivated the celebration and observance of Christmas.

We must, of course, move on with the times and the trends, but still I feel that it might not hurt us if now and then we could return to the humbleness and humility of such a Christmas as I have illustrated above—in thought, at least—for, after all, the very first Christmas was born in humility and humbleness.

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 • Monday, 10 March 1952

Yeepek, the Hunter

FROM day to day, in mid-winter, as I watch the capers of the inevitable sparrows—and they are quite amusing, especially when large flocks of chesty waxwings swoop down on their range—I think of another bird—a big bird: “Yeepek, the great American or Bald eagle.

Yeepek, as I knew him in the pioneer days in the wilds, was indeed a king of the skyways—a true monarch of the wilderness.

I have read a great deal about Yeepek and his kind of late. His numbers seem to have dwindled and from most accounts his species have moved on to coastal areas where their diet is chiefly fish.

Copy on the diet of the Bald eagle has been a bit too broadly presented in some of the articles. The impression has been given that everywhere, Yeepek and his kind live chiefly on fish. . . .

* * *

I had much close association with the big eagles in the early part of the century, for they were permanent residents of our frontier district, northwest of Edmonton.

Summer and winter, seldom a day passed that we did not see one or more of the big baldies. Summer and winter, one saw them planing, loafing idly, their white polls flashing in the sunlight against a sharply blue sky main. Then the shrieks, never-to-be-forgotten wild cries, and those sudden, swift plummets earthward.

In the long winters when creeks and lakes were frozen for months on end. I wonder what would have happened to the Bald eagles had their diet consisted of fish. For those long months there were no fish! Nor in springtime, when the suckers and jacks ran the creeks and lakes, did I ever see a Bald eagle fishing.

* * *

An interesting highlight of my association with the baldies occurred in the winter of 1906-07. I helped a professional trapper along his lines. In mid-winter he concentrated on coyotes which he poisoned with strychnine-impregnated bait on the frozen lakes. (The price per pelt then, $2.50.)

Occasionally a settler’s dog picked up a bait, but such occasions were rare. Now and then a fox might carry a bait some distance in its teeth, and drop it. Less crafty, a dog would find it, and—curtains for the dog!

Baits were dropped along a trail across a lake’s neck, or bay. over which trail a freshly-killed rabbit had been drawn. This operation took place in the late afternoon.

The following morning we were out in the dark, and bitterly cold it was, if you can recall that old terror of a winter of 1906-07.

Why all the hurry? YEEPEK!

At the first crack of pale dawn, the big baldies were alert. They would spot a dark object on the lakes—a poisoned coyote, perhaps still warm, and that was it! A swift plummet earthward and the eagles had their targets. Beak and talons gouged out what they could, and Yeepek would go soaring off to enjoy his meal in the sere tamarac cloisters which were his home ground and nesting place.

To give you some idea of the havoc wrought by the big bird kings, my friend and neighbor poisoned in all about one hundred and twenty coyotes during that one winter, but only brought home ninety-two for pelting. Yeepek, his “sisters, and his cousins and his aunts,” had accounted for the rest.

When spring came again we forgot the depredations of the big winged fellows. I recall having seen only one baldie shot. In those days we didn’t shoot at every moving creature, bird or animal. They had their places in the society of the frontier folk.

* * *

Yeepek. as I knew him, lived on rodents—gophers, mice and rabbits, and now and then, when smart enough to outsmart them, a duck, or grouse. More often than not the ducks, prairie chickens, and bush partridge were too clever for him. Never, to my knowledge, and I watched them closely, did the eagles fish.

Yeepek, the great symbol of the United States, was once very plentiful here in our own immediate districts—probably as numerous as on any part of the North American continent . . . a stately, magnificent sky creature who had no peer: a king in his own right—“High aloft, where none else dared follow!”