An unexpected treasure

I spent the first part of my childhood in High Level, Alberta, touted by many as the last real stop before the Northwest Territories. To me, the Peace River Country was a place of magic and merit. In the summer there wasn’t quite a midnight sun, but there was midnight twilight, when the sky only darkened to a milky grey before the sun rose again, and when it was at its highest it burned so intensely I knew what it must feel like to be microwaved. High Level also got all the bragging rights of the cold and the bugs like any other part of the north. It was the sort of place that made you aware that the world was bigger than you, and you could be tougher than you ever thought possible.

So imagine my delight when I was looking through a bookshelf in the old family house today and I found a book called Poems of the Peace River Country by Jessie M. Bresnahan, published in 1960 by Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd. out of Elms Court, Ilfracombe Devon. I can’t find much information about Bresnahan, but according to the frontispiece she was a district nurse in the Peace River Valley and Mackenzie Basin. I know from reading Dr. Mary Percy Jackson’s biography A Homemade Brass Plate that there was a call for nurses in the UK to immigrate to Northern Alberta around the turn of the twentieth century, and based on some of her poetry, I have a suspicion that Bresnahan was one of the nurses who answered the call.

This blog post is going to be a little different, because there is no easy research to bulk up what I learned from reading Poems of the Peace River Country. Instead I’m going to offer a selection of her poetry here so that you can learn a part of history of an important Alberta place through the eyes of a wonderful Alberta pioneer, just like I did.

“Mystery of the Little Smoky”

On the mysterious supposed death of O. Hansom while hunting whose horse returned without housing or saddle

If horses they could speak
How one could tell and solve a mystery so dark and deep,
How a stray bullet from a poacher’s gun did
Strike its master’s head and falling headlong on the ground
That strong man lay and bled.
Soon shaking hands beside him knelt
And tried to staunch the flow, but all in vain,
The life had fled, that life, they had laid low.
Then guilty hands the saddle loose and other housings too,
He’s off to free and open space, then stops and stands to view,
Those guilty hands then carry him,
Whose life had lately fled, they pause and think, just
On the brink, of Little Smoky’s bed,
They hesitate to make their sin, a deeper darksome crime,
Then on they drop in a pool where sun doth never shine;
Dead men tell no tales, they say.
But guilt will make them shudder
In days to come, we know someone
The crime will have to utter.

“In Alberta”

I thank Thee, Lord, thou broughtest me here,
I did not want to come,
It seemed so very far away,
From my first dear old home.
Aye! Thou art leading still,
I came, I saw, was conquered
Almost, against my will.
When once you drink from mighty Peace,
The aged Indian said,
“You will come back. You must not break.”
He shrugged and shook his head.
I drank its water, turned away
And left for other lands.
Thou called be back again to tread
Alberta’s sunny strands.
My three score years and ten have passed.
The tide may come this year,
To bear me through the Sunset Gate,
But I’ll be waiting here.