My Grandad emigrated to Canada after surviving the meat grinder of WW1. He showed up in Canada in the early 1920s and worked the logging camps with his sons. Alberta was still pretty rough back then and the pics from the era are delightful. Jasper Ave was one long mud strip surrounded by shops and warehouses, and behind those were the shacks most poorer families lived in.
I’m thinking of that as I watch this:
The soddies were gone long before my time. The last of them probably went at the close of the great depression. But as a kid I had my nose rubbed in the reality of harsh prairie winters - we all did. But our pioneer sodbusting grandparents made sure us kids knew what it was like. How I wish I could talk to them today…
So I’m listening to this - and I get it all. Our old Ukranian, Scandihoovian, Russian and European pioneers knew all about the sodbusting construction methods. What I don’t get is that the narrator seems to think this is the only way to live and survive the lethal winter climate. The indians lived in tents and did just fine.
Ughhhh. My mind is in a fog today. I’d be interested in how the sodbusters kept the bugs out during the summer…
They didn't keep the bugs out, they lived with them.
ReplyDeleteExile1981
I built a house in Eastern Washington West of Spokane by 23 miles out on the plains. I built it with 8" walls, sided it with 3/4" marine plywood and Hardy Board lap planks and filled the stud bays with closed cell polyurethane foam insulation and placed all my water connections on an interior utility closet where all the water use sinks, shower, toilet exited so as not to pierce an exterior wall. I used free batts of 12" fiberglass insulation in two cross laid pattern in the attic. I insulated my foundation walls and floor and only used a 14" air tight wood stove to heat with one radiant propane wall heater for backup and extended trips away and I was very comfortable in winter blizzard and snow storms with temps below zero and kept cool in summer with out AC using those same principles of thermal mass with a large stone and dense concrete wall(24" thick) behind the stove. I put in smaller insulated windows with a 90 degree vestibule on my front and back doors.
ReplyDeleteI think the Indians paid a huge amount of attention to micro-climates, far more than settlers who picked their homesteads based on where the surveyor had driven the stakes in the ground.
ReplyDeleteI think the tents/teepii thing was more for when they were following game and foraging. They were smart enough to see how bears hibernated in caves and in the hollows beneath tree blow-downs, hollows that were filled up with leaves and duff. THey got low. They got out of the wind. They picked places that were boxed in on three-and-a-half sides where there was ample firewood within easy reach.
Just my two-cents.
-Joe
The ones that stayed up north built lodges, or houses. The wanderers wandered down south, effectively leaving 'their' lands to the snow and ice.
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