Lac La Biche - History - Agriculture and Food

Agriculture | Fishing | Gardening & Greenhouse

AGRICULTURE

Lac La Biche Mission was a significant agricultural center in northern Alberta. However, in order to maintain this position, it was necessary for everyone on site to participate in agricultural efforts.

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Mission Notre-Dame-des-Victoires

Farming was necessary to provide food supplies for the mission. It was equally important in the Missionaries efforts to bring civilization into the daily lives of the natives. The Missionaries wanted to replace the fur trade, and the nomadic way of life, with an agrarian lifestyle with Christian values.

The mission was established at the present site in 1855 and in the first year a modest field of potatoes, barley and kohlrabi was planted. At this time the work was done mostly by hand with very few implements and draught animals. This entailed back-breaking work as it involved felling trees, uprooting stumps and breaking the ground with merely an axe and a hoe.

By 1864, the Mission's farm had become not only self-sufficient, but was producing surplus food. An inventory of its resources after the bumper crop of 1864 stated that there were also 32 cattle, 18 horses, 16 hogs and a wide variety of implements. Twenty acres were under cultivation, emphasis was on wheat, potatoes, and barley, apparently there were more pigs than the Mission could use, as the Fathers gave some away to community members to try and convince them to settle on the land.

Although the nuns were supposed to occupy themselves mostly with the education and health care functions of the Mission, quite often they were called upon to work in the fields alongside the brothers, as there were very few workers to go around. Imagine being a fine lady from Montréal who thought that the missionary work would be fine and then coming here and having to work under conditions of deprivation and hardship just like an animal and having to wear those enormous, heavy and hot habits!

After 1869, when Bishop Faraud took over the Mission, productivity increased and this is when the Mission became important in supplying the northern Oblate missions. The Lac La Biche Mission gained a reputation for being wealthy and productive.

Agriculture through the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s would have been all done by hand with implements like scythes, and sickles and horse or oxen drawn plows. In 1863 a grist mill was built for grinding wheat into flour and in 1887, the Mission Fathers used the mechanical reaper for the first time, this made farming much easier.

Due to the declien of the Mission, the officials from the government notified the clergy and the nuns to relocate at the Saddle Lake Inidian Reserve. However there continued to be some farming activity here as there are records of butchering cattle every year until 1898. When the residential school was transferred it removed the need for the farming machinery and the flour mill and its operational parts where then transferred to St-Paul-des-Métis.

The reopening of the school in 1905 provided an incentive for the recommencing of farming activities. Grains and animals were again being raised. Farming remained an important activity at the Mission especially since as well as the food, it provided the financial base for running the school until it was closed down in the early 1960's.

Given the farm technology of the 1850s and 1860s, field agriculture likely would have consisted of broadcast sowing on roughly ploughed and harrowed land, with the harvest carried out with sickle, scythe and flail. The harvest, beginning in late August and continuing into early September, was carried out by the Mission's brothers, priests, the older Métis girls from the school, and sometimes the nuns. The grain would have been reaped with a sickle and the sheaves then bound into shocks. The reaped grain was then carted from the fields to the farmyard and stacked. In the winter, threshing was done with the flail pounding out the grain on the threshing floor in the barn. It was then probably winnowed in the cold cross draught of the two-doored barn and sifted through home-made sieves. A mechanical reaper was used to cut the grain for the first time in 1887, and Faraud commented that it was a great invention. The necessity of enclosing all cultivated fields to protect the crops from cattle roaming at large would have kept the fields small. According to the inventory of 1864, the Mission had at the end of the harvest (but probably before threshing was completed) 200 bushels of potatoes, 120 bushels of wheat, 20 bushels of barley and 4 bushels of peas.

Clearly field crops alone were not feeding the personnel of the Mission through the winter months in the 1860s. Also listed on the inventory were 1,000 pounds of pemmican, 400 pounds of dried meat, and 300 pounds of freshly butchered meat. Much of the pemmican and dried meat was bought from the surrounding Métis community, but much of the fresh meat came from their own cattle slaughtered each fall in November. While the domestic cattle were allowed to forage freely in the summer, they were fed with wild hay in the winter.

The transfer of the jurisdiction of the Mission to Bishop Faraud after 1869 increased the amount of land cultivated at Lac La Biche as much of this farm produce, particularly the flour ground from the wheat, was shipped to northern missions. In 1878, the Mission farm, run by brother Milsenc, harvested 300 barrels of wheat, 200 barrels of oats and 600 barrels of potatoes. Cultivated acreage increased almost yearly and by 1879 Father Grouard was requesting that a new large plough (for four to six oxen) be sent to the Mission. In 1884 Faraud noted that a new strip of land had been broken near the powder house far behind the other buildings, and in 1888 Collignon recorded breaking another four acres of land.

With the Mission farm as one of the main bases of financial support for the school, the extent of cultivation increased as school costs rose. By 1930 the Mission owned part or all of lots 36, 38, 39, 42, 46, 52 and 54. In 1933 Father Pilon noted that 24 more acres were being broken in the "Big Park" which was to be seeded to wheat for the first two years and then to brome grass to create pasture land for the Mission's cows. In 1944 the Mission bought land back from Sylvester and Mary Bourque which had first been sold in 1922. By 1955 the Mission owned 755 acres, of which approximately 250 were under cultivation or used for hay.

The first wheat to be produced in commercial quantities in the province of Alberta was grown here at the Mission by the early 1860s. By June of 1863 construction of the first grist mill in Alberta was completed at the Mission. Before the mill was introduced, a hand coffee grinder similar to this was used to grind the wheat into flour. By the way, it took the Missionaries all day to produce enough flour to make 18 biscuits.

Food Sources

Fish, mainly whitefish caught in the Lac La Biche lake
Big game, pemmican and dried meat were bought from the Métis in the area (buffalo, caribou, elk, deer)
Small game, hunted by the brothers (rabbits, prairie chickens, partridge geese)
Wild berries, picked by the nuns and the children (saskatoons, raspberries, cranberries, strawberries, blueberries)
Wild duck eggs were found and used
Grew cereal crops, wheat, barley, oats
Raised cattle, hogs and chickens, (for milk, meat , eggs)
Made bread from flour milled from their own wheat

Some typical summer activities for the sisters were berry picking expeditions with the children, where wild fruits would be gathered for syrups, and canning to provide some relief to the winter diet. In July of 1894, four nuns left with the school children on a such camping trip to the lac Montagnais. This large shallow slough further west of the lac des Pères, which fed the mill, was certainly not a swimming lake. They went for the berries. There was much rain the next day, but it cleared up afterwards and the campers returned five days later, delighted with their vacation. The fruit of that particular expedition is not identified, but strawberries are likely at that time and in that area.

The children had a very plain diet of vegetables along with fish, meats and potatoes, very typical of what French-Canadians ate then. They would have cabbage, rutabaga, carrots or sauerkraut. A trap door led to the cellar underneath the boy’s room, where the potatoes and carrots were stored and cabbages were hung from hooks on the ceiling. In the winter, it was so cold in the cellar that they had to cover the potatoes to keep them from freezing. There was a pantry down there where salt pork was kept and there were shelves for preserves too. There was a smokehouse on the grounds. Whenever they slaughtered pork, one cook would always make head cheese (tête fromage), with the small bits and the parts of the head. She would also make blood sausage, at first as was usually done, in casings, but when she realized how fast it was eaten, she began to simply bake it in flat pans. She would also make stew with pigs' feet with a browned flour sauce (roux), the usual French-Canadian method. There were a lot of foodstuffs. There would be coffee, sugar, canned meats which she had prepared, butter and bread, salt and pepper, vegetables and flat cookies called galettes. – Champagne's Direct Quotation's page 293 and 294

They rarely had fresh fruit in those days, but everyone was allowed to have a slice of bread and butter with molasses after classes. They were aware that they were all living on a very minimal diet, and the active sisters risked malnourishment.

In the winter, three steers and two or three pigs would be butchered and canned for the summer. They often had fresh fish and kept around one hundred hens. The henhouse was heated and they had eggs all winter long because the cook would get up at 4:30 a.m. to go light a lamp there. – Champagne's Direct Quotation's page 293 and 294

Sources of Information :

Mission Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, Interpretive Matrix and Narrative History, by Juliette Champagne

Lac La Biche Chronicles, Gregory A. Johnson and Portage College, 1955

Rendezvous – Notre Dame des Victoires, by Mike Maccagno, 1988

Gestion, Initiative, Développement (GID), May 2002

Notre Dame des Victoires: A Structural History, by Great Plains Research Consultants, July 1990