CARLYLE - Old-time dances, that’s what.
And we’re having one on Dec. 6 as part of the Dickens Village Festival. A dance with a live dance caller, with fiddles and fun.
Charles Dickens, the founder of our feast, or at least the writer who was the inspiration behind our Dickens Festival, lived from Feb. 7, 1812, to June 9, 1870.
To put that in a Canadian perspective, Saskatchewan as a province did not even exist until 1905, so we were still Rupert’s Land at this time. Many of our settler forefathers came this way by canoes and Red River carts, because the first train only crossed this territory in 1882. And locally, in 1882, Cannington Manor was created.
But before all that, during the Victorian time in Canada, before 1870, the Indigenous people were living traditional lifestyles, and were trading with the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company, and the fur trade was thriving. The Métis Nation had been created out of the unions between Scottish and French traders and the Indigenous peoples.
Agricultural settlers from Europe made their way to this area through some of the most adverse conditions for European folk, and only with the help of their Indigenous neighbours did they manage to survive and to make a home in this unfamiliar and often hostile climate.
Some early stories from the Oxbow area even tell about families living in “houses” built by digging into the banks of the river, while the homestead was underway.
The settlers to the area brought very few possessions, but those who could, brought their musical instruments. Because what is life without a good party?
My friend, John Arcand, tells a story about his Métis grandfather in the mid 1800s, who would host the local gatherings at his house.
People travelled from kilometres around on horseback, in buggies and on foot.
They arrived with women and children and food and maybe a jug of something, and there were so many people that the wood stove had to be carried out of the house to make room for everyone.
The fiddler was perched on the table, pushed into a corner of the room, and he played all night, keeping the rhythms with his feet and playing the tunes as everyone danced their cares and worries away.
Albert Poncelet, from the Whitewood area, related stories that his grandfather told, which would have been at about the same timeframe, about how all the locals would travel from kilometres around to the schoolhouse. Often by the time they got there in the winter, the fiddles were all frozen up, and would need some time to thaw.
Poncelet told me that sometimes, the fiddler only knew a couple of tunes, but he’d play those same melodies as waltzes, as jigs, as reels, as foxtrots and schottisches – whatever people wanted to dance. And folks didn’t mind. They just wanted the fun and fellowship of the music and the dance.
Children fell asleep on the piles of fur coats under the tables, and dawn was breaking before anyone left to go home for morning chores.
That is a precious part of our Prairie heritage, and one which is still thriving today thanks to music camps like The Kenosee Lake Kitchen Party.
At the Dickens Festival, we’ll have the horse and buggy, and we’ll have the music, thanks to The Happy Wanderers, and this year, we’ll have the dancing. But we’re not staying up until the wee hours of the morning during the Dickens festival in Carlyle.
Instead, we’ll be welcoming our elders and community members in the afternoon, on both Dec. 6 and 7 when driving is a little easier on the nerves and parking is still abundant.
On Dec. 6, from 2-3 p.m., come join us for some fine dancing. Kids from the elementary school are coming over to enjoy the fun. Come again on Dec. 7 from 11:15 a.m.-12:30 p.m. for a family-style kitchen party and try it again.
Michele Amy and Rowan Teasdale from The Kenosee Lake Kitchen Party will do some dance instructing, if any young (or young at heart) want to get up and give it a try, or people can just watch and copy the pros as they dance to the waltz, schottische, seven-step, polkas and pattern dances.
It will be a fun addition to the Dickens festival, and a great way of honouring the Saskatchewan Victorian traditions which bring us together as rural communities.
