MARTHA OSTENSO: PRAIRIE AUTHOR

Martha Ostenso’s house in Brandon, Manitoba, is now a spa!  A very nice house that belonged to my grandparents for a while, our Strachan family considered it an icon of success and so a cousin visited it.  Our Kovar farm machinery franchise was housed next door.   We had thought Ostenso bought this house as part of her success as an author, but in fact it turns out to have been her childhood home.  The only book we knew she had written was “Wild Geese,”  No one had read the book.  Until me.  She wrote another book, “O River Remember,” which I ordered from Amazon for a penny and have just read.

Note the covers change over time.  Here’s what the bio-sites say:

 

Ostenso (1900 - 1963) is probably best known for the award-winning novel Wild Geese, published in 1925. Hailed by critics as a landmark in Canadian realism, the novel is a story about a young schoolteacher sent to teach in rural Manitoba. “Wild Geese” won the 1925 Dodd, Mead and Company Best Novel of the Year Award and brought her much popular and critical attention. It made her a well-known and best-selling author.  The novel was filmed as “Ruf der Wildgänse” in 1961 as a West-German and Austrian co-production and as “After the Harvest” in 2001 as a made for television movie for Canadian TV. The movie starred Sam Shepard.  [I have it on tape and love it, but then consider that it has Sam Shepard in it so I wouldn't really care about the origin.]

. . . Martha Ostenso was a critically acclaimed best-selling author in the 1930s and 1940s. . . She is known as the founder of “prairie realism” in literature due to her writing which was influenced by her growing up on Manitoba and Minnesota farmlands.

Born in Norway in 1900, Ostenso migrated to the United States and Canada in the early twentieth century with her parents Sigurd and Olina Ostenso. Spending her childhood in small towns throughout Minnesota and South Dakota, Martha and her family moved to Brandon, Manitoba where she attended Brandon Collegiate School and in 1918 enrolled in the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. While attending the University of Manitoba, Martha met English Professor Douglas Durkin, with whom she became romantically involved and eventually married in 1945. During the 1920’s, Durkin accepted a teaching position at Columbia University. There he taught a course entitled “The Technique of the Novel” which Martha herself also enrolled in. While in New York, Martha took a social work job in Brooklyn before returning back to Minnesota with Durkin. Her first publication was a book of poems called “A Far Land” (1924) and a year later she published her most successful work “Wild Geese” which earned her a couple of awards and $13,500 in prize money. The book was originally titled “The Passionate Flight” and was later turned into a film. Some critics think that Ostenso collaborated on many of her novels with Douglas Durkin, who became aware of Martha's writing ability during her early years in Manitoba. Most critics consider, however, that Martha single handedly wrote “Wild Geese.”

In “A Man Had Tall Sons” (1958) the happiness of the story’s main family is willingly sacrificed by the father for the success of the family farm; a similar theme also found in “Wild Geese”. In “O River, Remember” (1945) the lives of two immigrant families are outlined over multiple generations in Minnesota's Red River Valley . . .  Ostenso and Durkin were to finally marry after the death of Durkin's first wife whom he had been separated from for many years and they took up two residences; one at Gull Lake, Minnesota and the other in Hollywood, California. Together the couple brought in about $30,000-$40,000 per year in royalties and continued to write throughout their lives. They owned a number of luxury cars, boats and homes and befriended many famous people such as Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, Henry Fonda and Mary Pickford. Later in the couple's lives, the quality of their writing took a negative turn due to their decadent lifestyle. In 1963, they moved to Seattle, Washington to be closer to Durkin’s children and that is where Martha died on November 24th of that year. Her death was caused by cirrhosis of the liver. (J.Mckay)

For comparison Lucy Maude Montgomery (1874 -1942), the author of the beloved and famous “Anne of Green Gables” was slightly older, committing suicide (possibly) in the year before “O River Remember!” was published.  Montgomery, who tended to work in short stories united by one character, had a miserable life, particularly in a marriage to a troubled Presbyterian minister and also in a long war with her publisher.  Her work was an escape -- not a facing of reality -- and maybe that’s why it’s so popular even in Japan and Africa.  The lone oddball who becomes a scapegoat because she flies too high for radar is also a theme of Martha Ostenso's, but this is not remarkable since many of us can identify with that predicament.  It’s the intensity and truth of the description that makes the difference.

Montgomery addressed the small town trope with considerable effectiveness, but she didn’t go on to outline the wheel of generations as Ostenso did.  “Wild Geese” only describes the children growing and taking flight.  “O River, Remember!” tells the tale of several generations with one man, the gentle and moral Ivar, who lives for a century, as the axle.  But again, there is a strand of “artistic” and nonconforming Irish entwined with the clever, thrifty and sometimes avaricious Norwegian wife of Ivar.  Thus it takes up the problem of all frontiers:  how to take advantage of the new start and get ahead -- even how to recognize the opportunities which vary from quick strike-it-rich gambles to the steady tenacity of plowing -- without losing the values and ethnic identity of the previous stable ancestors.  Ostenso is part of a cloud of witnesses, often female and on both sides of the 49^th parallel, who observe the risks of creativity when it is conformity that will make you rich and respected.

But Ostenso was not set free by her prosperity and success, even though she had what seems to have been a true marriage of hearts, lots of money, big prizes, famous friends.  Norwegian genes -- indeed northern European genes distributed by those busy bees the Vikings -- can carry susceptibility to both depression and alcoholism.  As a shield, some resort to the wife’s (Magdali’s) strictly ordered life and abstinence.  Even my paternal grandmother took this path, though it didn’t make the family wealthy except for that Brandon blip.  The potential for the rearing up -- from within the genome -- of that dragon-prow of love of chaos, creativity, and wild flight from the family is always there.  The stay-at-homes did not row on Viking ships -- it was their taste for adventure that hooked the Irish and came with them to the North American prairies.

The most striking image in “O River, Remember!” is an immigrant group who somehow have developed a ritual as they travel.  Though there are wagons, they walk, holding onto one long rope and singing all the old familiar songs.  Twice, arrivals on Ivar’s land are heralded by sound before sight:  one is this group and the other is Metis, the deafening squeal of Red River carts, for this is the river’s name.  Sing it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM54-ZRd-9k

JEMMY JOCK BIRD: MARGINAL MAN ON THE BLACKFOOT FRONTIER

The early nineteenth century on the northern prairies was a shifting, rhizomatous territory with only a premise as a border between what were not yet the provinces of Canada and the states of America.  Life depended on alliances sometimes created and sometimes destroyed by commerce, marriage, friendships, rivalries, occasional massacres, and ecology.  There were plenty of subsistence resources but only two animal resources of commercial value: beaver for their fur fibre and buffalo, first for meat and then for hides.  The beaver were cleaned out first in a strange mingling of commercial bookkeeping and adventuring.  Then the buffalo were taken in a more brutal and political slaughter, meant to kill the Indians as collateral damage.  Jemmy Jock Bird (born c. 1798 –  died December 1892) was shaped by the forces that swept the land -- nothing at all like subsistence nomadism on one hand or homesteading and ranching on the other.  One way or another, he lived through the century, springing up as grass in the morning and finally cut down as hay at nightfall.

Following the story as presented here requires the memory skills of an inside baseball statistician.  The original research, heavily dependent on the archived books of the Hudson’s Bay Company which have now been opened, means learning the implications of profit, debt, and indenture as recorded daily by the Orkney factors and clerks able to do figures but little more, except survive.  So record they did!  We know exactly how many beaver pelts were bought, how many men of which tribes brought them in, how many of what kind were killed in battles, how many horses stolen and that the little brown cart horse (broken to harness so “value added”) was worth getting back.  

Here’s a description of Jemmy Jock written by Andrew D. Pamburn whose family name had become Pambrun by the time I taught John Pambrun and was befriended by his mother Audra, an award-winning nurse.  “On those plains roamed, the most notorious treacherous, cruel and therefore the most dreaded man.  His name was James Bird alias Jimmie Joke, was educated in England, and a large finely built man, very fair for a half breed and his beautiful raven hair, hung down in ringlets from his shoulders.  He was undoubtedly the finest specimen of a man I ever saw.”  It was hard to figure out just which side he was on at any given time, which is part of the treachery accusation.  Most of his working life had to do with trading -- enticing trappers to forts for commerce -- and interpreting since he understood several languages as well as the webwork of political crosscurrents.

The surges of power and sentiment began with the tribes:  Blackfeet (which were divided into sub-tribes), Cree (same story), plus a lot of smaller or larger groups -- Sioux, Crow, and others -- plus splinters and spin-offs of renegades and left overs.  Though his father was half-English and his mother was Cree, Jemmy Jock was voluntarily identified with Blackfeet, particularly the smaller band Jackson calls “Inuksick”, better known as Small Robes or even Scabby Robes.  This band, sticking close to the Rockies, was more open to “different” people, which may be why they were vulnerable to the small pox that ended the band.  The few remnants joined other bands and Darrell Kipp preserves the memory of the group in his middle name, “Robes.”

Over the top of all this came the Hudson’s Bay Company, fur-trading capital venturists in England.  Few of them had any sense of what the land was like, universally they obsessed over profit, and naturally they were riddled with their own brand of Euro-politics.  But that giant steam-powered engine was opposed on the US side by the Northwest Company, the Pacific Fur Company, and a lot of smaller shifting splinters and entrepreneurs from back east.  Not only stealing trade from each other, the loose coalitions captured the allegiance of employees back and forth.  The HBCo also brought in outside demographic groups:  Mohawk trappers from the east where the beaver was already trapped out (it took a while for the local indigenous tribes to kill them all), and Irish toughs in numbers enough that one of the worries about the Red River Rebellion was that the Metis might make common cause with the Fenians.

The next set of conflict-makers was religious: primarily Catholic Jesuits and Protestant Methodists who both filled everyone’s heads with totally irrelevant but inflammatory concepts like Hell.  In this context, Jemmy Jock seemed not averse to Catholics because of early experience with the Church of England, and his wife Sally was much interested, even to the point of wanting baptism, but since Jemmy Jock would not turn out his second wife (for who would support her and her children then?) the priest was faced with knotty problems over which Bird children could be baptized.  And one suspects the motives of Sally.  Eventually, after the children had grown, Sally got her wish.

It was hard to sort out the spontaneous murders from the raiding parties or from the vengeance killings.  Somehow, with strength and guile, Jemmy Jock managed to survive.  The community of aficionados of frontier derring-do must cherish this book.  John C. Jackson has been researching this world so long and so deeply that he inhabits it to the point of sometimes leaving the rest of us behind.  Crucially valuable as this book is, since it ties together so much documented research and presents it coherently, there are little skips and jokes that can cause the reader to reread several times before getting a grip on the real meaning.  After absorbing so many 19th century letters, Jackson can’t help slipping into their rhetoric but in the long run the turns of phrase become part of the meaning of the book.  In short, he takes sides about as much as Jemmy Jock did, but it’s subtle and Jackson doesn’t shift around, tacking into the wind, as much as Jemmy did, maybe because that was Metis temperament or maybe because it meant survival.  Most of the time he managed to accrue a pretty good pile of money on the HBCo books.  But no one can control the world at large and the continental conditions kept changing.  At some point the scales tip.

When he died 1898, his life had spanned the 19th century.  He’s buried at Holy Family Mission, not far from here.  His relatives remain, some of them in the St. Mary’s Valley, where his name is kept alive.  Not long ago I had an email contact from a young Canadian in BC. saying he was a descendant of a Blackfeet.  I’m not even Indian, much less Blackfeet, but from my library I was able to dope out enough to realize -- since confirmed by others -- that he was Metis, a mix of Cree, Blackfeet and white of various sorts: in short, a descendant of Jemmy Jock.  He sent me a photo of he and his dad: big splendid broad-shouldered men, much like Jemmy Jock must have been.  

John C. Jackson is still writing and lives in Olympia, Wa.  He blogs at  http://trudgingwithacurmudgeon.wordpress.com

I have a little spin-off thought here.  If this much good can come from opening up the Hudson’s Bay Company archives, what wonders could be revealed by the opening of the archives of the Catholic Church or even the Jesuit Order?  Much of it will be in Italian or French, but no doubt the Pope would want to pick up the cost of translation as reparation for the abuses of children in mission schools.  It would mean more and be more lasting than money.  He could send copies of relevant reports to every tribal headquarters and community college.