Over Prairie Trails

by Frederick Philip Grove

In this book, Grove recalls his solitary and often perilous journeys by gorse and wagon over the thirty-odd miles of Manitoba countryside that separated him from his wife and child during a year of hardship.

Genres: Nonfiction, Canada, Canadian Literature

146 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Frederick Philip Grove was a German-born Canadian novelist and translator.
He was a prolific translator in Germany, working under his original name Felix Paul Greve and posing as a dandy, before he left Berlin to start a new life in North America in late July 1909. Settling in Manitoba, Canada, in 1912, he became a well known Canadian fiction writer exploring Western prairie pioneer life in vibrant multi-cultural communities. A bigamist, married twice, Grove constructed his entire life as an intricate web of fact and fiction. He died in 1948 on his estate in Simcoe, Ontario, where he had resided since 1930.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Want to return to the Simple Things of Life, after another madcap week of work? This tiny book will get you there!

For the price you’ll pay for it in Kindle, it’s very definitely an offer you may not be able to refuse. And your stress levels will decrease as a result, to ensure you get a nice, relaxing weekend break.

Consider it an inexpensive but priceless gift to the World from your friends up in the Great White (meaning SNOWY, natch) North!

Not much happens in it. But as an anodyne for the mountains of stress we all bear in the modern office jungle, it’ll do the trick quite handily, Thank You Very Much!

Start, if you like, by reading the wonderfully-written GR review from my Fellow Canuck, Ibis...

You’ll readily agree it’s a wonderful segue into reading Grove’s nonviolent and peaceful tales of - well, a none-too-special kinda old-fashioned life - that can remind you of the simpler joys we all once cherished.

Remember those days? No confusion, no headaches and No Anxiety! Wasn’t that GREAT? It was just like that at the beginning of the last century, when Grove lived...

Grove really WAS a Prairie teacher in the early years of Canada who detested the humdrum drills with which he tried to make learning penetrate the thick numb skulls of the farm kids he taught.

But when FRIDAYS rolled around!

Fridays were THE day of short school work, pack your satchel, hitch up your horse to your One Hoss Shay (the title of my Utah grandmother’s runaway FAVE of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poetic yarns) and “light off a-grinnin’ to follow the Sun!’

Thirty rugged miles of trails and... HOME AT LAST.

To the ONLY life Grove calls REAL - his family.

Sound familiar? Home and Family - especially nowadays in this Phony World - is where the HEART is.

When I was in the workplace, the stresses - and the expenses of providing for our future - kept mounting up.

The world was indeed too much with me! I remember one Friday commute home. I was broke and payday was days away.

But, you know, I needn’t have worried, if I looked at the Big Picture like Frederick Grove does.

For when I got home, my wonderful wife took our indigence in stride.

‘C’mon!’ she said. ‘We’ll make do! It’s not the end of the world! Payday’s just days away!’

And, of course, she was right.

Isn’t that what marriage is about? A mutually supportive, self-reliant union formed in love.

And Grove, alone in his old buggy, negotiating the wearily monotonous ride across the prairie flatlands, knew the value of a good marriage, too.

For he had a simple, domestic imagination. AND he had a hot dinner and a warm, loving family anxiously awaiting him - and another wonderful, relaxing weekend with them ahead!

Going home can heal all your wounds!

If you buy this one, it’ll give you a Refreshing Break - and a Heartfelt one - from brute reality for a day or two.

It’ll be worth it - it’ll lead you through pristine green pastures and prairie trails -

And take you home, again, to your REAL Lost Life!

[Ibis3 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. My loving of this book amused me immensely.* Basically, it's 150 pages describing snow. And the wind, and the sky, but mostly snow. I was thrilled at the description of every swirl, every drift, every crystal, because it was all so familiar. I've never lived in the prairies, but I've lived in Edmonton and Ottawa and I've seen the winter in all of its forms. I've waited for the bus for an hour in -40 windchill. I've walked to the store and to work against the wind and in a blizzard. One day when I was 8 I missed the school bus and my friend and I decided to walk--probably about 45 minutes, part of the way through a field with metre-high drifts. It was one of those cold, cold Edmonton days with no moisture in the air and the wind driving around carrying tiny glints of ice every which way. I'm surprised I didn't freeze any body parts off (I'd given my scarf to my friend and was making do with my hood in front of my face). I've had my eyelashes frozen together more times than I can count. I can't say I enjoy it exactly, but, like Grove, I relish it. Winter ought to be risky and uncomfortable, dazzling and yet prematurely dark. Your wrists and ankles should ache when the snow creeps into your mittens or over the tops of your boots. Roads should be, at least once or twice a season, icy or unploughed with visibility non-existent. Going out should involve twenty minutes of bundling up in half a dozen layers.

We've had hints of the Canadian winter before--in sleighing trips in The History of Emily Montague and The Man from Glengarry, Christmas on the farm in The Mountain and the Valley, the unforgettable blizzard in the aftermath of the Halifax explosion in Barometer Rising, the snowball thrown by Boy Staunton in Fifth Business--but those were like the early December snowfalls which come but melt away before you can get your toque out of the closet. Over Prairie Trails is late January--winter through and through.

These two excerpts from Patrick Lane's afterword explain what all of this means with respect to the CanLit canon:

Over Prairie Trails is an archetypal book. It encapsulates the essence of the Canadian experience, the violence and beauty and severity of its seasons. Alden Nowlan, the quintessential Canadian poet, once said that Canadians live in a country where simply to go outside is to risk death. He was speaking of our winter, that most unique and ubiquitous of our seasons. The cold and snow of our long winter separate us from other nations and other cultures and distinguish us from them. In the heart of a Canadian winter the world is changed. It becomes immutable, transformed into a kind of silence, stark and exquisitely beautiful. It isolates us, stripping us of everything but ourselves.

For Grove winter becomes a metaphor for our Canadian lives, a symbol of our struggle in the wilderness. For Grove, to engage in that struggle is not simply an act of survival, rather it is a celebration of his ability to confront and endure.

--
*I kept wanting to share with my mother who absolutely hates reading description. I kept telling her how much she would hate this book since that's all it is. Too bad I couldn't get her to agree to listen to me read any of it.

[fearthainn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Everything you never wanted to know about driving a buggy through a Manitoba winter. Moderately more interesting once I found out that the guy was writing about the area in MB where my mother was born.

[Ronald Kelland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have enjoyed Frederick Philip Grove ever since being introduced to his novels in university.,I enjoy his kind of Prairie realism. Over Prairie Trails is not really a novel, but it isn’t really non-fiction either. It is a sort of early narrative non-fiction. Grove describes seven trips by horse and wagon/cutter from his place if work as a school teacher in Gladstone, Manitoba to visit his wife and daughter at his wife’s school 34 miles north. I don’t really believe that the seven journeys described are in actual fact a blow-by-blow account of seven actual journeys, rather I think they are the observations of made on all of his journeys distilled into these seven takes. Regardless, Grove demonstrates his powers of observation and description, describing the roads snd trails, the farms and landmarks on the way, the wildlife, the weather and the Prairie landscape. Without sounding too romantic and cliched, there are times I felt like I could have been sitting in the wagon beside him, his descriptions are so life-like and vivid. This may not be a book to read through cover-to-cover as I did. It might work better as one to dip into now snd then to experience one of the seven journeys, but however you read it, I hope that you find it as delightful as I did.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic.....

[W.H. (Wade) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slow moving at times but was a good read for my research purposes.

[CluckingBell · Rating 3 out of 5]

After the first couple essays, the author spends a lot of time talking about snow and snow drifts (and much of the book is weather-centric). His natural curiosity is endearing, but the detailed observations can wear a little thin for a modern reader who’s been able to see both Antarctica and the North Pole on TV her whole life. But as he says in his essays, he’s writing these primarily for his wife and daughter, and his devotion to his daughter specifically and his desire to see her learn about the world and nature and succeed in life is again endearing. There are references to his advanced age and chronic illness, both unspecified, that lend a sense of urgency and poignancy to his desire to share his knowledge and experiences with her. His sense of impending mortality is tangible, and yet he seems to risk an awful lot by traveling through extreme winter road conditions to spend barely a day each week with his family. It’s fascinating on several levels.

Peter and Dan, of course, are the not wholly unsung heroes of the piece. Grove knows he’s got a good pair of horses in them, and he does show genuine care and concern for their welfare even as he drives them 45 miles each way through monumental snow drifts in 30-below temperatures. You don’t get much concrete information about the people in these stories, but the extraordinary feats these horses undertook so willingly for Grove may speak as much to his character as their own.

ETA: According to Wikipedia, his "advanced age" would be his early forties, and he ended up outliving his young daughter. It was a different time... :-)

[Mrsgaskell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to follow

[Shane Hallam · Rating 1 out of 5]

F'ing terrible. Just...no.