One of the first tasks of the settler was to prepare his land for crops. Breaking was often described as a religious experience and no doubt there was a momentous feeling about turning over soil that had never been cultivated. But as this photograph shows, breaking sod was not like digging a garden. The prairie was covered with grasses, hardy and solidly-rooted, that fiercely resisted the plow. Had it not been for the new chilled steel mouldboard of the plows, the task might have been impossible. Though most stories of prairie pioneers describe life on the plains, the parkland districts also were opened to agricultural settlement and trees and roots had to be cleared from some of the land.
Although the farmer in this photograph is using horses to pull the plow, oxen were the preferred motive power during the first years on the homestead when breaking was the primary task. Buck and Bright (two common names) were slow but powerful. They fed on prairie grasses, saving the high price of feed grain which horses required. And they cost much less than horses, an important factor for any farmer who was just getting started. After the turn of the century, certainly by 1914, steam and gas tractors replaced the oxen as motive power for breaking sod but before that happened the oxen had already won a place in pioneer legend. Mrs. Sarah Ellen Roberts, one of those pioneers, recalled the oxen vividly, particularly during an early harvest on her family's Alberta homestead.
The four oxen were hitched abreast, Papa drove, and Lote stood on the trucks most of the time to urge the oxen on, waving the whip over them whenever it was necessary, for Papa, from the driver's seat, could not reach them with the whip at all, and they scarcely moved without its encouragement. For them, the temptation to stand still and fill themselves with grain, added to their natural inclination to move as slowly as possible, made it necessary to use two drivers. Frank, meanwhile, worked at the stooking, but of course he alone could not keep up with the binder, so from time to time, when the oxen were resting, Lathrop joined him at that task.
I remember well the day that Papa began to cut the oats, just south of the house. He was, for some reason, alone that day. The oats were very heavy. It was the first swath, so the oxen were right in the grain and simply would not move, for they had evidently made up their minds that, in the absence of the second driver with the whip, they would eat instead of work.
Papa pulled and sawed and yelled, and maybe he swore at them I don't know about that but they wouldn't budge an inch. I had once or twice gone along at the side waving the whip, so when I saw the trouble he was having I raised the window and in my sweetest voice said, "Could I help you any?"
He fairly yelled out, "No! The devil couldn't drive the damned things to hell!"
I shut the window quickly. If Papa had been a profane man, I would have been indignant, but since he was not indeed, he almost never swore I just thought it was plain funny, and we all laughed about it when I told it "on him" later.
