The Canadian Saints

What was the biggest trial facing the “Canadian Saints” during their immigrated to Lee’s Creek (present day Cardston), Alberta in 1887?

a.      Passing Canadian Customs

b.      Indian attacks

c.       Crossing the St. Mary’s River

d.      Late spring snowstorms

Yesterday’s answers:

1.      A.   Sunflowers

The following from Willa Cather: “All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs’s story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has struck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

Cather, Willa. My Antonia, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918, 28-29.

2.      C.   Lilacs and Tulips

John Muir stated the following about Salt Lake City gardens: “In almost every one you find daisies, and mint, and lilac bushes, and rows of plain English tulips. Lilacs and tulips are the most characteristic flowers, and nowhere have I seen them in greater perfection. . .”

Muir, John. Steep Trails, ed. by William Frederick Bade, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918, 105-109.