Recently we watched the new series of Little House on the Prairie. Jill and the kids (they were then) had watched the first series starring Michael Landon when it was on television from 1974 to 1983.

Both series are based on the books  Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about growing up in the 1870s, first in Kansas, then, after it was found that the farm they had settled was on Indian land, in Minnesota.

As I watched this first season I couldn’t help thinking how different life was for settlers in Kansas than here. (No doubt the next season in Minnesota will be different.)

Here settlers arriving from Britain to build a better life, landed on tree-covered lots. Today as I look out my window, I hardly see a tree that wasn’t planted by a farmer over the years.

When several families in the McGowan settlement, northwest of Blyth, arrived late in the year after a long journey by sailing ship from Scotland, none of the land was cleared so they had to build a log cabin to live in during the first winter.

My great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side, took up 100 acres at the northern edge of what was then West Wawanosh. He was only 17. But a family member arrived and said he would stay if he could have my ancestor’s land. My ancestor gave up his land and moved across what is now Hwy. 86 and took up a different farm, which included a lake named after him – Purves Lake.

Settlers set to work in winter clearing the land with only an axe. Generally they cleared about five acres a year and in the spring planted a crop to help them survive. Though they cut the trees, the stumps and roots were left and crops were planted by hand around the stumps

The second winter, they cut another five acres of trees, and the next yet another five acres.

Eventually the stumps and roots rotted and they could be pulled out. In the McGowan settlement the log cabins were eventually replaced by brick and stone houses. Ours is the least impressive of the McGowan settlement homes but it’s still two stories and brick.

Our house is at the end of a 1,000-foot lane that must have run through swamp at one point. The house is built into a hill so our basement stays mostly dry.

When I was first growing up on the farm northwest of Lucknow, my dad and uncle spent their winter days cutting trees, preparing logs for saw- mills and using limbs for firewood to heat the house. Later, when my father had to get a factory job, he bought space-heaters that burned stove oil.

When the settlers first cleared the land there were so many trees they burned them to get rid of them. It was only in later years that the worth of the wood was recognized.

Sawmills sprang up which cut trees into lumber that could be used  to build houses on the new farms.

When I was young, I remember that nearly every town had a furniture factory which turned local hardwood into lumber for use in furniture. There were factories making hardwood furniture or upholstered furniture.

But about the time Douglas Point was becoming Canada’s first nuclear power plant, they offered high wages that made those paid to furniture workers seem poor by comparison. One by one those factories closed and moved to where wages were lower in the central east-coast states.

Today it’s hard to imagine the task of the settlers as they faced endless trees. While they planted and harvested by hand, today huge tractors and combines can plant a crop over 200 acres in the spring and harvest it in the fall — all in a day.

I have one neighbour who still cuts trees to heat his house. There is one sawmill left a few miles northwest of our house. This is all that’s left of the forest that once covered our land.◊