Childhood and Early Life
 
A plain shaft of composition stone with the simple inscription:
 
Here Lies
Sarah Binks
 
marks the last resting place of the Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan. Below the inscription at the base of the shaft in smaller letters is carved the motto; alone, and above it in larger type:
 
this monument was erected by the
citizens of the municipality
of North Willows
and was unveiled on July 1, 1931
by
the Hon. Augustus E. Windheaver
in the presence of
the reeve and council
 
Here follows the names of the reeve and councillors together with the names of a number of outstanding statesmen of the day. Truly a fitting tribute to so great a woman. And it is no less a tribute to the Province of Saskatchewan that on the occasion of the unveiling of this monument the register of names at the Commercial House at Willows should be at the same time the roster of the greatest of Saskatchewan’s sons. The Hon. A.E. Windheaver writes of that occasion in a letter to his committee;
 
It was hot as hell! There was no making it by road and we could have arranged for a hot box to hold the 4.46 for half an hour, but it was no use. We had to stick it until everybody was through. I think I was wise to leave out the tariff in my speech. This Sarah seems to be something of a tin god around here.
 
Something of a god! The tribute of a great statesman to a great artist and a great woman.
 
Half way between Oak Bluff and Quagmire in Saskatchewan lies the little town of North Willows. Its public buildings are unpretentious but pure in architectural style. A post office, two general stores, Charley Wong’s restaurant and billiard parlour, two United churches, the Commercial House (Lib.), the Clarendon Hotel (Cons.), a drug store, a consolidated school, and eighteen filling stations, make up the east side of Railroad Avenue, its chief commercial street. On the west side Railway Avenue is taken up by the depot, the lumber yard and four elevators. At right angles to Railway Avenue runs Post Office Street, so called because the post office was on this street before the last provincial election. It is, however, generally known simply as the Correction Line.
 
Business in Willows is not what it used to be. The Board of Trade meets every Thursday night above Charley Wong’s, and the younger set of the town is beginning to give up auction bridge in favour of contract, but in spite of these signs of progress there has been little real growth for several years. The town is now in what is known as the dry belt. Once it boasted seven elevators; one was torn down and two were destroyed by fire and have not been rebuilt. But Willows has little need for commercial greatness. It lives in its glorious past, and to its shrine every year come hundreds who pause for a brief moment at the Clarendon Hotel or the Commercial House, or buy gasoline at the “Sarah Filling Station.”
 
If we follow Post Office Street, or the Correction Line, due east for half a mile to where it corrects we come to Willow View Cemetery where Sarah Binks’ monument stands. From a distance it appears to rise in lonely grandeur. If we follow Post Office Street due west for a mile and a quarter from the town, we come to the North East Quarter of Section 37, Township 21, Range 9, West, the former home of Sarah Binks herself. Little remains of the old homestead. The house itself has been torn down by souvenir hunters, one of the barns leans drunkenly and the other is about to fall. Gophers play on the site of the little corral where Sarah kept the calf, wild roses grow where once were beans and potatoes. In the coulee, now dry, that ran behind the house, a meadowlark has built its nest. It may have been that Sarah, with the prophetic eye of the poetess, visualized this scene when, in her later years, she wrote those famous lines, now inscribed in bronze over the gateway of St. Midget’s, entitled, Ode to A Deserted Farm.
 
How changed and bleak the meadows lie
And overgrown with hay,
The fields of oats and barley
Where the binder twined its way!
 
With doors ajar the cottage stands
Deserted on the hill –
No welcome bark, no thudding hoof,
And the voice of the pig is still.
 
The west was still the West in the days when Jacob and Agathea Binks first homesteaded the N.E. ¼ Sec. 37, Township 21, R. 9, W. To the east lay Oak Bluff, the end of the steel. To the west stretched the boundless prairies of the North West Territories, in which, to quote Sarah’s own words, “The hand of man hath never trod.” Here was the home of the coyote and the gopher, the antelope still flaunted his lack of tail to the western wind, and the pensive mosquito wandered unafraid. A region rich in historical interests and traditions, of tales of Indian fights with their squaws, of squaws with the Mounted Police. Willows was then Wallows, and the very name, Oak Bluff, was derived from an old Indian word, or combination of words, indicating that at that spot the white man had been frightened, or, to use the Indian term, “bluffed” at a conference between Chief Buffalo Chip and Colonel MacSqueamish, the outcome being described by the chief in the Cree dialect as being “oke,” meaning very good, or excellent.
 
Into this free and untrammelled country came Jacob Binks and his wife Agathea (née Agathea Thurnow), the parents of Sarah. It is not known exactly from where they came but, from a report of a conversation in front of the post office, and from the fact that Sarah was often wont to refer to herself proudly as a daughter of the Old South, it is now generally accepted that they came from South Dakota. Beyond this fact we know little of the Binks antecedents. The Thurnows, however, are said to have traced their family back to Confederation. The parish records in Quoddykodiac in New Brunswick show that a daughter Agathea was born to one Abram Turnip and that the Turnips later moved to South Dakota. The name Turnip may have been Americanized to Thurnip and later to Thurnow.
 
Prosperity smiled upon Jacob and Agathea Binks. The original sod house of the homesteader was replaced by a more pretentious frame building faced with best quality tar paper and having an outside stairs leading to the guest room over the kitchen roof. One entered the “lean- to” or antechamber before reaching the main body of the house and living quarters. This antechamber served the purpose of receiving and storage room. In it was kept the fuel, the churn, the harnesses undergoing repair, here the chickens were plucked, the eggs collected, and here slept Rover, the dog, and Ole, the hired man. Through the antechamber one passed into the kitchen and from there into the parlour which in turn led into the bedrooms.
 
The birthplace of Sarah has been described as having been furnished with some taste. Around the walls of the parlour were hung in pairs the ancestral portraits; Jacob and Agathea Binks in bevelled glass and gilt frames occupied the south wall. A crayon enlargement of Grandfather Thadeus T. Thurnow, together with a black and white steel engraving of a prize sheep which bore a remarkable resemblance to the old gentleman, occupied the north wall. The gaze of all four was thoughtfully concentrated upon the Quebec heater which stood in the mathematical centre of the room. This heater, when glowing with fire, not only served the purpose of heating the room, but acted during the night as a species of navigating light from the bedrooms to the outdoors via the kitchen when the occasion required. The keynote of severely artistic, almost geometrical simplicity, marked the arrangement of the three chairs and sideboard which completed the appointments.
 
The parlour was used only on great occasions. Rover and Ole were never allowed to use this room if we except the one occasion when, according to Dr. Taj Mahal, who claims to have examined the floor, the former made a complete circuit of the freshly painted surface, paused for a moment at one of the chairs and departed through the north window.
 
The kitchen too, was not without its artistic touches, but here a lighter and more imaginative motif prevails, the influence of the Thurnows to which Sarah’s artistic and imaginative qualities may always be referred. Two calendars in particular mark the aesthetic discrimination of the home. One shows a vessel in full sail in dangerous proximity to the Eddystone Light, and the other, of more idyllic theme, shows in an orchard a young woman of beautiful proportions offering a cherry to a young man of her acquaintance. One of these calendars is said by experts to be an original. (Both are preserved in the Binksian collection.) But quite apart from the cultural influence which these two great pictures must have had upon the susceptible mind of the young Sarah, they bear a great significance in that they enable us to fix with considerable certainty the dates of several of her early poems. Professor R. Ambush has called attention to the fact that the date of April 1st bears the entry “caff,” and that this refers to the date on which Sarah’s pet calf was born and that those poignant lines of Calf could not have been written before this date and were probably written soon after since it had not yet received a name;
 
Oh calf, that gambolled by my door,
Who made me rich who now am poor,
That licked my hand with milk bespread,
Oh calf, calf! Art dead, art dead?
 
Oh calf, I sit and languish, calf,
With somber face, I cannot laugh,
Can I forget thy playful bunts?
Oh calf, calf, that loved me once!
 
With mildewed optics, deathlike, still,
My nights are damp, my days are chill,
I weep again with doleful sniff,
Oh calf, calf, so dead, so stiff.
 
Sarah was the second or possibly the third child of Agathea and Jacob Binks. None of the other children survived their infancy, and Agathea Binks either died or abdicated while Sarah was still a child. But there is no evidence that Sarah was lonesome. She seems to have loved solitude and although some of her later work, notably that of her early Post Regina period, displays a touch of the morbid whose origin psychologists could undoubtedly trace to her childhood, there seems to be no doubt that her early girlhood was spent like that of other children of her day. She was a happy and a healthy child. She assisted in the simple household chores of weeding the garden, gathering the eggs, and picking the potato bugs. During the summer months the little Sarah, her lunch pail under her arm, trudged the mile and a quarter to the one- roomed school at Willows. Her education was sporadic at best. More often than not, especially as she grew older, she was obliged to stay at home and help around the farm. Moreover Jacob Binks was opposed to much education, “There ain’t no dam’ sense in all this book- learning,” was the frequent expression of his inner conviction and his public policy, as a result of which he was elected and invariably reelected to the School Board.
 
But if Sarah’s formal education was neglected, if her acquaintance with the great authors was a mere nodding acquaintance, she learned all the more from the big school of nature. Nature to her was something alive, and the life of the farm, wild as well as domestic, acquired in her eyes a character and a personality. The lowly blade of grass and the stately horse were equally objects of her sympathetic speculations. She understood the grasshoppers and held them in contempt, whereas the gophers, whose inclusion in the primordial curse had, according to Jacob Binks, been omitted only through some oversight on the part of the Creator, were to Sarah a constant source of humorous amusement. For the perennial calf she had a womanly affection, and its stupidity enthralled her. She was keenly aware of the beauty of sky and field. She loved the hot sunlight of the afternoon and the feel of the wind on her cheek. One need only read My Garden and The Bug to realize how deep is Sarah’s sympathetic understanding of nature.
 
My Garden
 
A little blade of grass I see,
Its banner waving wild and free,
And I wonder if in time to come
’Twill be a great big onion;
We cannot tell, we do not know,
For oft we reap and didn’t sow;
We plant the hairy coconut,
With hope serene and sturdy – but
We cannot tell, for who can say,
We plant the oats and reap the hay,
We sow the apple, reap the worm,
We tread the worm and reap the turn:
Too much, too much for us this thought,
With much too much exertion fraught;
In faith we get the garden dug –
And what do we reap – we reap the bug,
In goodly faith we plant the seed,
To- morrow morn we reap the weed.
 
The Bug
In a little nook, a nooklet,
There beside a babbling brooklet,
Sits a little bug, a beetle,
Browsing in a little volume,
Reading in a brand new booklet,
Studying the spinal column,
Learning where to put his needle,
Get me with his little hooklet.
 
But not only is Sarah’s understanding of nature a sympathetic one but her love for the animal life is deep and abiding. One need only recall The Goose, or The Apple, or the ever popular Song to the Cow, songs which Bishop Puddy of Bingobingoland places in the very first rank.
 
The Goose
The goose, a noisome bird to chatter,
But handsome on a garnished platter,
A loathsome brute to toil among,
But caught and killed and cooked and hung,
Before a crackling fire,
A songster to admire.
 
The Apple
To- day as I an apple mulched
A worm I fain did bite in twain,
’Twas curled up in its little world
Where it in peace had lain;
So ruthlessly did I disturb,
The little worm, helpless, infirm,
Yet no remorse did shake my soul,
No pricks of conscience make me squirm.
 
Song to the Cow
I’ll take no cow that fails to sing,
Or throstle with its horn,
Her milk must stimulate like tea,
Her tail stretch to infinity,
And her nose be plush- like and warm
Amorous of optic, mild but quick
To perceive where the grass is pale,
A rhomboid snout, a mellow lick,
And a breath like ale –
These attributes in a cow, I deem,
Are the best to be had and win my esteem.
 
“Amorous of optic, . . . breath like ale! What imagery! It is in lines like these,” says Miss Rosalind Drool, “with their haunting cadence that Miss Binks expresses the great soul of Saskatchewan. One wonders how she does it.”

From the Trade Paperback edition.