When I stop to think, water has always played an important part in our lives. It was true of our forbears too. In those days, when they came to the Island there were no roads and they had to travel the streams. It was canoes, and rafts that were the streams were the highways of the day. My forbears, my father's people, the MacDonalds, came from Scotland and they settled around Tracadie. But then they moved to around Monticello which is just west of Naufrage Harbour. They settled there and they were like the others; they were farmers. They moved there to clear the land and built the schools and the churches and the highways. They spread out from there and they worked in sawmills and other means of making a living. They still made a home there and I can go back to tell a lot of stories that they used to tell of them days. They lived there and they built homes and they mostly had big families.

They also had a struggle because I can't help but think of the animals they had at that time. The woods were full of bears. My parents were telling me that before their time, the bears would come out of the woods and they would kill not only the animals in the fields but also those in buildings. And one old guy was telling me about the time he had those bears outside, because, at that time, certainly before the days of fridges, they had those outside dairies; which was just a hole in the ground and a building over it to keep the milk and the produce cold and safe. He told me about the bear coming. He had a button on the door and a stick up against the door. The bear come along and took away the stick and went in and helped himself. Well, not only did he get in but he got back out and put the stick against the door!

And they had lots of these experiences. I heard of one time, not too far from my old home, they had cattle out in the woods at night and they heard the roar of the cattle and the two men went there. There was a huge bear among the cattle and between them they killed the bear with axes and I guess a gun, but it was pretty hard to use guns at close quarters. This was the story about how they lost lots of animals. It must have been an awful struggle to live.

They had saw mills there with what they called a knuckle-down saw. They had a platform made and there used to be two wings and they put the saw in end up and a far cry from what we have today. They used to take the lumber and even yet you can see an old farm some place and you'll probably see some of the beams that are hewn on three sides. I mean hewn by an axe. They used what they called a broad axe and they took this piece of timber and they squared it down with the axe and then they took the saw and ripped it in two or three pieces, as the case may be, to make the boards. An awful lot of them were hand hewn.

They depended on the sea, as I mentioned, for they had to depend on the water. They built dams and used it for power. It was not only to saw lumber but also to grind the barley and, the wheat that they grew. They used that for living, for when they went to settle the land in the early days they generally settled close to a spring, because it's a big job to dig a well to get water. They lived by the sea for fish.

The early people would have starved to death only for the Natives. When they came the Natives showed them how to live and how to make use of the herbs and such. All this medicine today is taken from herbs that's in the ground, and we don't know how to use it, but the Natives did know and they used it. I remember my mother very often would go into the woods to a tree and she'd make some kind of drink for a cold or a sore throat or something like that. And often times she'd use those and the people had to live by it. I can't help but think of all the differences in my lifetime. My heavens, where we lived on the farm we just had a horse, a few head of cattle and some sheep. The people have worked there and they value the work. They worked as long as they could work and things have changed so much.

A lot of the old people were very superstitious people. They believed in these ghosts and spooks. A lot of those things, I can't say if they are true or not, but I know when I was a youngster the neighbors would gather in our place and sit down in the evening and tell ghost stories. A lot of those stories were made up and a lot of them weren't true.

When I was a youngster, I had my different jobs I had to do. I'd have to get in the wood for the next day and even in the summertime we still had to use wood to cook. I had to do that and then we had the animals to feed and take care of. Young people today don't know one thing about it. I've seen a lot of change in my time. When you tell young people they just can't believe that we just lived away from any communications.

My father died when I was just a child. I was fourteen I guess, and I had the one sister and she was older than me and she was away so I worked the bit of land we had. We just had a very small piece of land. We grew what we needed to live on. We had the cattle and pigs and sheep and we grew grain. I lived through the dirty thirties. In a way we didn't suffer the depression because we had all of this stuff and grew our own vegetables. We had no money anyway. I think the people in the cities were hit hardest. I was close by the shore then and I'd walk to the Harbour as we called it and get fish for a few cents and we lived on that. I never fished myself.

We had a good community life there because first off in our school days we had our own group of youngsters. We had a time playing ball which was a very popular game. That was before the days of hockey. Hockey was unheard of at least to me anyway. We used to have get-togethers and have foot races. There'd be older people too and we'd always get prizes. It was a great game for the young people to get the leaves of the trees in the fall of different colors and press them and put them in their books. I seen people that got some kind of a scribbler and get those leaves and press them out with different colors and fill the book with different leaves.

And we'd all show what we made. We made such things as axe handles and handles for different tools. We made chairs and stools. We'd have kind of an exhibition and get them together and show them off. We had house parties just about every house had music of some type and also people could play that music. There'd be violins and accordions and mouth organs an old time organ or a pipe organ. We'd go in and the houses had no such things as rugs on the floors. We'd go in with old shoes on and the floors were not that fancy. We used to hold dances there at night and we'd go in and carry on and there was no such thing as liquor as we know it today. The most we could have there was a cup of tea or a cup of milk.

In 1938 a place opened up for a new man to drive the mail and I took that up driving along the North Shore and I worked at that until 1969 - thirty one years when they closed our post office. We had a local post office close by. In them days you couldn't go too far for we had only horses. At that time, my route was only about twenty miles, which is a darn long way when you have only a horse. I went over the road at North Shore. The Post office was inland, handy to the railroad track and I traveled along that on bad roads and in bad weather both winter and spring. I think I rode a while with a bicycle and I had a couple of motorcycles. But that was in the days of World War II, when you couldn't get a car even if you had the money. We used to have a two wheeled buggy and a sleigh and the horses before that. I just used the bicycles and motorcycles in the summer .Of course, even people who had cars had to put them up in the wintertime.

In the mid-forties the first snow plow crossed my district and that only came in the spring of the year to clear out the banks of snow that had been there for the winter. At that time there were so many fences that they caught the snow. The people traveled over the snow in the fields. That would be our route. I saw plenty of snow. I walked that route. I had those shoulder bags and I put on a couple of those and I walked at times in the winter when the snow was so desperate deep. If it was hard packed snow I could walk on top and I'd make better time than if I used a horse. I made skis one time but they didn't work they were too clumsy and too big.

We had storms when I couldn't see the horse from the sleigh. But the horses had an instinct that the human being has not. A dog can walk along and smell your tracks and the horse too. Lots of times I was in storms when I couldn't see where the heck I was going but the horse would always get me home. About them days, I have one story to tell. I got lost on the ice at Naufrage Harbour .I used to travel that way with the mail. I used to have a short cut across the fields. I crossed Naufrage Harbour and I'd follow up across by the shore. I got in a blizzard one time and the horse got lost. He used to travel along the shore when the tide came in. The storm the night before had washed out the tracks and flooded the trail. The next day when the horse came he lost the trail and I thought I was on the ice heading for the Madeleine Islands because I was going for quite a while and could tell nothing. It was calm and you couldn't even tell what way the wind was. It was a thick storm and you'd wet a finger and hold it up but that didn't work that day because it was calm. But anyway, I kept going and I came up to a wire fence. I was glad to see it because I didn't think there would be too many fences between Naufrage Harbour and the Madeleine Islands! Anyway, I followed along and I got a pretty good idea where I was and I kept going and delivered the mail and came back home.

One day it was too bad to take a horse, I thought, and I went to walk the mail route. I come along this muddy road and I saw a hat by the side of the road. I reached to pick the hat up and there was a man under it and he gave me all heck for taking the hat. He said "There's a team of horses and a load of hay under me".

Monticello was the name of the district there, and then Naufrage Harbour was really apart of it because the people of Naufrage Harbour went to the school at Monticello. Of course, in the early days, Naufrage Harbour was a fishing village, but the people didn't live there during the winter months. There'd be a group of fishermen there in the summer and there were buildings but they were just shacks good enough to live in the summer. It was only in the last thirty_five or forty years that people began to build houses and live there in the winter months. They all came to school in Monticello. Since they got the consolidated schools in later years, those old districts faded out. I'm not too sure where the division lines would be now. I notice there are many people moved in. When I was a youngster they were all pretty much the same group of people, the children and grandchildren of the ones who started there. But, as the years went on, new people and new names came.

They closed our Post Office out there. At that time there'd be only a short mail route. In the 1960s they were amalgamating all the post offices, making them into one larger unit. They came to our place in 1969 and I certainly wasn't up to retirement age but I was advised by some people to take semi_retirement, so I quit then and filled in when they needed me. I went, after that, as caretaker of the wharf at Naufrage. They have what they call Harbour Masters there. Some of my old people were sorry for me, and I was there as caretaker. It didn't mean all that big a job, but it was something to do.

Copyright
Waldron H. Leard