Thoughts About Settlers
Why does anyone live anyplace as crappy as Edmonton, Alberta?
I don’t know too much of the native history for the area, but from what I recall they were at least semi-nomadic large game hunters, so they were here because the things they killed were here. That’s fine. That’s sane, there’s a logic to it. But what about the settlers? What was up with them?
Just imagine this: you live in Europe, in a “developed country” with “civilization,” and it sucks so hard that getting on a long, uncomfortable boat ride to a different continent so you can trek across thousands of kilometres of wilderness to do some subsistence farming on a few hundred acres of frozen birch forest in the middle of nowhere was a step up.
So the fact that this area is even inhabited is sort of a telling proof of the scale of the inequality European society at the time. While we had people living in lovely countryside estates exchanging repartée and poncy English poets dying of syphilis and the leisure class enjoying their tea, we had a lot more people thinking, “man, digging into the frozen earth in the middle of nowhere would be such a great opportunity.”
And the big deal was land ownership. Yup, it might be a chunk of forest. It might be a hundred miles from the nearest store, where an unbathed man with a raccoon on his head would sell you salt and medium-sized sharp rocks. But it was your chunk of forest, and if anyone—even raccoon man—tried to take it you’d fuck them up. And probably eat them, because it’d be a pleasant change from birch bark and turnips.
Strangely, everything around here related to settlers glosses over winter. The Ukranian village has some stuff like a burdei, and in the summer there are costumed actors living in these places, but that’s only during the summer. Once fall hits, they’re done, and seriously: look at that photo. Imagine spending a winter snowed into that. Yes, this was a step up. Crazy.
