Bert Huffman: the bard of Inverlake.

Bradley, James

"It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones." Wallace Stegner (1)

When he wrote that, Stegner might have been thinking of Bert Huffman, a big American with big ideas and big opinions who swaggered into Alberta in 1909, full of populist zeal, poetic impulses, and opinions that ranged from acidic to elegant. A poet, freelance newspaper columnist, and inveterate writer of letters to the editor, Huffman was among the most enigmatic and puzzling of the colourful characters who have populated Alberta journalism.

In thirty years of writing for Alberta newspapers, this man of contradictions and unpredictability gave the province vivid anecdotal glimpses of early Alberta and insight into political and economic issues of the early 20th century. He left a treasury of aphorisms and homilies and a graphic description of the natural world, especially around his beloved Glen Doris Farm at Inverlake, just a few miles east of Calgary. He may have been the most skilled writer of Alberta's early journalists. But for all his powerful words, he was an enigma--an agrarian radical who pitched CPR land to hopeful immigrants, a labour supporter who despised idlers, a generous man who donated $50 to a woman who lost two daughters in a fire, (2) and who yet resented his tax dollars being spent on relief for destitute farmers in the province's dry belt.

As a columnist for several newspapers, Huffman developed a broad readership, both rural and urban. Farm readers saw him as one of them--a practical farmer who wrote truthfully about the joys and hardships on the land. To urban readers, he was a colourful, rustic sage whose distinctive voice mixed country wisdom with pointed observations. Though he is largely forgotten, his writings from 1910 to 1935 still have the power and resonance of a distinctive Alberta voice.

Huffman came to Alberta steeped in journalism, populist politics, and poetry. He grew up on a farm near Pendleton, Oregon. Around 1890, at age of twenty, he was an organizer with the Knights of Labor, the radical group that sought the eight-hour day and other reforms. In 1894, he joined Coxey's Army, a protest group that marched on Washington, demanding work for the unemployed. (3) He started his newspaper career about 1900 and soon was editor of the East Oregonian, a Pendleton daily. At the newspaper, he developed the flowing, colourful and occasionally florid writing style that adorned his Alberta columns. He also earned a local reputation as a poet, publishing his first book of poems in 1907, earning him the unofficial title of poet laureate of eastern Oregon. (4) Like many good editors, Huffman was not loved by all. One Pendleton resident suggested he was a "malicious scoundrel," a "treacherous and despicable person." (5) Some Albertans came to feel the same way.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Huffman left the newspaper around 1907 and entered into a long, tortured, and volatile relationship with the CPR. Over the next twenty-eight years, he sold land for the railway, praised it in print, then railed against its land policies and excoriated it in his newspaper columns and letters to the editor. Eventually, he came to see the railway as the epitome of rapacious capitalism in western Canada.

His curious CPR journey began in Oregon when he signed on as an agent, selling land in the railway's irrigation division near Calgary. There, he contacted potential American settlers and escorted them on land scouting trips in Alberta. In 1908, he wrote a promotional letter for the CPR describing how he had sold his Oregon business and was moving to Alberta with his family of six. He was sure he would be able to pay off his land loan after only two crops. He wrote,

   Any man who will go to Calgary and ride
   out over the magnificent new homemaking
   proposition, will come away an
   enthusiast. (6)

With money earned from land sales, he made a down payment on 360 acres of CPR land near the small rail stop of Inverlake. He moved there permanently in 1910. Once settled in Alberta, he began inspecting lands for the railway, reporting on their suitability for settlement and advising immigrants who were already in Alberta.

He stayed with the railway until 1916 when he concentrated on farming while at the same time writing for several newspapers across the province. Between 1918 and 1922, Huffman leased his farm to a son-in-law while selling real estate and working for the United Grain Growers (UGG) co-operative. (7)

After that, he farmed while freelancing for the newspapers. He wrote on an impressive array of subjects, among them his Alberta experiences, farm life, politics, nature, mysticism, poetry, and science. With his CPR experience, he could claim to have visited CPR lands across vast areas of Alberta (8) and he mined his CPR trips as well as experiences on the farm to fill his articles with colour, personality, and detail about early Alberta. In the early days, his writings depict a land full of promise and opportunity. For instance, he recalled many summer days around 1910 when he escorted wagon loads of prospective settlers to the prairie northeast of Calgary. Land seekers bedded down in haystacks or under the stars at one of the isolated ranches near Dead Horse Lake or on the Rosebud Creek near Hussar. He recalled,

   Four and five democrat loads of eager
   land buyers would be driven out of
   Strathmore eastward, feverishly looking
   for land corners, locating choice sections,
   exulting in the magnificent pasturage
   and going into rapture over the soil. I
   have purposely driven a crowd of those
   eager land seekers to the top of a high
   knoll north of Standard or Rockyford just
   to let them see the seemingly endless
   sweep of grass, far as the eye could see,
   without a house or a fence post to break
   the view. And I remember yet the wild
   enthusiasm which stirred many of those
   crowds, at such a sight. (9)

Huffman loved to spin a good yarn. He recalled one trip for the railway where he drove a team of mules from Chinook, east of Hanna, thirty miles south in search of one of the few half sections of CPR land still available for homesteading. He went there on instructions of CPR President Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, who in turn was acting for a British friend who wanted to send his shiftless son to the frontier for some toughening. Less than five years later, the area was drought-stricken, but Huffman's trip took him through a green and growing landscape.

   It was that long-to-be-remembered
   summer of 1915 and the lush wheat crops
   along the road were splendid to look
   upon. The green was so rich and vigorous
   that it looked almost black. Close in to
   Chinook, the fields were close together
   and wide-spread, far as I could see. (10)

Farther south, the land had been taken up, but settlers had not yet arrived and when Huffman eventually found the land he was looking for, it was a stony, desolate hill, not fit for cultivation. The well-connected Britisher would have to look elsewhere.

In one column about a wagon trip south from Castor, he described a technique land seekers used to find section corners on the open prairie. He explained it this way,

   A white handkerchief was tied around
   the rim of the front wheel of the democrat.
   The wheel was three feet in diameter, the
   distance travelled by the wheel in every
   revolution was roughly, ten feet. Five
   hundred and twenty eight revolutions to
   the mile. If you drove straight north or
   south or east or west, in whichever
   direction you were driving, you would
   come out very near the section corner
   you were seeking. 11

His companion on that trip was William Pearce, the CPR's irrigation and settlement expert, a man Huffman considered to be "a great-souled splendid land lover and engineer."

In his railway travels, Huffman always kept an eye out for human interest material to write his columns. He once described how a CPR trip to consult with settlers left him stranded in a prairie town on Christmas Eve when he missed the last train. He spent the night with the owner of the local Chinese restaurant and wrote a column that presented a condescending but nevertheless uncommonly sympathetic portrait of a Chinese restauranteur. (12)

In his columns for newspapers as diverse as the Calgary Albertan, The U.F.A., Strathmore Standard, and Hanna Herald, he held up a mirror for Alberta's rural people: a crowd of Russian-speaking immigrant farmers on a train near Hoadley; a local auction sale with people picking through the meagre offerings; or an evening at Hong's restaurant in Langdon.

   After twilight, life in Langdon swarms
   under Hong's only gasoline hanging
   lamp. The air is purple with cigaret
   smoke, but under his hanging lamp, in
   spite of the blue haze, Hong is able to
   distinguish a poker hand without the aid
   of a reading glass.

   During the day, when business is quiet
   and the apple pies have been made for a
   week ahead, Hong sits in a heap on a
   stool, reading "The Book of the Blue
   Flag" or "The Eighteen Genii," both of
   them Chinese classics over a thousand
   years old. (13)

Huffman's columns also unveiled vivid descriptions of scenes on his farm. On one minus 28 Fahrenheit February morning, he likened the scene at Invermere to a winter nocturne:

   A train engine whistles at Cheadle or
   Strathmore. The echo comes to me like
   the fading notes of an aria. The air is
   vibrant with ecstasy. The wires are
   singing a song such as no human voice
   ever uttered. (14)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

He marvelled at the wildlife on the farm -the plovers, the prairie-coloured coyote, the weasel in hunting mode. He wrote, "Putorius Nivalis, the cheeky weasel, white and swift as a fleeting vision, darts from out the cattle shed as a partridge flutters away, frightened almost to death at his savage onslaught from a hiding place." (15)

Huffman's fascination with the natural world included geology, but he especially loved the stars. He delighted in the annual Perseid meteor shower clearly visible from his Inverlake farm, and he had a detailed knowledge of the sky over southern Alberta. He was sure the stars were "peopled and inhabited and throbbing with light and glowing with activity and hope, perhaps thousands of times more beautiful and more sensible and truly human than our little circling planet." (16)

For all his travels around Alberta, Huffman regarded his farm as a place where he could retreat to enjoy his music and books, untroubled by the chaos of modern life. After one trip to Calgary, he painted a picture of an idyllic life on the farm, surrounded by his 1,000-book library.

   I have a cellar full of spuds, half a dozen
   fat pigs in the pen, have just ordered a
   winter's supply of music for my clarinet,
   and will unpack the old set of Harvard
   Classics from the box, and with my feet
   in the oven for the next four months will
   forget the confounded world and all its
   perplexities. (17)

Huffman's love for his farm and the farming way of life was typical of the country life movement that flourished early in the century. (18) Though he often called for more co-operation between town and country, he was nevertheless convinced that the rural life was best. Health and happiness were to be found not in the dingy, smoke-filled streets of the city but in the countryside awash in fresh air, sunshine, and growing life. In several poems, he drew a stark comparison between country and city life as in a 1911 poem for the Grain Growers Guide.

   No room for hate on the prairies
   Where the roads are free and wide--
   Where the fields are broad as empires--
   Where God's on every side. (19)

For Huffman, the country contained not only tangible benefits, but also the mystical elements of soil and plant. "I love to think of planting a seed in the earth which will multiply fifty-fold in a miracle-working space of 100 days," he wrote. (20) He expanded on the miracle of farming in several articles, including one about three cucumber seeds he found in the pocket of overalls left by a former hired man. Huffman planted the seeds, they flourished, and then grew into a marvel of creation. (21)

Like many in the country life movement, Huffman was an inveterate reformer. Despite having worked for the CPR, he declared himself a lifelong socialist who believed that capitalists were skimming off the profits from the value created by the work of others. "The wealth which we honestly produce goes to others--middlemen, dealers, traders in our wealth, all of whom take a handsome profit from their 'service' and leave the actual producers of the wealth in want, insecurity, and despair," he thundered in one column. (22)

Given his populist past, it was only natural that Huffman should turn to the Non-Partisan League (NPL) when it became established in Alberta in 1916. He wrote for NPL newspapers and continued to support the farm movement when the NPL merged with the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA). During the UFA government's life span, from 1921 to 1934, Huffman was consistently a supporter. During elections, he often made heart-felt pleas to voters to re-elect the farmers' government or to send progressive MPs to Ottawa. (23)

He also wrote about Henry Wise Wood, the leader of the farmers' movement who had his offices in Calgary.

   Meet my friend and quiet hero, Henry
   Wise Wood. He works and thinks and
   dreams and plans and mingles with the
   seething business world in this hive of
   activity, the Lougheed building. No
   secluded hermit, no isolated mystic, no
   inaccessible or unapproachable priest in
   a shadowed sanctuary, but a normal,
   jovial, controversial, thinking farmer,
   pulling to pieces the chaotic fabric of
   modern politics, in an effort to find a
   sure and unfailing recipe for agricultural
   salvation upon the earth." (24)

Huffman believed farm families were especially vulnerable to plundering capitalists, his political views becoming more strident as the years of drought and low farm commodity prices took their toll on the farmers. "They dig and plow and delve and sow and reap and haul away. And because the elevators and the grain buyers have the power, they confiscate the substance of this family," he wrote. (25) Similarly, he questioned why the price of cattle had fallen so sharply while the price of farm machinery went up. "Why does this curiously working economic law make the farmer the 'goat'?" he asked. (26) Another time he fairly shouted, "We feed and clothe the world, yet we must beg for the wherewithal to continue our calling." (27)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Huffman typically wrote a newspaper column per week in the 1920s, appearing most often in the Calgary Albertan. Often, his writing reflected the ups and downs that seemed to be his constant companion. One day was filled with hope and joy, the next with despair and strife. In the fall of 1929, with the binder ready on his farm, the harvesting crew hired, and the horses ready to cut a promising crop, Huffman was hailed out. His response was typical of the mood swings he expressed during his writing career.

   For a few moments after the storm was
   over I stood heartbroken in the midst of
   my labours, wondering if life were worth
   the cruel, brutal struggle which fate often
   imposes upon us. For a full year of
   hopeful labor I had patiently and honestly
   wrought at my task, building my temple
   of life as best I knew with the intelligence
   and the implements within my grasp.
   And now it lay before my tired eyes a
   desolate wreck, crushed to the earth, not
   worth salvaging.

   And then suddenly the sun came out,
   brilliantly, gloriously, I saw my green
   meadow land down under the canal like
   an emerald carpet in a palace. I saw my
   calves and young horses running and
   kicking up their heels in the warm
   sunlight. And within the twinkling of an
   eye, I felt myself another being, another
   man. From the desolation, I looked out
   upon the green pasture and the sunkist
   prairie and felt a thrill and a warmth in my
   life that I had not felt for years. (28)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

One constant with Huffman was his uncanny knack for creating controversy, a useful though often troublesome journalistic trait. He offended, agitated, and galvanized readers and letter writers by the dozens, building a readership but also creating outrage and bitter denunciations. No columns stirred more outrage than his 1925 writings about relief for drought and poverty-stricken farmers in the southeast dry belt--some of the very lands he had helped to sell for the CPR. From 1917 to 1921, Alberta helped dried out farmers to buy seed and livestock feed. Huffman sneered at the dryland farmers, alleging that the dole had "unmanned the virile manhood of the land." The solution, he suggested, was for those dried out farmers to leave. "If you have selected a farm in a drought area, move out of it," he wrote.

"There are plenty of places awaiting you elsewhere. Don't sit on a dry farm and rot." He said it was futile to pour money into "those accursed areas." (29)

Huffman's opinion was, in fact, very similar to that of UFA Premier Herbert Greenfield, who halted relief in 1923. Like Huffman, he worried that relief sapped the spirits of farmers. Huffman said little more than that, but he said it in a tone that infuriated readers. One man read Huffman's column with "a strong sense of nausea" and suggested the writer was totally without the great virtue of charity. (30) Other readers remained loyal. "It is no difference to us whether he dips his pen in ink or vinegar," wrote one admiring reader. (31)

Huffman also managed to rile Wheat Pool backers. He supported the Pools, but was concerned they had strayed from their original purpose of advancing orderly and fair marketing. With characteristic overstatement, he asserted that Wheat Pools had taken on big business ideals at the expense of bread buyers. "We are an actual menace to the humble table of the poor," he wrote. "We are a threat to the man who carries his lunch and buys every mouthful which his family eats. We are a club swinging over the heads of the bread consumers of the world." (32)

In 1925, in the midst of a federal election, for unknown reasons Huffman singled out travelling salesmen for attack. In a letter to the Albertan, he suggested they were frequenters of beer parlours and were a "garrulous, prattling, horde of sausage, oil, calico, nutmeg and lead pencil salesmen." He added that they are "mouthy and frothy" people who are to be found in the smoking cars of area trains where they "overflow all the cuspidors, occupy all the seats and befoul the air of otherwise sanitary smoking compartments." (33)

The Calgary branch of the Associated Commercial Travelers was horrified and demanded an apology from the newspaper. Albertan editor W.M. Davidson, an independent candidate in the election, quickly met with the salesmen and apologized personally and in print. (34) He said Huffman's diatribe had been an editing lapse. Davidson lost the election and some believed that Huffman's writing helped to defeat him.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Huffman's writings may have sometimes been foolish, but they were also undeniably fearless. In 1923, he wrote a vitriolic letter to Bow Valley municipality complaining about the council's plan to seize properties if taxes were not paid, and calling councillors "dirty scoundrels." When council demanded an apology, he wrote a sarcastic apology letter to the Strathmore Standard stating, "I was mistaken in calling this 'malicious persecution' of resident taxpayers living on their farms in the municipality, and struggling against untold odds to hold on to their homes; it is not malicious persecution at all. It is an outrage and a cowardly crime." (35)

Huffman was a man untroubled by alcohol; he seldom drank. Nevertheless, he struggled with his own demons that, despite outward signs of a peaceful rustic life, were reflected in unpredictability and restlessness. At times, he needed simply to get away from the strife of daily life--to dream.

Sometimes wanderlust overwhelmed him, despite the demands of the farm. For instance, in 1925 he joined a short-lived gold rush in Cassiar, B.C., leaving the farm in the hands of hired men. Huffman commented that he was:

   Gone, like a gypsy dreamer to roam the
   earth, to laugh at vows and good
   resolutions, to sleep under the stars, to
   follow the rain-drenched roads of
   summer, to join the roistering care-free
   brotherhood of dreamers, to forget for an
   hour the galling drudgery of labor, the
   alarm clock and the breakfast bell. (36)

Another time, he left the farm in the care of the hired men, and fled to the Yukon and Alaska with a little more than a wistful look back. (37)

Perhaps because of his travels, his personal finances were often in turmoil. Early hopes of paying off his debts in two years were quickly shattered. By 1913, he was thoroughly discouraged with farming and offered to sell the land back to the CPR. The railway refused so Huffman carried on, even adding a quarter section to the farm in 1917 and another in 1918. Like many who had contracts to buy CPR lands, he was caught between low farm commodity prices and aggressive railway debt collectors. In 1923, he joined a contract holders' revolt, calling for debts to be forgiven. (38) Huffman's land payments were indeed onerous. Between 1908 and 1928 he paid more than $11,000 in interest on his land purchases. Then, he stopped making payments altogether and by 1934 he owed more than $25,000 to the railway. (39)

In 1932, apparently discouraged again, he went to the Peace River country to find a new farm, even offering to give away some of his precious books before he left. (40) He changed his mind about moving, but the farm started literally going to seed. In 1934, weeds overtook a good portion of the land, with the municipal weed inspector arranging to plow down 101 acres, and Huffman agreeing to mow some further acreage. But as the summerfallow sprouted weeds and the depression deepened, Huffman's days at Inverlake drew near their end. By then, his writings were most often at the dark end of the spectrum such as with a grim, anti-capitalist poem titled 'Desolation', which was clearly aimed at the CPR.

   My harp is crushed
   'Neath the wheels of Greed
   My Garden of Hope is choked with
   Weed.
   I cannot sing
   Tho' the stars invite--
   Tho' suns glow golden
   I see no light.
   To the Plunderer's thirst
   I have paid and paid
   Yet the Plunderers thirst is unallayed." (41)

By 1934, with his farm near collapse, he wrote Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, charging that the CPR was about to force people off the land. It demanded that a quarter of farmers' crops go to the railway to be applied towards debt payments. "The situation is serious and will work untold hardships on our best and most willing farmers who have paid the C.P.R. hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past," he pleaded. (42) Huffman was still desperate in January, 1935, when he wrote a letter to the Calgary Herald, asking Bennett to cancel the CPR and Hudson's Bay Company land grants, a letter he must have known would be futile. (43)

As with his business matters, Huffman's personal life was similarly full of chaos and controversy. In 1913, a deadly disease struck his wife Ella, leaving her an invalid for the rest of her life. Soon the Huffmans separated and there were allegations that Huffman failed to provide adequate financial support for her. Furthermore, his son-in-law alleged that Huffman fathered a child with the nurse who had been looking after Ella. He also charged that Huffman had been involved with several other women over the years, fathering at least one more child. (44) It seems that by 1926, Huffman had established a common-law relationship with a local widow and there is some evidence they had at least two children. As noted Huffman won a seat on the county council despite the scandal. (45)

In 1935, with spring arriving at his beloved Inverlake farm, Huffman moved to the Delburne district where his new companion apparently had land. After he left his farm, his writings appeared less often. He occasionally submitted poems to the local newspaper, the Delburne Times, and published a volume of poetry and short prose pieces titled Echoes from the Grande Ronde in 1935. (46) At age seventy, he remained active in his new community, heading the board of the Delburne Consolidated School and helping found a local dairy co-operative. (47)

In 1943, he moved to New Westminster, B.C. where he wrote occasional articles for local papers and letters to the People's Weekly, a labour-CCF newspaper. He published one of his last poems in 1952. More wistful than fervid, it longed for the "winding trails of home." (48) Eventually, dementia took hold and his heart weakened. He died in 1953.

Though still remembered as a poet in Oregon, Huffman's contribution to Alberta literature has yet to be evaluated. Most of his writings were opinion pieces, but occasionally his columns wandered into the realm of parable and fiction. He also wrote short stories, such as "'Spirit of the Prairies'" which won him the Albertan's $100 short story prize in 1912. (49) Contest judge Emily Murphy commented that ".... behind its written words one cannot fail to recognize a fresh and vigorous personality and a finely organized mind." His prose and poetry reflect the styles of the times with their occasional sentimentality and lapses into purple prose.

Certainly, the judge was right about Huffman having a vigorous personality, but he was easier to enjoy than to understand. Huffman does present a romantic figure--playing the clarinet, reading the classics, writing winter poems before a blazing stove, pounding out a column for the papers at his rural retreat --in short a man of culture, intelligence, and learning. Sadly, beneath that image there was a restless man of volatile, often unpredictable and spiteful opinions, who embraced the mean as well as the poetic.

It is also certain that Huffman was as one of the province's outstanding rural sages--a class of newspaper writer given to dispensing wit, caustic comment, and stories from the countryside. One of his cohorts in the farmer's movement, J.P. Watson of Chinook, offered perhaps the best insight into Huffman's enigmatic persona. He suggested that Huffman was a poor politician and an even worse economist but added, "Bert, you're a dandy chap, one well worth knowing, a dreamer of the best type, a soulful poet and an inspiring writer." (50)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

An English Tall Tale

A party of merry-makers who were returing to Vilna, which lies north-east of Edmonton, has had the terrifying experience of being beseiged by a large pack of starving wolves. The party, which was returning on sleighs, was hotly pursued for many miles over snow-bound land. Some of the animals were brought down by rifle fire, but eventually the ammunition gave out, and the male members of the party had to fight off the wolves by using their rifles as clubs. The party succeeded in fighting their way through to safety, utterly worn out by their efforts.

Yorkshire (Eng.) Evening Post, March 16, 1925

NOTES

(1) Stegner, Wallace. Wolf Willow. Toronto: Laurentian Library, Macmillans of Canada, 1977. 8.

(2) "The Rea Fund," Strathmore Standard, April 28, 1926.

(3) "The Farmer Left Stranded at the Toll Bridge by the Politicians," The U.F.A., October 17, 1925.

(4) Powers, Alfred. History of Oregon Literature. Portland, Oregon: Metropolitan Press, 1935.

(5) "T.T. Geer Answers Stool Pigeon Publication in Scathing Terms," Daily Capital Journal, Salem, Oregon, April 8, 1908.

(6) Canadian Pacific Railway. Public Opinion Concerning the Bow River Valley, southern Alberta, Canada. Calgary: Western Printing and Litho. Co, 1909. 34.

(7) Len Nesbitt letter to S.G. Porter, August 20, 1934, CPR Land Development and Settlement fonds, Series 4, M2269-565, Glenbow archives.

(8) "Very Interesting Story of the Bow Valley," Strathmore Standard, May 28, 1930.

(9) Ibid.

(10) "The Last Homestead in the Dry Belt," Letter to the editor Hanna Herald, April 16, 1925.

(11) "Irrigation Project Seen Through the Eyes of An Engineer," Chinook Advance, February 1, 1934.

(12) "My Pagan Christmas," Calgary Albertan, January 8, 1925.

(13) "Hong," Morning Albertan, Feb. 27, 1923.

(14) "A Winter Nocturne From the Barnyard," Calgary Albertan, February 26, 1927.

(15) Ibid.

(16) "Two Most Fascinating Sciences," Hanna Herald, December 31, 1925.

(17) "The Guilty, Red-Handed Farmer," Morning Albertan, November 1, 1922.

(18) Jones, David C. "There is Some Power About the Land -the Western Agrarian Press and Country Life Ideology" In R. Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer eds., The Prairie West, Historical Readings, second edition. (Edmonton: 1992), pp. 455-471.

(19) "Creed of the Open Prairies," Grain Growers Guide, May 11, 1910.

(20) "Planting Golden Seeds of Hope and Faith in Life's Warm April Soil," Morning Albertan, April 27, 1927.

(21) "Three Wild Cucumber Seeds," Calgary Albertan, August 26, 1923.

(22) "The Wealth We Create is Not Ours to Enjoy," Wetaskiwin Times, July 20, 1933.

(23) "Shall We Lose Twenty Years' Labor by Half a Day's Neglect?" The UFA, September 7, 1926.

(24) "Henry Wise Wood, Leader of Farmers' Silent Revolution," Western Farmer and Weekly Albertan, March 24, 1927.

(25) "The Mail Bag: The Needless, Shameful Tragedy," Grain Growers Guide, December 25, 1912.

(26) "Eight Fat Cattle on a Dusty Road," Morning Albertan, November 7, 1923.

(27) "Optimism Won't Pay the Farmer's Bills," Calgary Albertan, February 13, 1923.

(28) "Hailed Out," Strathmore Standard, October 23, 1929.

(29) "Where Charity Has Proved to Be a Curse," Calgary Albertan, March 20, 1925.

(30) Letters to the Editor: "Alas for the Rarity of Christian Charity," Calgary Albertan, March 25, 1925.

(31) "Letters to the Editor" Huffman vs. the Maritimes," Calgary Albertan, April 6, 1927.

(32) "Should the Wheat Pool Consider Human Welfare?" Hanna Herald, August 4, 1927.

(33) Letters to the Editor: "Fred Davis and the U.F.A.," Calgary Albertan, October 3 1925.

(34) "Unfair Attack Made Upon Travellers," Calgary Albertan, October 5, 1925.

(35) "An 'Apology' from Bert Huffman," Strathmore Standard, November 21, 1923.

(36) "The Plow is Idle and the Plowman Gone," Calgary Albertan, June 24, 1924.

(37) "Down the Vanishing Trail of Ninety-eight," Calgary Albertan, July 28, 1925.

(38) "Optimism" op cit.

(39) Letter from S.G. Porter, CPR Department of Natural Resources to D.C. Coleman, Aug. 23, 1934, Glenbow, CPR Land Development and Settlement fonds, Series 4, M2269-565.

(40) Leonard Nesbitt letter to S.G. Porter, cited earlier.

(41) "Desolation," Chinook Advance, November 29, 1934.

(42) Bert Huffman letter to R. B. Bennett, August 1, 1934, Glenbow, CPR Land Development and Settlement fonds, Series 4, M2269-565, Glenbow archives. Bennett referred the letter back to the CPR which then undertook a critical assessment of Huffman's background.

(43) Letters to the Editor: "Time to Abolish Old Land Grants," Calgary Daily Herald, January 9, 1935.

(44) Nesbitt letter to S.G. Porter, op cit.

(45) "Bert Huffman Succeeds the Late Councillor Chamberlain," Strathmore Standard, June 19, 1933.

(46) Bert Huffman, Echoes of the Grande Ronde, self-published, first edition (1934).

(47) "Huffman named school trustee chairman for 1941," Delburne Times, March 16, 1941.

(48) "The Winding Trails of Home," Western Farm Leader, November 21, 1952.

(49) "The Albertan Stories," Morning Albertan, February 28, 1912.

(50) "The Passing of Bert Huffman," Western Farmer and Weekly Albertan, April 16, 1925.

James Bradley is a retired journalist and journalism instructor. A resident of Calgary, he now writes about Alberta's old-time journalists and their newspapers.