My Dad, Noah W. Shaefer, was born in Delphi, Indiana in 1867. In 1869 his parents, Ephraim and Rachel Shaefer, with Noah and an older brother, headed West across the plains in a covered wagon. They settled in Guthrie County, Iowa. While raising a family of ten children, Ephriam accumulated 824 acres of good Iowa land. I heard they raised all ten children without the services of a doctor. In 1893, Noah married Annie Guy and they located on a farm near Adair. In the Spring of 1905 with their four children -- Flo, Roy, Ricky, and Melvin, they loaded their farm machinery, livestock and household furniture in a railroad car and started North to the wide open plains of Saskatchewan. They arrived in Caron on March 5, 1905, the year Saskatchewan became a province. It must have been an unusually early Spring. The seeding was nearly finished, the grass was green and the crocuses were all out in bloom. Dad rented a farm from a "Land Shark" by the name of E. Warren Steeze, where Lake Valley now stands. During that summer, Dad and Mother’s brother, George Guy, drove many miles looking for a homestead.He bought the adjoining quarter section to the North on pre-emption. George took the North half of Section 10 in the same manner. This was near what was then known as the Eyebrow Hill Post Office. Mortlach was the nearest town about 22 miles away.
Our family moved to their new homestead in December of 1905. There was very little snow that Winter, but the next Spring made up for it. It started snowing on the 7th of November, 1906, and snowed hard for three days and nights. When it stopped, there was snow five or six feet deep on the level and up to twelve feet in the low places. That Winter the sleighs packed the snow and made a "hard road."There was a shortage of coal that Winter, and sometimes there was none in town, so the farmers weren’t able to get enough ahead to last very long. A couple of times Dad came home with what he called steam coal. It was mostly fine dust and we had to wet it to get it to burn. Dad said "one more Winter like this and I’m leaving." Larence was born in the Fall of 1906 and that was his introduction to pioneer life. Each year we got more land plowed and crops seeded. Dad brought a big one-cylinder International Harvester tractor that pulled a four-bottom plow.
The Canadian Pacific Railroad crossed Saskatchewan in 1882 or 1883, so there were quite a few settlements along near the railroad. Of course, we had some good times too. The schools were used as social halls. ..Our Ford was one of the first cars that was shipped to Eyeborw in 1912. The C.P.R. ran a branch line from Moose Jaw to Elbow in 1910 and now we were only nine miles from town. The Fall of 1912 our north quarter section didn’t have very good wheat on it. Dad said it wasn’t much better than chicken feed. When the dealer tried to sell him a car, Dad said he would give him this wheat for it, so that is how we got our first car. My two sisters, two brothers and I (Larence) all attended the Eyebrow Hill School #1137. I graduated in 1918.
During the threshing season, you got up, fed the horses, had breakfast and were ready to go to work at the first streak of day. You stayed at it until it was too dark to see Threshing was the hardest physical work of the year. In 1913, the Grand Truck Railway went right across our farm about four hundred yards from our house. Now we drove only about two and a half miles from Eskbank. Flo was the first to leave home. She married a local school teacher, B. A. Shields, about 1914. The next year they went to Toronto where B. A. became a flight instructor in the Air Force. Flo drove a lorry to transport offices from the army camp to and from Toronto. When the war ended, she left B. A. and went to Ohio. She died in San Jose, California in 1975. Roy was in the army during the first World War. In 1929, he married Helen Hubbs, a teacher from Hoosier, Saskatchewan. During the second World War, he was in the Air Force doing aircraft maintenance, stationed near Calgary. After the war, he became a carpenter and lived the rest of his life around Calgary. He died in 1966. Ruby left the farm in the Spring of 1924. She went to Moose Jaw to work in the Deluxe Beauty Shoppe. In 1932, she moved to Swift Current and opened her own shop. She married Willard Klingaman in 1935 and later moved to San Francisco, California, where she died in 1944. Melvin went to Moose Jaw in the Fall of 1924 to drive a milk wagon for Caulder’s Creamery, which later became the Sask. Co-Op Creamery. He stayed with them until he retired in 1964. He married Fern Bender in 1942. Melvin died in 1979. Dad, Mother and I left the farm in 1935. We lived with Ruby in Swift Current until I went to Chicago that Fall to attend the Coyne Electrical School. Dad and Mother moved to Mortlach the next Spring and lived there until Mother died in 1947. The next year Dad went to Tucson, Arizona and lived with Flo until he died in 1954. He was buried in the Rosedale Cemetery, in Moose Jaw, with Mother.
I graduated from Coyne in 1936 and worked in Indiana at a refrigeration plant for four years. I came to California in late 1939 and have been here ever since. I worked at Lockheed Aircraft Corp. as a mock-up mechanic on a spy reconnaissance sattelite program. I married Bonnie (Houk) Collett in 1949. She had a little five year old girl, Kay from a previous marriage. Donna was born in 1951, and I adopted Kay in 1961. I retired from Lockheed in 1971 at the age of 65 years.
