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D E L I V E R I N G W H E A T T O T H E V A L M A R I E ELEVATOR Jack Gunter
hen I was seven or eight years old, I remember delivering wheat to the Val Marie elevator with my dad with a team or horses on a high-wheeled wagon. The tail gate was made in two pieces – the bottom part was about ten inches high with a hinge in the middle and a lever that locked across the back. When you got to the elevator, you could remove this part of the tail gate to let the wheat out. The wagon box held sixty bushels of wheat. Some farmers had what they called a tank wagon that held ninety bushels of wheat.
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We lived in the Hillandale district – fifteen miles from the elevator – so my dad would get up early in the morning and go to the barn with the lantern to feed and harness his horses. It was usually fall when he was hauling wheat and the days would be short. Dad would have to have the wheat on the wagon the night before.
Some wagons had a spring seat on top of the box, but my dad’s had a plank across the top of the box. You sat on that with your feet hanging in front of the box. The horses could walk four miles in an hour with a load, so it would take us three and three-quarter hours to reach the elevator.
I remember one day we were on the flat about two miles from town. There was a big farmer that lived about five miles from town and he had a big team of well-fed horses and a big tank wagon with ninety bushels of wheat on it. He caught up to us, his horses were trotting at a brisk pace. He pulled out, passed us, and went right on to the elevator. My dad said that he would probably make several trips to the elevator that day.
When we reached the elevator, the horses would drive right up the ramp and over the scale so that the wagon was on the scale but the horses were not. There was a place to put the front wheels of the wagon. After the wagon was weighed, there was a part that would come up to keep the wheels from rolling off as the hoist lifted the front wheels of the wagon up with cables run by the engine that popped a tune in a shed beside the elevator. Then the bottom part of the tail gate of the wagon was removed and the wheat was let out. It
went into the pit and from there was elevated to the right bin. The elevator agent would take a sample of the wheat as it ran out, put it through a sieve and weighed it for dockage and grade. Then he would make out the ticket and pay my dad with a cheque from the grain company.
They would have the weight of the wagon when it was empty, so Dad would go to the coal shed and put on a load of coal from the winter. He went back to the elevator to weight the coal and pay the agent for it. He would take the horses and tie them to the slab fence along the tracks and go to the restaurant for lunch. Then he would pick up some supplies that my mother had asked for and we would return home. It made for a long day for a boy.
We hauled some wheat with our new truck that we got in 1949, but by that time we were mostly into ranching. When I took over the ranch in 1960, that was the last year we sold any wheat. After that we put everything up for feed for the cows.
Jack Gunter was born June 18, 1935, in Ponteix and grew up in the Hillandale district. He grew up ranching with his father, Russell “Curly” Gunter, fifteen miles northeast of Val Marie. He took his schooling through correspondence until Grade Eight. In 1955 he married Irene Garella, who grew up in the Stove Lake District south of Ponteix. They started ranching on the West Flat in 1955, raised four children there, and continue to live and ranch alongside their son and grandson.
