Bell-Irvings

My uncle, Harry Bell-Irving, graduated as a civil engineer and worked in that capacity for the C.P.R. from Regina to Vancouver. My uncle Duncan was a doctor and practised in Vancouver. He and Uncle Harry started the Anglo British Columbia Packing Company. My uncle Will was in partnership with my dad in a very large lease from the Government. They bought stock enough to stock this lease and the Government cancelled the lease. They were left with too many cattle for the land they owned and lost money quite heavily. The Government offered them a chance to buy leased land at one dollar an acre but they were not able to buy much. By building a dam on Grand Valley creek and digging ditches to prove that the land could be irrigated, they could buy additional land at one dollar per acre. The little dam was on the SE 14 27-27-5-5. 

At first, my grandmother Bell-Irving had a half section which is now under Glenmore Lake. She called the place Bonny Blink. After my mother married my father, W. D. Kerfoot, Grandmother sold her land to Joe Robinson of the Chipman Ranche and homesteaded just west of my parent’s home in the Valley, and had a log house built. This she used for a summer home. She spent the winters in Banff. 

My father had an Indian [sic], named Moses, working for him. One day Moses went to Morley, expecting to be back the next day. After four days passed with no sign of him, Archie and I became very worried and were sure that he had become lost. The next weekend my grandmother took us with her to Banff and on Sunday morning we went to church. In his sermon, the minister told that Moses wandered for forty days in the great and terrible wilderness. Little Archie stood up in church and announced, “No he didn’t! He came back last Friday.” 

I am the “baby” of the clan – born in 1900. Some of the stories of the past I was told, some I remember myself. When I was a baby we had a large coyote hound named Joe that was broken to drive. He pulled me around on a sleigh with a box on it. One day Joe sighted a coyote and away we went on high, till we hit an A fence which stopped everything. In later years Joe used to haul our sleigh up the hill which was both high and steep. He would gallop down behind the sleigh. After doing this about three times Joe would get lost. 

In those days grub lining was a common practice. In the late fall, a man would ride in and stay all winter, doing some chores and cutting wood for a warm bed and grub. Ed Thompson, who had a small ranch, had a man come in to stay the winter. In the spring, Ed arrived over at our house in a bad temper and told my mother his boarder had left, taking Ed’s bridle and silver-mounted spurs with him. 

My mother said, “What’s the matter with the man. Has he got kleptomania?” There was a pause and then Ed said, “I don’t know if he got that but he got most everything else in the house.”