Ernest Fiset remembers the grand old gambrel barn that was moved to the edge of Wood Mountain in the 1970s. Too wide to travel along the road, the barn had to be hauled across the fields after the harvest, leaving a fence in need of repair.

Ernest Fiset was proud of his 1929 Plymouth. Just a few years later, he would lose his Saskatchewan farm, his barn, and his horses during the Great Depression. Somehow, the Plymouth remained. It became his transportation, his livelihood, and a means of carrying his family toward a new life in British Columbia.

I sift through a small cardboard box that perhaps once held greeting cards, its lid long since gone. For decades it lay under Ernest’s bed in his tiny house. Inside are fragments of a life—tintypes, bank books, notebooks, and postcards from 1919. Piece by piece, they reveal the story of a young prairie farmer building a life after the First World War.