Vivian "Toody" Shirran arrived in the Cariboo with her family in a covered wagon in 1925. The Greenlee family had been on the road for a month, making their way from Washington to a homestead at Canim Lake. It was a dark, rainy day when they finally turned off the Cariboo Wagon Road and headed down the deeply-ruttedtrail to Canim Lake.
That day, Herb Auld was returning to 100 Mile House after delivering mail to the remote McNeil ranch, at the far end of Canim Lake. He remembered meeting the Greenlees on the Forest Grove Road. Toody's mother was driving the wagon. Auld said that the wagon was "loaded with camping gear, furniture and four little girls, peering at me from the edges of the canvas behind their mother".
Toody was five at the time. She remembers some of the adventures her family had during their trip north. She recalled a near–tragedy at Big Rock Creek when her father took a wrong turn off the main road. The family found themselves on a narrow road so high on a cliff that they could not see the canyon floor below. The road was treacherous, with ice on the cliff side and mud on the cut bank. The horses slipped toward the edge. Her father had to chop footholds in the ice for the horses all the way to the top. The children and their mother slogged along on foot behind the wagon.
At Maiden Creek, near Clinton, the horses struggled to pull the wagon up the steep slope. Toody recalled her frustration when three older girls living near the hill tried to hitch a ride behind thewagon, holding on and sliding on their heels.
"I thought about our poor horses. They already had such a heavy load to get up that hill," she said.
When the family reached Canim Lake they had to wait for the ice to clear. Finally their wagon was taken on a barge to their homestead site past Sand Point. As the barge rolled in the waves, one wagon wheel broke off over the side of the barge and was lost, a major catastrophe.
Once they were settled, the Greenlees set about clearing land. The girls worked alongside their parents. Their mother taught them to garden, to care for a household and to be self-sufficient. Outdoors, they worked as hard as men. They learned to farm, to log in the bush, to put up buildings, to hunt and to work on their parents' trapline which extended from Eagle Creek to Timothy Mountain. They grew up on the isolated homestead, learning to make do with what they had and to invent whatever else they needed.
Formal schooling for the girls was on an irregular basis. Toody was fourteen when she began to attend classes.
"I knew what I was going for so I made the best of it," Toody said, of her three years of sporadic schooling.
Greenlee cut a rough trail over a mountain from the farm at Canim Lake to the Bradley Creek School. " We could never get there on time. It was a terrible, rough ride. We left in the dark and came home in the dark. Two hours each way over very rugged country, up steep, rocky paths, through bogs and down through thick bush. Sometimes windfalls blocked the trail."
One time Toody's younger sister became sick at school. Toody remembered how hard it was to get her onto the horse and to hold on to her on as they rode home over the mountain.
As the pioneers homesteaded, their animals worked alongside them. People and animals depended on each other to ensure their survival. Toody told of some of the remarkable animals that she knew as a child and later, when she farmed with her husband Bill and daughter Vicky.
"I had this little horse named Joker," Toody said. "When he was born, he was so small he could walk under his mother's front legs, which is unusual. But he was very smart. He learned to do everything I told him. He could even undo gates and latches on doors.
"I used to pull a big harrow around the field with him. It was a little heavy but he'd go along and then stop to rest and I'd clean the harrow. I often hauled rocks with him. I'd get a load on and he wasn't interested in heading for home. He knew those rocks had to go up towards the mountain, so up he'd go with that load of rocks, right to the pile and wait for me to unload him. Later my father gave me another horse to go with him. Silver wasn't a very big horse but at least they made me a team. I used Joker to pull a cart. One time a couple of people came out from the Free Press to do a story and I took them for a ride."
"Joker was kind of a light sorrel but as he grew old, he became much darker. Before he died, he was almost black and white."
Another unusual animal Toody tells about was a cat named Tweedle O Twill. "He was a different cat than any other cat," she laughed. "When I'd go down to the lake and get in a boat, he'd swim out to be with me and when my husband would go in the bush and shoot a grouse, that cat would go get that grouse and bring it right to my husband's feet. He'd always go out with me hunting for the cows. He was just a little kitty and kind of fat. Well, he'd catch a mouse and have trouble carrying it and keeping up with me so I would carry the mouse home for him."
Toody's parents gave her a Holstein cow that became Toody's cow-of-all-trades. Toody described her hard-working partner.
"Well, to begin with, I didn't have a horse to ride at the time so I rode a cow everywhere. I'd put a harness on her and we'd go get loads of wood. It was a bit of a job to get her going where you wanted so I cut a little switch and she'd go. After a while she got so she'd doanything I told her, just like a horse.
"One time my husband shot two deer and he went down with the cow and a packsaddle and she packed the deer home for him. I've got a picture of her packing a load in the winter. You can see my violin sticking out of the pack. And there's a cute one of Vicky at two years-old milking that cow. You can see the two streams of milk she wasgetting."
Everyone living in the Cariboo wilderness has wild animals as neighbors. The Greenlees were unfazed by living in the heart of bearcountry. Over the years Toody had plenty of encounters with bears.
"I spent more time in the woods than any place else and I was never worried," she said. "Any time I came across a bear, it was more scared than I was. We had one who sometimes came by for breakfast. We were living up by the road in a small log cabin. We had a stout chain across the door, open just enough to let the cats in. We had a little box up on the wall outside the door where I'd put our milk and cream to cool. We'd see this bear walk right by that opening. He'd take thestuff from the box but he never bothered us.
"You just have to use common sense in this country. Make noise when you're in the bush. Let the bears know you're coming so they won't think you're sneaking up on them."
For many years, Toody entertained folks around the Cariboo with her fiddling. She has a music room where she keeps her beloved collection of violins hanging neatly from nails in a closet. Each one has special name and an interesting story. She also has a guitar and apiano.
Toody composes songs that are a unique blend of her own poems and familiar melodies.
As she goes about her daily chores, she carries a notepad to record her thoughts, something she has done for a very long time. The thoughts become poems. The story of her life unfolds in the poems. They areabout hard work, love and nature and are rich with humor and imagery.
Toody is also an accomplished artist. Her lively drawings of horses hang in her home, their graceful, slim lines and soft, pastel backgrounds reminiscent of Japanese paintings.
Toody has worked all of her life as hard as anyone could, doing every chore that farming entails. Her strong, gnarled hands tell of barbed wire fences and cutting cold blocks of ice on the lake, of building a stoneboat to haul dynamite and of tending to injured and older animals with skill and compassion.
In recent years, age has slowed her down. She is ninety now and should be retired. But not Toody. She is putting in her usual enormous garden and she has eighty chickens on the go. She has dozens of eggs to sell to the many people who come through her gate and vegetables to raise both for her family and her chickens. Using a cane, she makes her way down the hill to the chicken coop on painful feet and hips that need repairing.
"I get along better with two sticks than one but I always have something I have to pack back up to the house," she says. "Well, I've worked all my life and I guess it's what keeps me going!"