In 1869, about 150 years ago, a trio of young people found a big, clear-running spring in the western wilds of North America and decided to settle down.¹ The place was deserted except for a small population of Ojibwe hunters who moved through the region. Some six miles away, on the Seine River, lived a community of Métis called La Pointe-des-Chênes, in the parish of Ste. Anne. By May of the next year, the land they had chosen would become part of the new province of Manitoba. Two years later the land would be surveyed by Thomas Cheesman and his crew, who established that the young settlers had squatted in township 7, on the south-west quarter of section 13.

The settlers were John Hamilton Mack, twenty-five, his wife Bertha (Stelch) Mack, and their bachelor friend Thomas Slater. John’s parents had come from Ireland in 1844 and settled in Hensell County, Ontario. Here John had married Bertha, a German immigrant girl. The young couple and their friend Thomas had come west with horses, a wagon, and a cow, first on the Great Lakes to Duluth and then by train to St. Cloud, Minnesota. From there they rode their wagon north, with cow in tow, along the Minnesota Trail to Pembina and then into Rupert’s Land. Clear Springs history was preserved by first-generation residents Harry and Margaret Turnpenny and William Cohoe, and by third-generation residents Ed and Alice Laing, who published Pioneers of Clear Springs in 2001. Many of the facts and anecdotes in this article are taken from this book, too many to cite individually.

There was no Steinbach, no Blumenort, and no railway. The bison skulls turned up by the plow were all that was left of the great herds that had once ranged over the land claimed by the Macks. The Ojibwe, hunters of moose and deer, would, in two years’ time, give up their traditional rights and retreat to reserves meted out by Treaty Number 1. And then, after four years, during which time the settlement had come to be called Clear Springs,² the first Mennonites showed up. One of the first contacts happened in the summer of 1873 when Mennonite and Hutterite land scouts came upon the Macks’ cabin.³ A wagonload of German-speaking men in black emerged from the poplars and introduced themselves to Bertha Mack, who, to their surprise, replied in German.

Much had happened at Clear Springs in the four years before the arrival of Mennonites. Upon being informed that the Hudson’s Bay Company would sell most of Rupert’s Land to the Canadian government, the Métis, under Louis Riel, formed their own short-lived provisional government in 1869. In 1870 the “postage stamp” province was admitted to the Dominion of Canada and, at the insistence of Riel, the Métis were promised 1.4 million acres of land for their children. Ste. Anne was one of several parishes reserved by 1872 for the Métis, although ultimately few Métis settled on the reserve. During this period surveyors converted the open plains between the rivers into mile-square sections of land, ready for a massive influx of European and Canadian farmers. These farmers came by way of the new Dawson route from Lake Superior or from the United States by the developing railway network. Some were demobilized soldiers, sent originally to put down the Riel Rebellion of 1869, and some were former Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) employees who made it to Manitoba by way of the northern route from Hudson Bay. The Clear Springs farmers were part of these historic migrations.

Clear Springs was not a settlement block like that of the Mennonites and others. It was an assembly of strangers with a few extended families (e.g., Laings, Borlands, Carletons) that gradually became a community, most of whose members gathered around the Presbyterian church and the public schools. Until the development of Giroux village the community was completely rural and agricultural. The only non-farmers were the resident minister and, later, the station agent.

Probably the first contact between Mennonites and Clear Springs people occurred when John Peterson, a former HBC employee and officer of the London and Canadian Loan and Agency Co. of Toronto,⁴ took the Mennonite scouts under his wing to help them find land. It is said that he became quite familiar with the Low German language as he related to the new farmers. He had homesteaded quarter section SE3-7-6E in 1872 and so he drew the attention of incoming Mennonites to vacant land just south of his home, where they established the village of Steinbach in 1874.⁵ Thomas Rankin had homesteaded SW11 in the same township in 1870, land that is now occupied by the Mennonite Heritage Village and the Steinbach Fly-In Golf Course. The Rankins squatted on this land until the survey was completed and then filed for the homestead in 1873. Normally, section 11 would be designated “school lands” and not for homesteading, but Rankin’s earlier claim was recognized.

The massive influx of Mennonites in 1874–75 had an immediate effect on the lives of the Clear Springs settlers, whose community was partly surrounded by the large Mennonite East Reserve. After a few years Mennonites had established retail stores in Steinbach, Tannenau, and Niverville. Steinbach also had a grist mill, cheese factory, blacksmith shop, and a sawmill industry. Farm supplies and services were now much closer for the Clear Springs farmers than when they had to depend on Winnipeg merchants and on the HBC store in Ste. Anne. Business and farming collaboration sprang up very quickly as the two agricultural communities had many things in common.

Hamilton Mack Laing (1883–1982), son of Clear Springs pioneers William Oswald Laing (1841–1924) and Rachel Mack Laing (1851–1934), recalled relations between the two communities. When a friend sent a brochure featuring the full-size Dutch windmill at the Mennonite Heritage Village museum, Laing responded in a letter: “Steinbach was only three miles from my father’s farm. He homesteaded there barely ahead of the Mennonite invasion. We did a lot of business in the Mennonite village of Steinbach. They were a go-ahead people. There was a good general store (Reimer) and a splendid hardware (store) across the village owned by his son (Henry). The father was in the first wave of migration from Russia but Henry might have been born in Canada.

“They were wonderful people though we found their ways a bit strange. They were industrious, beavers at work, honest, sober, law-biding. I never heard of a crime. There wasn’t a policeman in the area. They at first kept a guard at night in the village. They were used to thievery in Russia. They were non-military and it was mainly to escape conscription in Russia that they left Russia. They had a quaint, foreign look.

“At first all the buildings were thatched. They were very religious and sometimes in mid-week they went to church. They wanted to be Canadians – two sons (from Steinbach) attended the same school I did in Clearsprings. That was before I got too big for my hat and had to go to Winnipeg for further education.

“In short, no one but those people could have built that windmill. They built the first grist mill in Steinbach. We got their flour and porridge meal locally ground. I recall the first time I got a tall view of the world. It was when I had climbed the 60-odd feet of the mill to look out of the highest window.

“I understand that Steinbach is now quite a town, has a good hospital and is modern. I come often on Mennonite proper names, third generation: Reimer, Toews, Friesen, etc.”⁶

Right from the start, a dramatic difference between the two communities was that the Clear Springs farmers were all young men and women – there were hardly any senior members. The average age of the men was 30.5, and a few of the wives were only 17 when they came to Clear Springs as new brides. There were also a significant number of bachelors who married late or never married. The Mennonites came as transplanted communities comprised of all generations, with many older farmers who often could buy land for their sons and daughters. Many of the Clear Springs farmers had some experience of farming in Ontario, and while they may have lacked expertise, they were soon acknowledged as excellent farmers. In 1880 a Montreal reporter wrote that “Clearsprings was the most prosperous settlement he had seen in the North West.”⁷ In 1879, four Clear Springs farmers participated in the Dominion Exhibition in Ottawa, bringing samples of their crops. Like Mennonites, they brought with them skills such as horse-breeding, carpentry, masonry, blacksmithing, beekeeping, mechanics, and, above all, midwifery (Mary Borland delivered many babies).

The young Clear Springs upstarts taught Mennonites a number of tricks for coping with pioneer life. They showed them how to build log buildings more efficiently and how to produce cedar shingles. They led the way in introducing new threshing technology and in improving livestock, especially horses, through selective breeding. Stud animals were bought cooperatively and shared throughout the community. John Warkentin claims that young farmers from both communities pushed each other to excel at farming and that this contributed to the relative progressiveness of the northeast part of the East Reserve. He also suggests that young Mennonite farmers admired the independence of the Clear Springs farmers and that this contributed to the move away from the Strassendorf system to that of dispersed farmsteads shortly after the turn of the century.⁸

Sometimes cooperation between Mennonites and the Clear Springs community took surprising turns. In 1884 John Peterson joined the Mennonite Brandordnung scheme, and two years later, so did Malcolm McCaskill.⁹ Mennonites brought over this fire insurance tradition from Russia. Claims were satisfied by payments demanded from each participant after a fire, so that mutual trust was essential. The participation of the Clear Springs farmers spoke of their good reputation as well as their confidence in Mennonite administration, even though it operated in the German language. Other financial arrangements also demonstrated the trust between the two groups. In 1893 Peter (Schmett) Toews borrowed money from James Steel to improve his home,¹⁰ and when the Steinbach Credit Union needed start-up capital in 1941, the money came from Steel’s son James.¹¹

The rapid development of farming techniques and farm-related trade was also a result of Clear Springs–Mennonite cooperation. William Cohoe acquired the second threshing machine in the area, and together with a Mennonite partner, embarked on a highly profitable threshing syndicate which served fifty-one farmers in 1878. Although ownership of the machines was cooperative because of the capital required, the threshing gangs were not integrated. An early threshing gang included only one Mennonite, David Unger, who was part of the Acres family operation.

The Clear Springs settlers had French neighbours to the northeast and Mennonite neighbours to the southwest. The cultural divide was greater between the French and the Clear Springs people because of language and religion. Thomas and William Laing actually first settled on River Lot #1 in the village of Ste. Anne but moved quickly to the centre of the community, selling the lot to another Clear Springs farmer, James Stanger, in 1877. The nine sections of township 7-6E just north of Steinbach were part of the Ste. Anne municipality until 1890, when the Clear Springs people petitioned the government to move these sections to the Hanover municipality, even though Clear Springs stalwarts such a William Laing, Josiah Cohoe, and James Steel served as councillors in the Rural Municipality of Ste. Anne. A Clear Springs settler told the Winnipeg Tribune in 1896, “The municipality is largely Mennonite and while we sometimes regard them as somewhat behind the times, we agree with them in other matters.”¹²

A very important geographical fact that had major consequences was that the Clear Springs settlers interacted primarily with the Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites of Steinbach, Blumenort, and Blumenhof, and after the great schism of 1881, with the so-called Holdeman Mennonites (Church of God in Christ, Mennonite) who had come out of the Kleine Gemeinde. If they had had more contact with the Chortitzer Mennonites, farther to the west and south, their perceptions of Mennonites would likely have been much different. Whereas none of the Kleine Gemeinde or Holdeman people joined the Presbyterian or United Church until much later in Steinbach, early on there was a small but significant presence of ex-Mennonites in the Niverville church. It is likely that the Niverville English people had more in common with the Chortitzer than the Clear Springs people had with the Kleine Gemeinde. The Chortitzer were less puritanical and not as stern as the Kleine Gemeinde.

Although the Kleine Gemeinde arrived in Canada in a separatist mood, especially regarding politics and religion, they were more open to cooperation with government in education than the Chortitzer. They transitioned from private to public schooling more readily and thus were spared the anglicization of their schools endured by the Chortitzer during the First World War. The Holdeman people were anglicized earlier because of the influence of American evangelists and because of their denominational ties to the United States. My Kleine Gemeinde father spoke English with a distinct Low German accent while my mother, raised by Holdeman parents and having attended the Clear Springs school, did not. These subtle differences between the Kleine Gemeinde/Holdeman people and the Chortitzer people may have shaped their interactions with the Clear Springs people. The Kleine Gemeinde were also more like the Presbyterians regarding Sunday observance, smoking, entertainment, and the entrepreneurial life.

Although there was extensive agricultural and commercial interaction between the two communities, cultural and religious understanding were not so easily achieved. However, there was never any conflict or rancour between the two communities, as they kept each other at arm’s length when it came to social and religious events. There was hardly any intermarriage, and the only mingling took place in the public schools, Clear Springs and Ridgewood. Clear Springs children far outnumbered Mennonite pupils until about 1912, and Clear Springs school trustees such as William Laing, Thomas Keating, and William Mooney were on the school board. They tended to recruit mostly non-Mennonite teachers until 1928, when A. A. Toews began his thirteen-year tenure. By then the Clear Springs pupils were a small minority but “English” trustees continued to serve on the school board into the 1960s.

There were major affinities between the religious life of the Clear Springs settlers and that of the Mennonites. And there were major differences. Both Presbyterians and Mennonites were puritanical in their outlook, especially with regard to Sunday (Sabbath) observance. Both frowned on farming activity and entertainment events on the Lord’s Day. Both deplored smoking, drunkenness, and frivolous behaviour. John McIntyre and Josiah Cohoe were members of the Sons of Temperance and were extremely judgmental of the drunkenness they witnessed while visiting Port Arthur, Ontario, vowing not to get into any boats with drinkers. The Presbyterians at their provincial conferences, which were reported in detail in the Winnipeg papers, typically spent half of the time discussing Sabbath-keeping. For the Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites, and especially their Holdeman relatives, Sunday activity was just one of many behaviours that were restricted. Both groups were austere Protestants with very plain churches and graveyards. In stark contrast to their French neighbours, symbols of faith, such as the cross and religious statuary, were not tolerated.

The differences were clearly seen in the areas of language, pacifism, and lifestyle. The Kleine Gemeinde very gradually relinquished the German language while the Holdeman’s free adoption of English facilitated interaction with their Clear Springs neighbours. John Langill is said to have offered English classes for adults at the Clear Springs school. It is believed that the only settler in Steinbach who could communicate in English in 1874 was the teacher Cornelius W. Fast, but Steinbach’s businesspeople were eager to learn.

The Canadian government promised Mennonites that they would not be required to participate in military service. They interpreted this promise to mean that they were also exempt from police work because it would inevitably lead to the use of force and the bearing of arms. In stark contrast, participation in the military or the police led many of the Clear Springs settlers to the area. At least ten of them had obtained their homesteads as military bounty grants, having served in units such as Colonel Wolseley’s force. One of them was the immigration agent William Hespeler, who received NE19-7-7E presumably for his participation in some European military unit. He did not live or farm on his quarter.

In spite of their close proximity to the Métis settlement of Ste. Anne, the people of Clear Springs held anti-Riel feelings. William Laing claimed that he had seen Riel and his men riding south at the US border, fleeing Col. Wolseley. Later, Wolseley “chided [Laing] for not using his rifle on the trail when he met the fugitives.”¹³ The local schoolteacher, John Code, joined the Winnipeg Rifles to help put down Riel’s North-West Rebellion and was killed at Batoche in 1885. In contrast, Mennonites had some knowledge of the Rebellion from its limited coverage in Die Mennonitische Rundschau.¹⁴ However, they did not view this issue as one of significance.

Mennonites did not participate significantly in the First World War, and even bristled when they were expected to display the flag at their schools. Many left for Mexico shortly after the war. The Clear Springs community was saddened when young Thomas Hasted was killed in action in France. His father, Angelo (Andy) Hasted, although too old for active service, joined up and was wounded in France. John Gorrie, 21, was killed at Vimy Ridge in 1917, the same year as the combat death of Steinbach’s Peter W. Friesen.¹⁵ Alexander Schilstra, a Steinbach doctor who identified with the Clear Springs community, served as a medic at the Tigris Front in Mesopotamia.

During the Second World War many Mennonites avoided military service by working as conscientious objectors, but many young men from Steinbach and the district went to war, and some became casualties. Those that returned to Steinbach after the war rarely rejoined Mennonite churches. If religious, they would find fellowship with the Clear Springs people. There is very little evidence that the Clear Springs people resented Mennonites because of their military exemptions. Farther west, Mennonite business owners in non-Mennonite communities sometimes suffered economically from community resentment.

There were many marriages between families within the Clear Springs community, but intermarriage with Mennonite neighbours was rare. The Mennonites were highly endogamous and the complications around church membership deterred most alliances. David Unger married Lauretta (Fenton) Acres in 1891 after her first husband William Acres died. Unger was accepted by the Clear Springs community and joined their cooperative farming efforts and was eventually buried in the Clear Springs cemetery. The Mooneys, who had an English Anglican background, had descendants in the second and third generations who married into Giesbrecht and Barkman Mennonite families. Most of these belonged to the Holdeman Church, which only permitted marriage between members of their group, so intermarriage and change of church membership went hand in hand. It is surprising that so few intermarriages occurred even while public school enrolments were highly pluralist. The reason must lie in Mennonites’ religious exclusiveness, which persisted into the third and fourth generation in Manitoba.

Mennonite exclusiveness with regard to religion had two phases. The first phase had deep historical roots. When the Kleine Gemeinde originated in the Molotschna Colony in Russia in 1812, the little breakaway church had to distinguish itself from the larger Mennonite society, and thus became more stringent with regard to boundaries. Attendance at other churches was forbidden and intermarriage, even with other Mennonites, was frowned upon. They did not go quite as far as the Holdeman Church in claiming to be the only true church, but they certainly excluded other Christian groups. This history formed an invisible barrier between the Clear Springs people and their Mennonite neighbours.

The second phase of Mennonite exclusiveness began in the 1940s when the Kleine Gemeinde communities experienced a surge of revivalism. After that, exclusiveness did not focus on ethnicity but on religious ideology and experience. Wes Keating, who grew up during this period, says that this form of exclusiveness was even more hurtful than the former one. Now people were judged on their spiritual status, which had been declared at a revival meeting, and on religious enthusiasm.

Lifestyle differences, mostly flowing from religious conviction, were sometimes fairly dramatic. Clear Springs women dressed in the latest fashions and had modern hair styles while Mennonite women did not. However, by the turn of the century, young women in Steinbach, according to historic photographs, affected worldly elegance in every way and the young men sported trim moustaches and fancy hats, ties, and suits. Most of the Clear Springs patriarchs had full beards, but for the Mennonites beards and ties became sensitive issues after the 1881–82 Kleine Gemeinde/Holdeman schism. The Holdeman moustache-less beard was part of their identity. My Holdeman uncles were a little nonplussed when my brother and I started wearing beards in the 1960s. The early Kleine Gemeinde considered moustaches to be a sign of vanity.

The two communities, however, made allowances for each other. At one point in the early 1950s, James Keating noticed that his son Wes’s comic book collection was a real attraction for Wes’s friend Bert Kroeker, who could not have comic books at home. Fearing discord between the Keatings and the Kroekers, James confiscated his son’s collection. Both boys felt very deprived, but the action of the Clear Springs father showed respect for the rules of his Mennonite neighbour. Doubtless the Mennonites were not uniform or consistent in these observances. The respect and peace between the Mennonites and their Clear Springs neighbours were probably greater than between their own denominational divisions.

Most of the pioneers who settled in Clear Springs were young men and women just starting their families. During the second generation the community consisted of nearly sixty families with enough school children to fill two schoolhouses. But by the 1920s, the English population had dwindled as the pioneers retired to Winnipeg, Steinbach, or Giroux while their offspring sold their farms and moved to Grandview, Killarney, and other farther-flung locations. The schools were now filled with Mennonite children with a few Laings, Keatings, McCaskills, and Mooneys. The land buyers were the Mennonite neighbours. Rachel (Langill) Christie comments, “Clear Springs was a nice prosperous settlement till the young folks began to get married and moved to other districts. Their parents got too old to continue farming and wanted to retire so started to sell their farms. Now the new owners who bought the farms get the benefits of the old pioneers’ hard work and labor and farms with ease.”¹⁶

Why did this happen? Was there a problem between the Clear Springs people and the Mennonites? Ed and Alice Laing, who stayed, certainly did not think so. They observed that “the sale of farms from the Clear Springs settlers to their Mennonite neighbours was gradual but consistent, while many of the Anglo-Saxons seemed more restless and were moving away. A phrase so often used by the Clear Springs settlers was, ‘We couldn’t have found better neighbours than the Mennonite people.’”¹⁷

John Warkentin has suggested a very practical reason for the depopulation of the English farms. With the coming of the railway in 1898, which skirted the Clear Springs community to the east, land values increased dramatically as easier shipment of grain and milk was anticipated.¹⁸ Second- and third-generation farmers took advantage of this and sold their relatively small holdings in order to start with larger spreads in new locations. The boom in grain and milk shipping from Giroux was realized by the Mennonites and the Clear Springs farmers who stayed, but was soon eclipsed by Steinbach trucking initiatives.

What’s left of Clear Springs in 2020? There is one large “century farm” (Laingspring), a well-tended cemetery, and the United Church in Steinbach. The village of Giroux is now just a crossroads without a train station. The names of the Clear Springs pioneers, however, live on in the names of local businesses and streets. A brand new middle school bears the settlement’s name as do Steinbach’s only shopping mall, a medical clinic, and a housing development. More roads, streets, and avenues are named for Clear Springs pioneers than those named for Mennonites.¹⁹ At least four businesses use the name.

The encounter between a vibrant “English” settlement and its Mennonite neighbours, which unfortunately lasted for only two generations, has had major effects on the economic and social reality of 2020. The farms that were hacked out of the bush and put to the plow were inherited by the second and third generation of (mostly) Mennonite farmers. Early agricultural innovation, often catalyzed by the presence of the young farmers of Clear Springs, has resulted in the efficient exploitation of a region in southeastern Manitoba that now leads in agribusiness. Early exposure to English language and culture in the Clear Springs schools was crucial for the eventual evaporation of the separatist mood of the Mennonite immigrants. Those who have inherited Clear Springs genes should be proud of their ancestors, who showed culturally isolated Manitobans of many ethnicities how to build a better Canada.

1. I wish to acknowledge the help of Wes Keating and Ray and Bertha Laing in the preparation of this paper. ↩︎
2. “Clear Springs” is the original name of the community. “Clearsprings” has been used frequently since then, even in the Laing book (e.g., see inside back cover). “Clearspring” is not acceptable. ↩︎
3. Leonhard Sudermann, Eine Deputationsreise von Ruszland nach Amerika (Elkhart, IN: Mennonitische Verlagshandlung, 1897). ↩︎
4. Winnipeg Free Press, May 5, 1881. ↩︎
5. Abe Warkentin, Reflections on Our Heritage (Steinbach: Derksen Printers, 1971), 38. ↩︎
6. Steinbach Carillon News, Nov. 28, 1978. Mack Laing lived most of his life in Comox, BC, where he established himself as a naturalist and author. The Mack Laing Heritage Society of the Comox Valley honours his memory and seeks to further his work in the study of nature, especially birds. Steinbach had a flour mill in 1878, followed by a succession of buildings that were destroyed by fire. We do not know which one was climbed by Mack Laing. ↩︎
7. John H. Warkentin, The Mennonite Settlements of Southern Manitoba (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1960; reprinted by the Hanover Steinbach Historical, 2000), 66. Citations refer to the reprint. ↩︎
8. Warkentin, 65–66. ↩︎
9. Brandordnung records in the possession of Henry Fast, Steinbach. ↩︎
10. Ralph Friesen, Between Earth and Sky: Steinbach, The First Fifty Years (Steinbach: Steinbach Heritage Committee, 2009), 267. ↩︎
11. Linda Peters, “Memories of the Steinbach Royal Bank: 1945-1951,” Heritage Posting, no. 96 (June 2020): 11. ↩︎
12. Winnipeg Tribune, January 28, 1896. ↩︎
13. Ed Laing and Alice Laing, Pioneers of Clear Springs (Steinbach: by the authors, 2001), 64. ↩︎
14. Joseph R. Wiebe, “On the Mennonite-Métis Borderland: Environment, Colonialism, and Settlement in Manitoba,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 35 (2017): 111–126. ↩︎
15. From Carillon News, Nov. 9, 1998, and Preservings, no. 12 (1998): 49. ↩︎
16. Rachel Christie, “Memories of my Young Pioneer Days in Clear Springs, Manitoba,” in Pioneers of Clear Springs, 146. ↩︎
17. Pioneers of Clear Springs, 128. ↩︎
18. Warkentin, 232. ↩︎
19. Mennonite roadway names: Loewen, Friesen, Reimer, Barkman, Kroeker, Goossen, Giesbrecht, Penner. Clear Springs names: Keating, Borland, Old Tom (Carleton), Carleton, Laing, Lund, Mooney, Slater, MacFarlane, Clearsprings. ↩︎