Rebecca Leavitt tells her story in a quietly powerful pioneering epic of what life meant for a young woman, surrounded by hard-working farming men and laughing, cooking, quilting young women, all Brothers and Sisters. BUFFALO FLATS is set in a community based on a real historical group of Latter-Day Saints who moved from Utah to Canada. Still under eighteen, Rebecca believes she sits down with God one day on the mountainside. God regrets that there are no buffalo left. There isn’t anything the girl can do about that, but she makes a private vow to buy the land and keep it for nature.
Canada was still a Crown Dependency in Victorian times, and single women were not allowed to buy or own land. Not unless they could pay the whole value upfront. All the families and single young men – Rebecca’s brothers included - are paying a token amount and homesteading for a sufficient length of time to prove their claim. Earning money any way she can, the determined girl makes farm produce to sell and learns from her mother, the midwife, how to help women through labour. Thus we see their life from the inside of the house out, as in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books about a similar prairie. Camaraderie and unspoken rivalries fill what could otherwise be a lonely life, as all the like-minded folks gather every Sunday and on special occasions. Winter hits hard and for longer than anyone thought possible. But that’s not the hardest blow.
I love that author Martine Leavitt has based her story on her own family’s records. Several experiences have been combined, she tells us in a note at the end. The community certainly has my admiration. Some people did leave the rugged Northern Territories, and I can’t blame them. Every summer was a constant striving to store enough food and wood for winter. The folks were utterly dependent on one another and on their learned precepts. While men are given the dominant roles, women held much of the influence in the household. Rebecca’s mother Eliza is a wonderful character, capable, devoted, worshipful and a good shot.
The other young people – handsome men Levi and Coby, attractive women LaRue and Radonna, as well as the brothers Ammon, Gideon, Zach, remind me of the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. There’s even a party and dancing. I was entertained, and keen to see how BUFFALO FLATS would turn out, which in parts was quite unexpected.
Based on true-life histories, Buffalo Flats shares the epic, coming of age story of Rebecca Leavitt as she searches for her identity in the Northwest Territories of Canada during the late 1800s.Seventeen-year-old Rebecca Leavitt has traveled by covered wagon from Utah to the Northwest Territories of Canada, where her father and brothers are now homesteading and establishing a new community with other Latter-Day Saints. Rebecca is old enough to get married, but what kind of man would she marry and who would have a girl like her—a girl filled with ideas and opinions? Someone gallant and exciting like Levi Howard? Or a man of ideas like her childhood friend Coby Webster? Rebecca decides to set her sights on something completely different. She loves the land and wants her own piece of it. When she learns that single women aren’t allowed to homestead, her father agrees to buy her land outright, as long as Rebecca earns the money —480 dollars, an impossible sum. She sets out to earn the money while surviving the relentless challenges of pioneer life—the ones that Mother Nature throws at her in the form of blizzards, grizzles, influenza and floods, and the ones that come with human nature, be they exasperating neighbors or the breathtaking frailty of life. Buffalo Flats is inspired by true-life histories of the author’s ancestors. It is an extraordinary novel that explores Latter-Day Saints culture and the hardships of pioneer life. It is about a stubborn, irreverent, and resourceful young woman who remains true to herself and discovers that it is the bonds of family, faith, and friendship—even romance--that tie her to the wild and unpredictable land she loves so fiercely.
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