Lure of the valley, Pauline Johnson
N 50° 41.653 W 103° 37.452
13U E 597170 N 5616723
Located in Katepwa Point Saskatchewan Park
Waymark Code: WMTMH2
Location: Saskatchewan, Canada
Date Posted: 12/11/2016
Views: 3
As the board reads:
The Lure of the Valley
Fore thousands of years people have been lured to the beauty, peace and abundance of the Qu'Appelle Valley, Stone tools, flakes and bison bones, excavated from Katepwa Point, were left behind by people who lived in the valley in 2,800 BC.
For some, the lure of the valley is mystical. Native legend tells of a spirit that travels up and down the valley. Its voice, resembling the cry of a human being, echoes off the valley walls. In Cree legend, the river of the valley is named Katapaywie sepi, the river that calls. The voyageurs of the fur trade translated the name to Riviere Qu'Appelle.
Today, all who live here speak of the valley's special lure; the reflections in the lakes as the morning fog rises, autumn hillsides in fall light and the feeling of calm as they leave the prairie behind and descend into the sunken garden of the Qu'Appelle Valley.
In 1895, E. Pauline Johnson, one of Canada's best-known poets in the 1890s and 1900s traveled west. She was struck by the beauty of the valley:
"It is the unexpected beauty that captivates, and as you drive along the level prairie trails you have no warning that a few rods before you Nature has opened her arms so silently that it seem like a transition into a dream world, when at your feet there stretches a long peaceful chain of lakes margined with wolf willows and cottonwoods, and enclosed by a distant rim of russet-coloured heights, whose summits are peakless and level, for from their topmost reaches the prairie again rolls out in limitless miles into the north."
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