The cooking was usually done on the kitchen stove using dried cow chips, collected by the children, as fuel.  an alternative was sheep manure carefully cut into suitably sized squares before being lifted from the Martin sheep corrals. It would then be thoroughly dried before being used as fuel.  the sheep certainly did prove useful in a lot of ways.  Coal was rarely used for anything except heating the house during the winter.  Wood was often hauled from the sand hills, or occasionally a load of pine from the Cypress Hills with a wagon and a team of horses.

My grandfather built all the furniture and grandmother sewed, by hand, all the clothing for the family.  Eventually she did get a sewing machine.  Beds were simply a canvas bag filled with fresh straw or hay.  John was not a very tall man but had broad shoulders and huge hands.  Like his sons his strength was in his great determination.  Louise was very small, well under five feet tall.  I have only one memory of her. After John died she lived with different family members and while she lived at our home, I remember seeing her run quickly from the house, because she was feeling sick to her stomach.  She was wearing a black l dress and I think I remember Dad saying she always wore black.  She died when I was three.

I recently. (May 1999) obtained documents from the Saskatchewan Archives Board regarding the Frank Family homestead.  The earliest document is stamped may 7/913 and during that summer they broke 18 acres.  The following year they cropped these 18 acres and broke another 24 acres.  Each year a bit more acres.  The following year they cropped these 18 acres and broke another 24 acres.  Each year a bit more prairie was broken and each year more stock was added.  Perhaps the reason that the children attended school only to grade three and then only during the winter months, was that John needed all the help he could get to break the prairie.  They attended Pontoville School, which was just one half mile north of the farm buildings where Mom and Dad lived when they were married.  The school was named for the Ponto family on whose land it was built.  the teacher was a local farmer, and he too was busy during nice weather, so taught only during the winter.  Dad liked school but there was  little time for education.  I suppose he was self-taught as he kept accurate records of his farm operation and read quite a lot.

One of the really big concerns during those pioneer days was the threat of prairie fires.  there were miles and miles of open grassland and sagebrush.  a lightning storm or a spark from a fire, intentionally set to burn stubble from a harvested field could be out of control in minutes.   Farmers would plow fireguards around their fields and especially around farm bu8ldings for protection.  I remember Mom telling us about when she was a child, having to carry buckets of water to wet down the area around their home as a prairie fire burned nearer and nearer.

Another thing that Dad often spoke of was the fact that shoes were for winter only.  He said that their feet would get so tough that even thorns were no problem.  One of the chores, which became the boy's responsibility during the nice weather, was herding the cattle, barefoot.  There were no fences.  On one of the days Dad and his brothers got so carried away playing with buffalo skulls, which made dandy pretend wagons, they completely forgot about the cows.  Bigstick was a large alkali lake nearby, and cows had been known to wander in looking for a cool drink, get stuck in the mud and not be able to get out.  They were very worried and walked for miles before they heard cowbells.  It was late and dark when they and  the cows finally got home safely.  Another source of amusement on these herding trips was to snare a gopher, put a string around its neck for harness and hitch it to an empty sardine tin.