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Governor-General's Train Canada
July 15, 1937
Red Deer Alberta
My darling BabaMother [edited ST]
I got your dear letter after mine had gone off. As I said before my heart simply aches for you as I do hate to think of poor darling Aunt Margie suffering. I do long for news but perhaps we shall get some letters today. We are miles from every where here, along a grass grown railway line & there was no train in yesterday but there may be one in today. The rain is pouring down & one sees that the people here, are torn between longing for the rain & disappointment that
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it will spoil our visit here. We were to have gone to see an early Hudson Bay post Rocky Mountain House but I fear it will be quite impossible and as we have no heating on the train & the nearest engine is fifty miles away it will be a long & chilly day!
This place is a little like England wooded & green & the crops are quite good - the people look rather poor & some a bit mental & there is an ominously large mental hospital on the top of the hill.
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I liked Drumheller very much indeed. It is a chicken coopy little mining town on a river; pretty distressed because the mines only work on such short time, but the people were so nice & it lies in the midst of an absolutely fascinating desert that they call the Bad Lands. Tiny hills shaped like beehives or small pyramids with the tops sliced off cactuses growing every where & wonderful roots of petrified trees; & dry tonic air.
It was millions of years ago a tropical valley, & then an inland sea & they
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find wonderful dinosaur things there. I was given a dinosaurs tooth & it was a bitter blow when we couldn't go & see the dinosaur which has been reconstructed where it was found on the hill side.
I was given a most charming little figurine carved out of a juniper root by a strange English rancher "a gentlemen with a public school education" they all remarked with bated breath! His ranch has never paid well & he couldn't afford to carve as he couldn't pay for the wood, so he took to carving the juniper roots he found on the hill side. His little figures follow the grain of the wood & are lovely. New York is beginning to buy them at quite high prices & they sent the rancher a big cheque for his expenses to come down to New York & see the dealers, but he sent it back & refuses to budge from the ranch! Alastair is on a ranch for a few days I am sorry he missed Drumheller but he will be having fun.
Yours lovingly
Susie [ST]
