Bunking with History: The Magazine School

There are a few things I’ve always loved about Saskatchewan: the bright, wide open skies; the friendly, welcoming hospitality of the cities, towns and out-of-the way places; and the fiercely inventive spirit of the people.

Blue Moon at Ghostown Blues Bed & Breakfast, Maple Creek, Saskatchewan

When you combine all those attributes, you get some marvelously creative and energetic activity.

Take Greg Hisey, for example. He describes starting Ghostown Blues Bed and Breakfast a “a backyard party gone wrong.”

“We were having a party in the backyard and someone said, ‘you should open a bed and breakfast.’ Well, I had a really pent-up need to create something.”

Greg Hisey, owner and proprietor, Ghostown Blues Bed & Breakfast, Highway 271, 1 km west of Maple Creek, SK. Greg is sitting at one of the dining tables in the lodge, a former church from Hatton, Saskatchewan.

The little frontier village that he assembled in his backyard has grown considerably since we stayed in 2012. You can’t suppress creativity.

During our visit, Ghostown Blues featured a couple of cabins, three wagons and a few tent sites clustered around a main lodge that used to be a country church. Since then, Hisey has added a lot more accommodation.

Belle Plaine in concert at Ghostown Blues Bed & Breakfast, Maple Creek, Saskatchewan. Belle Plaine [Melanie Hankewich], lead singer; Jeremy Sauer, drummer; Elizabeth (Beth) Curry, bass player. Belle Plaine personnel: Melanie Berglund (nee Hankewich), stage name Belle Plaine; Elizabeth Curry, bass; Steve Leidal, guitar; Bryce Lewis, guitar; and Jeremy Sauer, keyboard, piano, accordion, banjo.

I really enjoy these kinds of adventures. I love to discover new things on my travels: sitting down in coffee shops and bakeries, poking my head into shops, nosing around in volunteer-run museums.

The Magazine School, established by the Western Magazine Awards Foundation, called me up to talk about what motivates me to tell stories through writing and photography, and how I go about doing that. The online resource includes PowerPoint teaching presentations for instructors and professors to use in the classroom, copies of the stories to be used for instructional purposes, and interviews with the authors of Western Magazine Awards winners over five years.

Read the original article online, Westworld Saskatchewan, Spring 2015, pages 16 — 21.

Update: July 12, 2020

Ghostown Blues closed in 2020. Although the bed and breakfast in Maple Creek is no longer available, the wonderful, unique accommodations live on, after finding their way to other vacation properties throughout western Canada. Perhaps you will have an opportunity to stay in one of Greg’s lovingly restored sheep wagons, thresherman’s wagon or Eaton’s wagon elsewhere on your travels.

Cowboy brunch at the Lodge, Ghostown Blues Bed & Breakfast, Highway 271, 1 km west of Maple Creek, SK.

Sheep wagons under the stars, Ghostown Blues Bed & Breakfast, Highway 271, 1 km west of Maple Creek, SK. Guest gather ’round the campfire by the sheep wagons.

Historic log cabin (L) and Homestead cabin (R), Ghostown Blues Bed & Breakfast, Highway 271, 1 km west of Maple Creek, SK — Historic log cabin (L) and Homestead cabin (R), Ghostown Blues Bed & Breakfast, Maple Creek, SK. Greg Hisey: “This was originally a cowboy’s line shack. [train whistle]. Where they couldn’t make it home at night, on the big ranches, and Bill Ramsay, I got it from the Ramsey family, and he said his great granddad moved this off the prairies in the 1920s. He thinks it was built around 1912 and moved it to the ranch and lived in it until he built the house.”
“That’s an amazing build. The axe-smith who put this together with zero gaps and every log fully scribed from one end to the other…. it’s pine. The Cypress Hills burned in 1886 or 1887. One of the old ranchers down there told me that they were not allowed to cut live trees, so they had to use for building standing deadfall. That would explain why there was no chinking in it, because it was shrunk if it was standing deadfall. That kind of verifies the time it was built. It’s an amazing little cabin.”
“I should show you something interesting about this. I don’t show many people this, but you’ll get a kick out it. Stand over in that corner and look down the wall past the door. See how far out that wall is? … it takes a jog out past the door. This cabin was built on a hillside. That’s the original top plates. You can see how thick that log is on that end, and how it comes down to that. That was the roof line. I had to hide that, because this floor is level and this porch is level, so when you stand out here and look at the roof line, it was built on a side hill. You can see on my tin that I had to put a piece of board in to compensate for the roofline.”

Detail, dovetail construction of the Historic Log Cabin, Ghostown Blues Bed & Breakfast, Highway 271, 1 km west of Maple Creek, SK — Detail, dovetail construction of the Historic Log Cabin, Ghostown Blues Bed & Breakfast, Maple Creek, SK. Greg Hisey: “That’s an amazing build. The axe-smith who put this together with zero gaps and every log fully scribed from one end to the other…. it’s pine. The Cypress Hills burned in 1886 or 1887. One of the old ranchers down there told me that they were not allowed to cut live trees, so they had to use for building standing deadfall. That would explain why there was no chinking in it, because it was shrunk if it was standing deadfall. That kind of verifies the time it was built. It’s an amazing little cabin.”

Homestead Cabin, Ghostown Blues Bed & Breakfast, Highway 271, 1 km west of Maple Creek, SK. Greg Hisey says, this cabin was in the flood of 2010. The house it was in behind was condemned. It was originally a settler’s cabin from northeast of town. The lady who owned it in town said she thought they’d moved it to a school and the schoolmarm lived in it. “In Maple Creek and all these little communities, there’s these little shacks that they’ve moved off, settlers’ shacks that they’ve moved into town. This one was not big enough to put garage doors in, but that’s what most of them became. It was kept like this. Of course it didn’t look like that when I got it. That’s the original siding. I put the window in the end and you can see where I spliced in the boards there. That’s an old clapboard type siding. It’s a neat little old building. There’s some carvings on it.”

Drizzly Saturday morning at Ghostown Blues Bed & Breakfast, Maple Creek, Saskatchewan. Antique wagons. Greg Hisey: “This wagon. Nobody can tell me where it came from, what it was. That turned around under itself, it was very short coupled, it was made to take a team down a city street and turn around in the street. Here’s the interesting part of it. It counterbalanced. It’s got two more spokes than a regular wagon wheel. Heavy, heavy spokes. It’s got a three inch steel axle. The centre of the reach. This was an extremely heavy duty wagon. I figure it was used for making city streets or roads or something. But it was made to carry heavy loads. It’s all original. (It would have taken a team of more than two horses to pull it.) Yeah. The tongue has been shortened up. This one actually, I think they pulled two wagons together, and that’s what this hook’s about, maybe kind of a string of them, like a little train. And there’s a toolbox under the seat. I’ve got all the wheel wrenches and that to change a flat tire. But I’ve showed that to a lot of people and there’s nobody can really tell me what it is. That’s a wagon that I’d like to sell and get into somebody’s collection. It is original. At some point they’re going to start going backwards (weathered) out here in the sun.”

Share this article