Prairie Schooner

It was audacious, foolhardy and more than a little bit crazy.  But once Tom Sukanen got an idea in his head, it was hard to shake it.  So when he decided to build a ship and sail it home to Finland, it didn't matter that he was in the middle of the Canadian prairies.  

Tom Sukanen was in his early 20s when he emigrated to Minnesota around the turn of the 20th century.  He married, had a family, and farmed for a while.  Then he literally walked away from it all, traveling about a thousand miles on foot to homestead with his brother in Saskatchewan.  Tom returned to Minnesota some years later to find that his wife had died and his children had been sent to foster homes.  He tried and failed to bring one of his sons back to Canada.  Homesteading wasn't going all that well either, and he was losing heart.  After visiting Finland in 1929, he returned to Saskatchewan where, at the age of 51, he began building the ship that would take him home to Finland.

It was the Depression, yet somehow over half a dozen years Tom found the money and materials to build his dream. The Sontiainen is 43 feet long, and 26 feet high.  She draws 12 feet of water when fully loaded, and weighs 15 tons.  He built everything himself, often making the tools he needed to do a particular job.   The interior is spartan, but serviceable.

His plan was to break the ship down into three parts for the move 900 miles up the Saskatchewan River to Churchill, Manitoba.  There he would reassemble the Sontiainen and sail her 3500 miles across the North Atlantic and home to Finland.  But to begin his journey, he had to haul those three cumbersome pieces 17 miles to the Saskatchewan River.  A neighbour flatly refused the use of his steam engine.  Others just laughed at crazy old Tom.  Bewildered, broken, he was committed to an asylum in North Battleford, where he died in 1943 at the age of 64.

Tom Sukanen's story has been expertly told by Ken Kramer in his play The Shipbuilder, by Andreas Schroeder in his book Dustship Glory and in films by Stephen Surjik (Shipbuilder) and Chrystene R. Ells (Sisu).   And his ship lives on as the centrepiece of the Sukanen Ship Pioneer Village and Museum, a recreated small prairie town from the 1920s and '30s.

More than 50 buildings are spread across 10 acres of farmland just south of Moose Jaw, including a general store, railway station, library, barber shop, newspaper office, blacksmith, pharmacy and a couple of churches.  There are dozens of vehicles from tractors and other farm equipment to this lovingly restored 1947 Buick Roadmaster.

The museum grounds offer lots of room for kids to tear around.  And there are plenty of bathrooms, including an outhouse that is out of this world.

LINKS:

Sukanen Ship Pioneer Village and Museum:  https://www.sukanenshipmuseum.ca/