In the spring of 1905 we moved permanently to Alberta to live and labor as the Lord would be pleased to lead and use us.
My wife, family and I had a pleasant journey and arrived hail and hearty in Edmonton. It was not long before we settled down to the stern realities of life in new undeveloped country, where there are scarcely any railroads, and where the people had taken homesteads as far distant as one hundred miles from any railroad or town. First thing we did was to get a small four-room cottage beside a vacant lot in a suitable location.
On this lot I pitched the gospel tent. Brother C. J. Baker of Kansas City not only supplied the tent, but also a large box containing thousands of copies of John’s Gospel, Two Roads and Two Destinies, and a variety of good gospel tracts, so I was well equipped for summer work. I erected the tent and began early in July. While at times faith was tried, God was with me and I had the peculiar joy of knowing I was where others had never been, and I saw signs following from the very beginning.
On Saturday I would preach on the street, and every other night in the tent. Good companies attended and numbers were saved.
Among the first was a young man and his wife. They were a pair of runaways from the middle States, where they kept a hotel and had financially failed. Like Onesimus who had run away from his master, the young man and his wife had run away from the relatives to whom they owed money. But they ran into the gospel in Edmonton and were saved. No one where they formerly lived knew where they had gone, but the Lord followed them, and they were living in a little tent only a block away from where the gospel tent was located. They attended the meetings every night, and before the second week was over, this young man and his wife were saved and were very happy in knowing their sins forgiven.
She wrote to her mother in the U. S., who proved to be a Christian. The dear mother poured out her heart in her letter in reply, thanking God for not only letting her know where her daughter was, but most of all for saving her.
This young man owned a beautiful team of horses and was working for the fast- growing city of Edmonton making streets, and earning good wages. That autumn he showed me a draft for $500.00 he was sending back to the United States to pay some of his debt. Like Zacchaeus, upon receiving Jesus as his Saviour, he became a new creature in Christ Jesus and desired to show it by making his financial matters right. When people are saved by grace they are “created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).
This was only the beginning of showers of blessing to follow. Meetings increased in numbers and interest.
One of the things that was very difficult for the people to understand was how I lived, since I never took any collections. Several who attended the meetings made inquiry as to this. My reply was, “I have wireless telegraphy and sent the messages up to headquarters, from where they were dispatched, the Lord moving on the hearts of His people to have fellowship in His work, as carried on by the Lord in this scriptural way.”
During that first summer we were, on more than one occasion, reduced until our financial supplies were gone when He met our need in a most miraculous way. Let me give you a few instances.
In and around Selkirk, Manitoba, there lived a number of native peoples. Some of these had gone west, and among them were two men who went four hundred miles north of Edmonton where they operated a trading post. They supplied the Indians with food stuffs and clothes in trade for furs.
Twice a year those men would come to Edmonton—every spring with their furs, and every fall for supplies. The means of transportation was by wagon to Athabaska Landing, a distance of one hundred miles, and then by boat up the river. These men were descendants of Scotsmen who came to the west over one hundred years ago in the employ of the the Hudson Bay Company, and who had married Indian women.
One night during our meeting these two fur traders came into the tent and sat down near the door. One of them was a big man weighing almost 300 pounds. After the meeting was dismissed, and the rest of the people had gone, these two men remained seated. I went to them and inquired where they were from, and they told me. I then asked them if they were children of God, and they said they were. They told me they once lived near Selkirk, Manitoba, and had come west, and how some old associates of theirs still living in Selkirk had been saved and had sent them some gospel papers. God had blessed His Word in these tracts to their salvation away in this remote part. This is surely great encouragement for tract distributors!
During the terrible winter of 1889-1890, Alfred Goff and Richard Varder were preaching the gospel at a place called Poplar Point, MB, on the shore of Lake Winnipeg. Some miles beyond this was Balsam Bay. A resident of that place wanted to celebrate the fifth anniversary of his wedding, and to do this properly he considered he needed two gallons of whiskey, so he started for Selkirk—twenty-eight miles away—to obtain the liquor.
The first day he reached Poplar Point where his parents and other family members lived. He decided to break the trip there. As it happened, his journey took him by the house where the gospel was being preached. That night he was saved, as the preacher spoke of “Christ, the Bread of Life.” Imagine his joy when he discovered that his brother and sister-in-law had been saved the night before! So instead of going on to Selkirk for the whiskey, the next morning he requested the preachers to come back with him. They agreed and so instead of two gallons of whiskey, he brought two preachers to help celebrate the anniversary of his marriage by having a gospel meeting in his home. Brethren Goff and Varder continued there for some weeks and many souls were saved and an assembly formed. Many believers from this family are in fellowship in Winnipeg-area assemblies to this day.
It was from here the tracts came out to these men four hundred miles north of Edmonton, which were used in their salvation. We sat and talked for a while, and I took them into the house to meet my wife. As they left that night, the largest one of the two left $50. How wonderful are God’s workings and His ways past finding out. Our need was abundantly met.
On another occasion when the supplies were low, I sat one day on the bank overlooking the Saskatchewan River from the street. There had been a rain that caused little streamlets to run over the bank. As I sat there looking down over the bank, I saw a strange looking piece of paper with one end of it sticking in the mud. I bent down to see what it was and to my great surprise, I found it to be a $10 bill, and our need was again supplied. Who can have experiences like these and not have their faith in God strengthened and confirmed?
I continued the tent meetings into October by putting baseboard all around the tent, tacking the canvas down to it, and by using safety pins to fasten the eave of the roof, also by getting a load of prairie hay or wool, as it is called, and spreading it over the tent floor, and covering this with burlap so that our floor was comfortably carpeted. I also put in a stove, so we were very comfortable in the tent until the real cold weather set in. Then we rented a little hall, seating about 125 people, into which we transferred the tent seats and stove, and in which we also built a tank to baptize people. Quite a number were baptized, and the assembly began to meet in Edmonton. In this hall we carried on meetings during the winter with further blessing, and there we had our first conference at Christmas time.
Next spring the heavy tide of immigration began to flow. It was during this year also that the Canadian Northern Railroad came, which was the first railway to enter the city. A branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway came north to Strathcona on the south side of the river before this. Thousands of people flocked into the country in the spring and summer of 1907. Most of them went out to homesteads, while others remained in the city. The assembly was soon double in size by the arrival of Christian immigrants, and now there was plenty of gift to carry on without me.
I continued travelling from place to place, preaching the wonderful Word of God. In a matter of a few short years, country which had so recently been a wild prairie soon became populated, and several assemblies of Christians gathering in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ were to be found.
Written by J. J. Rouse