Dreams in the Dust

By Rick Book

The story of Canada’s most unlikely ship

An article coming in the June-July issue of Canada’s History magazine

There she was, red hull mounted on white keel, facing homeward toward Finland, but going nowhere. Rising above the prairie grass of rural Saskatchewan, not the rolling, grey North Atlantic, she is Canada’s most unlikely ship. The 43-foot Sontianen was part of my dad’s boyhood and later mine, and is one of the strangest reminders of the madness that was this country’s Great Depression.  

The pictures were in our family photograph albums, there in black and white, so my sisters and I knew the story was true. Dad had seen the boat, had met the giant Finlander, Tom Sukanen, who’d built her. On a cool fall Sunday in 1938, a bunch of farm kids put gas in a truck and drove to see this fantastic thing growing on the prairie. Dad, just 14, the youngest of the group, took photographs of the hull and keel with grandpa’s Kodak box camera. It was such an unlikely boat, an ocean-going steamship, built amidst the dust and despair of the Dirty Thirties, thousands of miles from the nearest salt water. And just across the muddy South Saskatchewan River from our family farm. Dad never tired of telling us the story, and we never tired of hearing it. He believed in Tom Sukanen’s dream, believed he could have done it, maybe, if only. Hope dies hard in the West.    

See the rest of this article in the June-July 2013 issue of  Canada’s History magazine:

https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/settlement-immigration/dreams-in-the-dust-the-story-of-tom-sukanen