Stamps and postmarks are portals for me. I like to look behind them to see what stories are there or what I can learn. Some time has gone by and I have forgotten what led me to Vita and its name change. All I remember is that I was at the Wiki site for Vita for whatever reason and saw the postmark for the old name. The next thing you know I'm off on a tangent. As mentioned above, I had intended adding more as to how Ukrainian immigrants on their arrival immediately influenced village layouts and settlement patterns but I got side-tracked by the grass fires that happened as I was posting.
I intend to still do that but to see what prompted me to be there in the first place I went back to Vita and came across another Wiki post that mentions Vita's role in the preservation of an endangered grassland ecosystem known as "tall grass prairie". When European settlers first came to Manitoba and Minnesota's Red River Valley they could see tall grass prairie "as far as the eye could see". I remember other quotes such as "it came up to a horses belly" or to "a man's stirrups".
Its existence, however, was short-lived given that the area became "the world's bread-basket". Soon tall grass prairie would only be found sporadically along railway tracks in patches too small to even be called an "eco-system". Its existence depended on fire, not unlike jack pine in the Boreal Forest of northern Canada, and the periodic fires associated with the railway corridors were conducive to its survival. For many years these scattered sites were their only known refuges until some areas were found in the Vita area of southeastern Manitoba. For the whole story go to this Wiki site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manito...rie_Preserve
Posted 10/02/2012 8:09 pm
