THE PLAGUE OF FACTS AND NUMBERS

Oh the plague of facts and numbers! With what I’ve been through this week, I find it a wonder that any history ever gets recorded accurately, or maybe it doesn’t.
First, there was the matter of the river floods on the North Saskatchewan. When I set out to develop a story about the floods, I thought I’d just get the numbers for the dozen or so high-water years. Not so simple though. Take 1915, for example. Did the water rise 14M as quoted by the Edmonton Public Library, or 12M as quoted in the City of Edmonton Disaster Plan, or 45.2 FT as recorded in the history books (No, 45.2 feet doesn’t equal either 12 or 14 meters. I already thought of that.) And then there is the catastrophic flood of 1899, which we are somewhat certain happened in 1899, though the 1915 Edmonton Bulletin newspaper refers to it often as the flood of 1898. Only 16 years passed between those two floods, and already they were getting it wrong.
With all this confusion going on, I wanted to drop the story, not wishing to be responsible for spreading inaccurate information. But I had already promised the story for a program, provided advertising details and taken up the time of the Provincial Archives staff doing the research, so quitting was out of the question. Alas, I have settled for the relative certainty that the 1986 flood was almost as big as the 1899 flood, which was almost as big as the 1915 flood. And I am not even going to mention the 1 in 100 year flood projection, which doesn’t mean that a flood will happen once every 100 years. In fact, the 1 in 100 year flood could theoretically happen every year, though it doesn’t seem to, especially since they installed the big dams up river, the dams which are supposed to prevent all serious floods, which they seem to do, except they didn’t in 1986. Nobody knows whether they prevented a serious flood in 2005, when we all prepared for a flood that didn’t turn out to be much of a flood, just a flood scare at 8.8M according to the Edmonton Public library.
Then there was the matter of Fanny Crosby. I started out knowing that she was a blind woman who lived to the age of 95 and wrote a few hymns, so I thought I’d do a little research and tell my music buddies about her. But it wasn’t more than ten minutes before I was mired in confusion. Did she write approximately 8000 hymns, or roughly 9000 hymns? There are only four in our hymnbook, though it is possible there are more, because the stories say that many of her hymns were published under other names, it not being appropriate for publishers to publish so many under one name. One story says that Fanny would occasionally hear a song by an unknown author and, finding it pleasing, would remark upon it, only to discover that it had actually been written by her. Well, that could be true. Surely nobody could actually remember 8000, let alone 9000 hymns. Fanny, born 1820, published three books in her lifetime—not books of hymns. At one time she had a publisher’s contract to write three hymns a week for the Sunday school—no problem for one who sometimes wrote seven hymns a day. She married but had no children—all the more time for writing. A minister said she told him she would have chosen to be blind so that she might praise her savior. This may have happened, but to me, a pragmatist jaded by the real life limitations of blindness, it sounds like the kind of story ministers really like to hear, and guilty congregations like to repeat with possible embellishment. And did I mention that Fanny also taught history at the New York Institute?
In the end I settled for one basic truth. Fanny Crosby was still a remarkable woman, even if she only wrote 8000 hymns. And one other truth, the North Saskatchewan River caused a lot of consternation with its flooding.