This film recreates the true story of Tom Sukanen, an eccentric Finnish immigrant who homesteaded in Saskatchewan in the | dG1fOEVqdGNldFFSVnM
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00 [ Music ]
00:13 >> Tom Sukkainen was an immigrant from Finland, like all of us on the farms
00:19 around Lucky Lake and Saskatchewan.
00:21 But he was different.
00:23 He had a dream.
00:25 He built a ship to sail home.
00:30 All through the '30s he'd been building it.
00:36 When I first started to notice him, I was just a little girl
00:39 and lived on the farm across the way.
00:43 He was obsessed with that ship and getting it back to Finland.
00:48 [ Music ]
00:53 I heard it had something to do with the wife
00:55 and baby he left behind in the old country.
00:59 [ Music ]
01:05 Nobody believed he could do it, but Tom just kept working.
01:10 [ Music ]
01:17 He pretty well gave up farming and everything else to do it.
01:22 [ Music ]
01:29 Never mind that his farm was 17 miles from the nearest water,
01:33 the South Saskatchewan River, he just kept at it for about 10 years.
01:39 First the hull, then the keel.
01:43 He was a real inventor too.
01:45 Built his own equipment, tools, even a camera and a water clock.
01:51 He was a genius.
01:55 He planned to haul the ship over land to the river with his horses
02:01 and float it down to Hudson's Bay and then to Finland.
02:05 [ Music ]
02:08 He had Sisu when other Finns had forgotten the spirit of bravery.
02:14 [ Music ]
02:21 And because they forgot, no one could help.
02:25 [ Music ]
02:39 The hull weighed around 20 tons.
02:43 It was like trying to shift a mountain.
02:47 [ Music ]
02:57 But he did move it.
02:59 On a good day they might make 20 yards.
03:03 That's when people stopped making a joke of it.
03:08 He headed for that river for more than two years.
03:13 One by one his horses died, but Tom kept going.
03:19 [ Music ]
03:24 When he could go no further, he just left the ship on the prairie
03:28 and went down to the river to start work on the boiler.
03:32 [ Music ]
03:41 He worked on that boiler only a mile from my father's farm.
03:46 By that time people started saying he was strange.
03:51 He was eating gophers and his dead horses.
03:55 [ Music ]
04:24 [ Background Sounds ]
04:27 [ Music ]
04:32 They said something had to be done.
04:36 He was starving and working himself to death.
04:40 [ Music ]
04:51 They came and took him away to the Battleford Asylum.
04:55 [ Music ]
04:57 That must have broken him.
05:00 [ Music ]
05:08 Within a year he was dead.
05:11 [ Music ]
05:17 But I know he never quit traveling on his journey
05:21 because his dream did carry him home to Suomi.
05:25 [ Music ]
05:54 [ Music ]