Where is St. Fee?

January 30, 1935  We went to St. Fee to buy a bull.  Paid $35.00.  Mary sewed.

When I was typing up my mom’s translation, I struggled to figure out what St. Fee was.  Was it a person or a place?  It did not look like a person’s name, so it must be a place.  I knew it had to be less than a day’s drive from Meade because Cornelius drove there and returned the same day.  And he surely would not go too far to buy a bull.  I could not find town or place called “St. Fee,” so I tried alternate spellings.  Then suddenly, I realized that maybe it was Santa Fe, Kans., which is now a ghost town located between Garden City and Sublette.  Then it made sense!  If you pronounce “St. Fee” like the French place names in southeastern Manitoba, it would sound like “sahn fay,” which is similar to how “Santa Fe” might be pronounced.  It is interesting that Cornelius had retained this much of Manitoba identity that he wrote unfamiliar place names like a Manitoban.