THE PROMISED LAND by PIERRE BER TON Books by Pierre Berton The Royal Family The Mysterious North Klondike Just Add Water and Stir Adventures of a Columnist Fast, Fast, Fast Relief The Big Sell The Comfortable Pew The Cool, Crazy, Committed World of the Sixties The Smug Minority The National Dream The Last Spike Drifting Home Hollywood's Canada My Country The Dionne Years The Wild Frontier The Invasion of Canada Flames Across the Border Why We Act Like Canadians The Promised Land PICTURE BOOKS The New City (with Henri Rossier) Remember Yesterday The Great Railway The Klondike Quest ANTHOLOGIES Great Canadians Pierre and Janet Berton's Canadian Food Guide Historic Headlines EOR YOUN(iER READERS The Golden Trail The Secret World of Og Contents Prologue: Professor Ole."ll~u~'s Vision .. .. .| ONE: THE YOUNCi NAPOLEON OF THE WEST 1. The new broom 8 2. The hard sell 13 3. A political animal 19 4. The spoils system....... 25 5. The Free Press changes hands 29 6. Master and servant 34 TWO: THE SHEEPSKIN PEOPLE 1. The long voyage 42 2. "Dirty, ignorant Slavs" 49 3. The Galician vote 56 4. The melting-pot syndrome 59 THREE: THE SPIRIT WRESTLERS 1. The Universal BrothLrhood 66 2. "Greetings, Doukhohors!" 75 3. The "peculiar people" .......... 81 4. The Sons of God 86 5. Peter the Lordly......................................................... 94 FOUR: ISAAC BARR'S LAMBS 1. Barr's dream 102 2. Quite a hustler 109 3. Stormy passage 114 4. Indignation meetings 121 5. Trekking to Britannia 128 FIVE: THE PR OBI EM OF THE ENGLISH 1. No Englishmen need apply 138 2. Remittance men 145 3. Lloydminster................................................... 149 4. The odyssey of Ella Sykes 156 5. Don't come back, Dad 162 vi SIX: THE AMERICAN IN\ASION 1. Will White thinks big 170 2. Catching the fever 175 3. Keeping out the Blacks 181 4. Loosening Imperial ties 187 SEVEN: THE PASSING OF THE OLD ORDER 1. Sifton's mysterious departure 196 2. The new era 205 3. The Indian dilemma 210 4. The Imperial Force 218 EIGHT: THE SIFT ON SCANDALS 1. The Minister's reputation 226 2. The mysterious company 227 3. A favoured relative 235 4. Big Jim's political clout 240 5. Cheating the Indians 245 6. Everybody's doing it.............................................. 249 NINE: THE SPIRIT OF THE. WEST 1. West versus East 252 2. The common experience256 3. The Western ethic261 4. Bob Edwards and the Eve Opener ..... 265 5. Radicalism and populism 272 6. The un-Western Westerner 278 TEN: THE DARK SIDE OF BOOSTERISM I. The image makers 288 2. Slums and brothels292 3. The Social Gospel299 4. Our Nellie 304 vii ELEVEN: BOOM AND BUST 1. Railway madness 312 2. The land frenzy ... 321 3. Get your feet wet .................................................... 4. Thelottery 334 5. Shattered dreams 339 Epilogue: On the Winnipeg Platibrn' 345 Author's Note..................................................348 Select Bibliography350 Notes 360 Index ........................................ 379 viii The Promised Land Dl TRI CT Ol ~ 41 AL COCA ~ I ~id ~..W~ (: ~ \'~(,/~/" ', RILERf~, ~4~: , ~ 1 v - , =~roys T ~I_ _ _ ~ ~ \r ~, / Edna ; 7: DISTRICT OF SAS ~ : ~Al BE Or; ~ n t ~/ " ~ ~ ad, it", ~ \I~f Cotu~B' ~:."]: . ~ a, ~ , A) A' , Pups :~, - . '~ t~-~'tA ~Y g ~ ~ ~ _ ~ ~ t~3"tpeg - ~QI2 ~Is 'fir sit,~ if'~ -' [) ,1) )(~} 1.(1~110~411RIS UNITED STATES OF AMERICA The West before 1905 Prologue: Professor Oleskow's Vision This is a book about dreams and illusions, escape and survival, triumph and despair. It is also a book about foolish optimism, political cunning, naivete, greed, scandal, and opportunism. It is a book about the search for Utopia, the promise of a Promised Land, and so it treats of hope, fulfilment, and liberation as well as drudgery, loneliness, and disenchantment. What we are dealing with here is a phenomenon rare, if not unique, in history: the filling up of an empty realm, a thousand miles broad, with more than one million people in less than one generation. This, then, is the story of the creation of a state within a state and the resultant transformation of a net ion. There are grafters in this tale and hard-nosed politicians and civic boosters with dollar signs in their eyes; but there are also idealists, dreamers, and visionaries. And since these last are in the minority it is best to start with the first of them, a Slavic professor of agriculture named Josef Oleskow, who saw in the untrammelled Canadian West a haven for the downtrodden of Eastern Europe. Let us join Dr. Ole.skuv1 in the hut sUn?/7?er If /895 as he n?akes his ear by train on a Burner uldi.s~over, to be Canadian prairies. He is int'7?ediate/r identifiable as astrunger. Hi.s hair, dark and luxuriant, is un parted c unshed straight hack in the Eurupean fashion. His moustache dues nut ciroup Her his lips in the Nurth American sty/e but turns shar/'lv upward in tug fierce paints, like that of the Hernias Kaiser. He is dressed furn?ant and fasticliousiv-neat dark suit, high starched cu//ar, heavy foulard. file its a handsome nan uf'thirt~-five u ith dark, intelligenteres and regu/arfeatures, and he is enchanted by the Neu Wurld: the people are so clean and, equally intpurtant, so independent. There are no lurcl.s, no peasants; here, e\'er~une is a master! Officials are nut uffic ious; they are markers just like evert huHr ese, Without .sl~ec ial pri\'i/eges. Their uffice.s operate just like stores. You can Walk in Without hui ving and the nan behind the desk -e\'en a Cabinet n?inister-~illprohahl~ (eel' his hat un. But, oh, the Waste! Fur tutu dais, D,: oleskuH s train plunges through the blackened f ure.s to uf'the Precambrian Shielcl. To hin? these east stretches of burned tin? her are a painful sight a forest e en?eter! No one, apparently, bothers to extinguish the gargantuan hazes that cle.spail the land. In the prule.s.su/ 's nati\ e Ruthenia, Loud is the n?ust preciotl.s of' cun?n?udit/es, tu he hu.shanded and huarcled. But these Canadians c/e.s~tro~, their het it age nietci/ess/l: Wh~, he discovers, Ivhen the~' c/ear the lancl, ther actual ll tUSS the StUn? pS into the nearest ravine! The train eaves the hlach-ened desert uf'the Shield and hursts intu the prairies Here are cher Ivanc/ers. The Canadians have an axe lvith a curved handle that fits the shape uf the hand. Oleshou tests it and uunders uh~ his Outn cunatr~,n?en have, in the cunrse uf' several centuries tailed tu in?p/ uve the design uf their uu~n in?p/en?ents. As the train passes thraugh the grain f i'elcis uf'Manitaha he nutes that nahod~ uses a sich le ur a sr l~the. Machines, nut n?en, harvest the lvheat, and iJ'a nan duesn't OM'n a n?achine, he can alu als rent onefrun! a neighbour. A t Pc~rtage la Prairie, the prule.ssur u ale lies these n?arvellous n?ac hines Julluiving U/?e an uther in a staggered rou ac russ the ~vide fields and n~arve/s at the horses that c/rau, then? nut the skinny n?iserahle nags ul' his native Carpath/ans hut trig hush r anin?als lvith rea leather harnesses. But the lancl its so en?pt~! The On/t' citr ula'?" cunsequence is Winnipeg. Frun? Pur/age the plains roll uestlvard, unfenced and un ploughed the huff alu grass still uaist high, bruken onlr hl a thin skein of trais-ntere ruts, really~-and the occasional river vane~ horde red b ~ c ott un U'U ud and u ulJ'u il lou Indians in hrightl ~ c uloured hlanh-cts squat in pic ture.sque groups un the station platforn?s. Mountains of huff alu bunes line the track in the far u est. But Jam?s are Jeu Strung o ut alung the railu a r is a series c>|' tin v set tlen?en tsc lusters off ran?e buildings lining u uaden sideuarks. Regina, the capital of the North West Territories, the so-called Queen Cit~ of the Plains, has Jeuer than tu~u thousand people' scattered in huddles of uooden shacks that straggle Jor tu~o n?i/es ac ross a sere plain, J1at as a kite hen table. Saskatoon scar. en' exists at all-a railual station and a feu houses, nuthing n?ore. Ca/garr, u ith four thousand citizens is a glorif ed c ou toll't?" Edn?OntOt? a glurif ed trading post. These are primitive settlen?ents. Calgar~'s dusty streets stink of horse nan ure Regina is redolent of the stench of the hotel slops that drench the main stree/. Edn?ontun echoes u ith the piercing squeal of ungreased Red River l arts cirau n a/on" Portage Avenue b ~ oxen and ponies. In the s~naller \'illages, c ou s, pigs, and chic kens u ander loose. These islets of civili at ion are /ost in the great su eep of the plains -u ave after u ave uJgrass/and rolling u est touard the foothills, so that the uh ole uJ' the prairie countrr Jron? the Red River to the Rockies resen~l~lesa/'rehistoric cJceanthathassontehou e ongealed. But,asD': Oleskou notes, the earth is e~erruhere rich and hlacl/~. [fis OU'/? countrrn~en are starved for lancl. This en~/'t' ream' could /~e their salvation. Josef Oleskow's journey took him as far west as Edmonton. A handful of his countrymen had preceded him to Canada, and their prosperity astonished him: Vasyl Tasiv, who came out in 1892 with only $40, now owned a house in Winnipeg, two cows, and a nest egg of $120. Yurko Paish had even managed to send home $120-a small fortune. Dmytro Widynovich had also come with only $40 in 1893 and had been able to save $400. Credit was easy. In a town of twenty houses there were three banks, all eager to lend money. Machines could be bought on time. The problem, as Oleskow saw it, was not how to borrow money but how to avoid borrowing too much. This was an optimistic country; people talked only of success; none thought of failure. Yet one thing bothered the fastidious professor. His countrymen in Canada were an embarrassment to him. They dressed in rags, scratched incessantly, did not appear to bathe. This offended the idealist in Oleskow. In the Promised Land, newcomers must not look and act like serfs! They must wear suits that would cover their bare chests; they must abandon hooks and ribbons for real buttons; they must scrub themselves regularly and learn to use a knife and fork. Above all, they must rid themselves of the stigma of slavery, learn to lift their heads and look squarely into the eyes of others instead of peering up from under the brow like a dog. Like so many others who were to follow him to the Canadian West, Oleskow was looking for perfection, or, more correctly, hits idea of perfection. It was his dream to turn Ruthenian peasants into instant Canadian farmers employing Canadian agricultural techniques, wearing Canadian clothes, speaking Canadian English. It was a magic vision that would become widely promulgated in the West. Oleskow was shocked during a visit to one farm of Ruthenian colonists. To him, the children seemed to be clothed in filthy castoffs; and the women! Why, they didn't bother to wear blouses! "For Heaven's sake," he cried. "How could you let yourselves go like this?" To which one woman gave a perfectly sensible answer: "And why not? There is no one to dress for." But Dr. Oleskow had never been a peasant. In his neat dark suit, he was more out of place than his countrymen. He was an academic with a doctorate in botany, chemistry, and geology. As a member of the faculty of the leachers' seminary at Lemberg, in that section of the Austro-Hungarian Empire then known as Ruthenia, he was paid six hundred dollars a year. His dream was always to better the conditions of the peasantry-partly by improving the mineral and chemical content of the soil and partly by reducing the population through emigration. He was the leader among a group of intellectuals who made up Provista, the Ruthenian Population Society. These selfless men had two purposes: first, to stem the flow of their countrymen to the jungles of Brazil and redirect it to the Canadian prairies, and second, to prevent the exploitation of Ruthenian emigrants by unscrupulous agents working for the major shipping companies. Brazil was tempting his people with offers of free transportation, free land, and financial assistance. The peasantry swallowed whole the Brazilian propaganda, which suggested they could loll at their ease in the new land while monkeys came down from the trees to handle all manual labour. In fact, those who reached Brazil were treated little better than slaves. The steamship agents, who were paid a bonus for every ticket sold to a warm body, shamelessly hoodwinked each emigrant in a dozen ways, charging huge sums to exchange money, extracting fees for fake medical examinations while bribing the petty officials to ignore their swindles. No wonder Slavic peasants were arriving in Canada penniless. Oleskow wanted to change all that. Ruthenia was so heavily overpopulated that wealthy landowners could pay their labourers only a pittance. The excess population, in the professor's belief, was more than two million. But if the remedy was emigration to Canada, it must be selective, and the exploitation of the ignorant must stop. That is why the society sent Dr. Oleskow to Canada, having persuaded the Canadian government to pay for his transportation. Oleskow outlined his plan to T. Mayne Daly, the minister responsible for immigration in the Conservative government. He was' he explained, prepared to quit his academic post to work for Canada, to control all immigration from Ruthenia and its provinces of Galicia and Bukovina. He wanted no salary, only expenses. It would be for him a labour of love. It was his plan to build a well-organized immigration movement, independent of the steamship companies and their agents, choosing his subjects carefully farmers of adequate means whose funds would be safeguarded and who would be protected from exploitation. These people would be the best stock that Eastern Europe could offer. But Josef Oleskow was a man ahead of his time. Daly was interested but cautious. Canada had had its share of crackpot idealists. The government recognized that Oleskow was no crackpot, but it was wary of setting a precedent. Within a year the government changed. A new minister, Clifford Sifton, was too busy sweeping the dead wood from his department to consider the Oleskow plan. In Austria, the shipping companies and agents were opposed to any scheme that they themselves could not control. The Austrian government did not specifically oppose emigration, but it did oppose proselytisers like Oleskow. The lan downing nobility was more interested in keeping the labour force high and wages low. As Canada procrastinated, Oleskow grew dejected. His pamphlet extolling the Canadian West, describing his tour of the prairies and giving practical advice to would-be emigrants, was read by thousands. But it was the shipping agents who reaped the benefit. They slipped into the villages, disguised as pedlars and itinerant journeymen, signed up anybody they could, promised the moon, and cheated their victims. Oleskow continued to travel at his own expense, pushing the idea of emigration to the New World. In 1898 Clifford Sifton actually gave him some expense money, recognizing the professor's role in bringing to Canada the sturdy farmers he would eventually dub "the men in sheepskin coats." But Josef Oleskow's plan was never adopted. In 1900 Sifton opted for an unrestricted settlement policy and sublet all continental immigration work to a mysterious organization known as the North Atlantic Trading Company. This suspect "company"-to this day we do not know the identity of its principals-was paid five dollars for every healthy man, woman, and child who reached Canadian shores. That was a far cry from Oleskow's carefully thought out plan. In spite of the regulations, many arrived destitute. By this time Oleskow's little trickle of new arrivals had become a tidal wave. His report on the West had started a chain reaction, for better or for worse. The movement fed upon itself. By 1903, the Galicians as they were then called (we know them as Poles and Ukrainians today) were strung out by the tens of thousands along the northern rim of the prairies. Long before that Josef Oleskow had wound down his activities in the emigration field. His wife was dead. He had a new post-director of a teachers' seminary-in a new town, Sokal. And he was gravely ill. On October 18, 1903, the man who helped to start it all but who would soon be forgotten, was dead at the age of forty-three. Chapter One The Young Napoleon of the West The new broom The hard sell A political animal The spoils system The Free Press changes hands Master and servant The What are we to say of Clifford Sifton'? That for almost a decade he was '?e~v the most powerful politician in Western Canada'? That he was a visionhr(~? ary who changed the face of the prairies'? That he enriched his closest political cronies, as well as his brother-in-law, as a result of his position'? That he LIUit his post on a matter of principle'? That he resigned not for principle at all but because of a personal scandal? That he was a ruthlessly efficient organiser'? That he had no political philosophy other than the philosophy of maintaining power'? l hat he never shrank from a battle, ignored whispering campaigns, never stooped to respond to criticism? That he was a workaholic who exhausted his colleagues'? That he was an ailing cabinet minister, exhausted by overwork? That he was a political puppet master whose control extended even into the highest echelons of the Mounted Police'? That he was the Pied Piper who brought prosperity to the prairies'? That he was nothing less than the devil incarnate'? All these things were said of Sifton between 1896, when he took office as Minister of the Interior in Wilfrid Laurier's Liberal cabinet, and 1905, when he abruptly resigned. He was a man of impressive strength and glaring flaws who, for better or for worse, put his stamp on the times. When one speaks or writes of the West at the turn of the century one does not call it the Laurier Period. It is the Sifton Period, the Sifton Era, the Sifton Decade. His name has become a symbol, conjuring up a series of dramatic tableaux: the grimy immigrant ships, crammed with strange, dark featured farmers; the colonist cars, crowded with kerchiefed women and men in coats of rough sheepskin; the hovels grubbed out of tough prairie sod; the covered wagons lumbering across the border from Utah and Minnesota; the babel of tongues in Winnipeg's immigration hall; the bell tents of the Barr colonists whitening the plains at Saskatoon; the straggle of barefooted Doukhobor fanatics, tramping down the frosted roads of Saskatchewan; the remittance men holding up the long bar of the'Ylberta Hotel. So it is appropriate to look at Sifton on the threshold of his federal career, recently sworn into the Laurier cabinet, and about to return triumphantly to his home town, where he knows he will shortly win his federal seat by acclamation. It [.Y the flight of Nov' her 25, 1896, ael lve have joi'?e"I the h"'ister8 ous c ro~vd oJ' Liberal.s <)t? the C PR plats m at Branc/o/?" Manit<'ha, bra\'ing the hitler thiril-helo~" weal he ~vailing m "reel the city's faV<)Urile S<)t?. D'A/I(Jt? M<"Cailhl' hats been pc/"SUaCieCI /0 /'elittCItliSh the riding; SiJion is slaled lo lain-e il u/?t)p/)<)seel. The train its an hour lale. The failhful slan?/) their feel and beal their hands logelher. Mou.slamefi~ud fur the trip in a c lath trundle as the neighhc>urs and relatives pour into the house to say gouclh ret What a C'U/??n?UtiUn, U ith e"'errhod r talking at once! There are Sn?i/eS at first; then, sudden iv sone uJ' the u amen begin to cry they hug and kiss Anastasia, a/,ologizing for things left undone, past uffenc es real and imagined. The children start to c rv tou, and then sune of' the n?en are seen to u ipe tears frun? their eves. SomehuHr shouts fur silence and then, as all host their heads, he begins to ret ite a prarer, asking Gucl to bless the Huneninks and their tutu small children, Petrvk and hazy Theudore, and give them a safe vo rage, prosperitr, and gem health in the strange land across the ocean. Write soon, everybody cries, u rite as sOun as vlJu arrive! The u agun and team are u aitingfor the journe~'tu the. station Four n?en hoist the big trunk onto the hat k as the fun? il r c limbs aboard. But Anastasia Hunenink stops and turns hat k, her hate v in her arms. She u alks to the douru ah makes the sign Of the truss, kisses the frame, and then, in one last gesture, pit ks up a small lump of Galician earth, u raps it in a rag, and puts it in her hand v arise, a memory' of a land she u ill never see again. Professor Oleskow's plan had been to bring to Canada only the best farmers, the most productive and educated elements of the population-those who owned enough land to finance the long journey overseas and the first hard years on a Canadian homestead. But The In the mountain trenches of Galicia, the land was too precious to be long wasted. The furrows of the strip farms ran to the very edges of the vow age houses. Cows and sheep dotted the pasture land on the lower flanks of the mountains. Oats, rye, and potatoes sprouted up from the valley floor. Above the huddle of thatched roofs the great peaks rose, clothed in oak, beech, and fir, each ridge effectively sealing off one village from the next, maintaining a peasant culture that was frozen in time. Since there were no fences-only corner stakes to identify personal holdings -each fertile Carpathian valley resembled one gigantic farm under a single management. Appearances were deceptive. Each peasant required fourteen acres to provide for himself and his family, yet 70 per cent of the farms were no more than half that size. Some families, in fact, tried to subsist on a single acre. Wages were as low as five cents a day, but the price of land for those who could afford it was high. The mean was eighty dollars an acre, but some land fetched as much as four hundred dollars. Taxes were among the highest in Europe. Under these depressing conditions thievery was common and alcoholism endemic. The wealthy palms (lords) owned not only the forests, meadows, and villages; they also owned the taverns, of which there were more than twenty-three thousand in Galicia. It was in the interests of the ruling class to keep the peasants drunk and underpaid. The consumption of liquor was stupendous: twenty-six lit res a year for every man, woman, and child. One of the commonest words in the language was heeda, meaning misery. To the question "How is everything?" the usual reply was "Beeda. " No wonder, then, that Josef Oleskou's pamphlets were so successful. Across the ocean lay a promised land where 160 acres of fertile soil could be had for the asking. Thus was initiated the great emigration of Poles and Ukrainians from Austria-llungary. Until the Great War, Canadians lumped them together as Galicians because so many150,000-came from that region. To save confusion, that is what we will call them in this book. It was these people that Clifford Sifton was describing when, more than twenty years later, he talked of "a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat." It is a spring n?"ming in 1897, and in the Calician \'illage of Chapter Two The Sheepskin People The long voyage "Dirty, ignorant Slavs" The Galician vote The melting-pot syndrome the Liberal party and a new generation of respected journalists surely begins with the Dafoe example. Such partisan newspapermen as Grant Dexter, Blair Fraser, and Bruce Hutchison were to carry it forward into the mid-century. Fraser, for one, was so close to being an apologist for the Liberal party during his years as Ottawa editor for Maclean's that, when the government changed, he found his sources had dried up And Bruce Hutchison, while editor of the Va'?c~user Sun and Winnipeg Free Pre.s.s, actually wrote speeches for Lester B. Pearson. Thus, like so much else that happened in the West during those yeasty years, the pact that was sealed in 1901 between the ambitious young newspaperman and his hard-headed publisher created a ripple that was not without effect half a century later. To Maclean's editors, Fraser played down the rising importance of John Diefenbaker, referring to him as "a lightweight, not destined for power." It was almost certainly his influence that prompted the then editor. Ralph Allen, to commit to type in 1957 an editorial on another Liberal win before the actual election took place. To Allen's embarrassment, the Liberals lost. who was tired of paying a premium on agricultural implements and other goods, which would be cheapt r if the tariff were reduced or d rapped. But Sifton was ever the businessman. For his newspaper suddenly to change its advocacy of reciprocity would be embarrassing and damaging; the Free Press would lose not only its hard-won prestige in the West but also circulation. So Daioe was allowed to continue his support of the official Liberal platform. As a result, the paper gained credibility among the Western farmers, Dafoe went down in history as a fighting editor who was no man's servant, and Sifton's own image was immeasurably polished as a man of principle, broad minded enough to give a great journalist his head. The fact that one editor had actually been permitted to take a different line from his political master was so startling in those days that it became a cause ce'/ehre. Nothing like it had ever happened before, certainly in Western Canada. And, in Dafoe's case, nothing like it happened again. A year after this indulgence Sifton was again giving orders to Dafoe, and Dafoe was following them. Here is Sifton, gently rapping his editor's knuckles on the matter of the Grand Trunk Pacific, at that time the Liberal party's pet railway but certainly not Sifton's: "Now I want to be perfectly plain with you. So far as I can remember you have sheared off of making any attacks on or serious criticism of the Grand Trunk Pacific. You have always been ready enough to strike the CPR or the CNR [Canadian Northern Railway] but apparently for political reasons you are very loathe to say anything about the GTP. That policy will have to be dropped." And Dafoe dropped it. None of this is in the least surprising. Editors were hired because their publishers knew in advance what political opinions they held. Dafoe's views rarely differed from those of Sifton. Some journalists who professed to know said that Dafoe did not care for his employer, but there is no documentary evidence of that. His biography of Sifton, in fact, borders on the sycophantic; in it Dafoe was not above glossing over certain disagreeable facts and inflating favourable ones to put his publisher in the best possible light. But that, too, was the way of politics and journalism in the early years of the century. Dafoe was not the first editor, nor the last, to jump with both feet into party politics. The difference was that his subsequent stature as a leading Canadian editor and an international figure made his close political ties seem acceptable to others who followed. The link between public attention," he wrote to Sifton in December 1902, adding, "I had already taken much the same ground on most of the points; and have since worked them over again...." Dafoe, of course, was more than a passive political servant dancing to Sifton's tune. He had always been an activist, even under a Conservative publisher. When, at the outset of his editorship, a public outcry washed over the West because of the absence of enough freight cars to handle grain shipments, he saw in it a prime opportunity to erase the pro-CPR bias that had stained Sifton's new organ. His articles on the subject, he told his employer, "were written very carefully to .. . serve notice on the railway officials that the Free Press was quite prepared to criticize them land] to satisfy the farmers that the Free Press is quite free from railway control." At times Dafoe seems to have spent as much or more time working as a politician than as a journalist. When he discovered a new German language paper was about to be launched at liosthern in the District of Saskatchewan, he managed to bring its editor at least part way into the Liberal camp and "to say a good word for the Liberal government in its record of settling the west." To sweeten the deal, Dafoe urged Sifton to throw the paper some government business. On another occasion, he prepared a blatantly pro-Liberal pamphlet to be distributed among Galician settlers containing photographs of all the Liberal candidates who had Galicians in their constituencies. "Under every cut," he told Sifton, proudly, "we will put the name and then some legend as this" This is the Government Candidate for such and such a constituency, all Galetians [sic] should vote for him." We are also arranging to include a small map of western Canada showing the projected G.T.P. [Grand Trunk Pacific] line and branches in bold relief. Under it we will put some such words as these,-"This is a railway the Liberal government intends to build. If you want this railway vote for the Liberal Candidates." It is true that Sifton-after considerable argument (the two men wrangled for a week)-allowed Dafoe to go his own way during the 1911 election campaign. It was an odd reversal of roles. Sifton, the leading Westerner, was now an Eastern capitalist. Dafoe, whose family roots in Ontario went back for several generations, had become a fervent Westerner. Sifton moved in the same social and financial circles as the industrial power brokers of Ontario and Quebec who wanted to maintain the protective tariff on Eastern manufactured goods. Dafoe saw himself as the spokesman for the Western farmer, some of Sifton's Immigration Department employees -and with more power. The Free Pre.ss operated as a kind of clearing house for party patronage. And when Sifton gave an order, Dafoe jumped. When, for example, R.S. Mullins, a prominent Manitoba Conservative, bolted the Tory ranks, Sifton seized the opportunity to exploit the defection in the Free Press. He did not leave the task to his editors; instead, he had a former Brandon crony prepare an interview, which he sent to Dafoe with specific instructions. The story was to be vetted, not by the newspaper, but by another old Sifton hand, J. D. Cameron, and then turned over to the paper. Dafoe was ordered to give it a great deal of prominence and to accompany the news story with an editorial. There was never any question but that Dafoe would go along with what many journalists would today consider front office meddling. The same year 1904 - Dafoe was ordered to write or have written a "first class" introduction to a special election edition that was to appear as a Free Press supplement. The introduction was to occupy half of the front page. The supplement itself was not written in the Free Press offices but in those of the Toronto Globe. Some seventy thousand were to be sent out. "My o~ganizer tells me that the people, strange to say, read these sheets better than they do carefully prepared and well printed pamphlets," Sifton told Dafoe, "so we will give them both." Sifton, who was not one to overestimate the intelligence of the electorate, saw his paper as a political tool. Dafoe, the loyal Grit, did not demur in this assessment. During election campaigns, Sifton's people would prepare lists of doubtful voters who were to receive the Free Press free until voting day. The paper was also used as a cover for partisan political activity. In 1901, for instance, Sifton suggested that one of his organisers travel about the province, ostensibly as a Free Press reporter but actually to devote his time to visiting Orange lodges and proselytising Protestant voters. If Dafoe didn't know Sifton's views on a subject, he asked for them before committing an editorial to print. What, for instance, should be the Free Press policy on the Crow's Nest Pass rail extension? What line should the paper take on the coming visit to Winnipeg of Israel Tarte, Minister of Public Works, who had little love for Sifton? When Dafoe prepared an editorial critical of the Go\ ernor General he sent a copy to his employer before printing it. Sifton "suggested" more than he ordered, but to Dafoe these suggestions were law. "I was glad to get your letter giving me your views on some of the subjects now attracting the age of nineteen the new Ottawa Journal hired him as editor, surely the youngest in history. It was too much for him. Three weeks later he bounced west to the Free Pre.s.s, and there he learned his craft. In 1892, the Montreal llerald offered him its editorship and he grabbed it, flinging himself into the task, working fourteen hours a day, tripling the circulation in his first year, then moving to the companion Weel"-lr Star, which he edited for six years, doubling its circulation from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand. It did not seem to bother Dafoe, the Liberal convert, that he was working for a Tory organ. But Sifton knew he was a Liberal. "I do not think we can afford to let you work for the Fories any longer," he told Dafoe, who seized the offer, moved back to Winnipeg, and proceeded to put Sifton's stamp, and his own, on the one-time CPR organ. Richardson attacked his editorial style almost immediately as "a sort of cheap imitation, Macaulayese, stilted, tawdry and ranting." But it was Dafoe's style, not Richardson's, that would influence a future generation of editorial writers. To Dafoe, Richardson was "a blatherskite." For decades, the name of Dafoe has had a godlike ring to young journalists. The myth, still believed in some quarters, was that the young editor was granted, almost from the outset, the ideal arrangement that every journalist seeks from the publisher but few attain -absolute independence and freedom to express opinion The myth stems entirely from Dafoe's celebrated break with his employer over the issue of reciprocity during the 1911 election. But for the first decade of his career, and indeed with that one exception for some time after, Dafoe was Sifton's willing and compliant servant. He wrote what he was told. In those early years, he was as much a party hack as an editor. He addressed political meetings, attended Liberal conventions, advised on patronage, wrote party pamphlets, and published propaganda for the Liberal government in general and Sifton's department in particular. His job was to drive the Conservatives in Manitoba out of office, a task that took fifteen years. In 1903, for instance, Dafoe thought nothing of devoting more than half the paper to attacks on Rodmond Roblin, the Premier. Dafoe was as much a Liberal back-room boy as *Arthurlrwin,theformereditorofMac/ca'~'s,toldmcin 19X3thathehadalways believed the story that Dafoe had a contract with Sifton guaranteeing editorial independence. No such contract existed. Master Sifton, the cynical pragmatist, realized that slanted news stories were anal far more effective than opinionated editorials. In 1901 he told his servant business manager, EH. Macklin, that the government wasn't hurt by opposition editorials nor much helped by friendly ones. "What actually injures the Government is some carefully concocted piece of alleged news.... The simple-minded farmer swallows it and a great many people who are not farmers and ought to know better. I am quite convinced however that the damage is done by the news columns and not by the editorial columns...." But he needed a strong voice, and the following year he hired a new editor in the person of John Wesley Dafoe, the big, dishevelled genius who would rise to become the most respected journalist in Canada. Like so many other Manitobans of that time, Dafoe had his roots in pioneer Ontario. There was always something of the backwoods boy about him. He was tall and thickset, vat ith a shock of red hair, a shaggy moustache, and a long, flabby face with a nose to match. In his photographs he always seems to be peering downwards through his pince-nez at some obscure and mysterious document. As a youth he was something of a prodigy and something of a rebel. Although he had no more than a high school education, he was a schoolteacher at the age of fifteen. His parents were Conservative farmers and doctrinaire Methodists. But a single speech by the great Liberal orator Edward Blake turned Dafoe into a Grit; and as lor fundamentalism, he shucked that off in his early years-it was, to him, "a damnable doctrine." As a token Anglican, a passionate Liberal, and a sometimes cynical journalist, Dafoe seemed to be at war with his upbringing, yet his philosophy was deeply influenced by his agrarian background. In the one instance in which he broke with his employer he took the Western farmers' side against the Eastern industrialists. He was never comfortable in what he called a "plug hat." Even in his later years when he had achieved an awesome prestige he looked like a farmer-a "cube," to use the expression of the day. That stood him in good stead when with no experience he got his first job on the Montreal Star. The teenaged tyro looked enough like a hick to be disguised as one in the newspaper's expose of a clothing store that was cheating country bumpkins by substituting cheap suits for expensive ones. In one year he rose to be the paper's Ottawa correspondent. At MR. SIFT ON DISPOSES OF AIRY OPPONEN r Richardson Gets Severely Worsted at the Joint Meeting at Bran don-His Braggadocio and Abuse Fails--The Minister's Clean Cut, Facty Reply Scored Hard Political Record of Opposition Candidate Exposed This Free Press report of November 1, 1904, which described Richardson's remarks as "tawdry and commonplace in comparison with the weighty, earnest utterances of the minister" was no more shameless than the report of the same meeting the same day in the Tribune: GREAT TRIUMPH FOR PUBLIC OWNERSHII' Mr. Richardson, Candidate of the Great Cause, Carried the Mammoth Mass Meeting at Brandon Mr. Sifton, Apologist for Private Corporations, Clearly Worsted in the Joint Debate The accompanying story described Richardson's speech as "a nail in the coffin of the Young Napoleon," claimed that Brandon "failed to give the minister one spontaneous cheer," and reported that "it was apparent at once that the sympathies of the great majority of the audience" were with Richardson. With commendable optimism Richardson was forever announcing the complete disarray of the dark Siftonian forces aligned against him, only to be forced into an apologetic editorial the day after each election -as in the 1904 federal election, in which Richardson decided to take on Sifton in Brandon. Tribune news story, November 2, 1904: "The forces of the Sifton party are shattered.... The total rout of Sifton and his boodle gang is only a matter of hours.... Sifton is a gonner [arc].... That Richardson will be elected by the will of the people tomorrow is an indisputable fact.... Opinion in the Conservative and Independent ranks is ... that Richardson will have a clear majority of 500...." But Sifton beat Richardson handily, and in an editorial on November 4, Richardson blandly pretended he had expected a Sifton win all along: "In view of all that Mr. Sifton had at stake in the election, The Tribune hardly expected that Mr. Richardson would defeat him. We hoped, however, a much closer run would have been made...." Richardson continued gamely to run for office and continued to be defeated. Thirteen years passed before he regained a seat in Parliament. thinnest of evidence in order to arrange a saw-off with the opposition, who were chary of expensive and long-drawn-out court cases. The amount of newspaper space devoted to politics was awesome. Speeches were reported verbatim and often ran to several columns. Banner headlines, otherwise reserved for an earthquake or a railway disaster, trumpeted each candidate's dualities and his opponent's shortcomings. A newcomer reading the Regina Leader, the Winnipeg Celebrant, or the Edn?untun Bulletin might easily have concluded that politics was a game that obsessed every man, woman, and child on the prairies. This was far from the truth. As the British magazine Nineteenth Century reported late in the nineties, "the mass of the people do not pay enough attention to politics to care much what individual gets in." Everybody, save for a small coterie of heelers and hacks, was far more concerned with clearing the land, ploughing the new fields, working a homestead, and making a living. The Machine got out the vote, but it was a five-dollar bill, a bottle of whiskey, or the promise of a job that brought an apathetic public to the polls. But to the politicians and their hangers-on, each campaign was a life-and-death contest. To Sifton, the Conservatives were more than the Opposition; they were "the enemy." At election time he talked of putting on his war paint, and he entered the lists as a battler who genuinely enjoyed a scrap. He asked for no quarter and gave none. He was subjected to the most vicious calumny, especially by Richardson, but he never complained and never sued. The Tribune called him "unsavory," - "a grafter," "a crook," "a coward," and "a thief." Richardson charged that the Free Press was controlled by "financial grafters" and that the Department of the Interior was "a paradise for partisan hangers on .. . a bribery agency." "MR. SIFT ON CROOKED CAREER LAID BARE," one of its headlines declared in 1902. During the federal election campaign of 1904, Richardson wrote that "no man in Canada now in public life has done more to smash ideals of public righteousness and promote public wrong doing and political corruption, to bedevil the public interests, to enslave the people and to debauch the politics of the country...." The Free Press was under Sifton's orders not to attack Richardson personally except in its reports of political meetings. Instead, its job was to boost the Liberal party in general and the Minister of the Interior in particular. hers of Parliament or the legislature. If they supported the government they expected to get government advertising. knowing that they would lose it if the government fell. In their news columns and headlines they made no pretence at objectivity. News stories, when they dealt with political issues, read like editorials. Reporters thought nothing of inserting their own opinions (or, more realistically, their employer's opinions) into reports of political meetings. And it was not difficult to buy an editor. Smaller papers could easily be persuaded to change their political thrust under the promise of government patronage. Sifton, it was said, controlled nineteen or twenty papers in Manitoba alone through the judicious dispensation of advertising. A headline on a news story from the rabidly Conservative Calgary lleralcl reporting one of Clifford Sifton's political speeches in the 1904 campaign gives the flavour of Western journalism during the period: OIL THE MACHINE THAT HAS GROUND OUT A COLL) MILLION FOR ME-CLIFI ORD $1FLON It was the lleralcl's regular device to employ a dollar sign whenever Sifton's name appeared above a major news story. This kind of headline, which would cause a scandal today, was accepted by newspaper readers as part of the game. In today's context, reports of political meetings at the turn of the century are hilarious, and it is difficult to believe that anybody but the faithful took them seriously, if, in fact, they read them at all. The newspaper's candidate-who was so often its publisher-was praised to the heavens. He invariably spoke to a large and deliriously enthusiastic crowd, who, it was reported, greeted his every statement with prolonged cheers. Incisive, clear headed, totally convincing, he demolished his opponent, who was portrayed as a pathetic puppet, dancing to the tune of his party's machine. The day before the election each paper announced unreservedly that the candidate of its choice would sweep the polls and decimate the opposition. If he lost, the paper would explain that he had never had a chance because of rampant bribery on the part of the winner. Name calling was part of the game. In the provincial election of 1910, the Trite was able to point out that of ninety candidates only seven had not been called liars, Doodlers, or crooks. Scores of elections were challenged because of election day irregularities (Richardson was one who lost his seat). If bribery was proved -and it often was the election was declared null and void. As a result, each party would challenge a number of elections on the pon dent on November 14, "At the present time as in the past I have no interest or control over the Free Press"; to a friend on November 16, "I have .. . no interest whatever in the paper .. "; and in another letter on January 19, as the news began to leak out, "The statement that I was the owner of a controlling interest in the Free Press of Winnipeg was made by interested persons for the purpose of injuring me politically. There is no truth whatever in the statement. I have no control over the editorial utterances of the Winnipeg Free Press...." The "interested persons" were R.L. Richardson and the dissident Liberals. The week before, Richardson's Tribune had challenged its rival to "withdraw the veil of mystery from its ownership." If the CPR didn't control the paper, Richardson wrote, "then the control is in the hands of the minister of the interior." Sifton bought the paper partly because he needed to neutralize Richardson, the defecting Liberal, partly because he needed a strong government organ in Winnipeg, and partly because he thought it was a good business proposition. The precious August he had stripped the Tribune of all patronage under his control and shifted this lucrative government advertising to his own paper. In November he further pulled Richardson's political teeth by ordering that the Member for Lisgar no longer be consulted in matters of local patronage. In Richardson, Sifton had a tough and uncompromising opponent. R. L." as he was called, was a big, ruggedly handsome man, raised on a pioneer Ontario farm -an ex-boxer and wrestler and an enthusiastic and indefatigable outdoorsman. He had an enviable reputation. As a reporter, one colleague recalled, he was "one of the ablest in Winnipeg's history." He had worked for the Montreal Star, the Toronto Globe, and as city editor of the Winnipeg SUn until its absorption by the Free Press. After three weeks on the latter paper he decided to buy the old Sun equipment and start a paper of his own, the Tribune. An independent Liberal (the worst kind!), a populist, a believer in public ownership and government by referendum, an enemy of the political spoils system, he was everything that Sifton was not. Impetuous, quirky, a lover of the classics, a student of history, a political gadfly ever in hot water, he gave as good as he got in the pages of his personal organ. In those days there was no such thing in Canada as an objective press. Most of the major dailies were controlled by active politicians or by the railways. Of seventeen city dailies in the West in the early days of the century, twelve were owned, edited, or controlled by sitting mem who liked to run his own show. He did not brook disagreement; he did not always listen to advice; he was never one of the boys. But there was another reason for the disaffection of Richardson, a fellow Liberal (for Lisgar) and one-time Sifton supporter. The Member for Lisgar was also proprietor and editor of a Winnipeg newspaper. When it dawned on him that Clifford Sifton had for some time been the secret proprietor of the rival Manitoba Free Press, he felt he had been stabbed in the back. From then on, he became one of Sifton's bitterest enemies. On October 14, 1898, the Manitoba Free Press in a lavish editorial The showered praises upon the Sifton record: "There is not a man in public Free Press life on the continent who would not be envious of such a record, but changes Mr. Sifton, with a modesty that is new in the political life of Canada, hands has not even claimed that credit for himself to which he is justly entitled.... No man could have worked harder or thought more of his duties and responsibilities than Clifford Sifton." Since the Free Press was widely believed to be under the control of the pro-Tory CPR, this seemed high praise indeed. The paper had not always been so complimentary. It had once called Sifton "the most slippery customer Manitoba politics has yet developed" and "the greatest of all ministerial hypocrites." Why this startling change of heart? What was not known was that the paper was no longer a CPR organ. It was, in fact, under the direct control of Sifton. He had bought it the previous January from Sir William Van Home, the CPR'S chairman, and Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona), one of the railway's major shareholders. For all of that year Sifton categorically denied, publicly and privately, that he had any control over the newspaper -quite the contrary. Even his close friend Campbell was kept in the dark. "My own judgement," Sifton wrote to him on November 9, "is that it is an extremely injudicious thing for any man in public life to own a newspaper. I do not own the Free Press or any interest in it directly or indirectly .. . I have .. . no financial interest whatever in the paper, it is in perfectly independent hands." This was, of course, a bald lie, but Sifton kept it up: to a cor res Member of Parliament. When he learned that Bill McCreary had bought uniforms for his immigration officials in Winnipeg without consulting Richard Jamieson, the local Member, he rapped the commissioner's knuckles: "The rule is perfectly explicit that in purchasing any goods or supplies of this kind you must either purchase from the persons to whom you are directed by myself or Mr. Smart, or when you have no such directions and have not the time to write .. . you must consult the member. This is a rule that cannot in any case be overlooked or neglected...." But Sifton's real patronage problems centred around jobs, not contracts. Once the party gained power it seemed that every minion who had toiled in the Liberal vineyards wanted a job for himself, his brother, or his sons. Sifton had no intention of hiring incompetent party members, no matter how fierce the pressure. "I understand," he wrote to the Minister of Customs early in 1897, "that the Collector of Customs is pressing for the appointment of a man named Jones. The Collector of Customs at Winnipeg is a drunken reprobate. He is a disgrace to the Government service and his opinion in regard to the matter is of no value whatsoever, in fact I would myself consider it sufficient to indicate that a man was unfit for a position if the Collector recommended him...." "I cannot take every active Grit in the West on my immigration staff," he wrote in exasperation to (bed Smith in 1901. To another colleague, he tried to explain that "if we are going to accomplish anything in immigration we will have to make use of men who know how to do the work and they are not always the men we would like to give political rewards to." This attitude got him into trouble in Winnipeg. "I am a good deal put out by the kicking that has taken place about the appointments," he told his friend and former colleague Isaac Campbell, a Liberal lawyer in Winnipeg, in August 1897. "I have done everything I possibly could to meet everybody's wishes, but I only had five loaves and two fishes and what are they among so many?" Nonetheless, the Winnipeg situation didn't calm down, and within a year the anti-Siftonites, led by R.L. Richardson, MP., the ambitious, cranky editor of the Winnipeg Daily Tribune, gained control of the annual meeting of the party. "They are unfriendly to me because, to put it shortly, they are all for Doodling and they do not see any chance for success so long as I am here," Sifton explained to John Willison, editor of the Globe, Toronto. That was certainly one of the reasons for the anti-Sifton dissent among Manitoba Liberals. Sifton was a man of the conversation, "but Fred White has assured me on more than one occasion most positively that the manipulation of the N.W.MP. is absolutely in Sifton's hands-that Sifton takes no advice whatever and that he himself has almost despaired of being able to carry on control of the Force. In fact Fred White has expressed to me his utter despondence at the consequences of Sifton's unjustifiable interference.... " Sifton had a short list of Brandon and Winnipeg supporters who were to receive departmental patronage. These were the key men who had organized his torchlight procession in Brandon and who ran his campaigns. The largess did not stop at the Department of the Interior. When, for instance, Sifton discovered that an Ottawa firm "not a friend of ours" had done business with the Militia Department, he wrote to the Minister and again urged that all further leather business be directed to his friends, the Adams brothers. The biggest supporter of the Conservative party was, of course, the Canadian Pacific Railway, John A. Macdonald's creation. The company poured money into Tory election campaigns, persuaded its employees to vote Tory, and on occasion trucked them into town on election day with clear instructions on how to cast their ballots. When Sifton discovered that the company was giving contracts to a Tory supporter to supply beef for the nav vies building the CPR line through the Crow's Nest Pass, he struck hard at its president, Thomas Shaughnessy. "No better way could be devised," he wrote, "of making the Liberals in Manitoba hostile to the Railway Company, to the contract and to anybody who has anything to do with it myself included." The threat was naked: if the CPR wanted any further government aid it had better toe the line. And Sifton would tell the company exactly which Liberal would benefit. "If there is any beef to be supplied, I would rather see the contract go to Mr. J.D. McGregor of Brandon than to anybody else. He is a practical stock man and perfectly competent to handle it satisfactorily." McGregor-"Big Jim" as he was sometimes called-was Sifton's campaign manager. He headed Sifton's list of Brandon cronies, which also included AC. Fraser, who had replaced Sifton as provincial member for North Brandon (dry goods), J.W. Fleming, an old Brandon Liberal and unswerving Sifton supporter (drugs), and, of course, the Adams brothers (harness and leather goods). Sifton preferred to dispense patronage himself or else through James Smart, his deputy, but sometimes also on the advice of the local Galician people who were brought in before the change in '96 were neglected and in a miserable condition and that immediately after I took office they were looked after and work found for them.... Point out that they were neglected and deprived of the franchise and indicate that the Party which has deliberately broken all political traditions by depriving them of the franchise would be equally ready to deprive them of a right to homestead, in fact t heir rights of any kind would not be safe...." In 1903, one Immigration Department employee, J.B. Harkin, was ordered to devote himself almost entirely "to attending to the Galician business." And when the anti-Sifton Winnipeg Daily Tribune attacked the government for making the West "a dumping ground for immigrants," Sifton made sure that fact was brought to the attention of all foreign voters. Even the smallest ethnic groups received his personal attention. There were about forty Icelandic voters in Manitoba in 1900, but Sifton went after all of them, bringing in speakers of Icelandic descent to spread the Liberal gospel and even putting one Icelandic youth in the local post office after learning that the incumbent clerk, unable to tell one Icelander from another, had been blindly handing out Liberal campaign literature to Conservatives. The oil that lubricated the Sifton machine in the West was patronage. Party stalwarts and political cronies expected to be rewarded with fat contracts and good jobs. If anybody wanted to do business with the government he must be seen to be a party wheel horse In his first month in office, Sifton discovered that the North West Mounted Police were buying their harness, saddles, and leather goods from E. F. Hutchings of Winnipeg. Hutchings, he told Laurier, was "the most uncompromising and violent opponent of the Government, and perhaps the most offensive to our Liberal friends of any Conservative in the City of Winnipeg." The contract should go to Sifton's friends and supporters, the Adams brothers of Brandon, one of whom sat as a Liberal in the Manitoba legislature. The NWMP had been formed under the Conservative administration of John A. Macdonald; thus its leadership was Conservative. Now it found itself dominated by an aggressive politician from the opposing party. Laurier apparently did not realize the extent to which Sifton controlled the police. In 1902, he told Lord Minto that the force was totally in his own hands under its comptroller, Fred White. "I did not think it advisable to contradict him," Minto wrote in a memorandum He revelled in it, made no apologies, and never replied to his critics, some of whom accused him of outright theft. When he died in 1929, his will was probated at $3 million, a sum equal to almost $20 million in 1984 values. How did he get it? Through shrewd investment, wild speculation, inside knowledge, political manipulation, or a combination of all these? No one will ever really know. In the words of Beecham Trotter, a Brandon pioneer and a chronicler The of his times, Sifton was "the greatest combination of cold blooded spoils businessman, machine politician and statesman our country has pro- system duced." He was more than a mere cabinet minister; he was the political monarch of the West, in charge of the Liberal machine in Manitoba and the North West Territories. From the Ontario border to the Rockies, from the forty-ninth parallel to the Arctic coast, Sifton was boss-totally in control of party propaganda, party patronage, and election tactics. The key members of his department were also his political vassals. One of their tasks was to make sure the European immigrants voted the right way at election thee. The Liberal government had brought them to Canada; the Liberal government expected gratitude. The Doukhobors must be brought alongside, and who better to do the job than another Liberal stalwart, J. Obed Smith, Sifton's new commissioner of immigration in Winnipeg'? (The overworked but popular ex-mayor McCreary, his predecessor. had been promoted to Member of Parliament.) "I think the Doukhobours should all take out naturalisation papers, get their names on the voters list and vote," Sifton wrote to Smith in 1903. "There is no necessity for anyone except themselves to know what is going to be done. It will be enough for the opposition to find out they are going to vote after they have voted." The vision of Conservative candidates suddenly faced with long queues of unbribable Doukhobors at the polling booths must surely have caused a brief smile to play over that sober countenance. Sifton left nothing to chance, watched over every detail where matters of political tactics were involved. He virtually dictated the text of political pamphlets designed to convince newcomers to vote Liberal: "In the Galician pamphlet .. . it should set out that a few of the note this display of affluence on the part of a minister so new and young? Do you note those spirited horses, that silver mounted harness and the magnificent chariot behind? Shall I tell you what Sir John Macdonald would have said to one of his ministers if he'd appeared thus? Sir John would have said: "My dear fellow, it is bad enough to do it, but for Heaven's sake, don't advertise it!" But Sifton did advertise it. Opposition members and opposition newspapers harped on his vast wealth and hinted darkly at crooked dealings within his department. It is certainly true that several of his key people, including James Smart, enriched themselves as a result of their positions. It is equally true that his closest political cronies in Brandon profited by their friendship with the Minister and that Sifton handed out timber leases on a platter to his brother-in-law, Theodore Burrows. If he had personal tracks to cover, he covered them carefully, for there is no direct evidence suggesting that he shared in any of the booty. Yet, given the loose morality of the times, it is difficult to believe that he did not profit financially from his position. The Governor General himself was suspicious. In 1902, Lord Minto told Laurier that "Mr. Sifton's reputation was not alcove reproach" and added, "the opinion of the man on the street was certainly not favourable to Mr. Sifton in respect to his apparent wealth, his yacht on the Lakes, etc. etc." Sifton didn't give a hoot. The Winnipeg Dailr Tribune, whose editor, R. L. Richardson, was an anti-Sifton fanatic, loved to point out that the Minister never travelled anywhere "whether on public or private business, without a couple of private secretaries, a retinue of servants, refreshments for the boys, all stowed away in a luxuriantly furnished private car paid for out of the pockets of the people." Sifton's salary as minister was $7,1)00 a year plus a sessional indemnity of $1,500; yet, as Le Journal of Montreal reported in 1902, he lived on a scale that would require twice that income, "a scale which none of his colleagues can imitate; indeed there are few millionaires who live as well as he." The paper listed some of Sifton's assets: a house assessed at $23,000 and maintained at a cost of $90,000; shares in the Bank of Ottawa valued at $42,000; a steam yacht worth at least $25,000; and a "magnificent villa in the west," value unknown. Le Journal clearly underestimated Sifton's wealth. He was then in the process of building one of the finest racing stables in the country. He entertained lavishly at private dinners and society balls. In his top hat and hunting pinks, he was a figure of ducal opulence. games as three-card monte. In the by-elections that followed, the Sifton forces were victorious. In the political donnybrooks of prairie elections, Sifton's early training as a Methodist lay preacher served him well. His platform style was an extension of his personality-crisp, logical, forceful. He did not engage in rhetoric or bombast; instead, he mastered his subject and attacked his audience with clear, direct prose, "delivering his arguments in such continuous and aggressive sequence that they seemed to batter down all opposition." But he wasn't content to batter the Opposition only at election time. The battering continued in Parliament, when a more conciliatory attitude might have been more effective. In the course of a debate, when he himself was not speaking, Sifton was in the habit of passing belligerent notes across the floor of the House: "How do you like that?" or "Take your medicine!" He made enemies, not only among the Tories but also among members of his own party. By 1899, when he was firmly ensconced in the federal cabinet, there were in Winnipeg twenty members of his own party who he said "hate me .. . Iike the devil hates holy water." He seemed to rejoice in this acrimony and had his own explanation for it: "I suppose I might size it up by saying that .. . I occasionally wear a silk hat and a dress coat and do not drink whiskey in the bar of a third class hotel...." There was something of the patrician about Sifton. One could not describe him as a hail-fellow-well-met. One cannot imagine a ward heeler daring to put his arm around Sifton's shoulder any more than one could imagine Sifton slapping a fellow Liberal on the back. Sifton's wealth, his lifestyle, and his personal ostentation were a source of criticism throughout his career. The young lawyer who had started life on a pittance arrived in Ottawa with two suitcases and a trunk crammed with securities, including a batch of first mortgages worth $100,000. He never attempted to conceal his wealth; indeed, he flaunted it. The Calgary Herald, which hated him, gleefully described his appearance during a campaign rally in the Lyric Theatre in 1904: "A great diamond flashed on his left hand, a handsome pin of precious stones peeped out from his natty tie and a massive gold watch chain was looped high on his vest from which dangled a big locket and a charm." The veteran Grit Sir Richard Cartwright, who blamed Sifton for the loss of a cabinet post in the Laurier government, watched the young Napoleon step from his carriage and warned him, "Young man do you the legislature. His son Clifford graduated in 1880, a gold medallist from Victoria College, a Methodist institution in Cobourg, Ontario. Unlike so many of his political colleagues, Clifford Sifton had the advantage of a classical education. A serious student who exhibited none of the frivolity or bonhomie of his brother, Arthur, he was for all of his life an omnivorous reader. His interest in newspapers also went back to his days at Cobourg, where he had helped to found and edit the college paper. With his brother, Clifford hung ou' his lawyer's shingle in Brandon. Later he liked to boast that he made $428 that first year and lived on it. But his father's political connections, and before long his own contacts, brought him business and, undoubtedly, inside information that aided his considerable speculation in prairie lands. He learned the political ropes working on his father's election campaigns in 1883 and 1886. In 188 7 he himself ran successfully for office. Three years later he was Attorney General of Manitoba. He quickly established a reputation as a skilled political organiser and a hard and tenacious campaigner who loved politics for the joy of the battle. They called him the Young Napoleon of the West. The title fitted, for Sifton ran his campaigns like a field marshal. His generals were the key civil servants in the Immigration and Indian departments. Below them were the field officers: the local Members, the constituency workers, the friendly journalists, all kept in line by the glue of patronage. And like any great military strategist, Sifton had his own intelligence and espionage dcpa tments. He planted spies in the opposition camp to report back on the enemy's tactics, especially if those tactics were seen to be illegal or improper. Later he could use them to unseat a successful opponent or, perhaps, defend himself from similar charges, thus preventing the Conservatives from taking a successful Liberal to court for bribers or ballot-box stuffing. In addition, he sent watchdogs to Conservative meetings to take down statements that could later be nailed as lies or produce subsequent libel actions. These tactics paid off. After the 1896 campaign, for example, Sifton was able to gather enough evidence to unseat two Conservative winners including John Al's son, the powerful Hugh John Macdonald. It turned out that the Tories were giving their people courses in the fine art of ballot-box stuffing, even to the extent of introducing their rural supporters to a professional gambler a nd card sharp from Winnipeg, a master at the kind of sleight-of-hand required for such sure-thing momentarily, on the eve of his resignation ht is caught in a dalliance -and then closes tantalisingly. It is not possible to feel the kind of familiarity with Sifton that we sense when we study some of his contemporaries-John A. Macdonald, for example, or William Cornelius Van Home, or George Stephen, who poured out his heart in his letters. But Sifton, even when he wrote to his father, was chillingly formal. He did not sign his correspondence with the elder Sifton "Affectionately, Cliff" or "Love, Clifford" or even "Your loving son, Clifford." It was always "Yours faithfully, ('lifford Sifton," as if he were addressing a chance acquaintance or a constituent seeking favours. Yet he was his father's son, the younger of two boys. (His easy-going brother, Arthur, would eventually become Premier of Alberta.) Like his father, he was a political animal and a staunch Methodist who passed the plate on Sundays in Brandon and t or all of his life took part in the ritual of family prayers. As a Methodist he was a fervent advocate of temperance. Strong drink never sullied his lips, though he did not shrink from passing out gallons to the faithful at election time. He had a deep-seated suspicion of Roman Catholics and French Canadians. He did not employ Quebeckers in his department, nor did he mingle with his French-Canadian colleagues. There was no love lost between Sifton and Israel Tarte, the Minister of Public Works from Quebec, and there was a real dislike for Charles Fitzpatrick, the pious Irish-Catholic Solicitor General and later Justice Minister, with whom he would publicly tangle in 1905. These attitudes sprang out of the traditional Methodist Clear Grit tradition of southern Ontario in which the Sit tons had been nurtured. Clifford's father had been a neighbour and close political ally of Alexander Mackenzie, the dour Liberal M. P. from Lambton who later became Prime Minister. Like every other successful officeholder, Mackenzie rewarded his friends. In 1874, J.W. Sifton managed to wangle a $100,000 government contract to build a telegraph line out of Fort Garry, in spite of the fact that there were lower bidders and that his tender was so ambiguous nobody could understand it. He was paid an inflated price for the work, constructed the poles out of cheap poplar, allowed them to rot away in spite of his contractual obligation to maintain the line for five years, and pocketed a substantial profit, to which a subsequent royal commission said he wasn't entitled. None of this had the least effect on the elder Sifton's political career. He soon became a leading Manitoba politician, rising to Speaker of to call in the police and confine the new arrivals to sheds until they could be put into railway cars with their final destination clearly marked and the tickets in their hands. The exploitation resumed in Winnipeg, the jumping-off spot for the prairies. Here, a group of Winnipeg real estate agents collared six Galicians, discovered they had twelve thousand dollars among them, and talked them out of leaving Winnipeg, saying it was too cold in Alberta and that the very horns on the cattle froze in the winter. The real estate men were a little too persuasive. Four of their victims immediately bought tickets and returned to Europe. There were other disappointments. Maria Olinyk and her family were among those who took one of the special trains to the Yorkton area where hundreds of their fellow countrymen were homesteading. A friend who had come out the year before had written to them, boasting of his prosperity, describing his home as a mansion, telling of his immense cultivated fields and how his wife now dressed like a lady. He depicted Canada "as a country of incredible abundance whose borders were braided with sausage like some fantastic land in a fairy tale." The family hired a rig and after a thirty-mile journey north through clouds of mosquitoes finally reached their destination. What they found was a small log cabin, partially plastered and roofed with sod, a tiny garden plot dug with a spade, a woman dressed in ancient torn overalls "suntanned like a gypsy," and her husband, his face smeared with dirt from ear to ear, "weird, like some unearthly creature," grubbing up stumps. Maria's mother broke into tears at the sight, but, like so many others, the Olinyk family hung on and, after years of pain and hardship, eventually prospered. Maria became Dr. Maria Adamowska, a noted Ukrainian-Canadian poet, who, when she died in 1961 at Melville, Saskatchewan, left behind a literary legacy that included her vivid memories of those lean, far-off years. The Galicians did not care to settle on the bald southern prairie. They preferred the wooded valleys of the Saskatchewan. This baffled the immigration authorities. "These Galicians are a peculiar people," McCreary wrote to James Smart in the spring of 1897. "They will not accept as a gift 160 acres of what we consider the best land in Manitoba, that is first class wheat growing prairie land; what they particularly want is wood; and they care but little whether the land is heavy soil or light gravel; but each man must have some wood on his place...." There was reason for this. Wood was precious in the Carpathians so scarce that it was bought by the pound. In some areas the harvesting of wood was a monopoly: it was a crime to cut down a tree. Thus in Canada the Galicians were allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to settle on marginal lands while other immigrants, notably the Americans, seized the more fertile prairie to the south. It is June of 1897, and the Hun7enink fancily has arri\'ectin Winnipeg. In the colonist car, they and the others sit quiet lt i/? their seats as they have been told, peering curious/v out of the u inc lou s at the equally curious croud on the platJorn7 peering in. Suddenly they spot a familiar Jigure -a Galician searching about for acquaintances. His name is Michaninh-, and he Soon spies his old friends. "Neighbours!" Mr. Mie han ink shouts, "u here are r on going?" There is a commotion in the c each. Where are ther going? Nobody seems to knob "Don't go an r farther, " cries Mr. Mie han ink to his forn7er loo nspeople. "It is good here!" One of the men in he coach rises to his feet and addresses the assembly. "There is our neighbour, Mr. Michaninh. He c ante to Canada last year. He says it is good here. Let us get off the train. " A stampedefollouts. Men seize the floors, but they are locked. they try the uindous, but these too are fastened. Several, in afrenzv, pick up their handbags, smash the glass, and begin to cr au l through the openings, throuingtheirgoodsahead oJthen7. The Humeninkfa/milr is borne forward hr the press of people onto the platform. Up runs the conductor, accompanied by an interpreter. " What are you going to do non ? " the interpreter cries out. " We have good land for v on near Yorkton. There are no free good homesteads for farming leJi in Mannoba." But the neu comers cannot be com~inced. A spokesman replies: "We are not going an r further. Our Old Country friend has been here one year. He says it is good u here he settled. " No one can persuade them to go on to Yorkton. The dissidents are moved to the immigration hall u here the u omen begin to cook food, launder the clothes, and tend to the children. The menfollou Mr. Mie han ink to the Dominion Land Office to file Jor homesteads near Stuartburn on the Roseau Rifler, u here thirty-seven Galician families are al read v located. It turns out that some land is still available, and it is there that they settle. Afost u ill still be there more than half a c enters later, u hen Nrkola and Anastasia Hunenink, surrounded by grandchildren, c e/ebrate theirgolcJen Wedding anni~'ersarr on the farm the v Tiled for back in 1897. The sheepskin people made do with essentials. Their houses were constructed of timber and whitewashed clay, the roofs thatched with straw. Entire families slept on top of the vast stove-furnaces, six feet square. Gardens were dug with spades, since better equipment was beyond the financial reach of most families. Benches and tables were hand hewn. Plates were hammered out of tin cans found in garbage dumps. Drinking glasses were created by cutting beer bottles in half. Browbeaten for centuries, the Galicians did not find it easy to throw off old habits. WA. Griesbach, the young mayor of Edmonton, found them timid and frightened and noticed that when a uniformed policeman approached they drove right off the road, removed their caps, and waited for him to pass. If a well-dressed Canadian gave them an order, they would immediately obey. This made them ripe targets for exploitation. Ely Culbertson, who later devised the famous contract bridge bidding system that bears his name, worked as a bookkeeper on the Grand Trunk Pacific, where mst of the labourers were Galicians'na~ve, trustful, bearded giants Who] worked like elephants, laughed like children and asked no questions" but were subjected to a "ruthless, brazen robbery." The food was meagre and barely edible; better fare was available in the commissary but "for prices that New York night clubs would be ashamed to ask.... Those who didn't like it could get out (at their own expense) for there was a never ending stream shanghaied by the mass-procurement agencies of the East.... The Ukrainians were held in check by the small Anglo-Saxon element present in every camp, who, being decently treated, were always ready to put down with fists, clubs, and even guns, any outbreak of the "Bohunks." But the Galicians were changing the look of the prairies. Carpathian villages with neat, whitewashed houses and thatched roofs sprang up. Onion-shaped spires began to dominate the landscape. Mingled with the starker silhouettes of the grain elevators and the familiar style of the prairie railway stations, they helped create a profile that was distinctively Western. To those public figures who had no axe to grind, the Galicians were an attractive addition to the prairie mix. Van Horne found them "a very desirable people." Charles Constantine, the veteran Mounted Police inspector at Fort Saskatchewan, used the same adjective. The immigration agent in Edmonton, R.A. Ruttan, reported to Ottawa that "they are good settlers and I should like to see more of them." James Dickson, a Dominion Land Surveyor who had had some doubts, changed his mind and expressed himself as "agreeably surprised" at the Galicians' progress in the Dauphin district of Manitoba. Van Home, in 1899, was astonished to discover that those Galicians who had been given railway transportation on credit actually paid the debt! "We had little hope of ever getting what they owed us but they have paid up every cent." In such cases, familiarity bred the opposite of contempt. Dr. R. H. Mason of Saltcoats, originally a bitter opponent of Slavic immigration, described his visit to a Galician colony as "a revelation" and went on to describe the colonists as "worthy, industrious, sober, and ambitious to make homes for themselves." Another who had a change of heart was W. M. Fisher, manager of the Canada Permanent and Western Canada Mortgage Company. After visiting the Edmonton district he reported that "the Galicians against whom I was prejudiced before my visit .. . I found to be a most desirable class of settlers, being hard working, frugal people and in their financial dealings honest to a degree." The newspapers' attitude to the newcomers was predictable. The government press thought they were wonderful; the opposition papers thought the opposite. The first wave of Galicians had scarcely stepped ashore when the Conservative newspapers mounted a virulent attack. To the Belleville Intelligencer they were "disgusting creatures," to the Brandon Indel~endent "human vermin." The Ottawa Citizen objected to Canada '"being turned into a social sewage farm to purify the rinsings and leavings of rotten European states." In Edmonton, the Bulletin's Frank Oliver, an independent and generally wayward Liberal, pulled out all the stops. The Galicians were "a servile, shiftless people .. . the scum of other lands .. . not a people who are wanted in this country at any price." Oliver coveted Sifton's job; eventually he got it. The attacks were entirely political. In the pro-Sifton newspapers, the Galicians could do no wrong. Sifton's Winnipeg organ was so laudatory that Oliver's linlletin referred caustically to "the Galician editor of the Free Press." In Parliament, the Conservative outcry over Sifton's policy of unrestricted immigration was so violent that the Minister was finally forced to put a damper on Galician immigration into Canada. The general Opposition contention was that the influx of Slavs would dilute and muddy the purity of an ada Anglo-Saxon heritage. Hugh John Macdonald, the son of an ada first prime minister, actually referred to the Galicians as "a mongrel race." Premier Roblin of Manitoba went further. He called them "foreign trash" and proceeded to deny them the provincial franchise in order to "defend the 'old flag' against an invading foe." The Conservatives harped on the belief that the Galicians were subhumans with violent criminal tendencies, subject to avarice and uncontrollable passions. Mackenzie Bowen wrote of "tales of murder, arson and brutality, more horrible than anything ever dreamed of by the wildest disciple of the school of realistic fiction." These were not the words of a street-corner bigot; they came from the pen of a former . prime mm~ster. The tales of murder and brutality were just that -fiction. When, in February, 1900, the Shoal Lake Star wrote of murder, robbery, wife beating and other crimes being committed among the Galicians of that area, Bill McCreary sent his best agent, Wesley Speers, to investigate. Speers tracked down every story, found all to be untrue, and forced an apology and a correction from the offending reporter. Yet the concept of the Galicians as potentially dangerous criminals persisted in the public mind, largely because every Galician who got into trouble was identified as such in bold headlines. "GALICIAN HORROR" is the way the Winnipeg Daily Tribune headlined a local murder in June, 1899, convicting the accused out of hand long before he went to trial. Another Galician, charged with murder, was castigated as an "inhuman wretch." Trial by newspaper was far more common at the turn of the century than it was several decades later. The following month the pro-Conservative Winnipeg Telegral?? reported the murder of Mrs. Robert Lane of Brandon and identified her assailant as Galician. The real culprit, of course, in the Telegral??"s eyes, was the man who had brought the "foreign scum" into Canada. ANOTHER Sl F TON IAN TRAGEDY Another horrible crime has been committed by the foreign ruffians whom Mr. Sifton is rushing into this country. The tragedy took place in Mr. Sifton's own town, Brandon. A foreign tramp goes to the door of one of Brandon's most prominent citizens and demands provisions; the lady of the house tells him she has no time to bother with him; he draws a revolver and brutally shoots her before the eyes of her little children! .. . In order that Mr. Sifton may keep his Liberal party in power by the votes of ignorant and vicious foreign scum he is dumping on our prairies, we are to submit to have our nearest and dearest butchered on our dt~or-steps. This account was a total fabrication. The murderer was not a Galician but an English woman, Emily Hilda Blake. Later she confessed to the crime and was hanged for it. But the impression of Galician madmen murdering defenceless Canadian women was hard to erase. As for real Galician crime, it was virtually non-existent. That very year the chief of police in Winnipeg released annual figures showing the ethnic origins of convicted prisoners. Of 1,205 criminals, 1,037 were Canadians and 1~8 were foreign born. Of these latter only nine were Galicians. The In 1904, the attitude toward the Galicians began to change, and for a Galician very practical reason. Suddenly, the newspapers and politicians who rate had attacked "Sifton's dirty Slavs" reversed their strategy. The violently Tory Winnipeg Telegram for instance, which had vilified the immigrants as "ignorant, superstitious and filthy," now discovered that they were "industrious," "thrifty," "progressive," and "prosperous." How to explain this sudden and astonishing about-face? The answer was that a federal election was called for 1904, and the editor of the Telegran', among others, was a candidate. The Conservatives were scrambling for Galician votes, and even the Tory premier of Manitoba was having second thoughts. Roblin, who had once called the newcomers "dirty ignorant Slavs" who lived on rats and mice, now rose in the legislature that February to praise "their diligence, their intelligence, their sobriety, their generally estimable character." In 1899, Manitoba had denied the Galicians the provincial franchise. Now the Premier scrambled to redeem himself. He had been receiving Galician delegations, he announced, "and in every case they used English with fluency and betrayed a comprehension of the rights of citizens that showed that no disqualification was longer needed or could fairly be retained." This, too, was nonsense. Few Galicians yet spoke English or cared about the Canadian political process. But the Premier had to do something to thwart the federal Liberal campaign, which was making great headway among all the immigrant groups in the West. Dmytro Romanchych explained in his memoirs why the Galicians in the Dauphin district of the province voted for the Liberal candidate, who happened to be Sifton's brother-in-law, Theodore Burrows. Some did it, he said, because it was felt the Conservatives were the party of the rich, some because the Liberal program resembled that of the radical party of Galicia; but the main reason lay in the fact that it was the Liberal party that had opened the doors to Galician immigrants and granted them free lands. In the provincial election of 1908, however, the same people voted for the Conservatives because it was the Tories who had established bilingual schools and a college in Brandon for the training of Ukrainian teachers. It's doubtful whether many (ialicians really understood the Canadian electoral system, at least in the early years. In Eastern Europe they had voted for "electors" one for every five hundred voters who, in turn, went to the political centre of their district and voted for the actual candidate, usually a big landowner That system made the newcomers suspicious of all politicians. Their cynicism was reinforced when they discovered that in Canada a vote could be sold for a dollar. Some sold their votes twice-once to each opposing candidate-and then voted as they pleased. In spite of Roblin's contention that "they used English with fluency," most could not understand a word the politicians uttered when they toured their villages. Both parties were forced to use interpreters chosen from among those leading Galicians who spoke some English. Illia Kiriak has left a lively account of one local interpreter warming up a crowd of potential Liberal voters: "I am going to call upon the local candidate to speak and I want you to listen carefully. When I start clapping I want all of you to do the same. And when he finishes I want all of you to give him a great ovation. You won't regret it and neither will 1." To such men, the Liberal party extended the expected patronage. After the election they went on the government payroll as weed inspectors, game guardians, fire wardens. In Edmonton in 1904, Frank Oliver woke up to discover that his own riding was so crowded with Cialicians that they could, if organized, defeat him. The newcomers had known no enemy more deadly than Oliver, who had called them scum and had declared a Galician was "only a generation removed from a debased and brutalized serf." Westerners, he insisted, "objected to having this millstone of an alien Slav population hung about their necks." A more sensitive or less determined politician might have had some reservations about attempting to solicit the Galician vote after these attacks, but Oliver had no such qualms. He intended to collar that vote and put his considerable party machine into high gear for that purpose. Surprisingly, he succeeded. J.G. MacGregor, Alberta's best-known social historian, has an amusing account of Oliver speaking to a group of Galicians in a small general store in his riding. Except for the local party interpreter, none had any idea what the candidate was saying, and if they had would have had little interest in the subject, for Oliver was ranting on about the Department of the Interior, about high tariffs, about British preference and the Alaska border dispute. "What's he say?" one listener finally asked the interpreter. "He's glad we're here. Canada was lucky to get us...." "What about the stupid fire regulations?" "He'll fix them." "What's he say about the railroad?" "I forgot to tell you that-he's got it started for sure." "What about the mud holes around Whitford Lake?" "He'll fix them-he'll do all he can for our area...." Griesbach, the so-called boy mayor of Edmonton, who was backing the Conservative candidate, Richard Secord, attempted to set up local organizations in every township to secure the Galician vote. Oliver bested him at every turn. A week before the election, parties of three or four men dressed as surveyors and carrying transits began appearing in areas organized for Secord. These men drove into the Galician farmyard, set up their instruments, and pretended to run a line directly through the barn, explaining to the worried farmer that they were locating Frank Oliver's new railway. Disaster! When the despairing immigrant begged for a change of route, the pseudo-surveyors suggested he get in touch with the local Liberal agent who might just be persuaded to switch the direction of the line. In every case, of course, the Liberals agreed and the grateful farmer gave Frank Oliver his vote. The Galicians were vague about voting dates, since they read no English, and an effort was needed to get out the vote, or, in some cases, to keep it away. Oliver had his organizers swarm over the Galician communities asking each man for whom he intended to vote. Those who were voting Liberal were told the proper date of the election, Monday. The Conservative voters were told it was Wednesday. Oliver always got out the vote. In the 1904 election, 352 out of 458 Galicians turned up at the polls. Of these, 278 voted for the man who had called them "debased and brutalized." As a result, Oliver was swept back into office and the following year replaced Clifford Sifton as Minister of the Interior. Not surprisingly, under Oliver the concept of unrestricted immigration was tossed aside. "Ethnic" has become a peculiarly Canadian word, but it belongs to a The later era. At the turn of the century there were no discussions about n~elting'roots," no talk of "multiculturalism," little pandering to national pot cultures, and certainly no reference to a Canadian mosaic. The key svndron~e word-the only word-was "assimilation." Assimilation meant conformity: in dress, in language, in customs, in attitudes, in religion. It meant, in short, that every immigrant who arrived in the West was expected to accept as quickly as possible the Anglo-Celtic Protestant values of his Canadian neighbours. These attitudes were held almost universally and at every level of society, espoused by such diverse public figures as William Van Home of the CPR; by the Reverend J.S. Woodsworth, the Methodist reformer; by John Wesley Dafoe of the Manitot>a Free Press; by Nellie McClung, the suffragette and temperance activist; and by Clifford Sifton himself. Everybody agreed that certain races could not be assimilated and had no place in Canadian society. Orientals, East Indians, and Blacks were not wanted. Anti-Semitism was universal, as the stereotype caricatures in the newspapers and periodicals make clear. And the press did not engage in racial niceties: Negroes were riggers; Orientals were Chinamen; Jews were sheenies. Could the Galicians be assimilated, or would their presence mongrelize the nation? That was the crux of the controversy from the moment of their arrival. It was generally held that they were an inferior race; that was not the argument. The question was whether or not they could be turned into "white" Ganadians. The anti-Sifton newspapers -Oliver's Bulletin was the worst offender-did not believe it possible. "They have withstood assimilation in the country from whence they come for many generations. What reason have we to expect their ready assimilation here?" Others, such as the Hamilton Times, were grudgingly optimistic: "They may never develop into such perfect Canadians as the Scotch or the Irish but the chances are they will turn out all right." That was the general sentiment. Everything would turn out all right. The prevailing attitude in the West was one of heady optimism. A new century was dawning--Canada's century, Laurier called it-and the country was capable of working miracles. The men in sheepskin coats would quickly be transformed into well-cropped, bowler-hatted Canadians. As the Manitoha Free Press put it in the fall of 1897, "the land is here and the Anglo-Saxon race has great assimilating qualities." Already William McCreary was reporting to Sifton that the Galicians were "dressing in a more civilized garb" and that the majority were "accepting Canadian customs and ways." It was widely held that those immigrants who did not come from northwestern Europe were inferior to others in terms of religion, education, and political outlook. Germans and Scandinavians were not really aliens. As John Dafoe put it in 1907, in an article for an American publication about the influx of immigrants, "a considerable percentage of those recorded as foreigners are of Teutonic and Scandinavian stock and therefore albeit [my italics].... The only alien race represented at all strongly is Slavic." Dafoe went on to reassure his American readers that there was no chance of "a mongrel race and a mongrel civilization" springing up in Western Canada because the Slavic peoples were "being Anglicized with a rapidity which sometimes results in startling transformations.... The Galician youth of five or seven years ago is now, in many cases, not easily distinguishable in speech or manners from his neighbour of Canadian birth and lineage." J.S. Woodsworth in his book Strangers within Our Gates was happy to quote an American view that a line drawn from northeast to southwest across Europe separated the "superior" races-Scandinavian, British, German, and French -from the "inferior" ones Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Italian, and Turkish. Like almost everybody else, the future founder of the CCF was convinced that the Galicians must be assimilated to a uniform standard, which was the Anglo Celtic norm. He went along with the view that "the Galician figures, disproportionately to his numbers, in the police court and penitentiary. Centuries of poverty and oppression have to some extent animalized him. Drunk, he is quarrelsome and dangerous. The flowers of courtesy and refinement are not abundant in the first generation of immigrants." One of Canada's leading churchmen, J.W. Sparling, principal of Winnipeg's Methodist Wesley (college, in his introduction to Woodsworth's book urged everybody to read it: "For there is a danger and it is national! Either we must educate and elevate the incoming multitudes or they will drag us and our children down to a lower level. We must see to it that the civilisation and ideals of Southeastern Europe are not transplanted to and perpetuated on our virgin soil." To Sparling, these ideals were, of course, those of the Catholic religions. To a generation that views Woodsworth as a socialist saint, his acceptance of these sentiments in a book that bears his name may seem shocking. But he was very much a man of his time, a Methodist activist who staunchly believed in the virtues of radical Protestantism and the civilizing effect of the British Empire. His motives were pure enough. In the All Peoples' Mission in Winnipeg's North End, he saw it as his duty to minister to the immigrant poor. His book was designed to familiarize Canadians with their problems and to help make his fellow countrymen more responsive to them. The Methodists were proselytisers and therefore in the forefront of the active movement to assimilate the Galicians. Men like Woodsworth did not believe the process would work without a strong nudge from the church. That was very much in the Methodist tradition. Unlike the Anglicans, they did not wait for communicants to come to them; their circuit riders went out into the villages to spread the Word. Behind this activism lay the fear of the growing power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The move to assimilate the Slavs was bound up with the desperate battle in Manitoba over religious education. The Methodists were in the vanguard of the fight against parochial schools in the province. The leading politicians were Methodists. Sifton was a Methodist and so were many of his political cronies. Dafoe had been born a Methodist, and though he rejected dogma and became a nominal Anglican, he could not reject the tenets of Methodism's social creed. The cant of the day was that while Catholicism bred ignorance, suspicion, and autocracy, Protestantism brought freedom, initiative, industry, and democracy. To a very large extent, this Methodist credo helped form the Western ethic. In June 1908, the Methodist publication Missionarr Outlool~ summed up the Methodist point of view: "If from this North American continent is to come a superior race, a race to be specially used of God in the carrying on of His work, what is our duty to those who are now our fellow-citizens ~ Many of them come to us as nominal Christians, that is, they owe allegiance to the Greek or Roman Catholic churches but their moral standards and ideals are far below those of the Christian citizens of the Dominion.... It is our duty to meet them with an open Bible, and to instill into their minds the principles and ideals of Anglo-Saxon civilisation." In this crusade, the Methodists had the help of both the Presbyterians and the Baptists. The Reverend Dr. James Robertson, superintendent of home missions for the Presbyterian Church, was on record as early as 1898 i n declaring that "the interest of the state lies in its doing all it can to assimilate these and other foreigners and make of them Canadians. They should be put into the great Anglo-Saxon mill and be ground up; in the grinding they lose their foreign prejudices and characters." The Methodists had no intention of poaching on the territory of these other Protestants. After all, the ideal of a United Church was less than two decades away. When Woodsworth talked of "independence," he clearly meant independence from Greek or Roman Catholicism: "Independence means that people are taught to think for themselves; it means that the Bible is placed in their hands; it means that their children attend the Public Schools instead of the parochial schools; it means that people ally themselves with Protestants rather than Catholics. Independence offers the opportunity for resonation." Things did not work out as Woodsworth hoped. Nobody had asked the Galicians whether or not they wished to be ground up in the great Anglo-Saxon mill. They clung tenaciously to their religion; indeed, the presence of Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches in the rural Prairies acted as a spur to the retention of language and culture. Certainly, many were anxious to learn English and even more anxious that their children learn it. It is ironic that in this desire they were often frustrated by the lack of good teachers in their communities. But they also wanted to retain their original language, and this they did to a remarkable degree, producing an impressive body of prose and poetry in their own tongue. In a sense Oliver was right when he said that the Slavic peoples had withstood assimilation for many centuries and would also withstand it in Canada. But the fears of mongrelisation were groundless. The newcomers and their children managed to become Canadians while retaining a pride in their heritage, as the Scots did, as the Icelanders and others did. By the First World War, when immigration ceased, the talk of assimilation began to abate. By the 1920s, the term "Galician" had died out. By then most Canadians were beginning to understand the difference between Poles and Ukrainians, for by then Polish and Ukrainian social and political clubs were scattered across the West. The time was coming when Canadians of every background would be referring to the Canadian Mosaic and indeed boasting about it as if it had been purposely invented as an instrument of national policy to preserve the Dominion from the conformity of the American Melting Pot Chapter Three The Spirit Wrestlers The Universal Brotherhood 2 "Greetings, Doukhobors!" The "peculiar people" The Sons of God Peter the Lordly The The touching and often tragic drama of the Doukhobor migration to Universal the Canadian West is animated by a singular cast of characters. The Brutherhc'od leading actors (setting aside the Spirit Wrestlers themselves) form a unique international brotherhood, perhaps the most remarkable ever assembled to make common and selfless cause in the interests of one immigrant sect. They were poorly organized; they often quarrelled with one another; and they only vaguely understood the nature of the communities they proposed to settle in the West. But they were idealists, men of quality and rank in most cases, who were prepared to devote their time, energies, money, and reputation to a project from which they could not personally benefit and which some would live to regret. Look at them! There were, first, those indomitable Russian nobles with the tangled beards who seem to have stepped out of a Tolstoyan novel: Kropotkin, Hilkoff, Tchertkoff, and the saintly count himself-the author of War and Peace-who had, often at considerable cost, rejected the crasser values of their homeland. There were the Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic, stubborn pacifists who dressed in funereal black and peppered their conversations with the archaic second-person singular. There was Aylmer Maude, hard-nosed businessman turned Tolstoyan disciple, prickly, dedicated, often impractical. There were those quirky anarchists from the doomed Utopian colony of Purleigh in Essex. And last, but not least, there was the eccentric professor of political science at the University of Toronto, the remarkable James Mavor. On September 22, 1897, there arrived in Winnipeg the most exotic member of this group, Peter Aleksevich Kropotkin, who was-or had been-a Czarist prince. An exile from his native land, an escapee from a Siberian cell, expelled from Switzerland, imprisoned in France, this one-time royal aide and army officer had an international reputation among scientists as a geographer, zoologist, sociologist, and historian and among his friends and enemies as a radical, an anarchist, and a revolutionary. Prince Kropotkin spent an hour dashing about at full speed on one of Winnipeg's electric tram cars, marvelling at the city, which was already being compared with Chicago. Substantial buildings of masonry and brick lined the downtown streets, where the pavements were of solid stone blocks. I{ere was the dazzling city hall, flamboyantly baroque Western enthusiasm expressed in pink brick and spikey domes. Here were grand hotels with grander names flanking the two-hundred-foot-wide expanse of Main: the Oriental, the Cosmopolitan, the American, the Brunswick, and, at the busy intersection of Main and Water, the eight-storey Manitoban with its curved facade and conical cupola. By the time he took the train west, Prince Kropotkin was properly impressed. Why, Winnipeg was only twenty five years old! In Russia, a city of that size and quality might go back for centuries. We have boarded the train ~ ith the Prince. He is a hull ~ waft U ith a great naked clone and a n70nstrou.s square heard. As the train rolls heavier out Blithe c it ~ limits anti enters the prairie, he takes every thing in u ith the en es troth of a geographer and of a poet. They are blue and intelligent, those cres, peering out from? behind a pair of tiny: u ire-rin?ned sped sac/es, and Ecu they sparkle u ith asto/?ishn7e/?t as he c ontemp/ates the flatness of the prairie. Ahead, he sees the straight line of the rails Ala ruler laid across the level surface of' the plain; behind him its another. steel ruler leading hack to Winnipeg. The land is so flat that even after ml/es of'trac k have c tattered beneath hin?" he can still spot the silhouette Blithe elevators on the c itHs outskirts. He notes the blat k earth, the extraordinary absence of a singe tree or shrub, and, on the horizon, a sunset such as he has not experienced sine e he left the steppes of southern Russia. We, his trammelling companions including his fellow members of' the British Association for the Advance/r7ent oJ'Science, find it all verr n?cJnotonous, hut the Prince is thrilled. " What an infinite va id cJf'life in these steppes!" he thinks to himself: These We.s tern Europeans have no concept Blithe poetry Blithe steppes; even hits on n people in middle Russia are ignorant of' it. One cannot find an r referent e to it in the geographical uar ks u ith which he its SO familiar. One ,7tust seek for it instead in Russian literature -in the souls of men born on the steppes, in the poetry of K/otsof3'or the novels of' Oertel. One must have lived on the steppes, rambled over then? on horseback, inhaled the perfume of noun grass, spent the night in the open, crossed the boundless prairie in sledges behind a trio of galloping horses to realize the real beauty okra country' u which, in Kropotkin's poetic vision, is so like this Manitoha prairie. This is his kind of'countr~; n?ountains and valleys are not for him - ther make him? feel like a bird in a cage. The prairie, though am?ost empt r of him ans is bursting u ith life. Flochs of Wildfowl hla~hen the she Culls /'iSe Se/can7ing ti'on7 the lake lets Ducks spechle the p/aiie po/?cis. Gophers and sa,ui//els sc an7 per about he the th"'usancl.s. The Is ilcigras.se.s, tinted reel, ~ el lou and hrou n, make a Persian carpet of the plains. As the prairie u/?f Icis the Prince conti/?ue.s to be ania~etl he the .sin7ilarities beta een Canada's geographical featu/ es and those of hits native land. When he first reached Manitoha the illusion Ivas complete; he n7ight as 11 elf he in the prai ies of South Toholsh at the Joot of the Urals: the san7e aspect, the sable black soil, the san7e driecl-up lake h"'tton7.s, the Dante ~ haraeter of e lin7ate. NOI1; as the train rolls ~vestivar~1 tolvacl the high .suh-aid P/airie, he can east" imagine hi,77selJ Upf In the higher levelstep/>e, lo which the Trans-Siberian railway enters her only To/77.sh. The little Siberian tongs, he teds us, could be described as sister grc'"~ths of Medicine flat. Ca/garr, and Regina "I ere it not for the Ante/ icani-eel aspen t of the Canadian cc'n7/77unities. Even the vegetation is.\in7ila/. SUCICien1V the expatriate f els at hence again. And, With his help, the clay Will con7e When actual Russian villages indistinguishable 1JOn7 those of the Caucasus, ~vill.Ypring up here in this strangely familiar lancl. There was another reminder of home, here in the Canadian West -the presence of the Mennonites. These were also followers of Leo Tolstoy, with whom the anarchist prince felt more than kinship. To escape military service, these industrious, God-fearing people had left Russia in the 1870s. Visiting a Mennonite village, Kropotkin once again found himself in a replica of his homeland, a small Russian community, complete with thatched houses, broad streets, manured plots, and lines of little trees. These people, too, were anarchists in the sense that "they never have anything to do with justice or law." Kropotkin found it remarkable that in the midst of a capitalist civilisation some twenty thousand people had been able to continue to live and thrive under a system of partial communism and passive resistance to the state, which they had managed to maintain for more than three centuries in the face of almost continual persecution. He was, of course, aware that in the valleys of the Caucasus Mountains, between the Caspian and Black seas, there was another religious group in some ways similar to the Mennonites, who lived communally, rejected military service, and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Czar. They called themselves the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood, but their tormentors jeered at them as Doukhoborski, or Spirit Wrestlers. The name stuck and, in the end, was accepted with pride, in the same way that the Society of Friends accepted the epithet "Quaker." Among these simple people, until he fled the country, lived another of those curiously attractive Russian noblemen-one who, like Kropotkin, had been driven to reject his aristocratic heritage by Czarist excesses and his own conscience. Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich Hilkoff came of one of the oldest of the noble families-older, in fact, than the ruling Romanovs. The family was still powerful; Hilkoff's uncle was a member of the Czarist cabinet. But Hilkoff himself subscribed to the pacifist philosophy of Leo Tolstoy. As a colonel in the Russian Army during the war with Turkey in 1878, he had slain an enemy soldier in battle and suffered such pangs of remorse that he quit both the army and the Orthodox Church. Appalled at the condition of the serfs on the family e state, he gave up his legacy upon his mother's death and divided all his lands among them. Banished to the Caucasus (where he encountered the Doukhobors), broken hearted because his children had been removed from him forever by the Czar's decree, he at last received permission to exile himself from Russia, but not before he had brought the plight of the Doukhobors to the attention of his hero, Tolstoy. Doukhobors were being plundered, raped, tortured, imprisoned, beaten, and starved by Cossack troops because they refused to bear arms or take an oath of allegiance to the Czar. Tolstoy, whose own philosophy was remarkably similar to theirs, brought the details of their plight to the world. In March, 1898, a few months after Kropotkin's Canadian tour, three events took place that were to lead to the most bizarre chapter in the history of the shaping of the Canadian West. First, Kropotkin published in the Ni'etee~'th Century a long article about Canada and the Mennonites, which he had written in the Toronto home of his friend Professor James Mavor. Second, the Empress Alexandra of Russia, prompted both by Tolst",y's importunings and by those of the Society of Friends of England, had persuaded the Czar that the Doukhobors might leave Russia if they did so immediately. Third, lolstoy's personal representative, another exiled noble named Vladimir Tchertkoff, arrived at Purleigh in England. Here a Tolstoyan community had been set up by J.C. Kenworthy, a disciple of the Russian author and an anarchist colleague of Kropotkin. It was to be a "part of a world wide movement toward a better and truer life for humanity." The spirit there was one of tolerance, of encouraging others "to wake up to the real meaning of life...." At Purleigh, Tchertkoff, the one-time St. Petersburg aristocrat, and his wife lived a life of absolute simplicity, eschewing all meat and proclaiming that "as long as there are starving men in the world we hold that luxury is wrong." Prince Hilkoff also turned up at Purleigh, another exotic figure to visiting journalists who goggled over the spectacle of the scion of one of Russia's noblest families working with a spade in the garden ~ bile his wife, the Princess, chopped wood and hauled water "in true Tolstoy fashion." Here, too, was Aylmer Maude, a former businessman who had spent seventeen years he Russia. While acting as director of the Russian Carpet Company, Maude had encountered Tolstoy's work and presently became a regular visitor at the author's home in Moscow and at his country villa at Tula. Tolstoy's influence on nineteenth-century thought cannot be overestimated. Here was Maude, the English carpet salesman, about to toss aside those values that had sustained him into middle age. Early in the 1890s, under Tolstoy's influence, he found his conscience could no longer allow him to continue as a tool of the capitalistic world; after all, his mentor's whole philosophy was an indictment of the industrial system. He quit his job and proceeded to devote himself to the translation of Tolstoy's works into English. Tolstoy's What Is Art? would shortly be published by Purleigh's founder, Kenworthy, through his own Brotherhood Press. Meanwhile, the members of the Purleigh community busied themselves with efforts to save the Do uk hobo rs . Tolstoyism was the glue that held all these people together. Tchertkoff had been sent to Purleigh by Tolstoy in the hope that the community, aided by Maude's business acumen, would raise funds to pay for the Doukhobors' passage to another country. But time was of the essence: the Czarina might withdraw her permission for the sect's departure at any moment. A variety of destinations was discussed: Texas, Brazil7 Argentina, Hawaii, Cyprus. The last was finally chosen because it was the closest refuge to the Black Sea port of Batum, from which the Doukhobors would embark. Plans were laid and money raised to move eleven hundred Doukhobors to Cyprus at once. Prince Hilkoff was dispatched to the island to prepare for their arrival. Then, on the eve of his departure, Tchertkoff came across Kropotkin's article about Canada and the Mennonites. Canada! To most Europeans it hardly existed. Certainly no one had considered it as a new home for the Spirit Wrestlers. Yet Kropotkin made it clear that this oddly attractive country would welcome Russian religious refugees with farming experience as it had the Mennonites, and that the conditions were remarkably similar to those in Russia. Kropotkin was invited to come to Purleigh to discuss the Doukhobor problem. From there he wrote a long letter to his closest friend in Canada, Professor Mavor, whom he had known since 1884 and who had arranged the cross-Canada tour of the British association, which had sparked the Prince's article on the Canadian West. In his letter Kropotkin asked if Mavor thought Canada would accept twelve thousand Doukhobors and what advice the professor could give about the mechanics of such a venture. Here was another remarkable figure. At forty-four, Jimmy Mavor had already acquired a reputation as an eccentric and a Bohemian -a man who dazzled his students with his broad range of knowledge and the brilliance of his teaching. With his vast, rumpled beard, his high, balding forehead, and his long. greying hair, he was said to be Toronto's "most picturesque academic personality." He seemed to know a little about everything: indeed, his colleagues tended to look askance at him because he peppered his lectures with anecdotes! He had held the chair of political science at the University of Toronto since 1892, but his bents were also literary and scientific. He had once studied informally under the future Lord Kelvin, the inventor of the absolute temperature scale that bears his name. His correspondence was wide and eclectic, including such exotic figures as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. He had once been a Fabian reformer but was now in the process of reforming himself. I{e believed, however, that "there must be a constant effort to correct the prevailing tendency of things." He was an admirer of Tolstoy, of course (he would shortly visit him in Russia), and was also a Russophile who had wintered in St. Petersburg. And he knew a good deal about the Doukhobors. This was the man who would act as the catalyst to bring the Spirit Wrestlers to Canada-the go-between who linked the American and British Quakers, the Purleigh community, the Russian expatriates, and Clifford Sifton's Department of Immigration. Without Mavor, the Doukhobor immigration to Canada would not have been possible. He knew he must act quickly. "They must leave at once," his friend Kropotkin wrote to him; "there is not a moment to be lost." Mavor plunged into his task with characteristic enthusiasm. He wrote at once to Sir William Mulock, the Postmaster General, whom he knew, and to Clifford Sifton, whom he didn't. He wrote to Tchertkoff, to Kropotkin, to Tolstoy. This was the beginning of a voluminous correspondence on the Doukhobors by Mavor-some five hundred letters in all, of which sixty were written that late summer and fall of 1898 when Mavor was also busying himself with the autumn semester. The emigration was already moving with precipitate and (to Mavor) alarming speed. On September 2, long before he had any word from the Canadian government, Mavor learned that eleven hundred Doukhobors had landed at Cyprus, which was to prove unsuitable, and that a delegation from Purleigh, consisting of two Doukhobor farmers together with Aylmer Maude and Prince Hilkoff, had embarked for Canada. They expected to meet Mavor at Quebec on the tenth and proceed to Ottawa to arrange matters with the government. They paid their own way, the penniless prince and the Doukhobors travelling steerage while Maude, who was now in charge, took a first-class cabin, "feeling much ashamed of myself for such un-Tolstoyan self-indulgence." The Doukhobors were rarely consulted since they spoke a dialect of their own, which Hilkoff understood imperfectly and Maude not at all. Nor were they ever party to the deals that were subsetluently made on their behalf with the Canadian government. Among these well-intentioned but often naive idealists, personality conflicts were beginning to develop. Maude, the nominal leader, unable to speak the language, found himself a mere supernumerary. Hilkoff and Tchertkoff had had a flaming row over Cyprus arising from the fact that one controlled the money1,100 contributed by the Purleigh community-while the other organized the emigration. They no longer spoke to one another. Maude was also cool to Tchertkoff, who he felt entirely lacked any business capacity. His own prickly letters irritated Mavor. Eventually Maude and Mavor became such bitter antagonists that in their respective books on the Doukhobor migration they scarcely mentioned one another. Similar tensions were to cause the breakup of the anarchist colony at Purleigh. The situation was ripe for the misunderstandings that followed. The Doukhobors, "like a Queenless hive of bees," were leaderless, their acknowledged helmsman, Peter Verigin, an exile in Siberia. Their friends and supporters were not only at odds with one another but, and this was equally serious, also appeared to believe that once the Doukhobors were landed in Canada they would be able to fend for themselves without further aid. No one, apparently, understood the rig ours of the Canadian winter. For Mavor, with the university year about to begin, the next two weeks were hectic. Sifton was in the West, but a letter from his deputy, James Smart, finally indicated the government was interested. Indeed, the Doukhobors represented exactly the kind of tough, experienced peasantry that Sifton felt could withstand the appalling conditions on the empty plains. Mavor rushed to Ottawa to talk with Smart. Here, as he had in his previous correspondence, he tried to make clear the terms under which the Doukhobors were prepared to come to Canada. They expected exemption from military service. They wanted to hold land communally. They wanted some help in getting established. They wished to be consulted about the education of their children. Nothing, apparently, was said about the Doukhobors' refusal to take an oath of allegiance to the sovereign. Their only allegiance, they insisted, was to God. When Maude, behind Mavor's back and to his considerable annoyance, finally signed a contract with the Immigration Department on behalf of the Purleigh community (neither Mavor nor the Doukhobor representatives were present) the oath was never mentioned. Nor was another significant condition: the right to hold land in common rather than individually. These omissions would eventually force the Doukhobors out of Saskatchewan at great financial sacrifice. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to take responsibility for the Doukhobors, yet more and more of them, it appeared, were preparing to leave Russia. Besides the Purleigh community, the Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic and Leo Jolstoy himself were raising funds for their passage and subsequent establishment in the West. Tolstoy, for one, contributed seventeen thousand dollars in royalties from What Is Art? But who would look after all this money? And was it sufficient? Many of the Doukhobors were destitute. Eleven hundred pounds had already been squandered on the abortive voyage to Cyprus. Queries began arriving: could Canada accept another two thousand, then four thousand, then an additional three thousand, as well as the Cyprus exiles? Mavor was appalled. As he wrote to Smart, "Their idea that they might as well be frozen to death in Canada as flogged to death by the Cossacks, is natural enough, but no one would venture to induce the Government to receive a greater number of them than can be reasonably well sheltered and fed during the winter." Maude rushed off to Philadelphia to raise money from the Quakers there. Then, by-passing Mavor, he left for England, turning over all responsibility for the Doukhobors in Canada to Hilkoff. For Mavor this was the last straw; his breach with Maude was complete. The government, eager to get farmers on the empty Western lands, found a way to subsidise the Doukhobors without actually having to admit to it. Since no shipping agents were involved, why not pay into a special Doukhobor fund all the public money that would normally have gone into bonuses' Thus one pound for every Doukhobor man, woman, and child landed in Canada went toward settling the new immigrants. The money, however, could not be paid out until the Doukhobors actually arrived -in instalments. This subsidy was legalized in a new contract with Hilkoff, a contract that guaranteed the Doukhobors exemption from military service and gave them a block of 750,000 acres in northern Assiniboia. But again, in this contract there was no mention of exemption from the oath of allegiance or from the homestead law, which prevented the holding of land in common. The government was in a dilemma. It wanted these immigrants. And whether or not it wanted them, they seemed determined to come anyway. Some twenty-one hundred were already preparing to embark at the Black Sea port of Batum. But Sifton was already under extreme criticism from the Conservative press over his "coddling" of the Galicians. He could not be seen to give anything more to the Doukhobors than was the rightful due of any immigrant. On the other hand, he could not leave them to starve and freeze when they left the train at Winnipeg. The government agreed to pay out ten thousand dollars of the bonus money on the arrival of the first group of twenty-one hundred in Winnipeg. A second party, under the leadership of Tolstoy's son, Sergius, was not expected until May. In addition to the bonus money, the Doukhobor trust fund had reached $200,000, one fifth of it contributed by the Doukhobors themselves. The Immigration Department now faced a superhuman task. Nothing like this had ever taken place before, and nothing like it has ever taken place since. This was the largest single immigration ever organized in Canada. Somehow, more than two thousand men, women, and children, scarcely any of whom understood a word of English, had to be trundled half way across Canada, immediately after disembarkation. With winter (the worst in decades) about to strike, the hard-pressed Commissioner of Immigration in Winnipeg, Bill McCreary, would have to have warm accommodation and food waiting for all of them. Somehow he would have to get them aboard other trains and dispatch them to northern Assiniboia. And there, on the treeless snow-swept prairie, frozen hard as granite. they would have to survive until they could begin tilling the land in the spring. They were slated to arrive in mid-January. McCreary had nit more than six weeks to get ready. At 4 p.m. on January 20 -a perfect winter's day -the S.S. Lake Huron "Greetings, steamed into Halifax harbour with twenty-one hundred Doukhobors Dou on board-the largest single body of emigrants ever to have crossed khobors!" the Atlantic in one ship. She had travelled for twenty-nine days from Batum, manned by a skeleton crew (to save money) assisted by ninety-four untrained emigrants. Ten persons had died during the voyage; five more couples had been married in the simple Doukhobor ceremony. The new arrivals had also survived a dreadful tempest that blew unceasingly for eight days, causing all to give up hope of ever reaching Canadian shores. In spite of this, the ship was spanking clean, scrubbed spotless by the women. The chief health officer remarked he had never known so clean a vessel to enter Halifax harbour. We have joined the.sntall knot of dignitaries boarding the.steant tug Henry Hooverasshe chugs oJ7'o meet the incontingsteantship. These include Jante.s Sntart and William White of the In7/7tigration De/7artntent; Prince If ilkolJ; already crabbed hr the press "the lath Centurr Moses "; a representative of Canadian labour; several neu.spapernten; and to o .saintl ~ and venerable Quakers in the dark c lathing and inroad hlack hats of their set t Joseph Elkington of Philadelphia and Joh Giciler of North Dartn70uth, Massac hu.setts. A c ross the u ater comes the ha?? of human v oil es raised in song. To o thousand and se"'entt!-three Doukhohors arechantinga psaln?. Hilkoff translates Jor us: "God is u ith us; he has brought us through. " Joh Gidley raises his hat. " Welc once, Doukhohors! " he c ails at ross the water. High above u.s nun; c r uu "ed a/ung the elec k r al, hurting their heads in greeting, are the "pee u/jar percale" as the neu.spape/.s hal e called then? the n?e/7 in high hout.s, fur /eggif7g.s, sheepskin coats, and fur hats, the u on7en in en?b/ Ridered houses, Vests, red sashes, shad Is, red plaid.skirt.s, and ~ uo//en con?lurte/s, a//.staringHutt /? at theirf/st v icu uJ Canadians and Canada. We all c lamber on board. Joseph Elkingto/? c uses his e ~ es, n7uistens his lips, and utters a prayer. The peculia/ people hoe: With Hilkoff translating, J. 77 Bulme/. the /abaur Ida/?" Jo//o~rs With a fervent and elec /an7ator~ speech on heha j Of "the peat eful "~ orkn7e/? of this ('ountr' " A.s he finishes, the entire n7U/titUde, in a/7 aStU/?i.shi/?g gestH/e, fling then?se/ve.s to their knees and press their foreheads to the deck. Buh?7er /uuk.s harried. ILh~ this fan ni/?g di.spla~ of serf flit' in free Canada:' Hilkoff hastens to explai?. They are nut honing I") the u elc Inning c on7/77ittee hilt to "the spirit of God in their hearts, Whit h has made then7 take U.5' a." Brothers in their OM'/? hon7 clad of Canada. " The Lake Hurun steamed on to Saint John, with the Doukhobors gossiping among themselves about the marvels they had witnessed. No policemen had come to meet them! The government doctor did not wear gold braid nor did the immigration agent. The governor of the country was a Frenchman, but the English didn't seem to mind! And it was even said there were no soldiers in this governor's palace! Five passenger trains, each eleven cars in length (one entire car carrying food), awaited the newcomers at Saint John. Since there was no room in the passenger cars for baggage, every trunk and box had to be relabelled. To avoid congestion, the newcomers were held on board ship until each train was ready to roll westward. On the dock, waiting for the Doukhobor children. were barrels of candies, donated by a group of Montreal well wishers By the time the Doukhobors entrained, the commissary cars were loaded with 1,700 two-pound loaves of bread, 1,700 pounds of baked beans, 850 pounds of hard tack, 80 gallons of milk, 55 pounds of salt, 6 bushels of onions, and 50 pounds of coffee. By the time the trains reached Ottawa, it had all been devoured. Twice that amount was waiting on the station platform for the next leg of the journey. In Winnipeg, meanwhile, McCreary had been struggling night and day to find accommodation for the new arrivals. Where was he going to house twenty-one hundred people? The immigration shed at Winnipeg could handle no more than six hundred. The shed at Brandon could hold another four hundred; but it was not insulated, and blowing snow was pouring through the cracks in the walls. Calgary might handle two hundred, but that, clearly, was not enough. Nor was the department equipped to feed such an army. McCreary figured that even if the two ranges in the immigration hall ran day and night, they couldn't boil enough vegetables or bake enough bread to feed more than one hundred. He could, of course, buy bread, but at twenty-five loaves for a dollar the price was prohibitive. He would need to have a dozen big cauldrons, again working night and day, to boil enough soup for six hundred people. Prince Hilkoff, who had arrived in town to help, suggested erecting clay ovens in the yard. He could not realize that when his compatriots arrived, the temperature would be colder than forty below with a blizzard blowing. By early January, with the deadline fast approaching, McCreary was managing to untangle the problem of accommodation. Calgary was too far away, but he was planning to throw up a frame shed at Yorkton, which he hoped would be ready by January 16. There would be no time to paint it, but he thought he could cram three hundred into it, and in a pinch an extra one hundred. There was also a shed at Dauphin, Manitoba, that could hold another three hundred, mainly women and children (the men would be sent out at once to put up houses of timber). An additional hundred could perhaps be squeezed into the immigration shed in Brandon, another hundred at Birtle, and upwards of fifty at Qu'Appelle. That would still leave another hundred who would have to be shoe-horned into the overtaxed hall in Winnipeg. At Selkirk, north of Winnipeg, there was an ancient railway roundhouse capable of holding between fifteen hundred and two thousand souls; but it needed to be repaired, and Sifton's department was getting nowhere with his adversary, Israel Tarte, of the Department of Public Works. McCreary was beside himself from overwork, and on the verge of breakdown. That midwinter he had worked every holiday, every Sunday, and almost every evening until shortly before midnight. The only meal he was able to enjoy with his family was breakfast. He wolfed lunch and dinner in twenty-minute breaks at a restaurant next door to his office. "I do not think I could stand it more than a couple of years longer," he told Sifton. A reformed alcoholic, he had fallen off the wagon at Christmas, got himself entangled in a public quarrel, and almost lost his job. He blamed this fall from grace on overwork. "I have been completely prostrated at times," he wrote, "and hardly felt able to draw one foot after the other from the severe strain that has been on me.... I have not a blessed moment that I can call my own." A year later McCreary quit his j oh, ran for federal office as a Liberal, and was elected. Three years after that he was dead. In Winnipeg he felt powerless to cope with the Doukhobor influx. It was easy enough, he told Smart, to ship 2,073 people by train from the East, "but to take hold of 2073, house and feed them, look after the sanitary arrangements a nd prevent them from being frozen to death is not an easy task. Our weather here has been from twenty to forty below zero for two or three weeks with a bad blizzard blowing...." He had no authority to make purchases. No committee had been organized to handle Doukhobor funds and no line of credit issued. He needed to buy wood, water, harnesses, oxen, sleighs, flour, and vegetables. He could not find sixty-gallon cauldrons in the West; these would have to be shipped by freight, and that would take a week or ten days or even longer, should there be a blizzard. "It will then take twenty-four hours to set them up," McCreary reminded Smart, "so I should know now more particulars of what my powers are." In the end he did the only thing possible: he dipped into his own departmental funds and endured a tough reprimand from Ottawa for doing so. The five trainloads of Doukhobors began arriving in Winnipeg at 12:30 on the afternoon of January 27, 1899. The first train, delayed by weather at White River, was destined for Yorkton. But the shed there was not yet complete, and with the temperature now at forty-five below, McCreary did not feel it safe to house anybody there until the stoves and cauldrons had been going for at least twenty-four hours. He crammed 296 into the Dufferin School in Winnipeg "forty more than its capacity"-and kept the rest in the immigration hall. This was the coldest winter in the memory of the city's oldest inhabitants. The third train did not pull into the station until one o'clock in the morning; by then it was so cold on the platform that McCreary froze his nose and fingers. Train No. 4 was an hour behind, en route to Brandon and making slow time, being forced to stop periodically to make steam when the engines froze. The fifth train arrived at 5:30 a.m. and collided with a yard engine just as it pulled out for Dauphin. Two cars were damaged and had to be replaced. But the Doukhobors were in a state of near ecstasy. To them, McCreary's makeshift arrangements were little short of Elysian. Hot dinners awaited them the moment they stepped off the train: the women of Winnipeg had spent hours peeling potatoes, chopping cabbage, making soup. Thousands turned out the following day to greet them. An address of welcome was offered by R.G. Macbeth, a local minister heading a committee especially organized for that purpose. As Wasil Papsouf stood up to reply, his face wreathed in smiles, there were tears of emotion in the eyes of the onlookers. "God has been good to us," Papsouf said. "We have come to a country where oppression does not exist. The kindness of your people has deeply impressed us all, and we are thankful. Everything has been first class." As the spectators applauded, all the Doukhobors dropped to their knees and bowed their heads to the ground. That night, one of the leaders, Leopold Soulerkitsky, wired to Count Tolstoy: "Safe. DcJukhcJbc~rs obtained grand u e/c once Arcane Canada. A 11 are free. " As far as the Spirit Wrestlers were concerned, their problems were over. McCreary's were just beginning. He had managed to house two thousand-odd Doukhobors in temporary quarters. Now he was faced with four new concerns: clothing his charges, moving food out to the various accommodations, providing more permanent housing, and doing all this before the next two thousand arrived. These were already aboard the Beaver Line's Lake Superior, due to reach Halifax in a fortnight's time. The Doukhobors were ill prepared for the forty-five below weather. The men wore hard leather boots with pieces of blanket around the feet in lieu of socks. The women wore only a half-slipper with a leather sole. None had mitts. Several froze their toes trying to work out of doors. McCreary bought two hundred pairs of moccasins, four hundred pairs of socks, and a mountain of warm clothing for the men he was dispatching to prepare the new colonies for the others. The staple food was simplified. Cheese, molasses, and fish, which some had been fed at Brandon and Portage la Prairie, were cut off because the Doukhobors themselves insisted that they all get the same provisions. The regular diet would be potatoes, onions, cabbage, tea, and sugar. But it soon became impossible to move the vegetables by sleigh because of the weather. "To try to keep vegetables warm by putting a stove in a sleigh would be impossible as they will quite likely meet with some upsets." Nor was there any place to store perishables. Early that fall, Aylmer Maude had spent two thousand dollars on vegetables. All had rotted in Winnipeg. When McCreary finally received the government advance in February for the first group of Doukhobors it was two thousand dollars short of the promised ten thousand because of this unfortunate purchase. Luckily for McCrearv, the next contingent was held for twenty-eight days in quarantine because of an outbreak of smallpox aboard the Lake Superior. But the long delay was costly. The new arrivals still had to be fed, and the CPR had to be paid a stiff price for holding its trains at Saint John. Meanwhile, McCreary had managed to outfit and supply gangs of ten men from each of the three colonies planning to settle in the West, who were cutting timber for houses. By February 9, one gang had erected three buildings in the settlement, each twenty-four-feet square and large enough to hold fifty or sixty Doukhobors. Food was still a problem. No teamster would go out, even for additional pay, in the face of the biting cold. It was essential that the roundhouse at Selkirk be refurbished before the new trainloads arrived. McCreary had thirty Doukhobors working on the building, which had to be plastered and papered before it would be habitable. And so it went, with McCreary shuMing thousands of people by train and ox team off to Yorkton to make way for the new arrivals, while gangs of men on the new village sites kept cauldrons of water bubbling to warm the plaster for the partially built homes. By February 9, the government payment of eight thousand dollars was gone and the Treasury Board was vacillating because of the quarantine delay. McCreary was told he would not receive the second payment of sixteen thousand dollars until June. A final payment of about eight thousand dollars was no' made until the last contingent of Doukhobors reached Canada in the fall, many of whom were forced to live in caves for a portion of the winter. At that point the government was relieved of all payments based on the bonus of $4.87 for each immigrant settled in the West. Much of the sum raised by the Quakers and Purleigh community had gone to pay transportation costs; the rest was not available until late in the summer. Thrown on their own resources, the Doukhobors rose to the challenge. Out went the men from Selkirk, Brandon, and Winnipeg, taking any job they could get from shovelling snow to chopping wood. The older men set up cottage industries, making wooden spoons and painted bowls for sale. The women responded to the local demand for line embroidery and woven wool lens The younger girls took jobs as domestics. Rather than purchase shovels and harnesses, the Doukhobor farmers bought iron bars and leather, built forges to produce implements, and fashioned Russian-style gear that was superior to the mass-produced Canadian harnesses. Meanwhile, James Mavor had persuaded William Saunders of the Dominion Experimental Farm to visit the villages and give advice on crops. He had also talked the Massey-Harris Company into selling the newcomers equipment on credit. By the summer of 1901, the Doukhobors had 40 binders, 70 mowers, and 120 ploughing machines in operation. Thus, with the help of a number of dedicated and generous friends, these extraordinary people were well on the way to self-sufficiency. In spite of all the problems. the Doukhobor resettlement was a remarkable feat. In a little more than a year after Prince Kropotkin wrote his original letter to Mavor, Canada had managed to settle seventy-five hundred persecuted and poverty-stricken Russians on the black soil of northern Saskatchewan. Within another year, their villages had been built and their future, it seemed, was secure. Yet the seeds of future trouble had already been sown by the government in its eagerness to complete a vague and ambiguous contract and by a small but fanatical group of Doukhoborski to whom the true promised land was not in Saskatchewan at all but in the dreams and visions of their leaders. Who were these "peculiar people" now struggling to build their com The munal homes and villages in three colonies in Saskatchewan? They "peculiar were not nearly as monolithic as the naive Tchertkoff had believed and people" as McCreary came to realize: "They are not by any means Universal Brethren, from the fact that they do not altogether agree on every point; they have their dissensions like ordinary mortals, so that a little difficulty may arise at times of this nature. Some of them, too, I understand, at Portage la Prairie. especially, are calling for fish, so that they are not all strictly vegetarians." This was a prescient assessment. In 1886, the death of their passionate leader, Lukeria Vasilevna Gubanova, and the disputed choice of her selected heir, Peter Vasilivich Verigin (rightly or wrongly believed to be her young lover), had caused a split in the sect, which was further DiSTRIcT OF SASKATCHEWAN ~ ~ J ;~4 Prince Albe: ~ _~ "J ,~ ; ~ d~ / ~ ~ I ~ ~ ^ ~ ; I Fiji d _ F] \ ~ ~ 1 DISTRICT )F: ASslNlBOlA'Ye~rkt~ltcoats: " Qu'Appel/~. ~ant MANITOBA ~ ~ ~= "E:-=1 - if'("U'E'\ ~j _ _ CANADA _ ~I~ll)Mlr~sI_ UNITED STATES Doukhobor Settlements in Saskatchewan divided geographically by Russian persecution. Some Doukhobors were vegetarians; some were not. Some were comparatively wealthy; some were destitute. Some believed in independence, others in conformity. In Canada, the divisions continued. The Georgian group went to Thunder Hill. seventy miles north of Yorkton; it became known as the North Colony. The refugees from Cyprus went to Devil's Hill, thirty miles north of Yorkton, the "South Colony." The people from Kars went to the' Prince Albert" or "Rosthern Colony" between Saskatoon and Prince Albert. In general, the Doukhobors believed that Christ lived in every man and thus priests were unnecessary and the Bible obsolete. They rejected churches, litany, ikons. and festivals. Their only allegiance, they insisted, was to Christ; they could take no oath to temporal power. And yet their subservience to Peter Verigin seemed almost total. Since 1886 Verigin had been in exile in Siberia, where he too had come under the influence of Tolstoy's teachings. His directives, sent secretly to the community's headmen, had been partly responsible for The Promised "And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey .. ." -Exodus 3:8 Settling the West 1896-1914 Land McClelland and Stewart Copyright ~ 1984 by Pierre Berton Enterprises Ltd. Third printing 1984 All rights reserved The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. Fnd/,aper.s 17~ T,n' McNeely Males by Ce"~tticy Ma~Ite~vs Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Bergen, Pierre, 1920l he promised land: settling the West 1X96-1914 Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7710-1243-8 (bound). ISBN 0-7710-1242-X (deluxe). 1. Canada, Western Emigration and immigration -History * 2. Canada, Western Social conditions -History * 1. Title. FC3209.14B47 19X4 "71.2'02CX4-09X6X6-6 Fl()60.9.B47 19X4 McClelland and Stewart Limited The Canadian Pul71i.she, s 25 Hollinger Road Toronto, Ontario M4B.lG2 Printed and bound in Canada by TH. Best Printing Company Limited bringing about the persecution of the Doukhobors under Czar Nicholas 11. Verigin advocated a form of Christian communism, vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol and, in times of tribulation, sex. He issued a ban on killing of any living thing, including human beings hence the refusal to serve in the Czar's army. But Verigin's directives were often subtle and ambiguous, causing dissension within the sect. When all of Verigin's flock was settled in Canada, another directive arrived from Siberia. It was permissible, the leader said, to learn to read and write. All essential goods, all shops, smithies, storehouses, granaries and the like should be held in common. Villages should not contain more than fifty houses, each capable of sheltering an extended family. Trees should line the streets; windbreaks must be planted and orchards cultivated. By the end of 1900, a total of fifty-seven villages had sprung up in the three communities, most containing fewer than twenty houses. James Mavor, who was sent out by Sifton in April 1899 to report on the Doukhobors, spent three weeks in one of these one-room buildings with Prince Hilkoff. The house was built of logs, caulked with clay, and heated by a single stove. On two sides of the big room were double tiers of bunks, fourteen in all, each seven feet long and five feet wide. In each bunk an entire family slept together. Mavor and Hilkoff had one to themselves. The remaining thirteen accommodated fifty persons. In that first summer there was scarcely an able-bodied man left in any of the villages. While they worked on the railway, the women broke the sod. Since the few horses available were needed to bring supplies from Yorkton, the women hitched themselves to the ploughs -twenty-four women to each team, guided by one of the old men of the village. A photograph of one of these teams appeared in the Conservative newspapers, which reviled the Doukhobor men as inhuman beasts who forced their womenfolk into harness. By 1900, the men themselves were back at work in the fields. Life was hard, yet there is an engaging quality to the descriptions of Doukhobor society the choir chanting in the streets each morning to wake the workers; the men, divided into gangs, singing as they marched toward the fields; the town meeting or sobranie, where a rough democracy prevailed; the antelope and deer foraging unmolested among the cattle; the family dipping their wooden spoons into the communal bowl of borscht. Those officials who came into contact with the Doukhobors were impressed. "I never saw a more orderly lot of people," the Mounted Police inspector at Duck Lake wrote in August 1899. One immigrant agent aboard a Doukhobor train wrote: "I take the greatest pleasure in stating that during my many years travelling with passengers of so many different nationalities, I never came across a more clean, respectable, well behaved lot of people." The veteran Mounted Police Inspector Darcy Strickland was astonished to note that they never passed one another on the village streets without removing their caps and bowing. Old men bowed to children, and the children bowed back. It was explained to him that they were not really bowing to each other but to the spirit of Jesus within them. It is a crisp March morning in 1902 and we are driving u est from Rosthern in a tug-horse cutter a/on" the u edge of land that lies between the two bran lies of the Saskatcheu an. Dawn is a lemon coloured streak on the horizon, and the loner edges of the purple clouds are tinged u ith rose. This is new c ountrr, the haunt until recently of Me'tis, Indian, and fox Five rears ago, Rosthern did not exist. Now the prairie is dotted with homesteads and diapered with fields broken by the plough--a land of hollows and crests, of poplar and u il lou saplings and the occasional gnarled oak. The scattered buildings tell the story of Western settlement: the original homestead shacks have been turned into hen houses and the first log cabins are used non as granaries. Beside the ~ abins, more substantial frame, and even brick, d wellings signal the progress of the German and Scandinavian settlers who came here in '96, "Y7, and '98. A s u e approach the great river, the homesteads are scattered farther apart. At some points we can see no sign of human life in any direction. Far out of the north the Blue Hilts rise gracefully a golden saffron in the morning light, striped u ith u trite snow and brow n belts of timber, intersected b r purple ravines. Before us lies the great trench of the North Saskatcheuan with the frozen ribbon of the river at its bottom, fringed u ith birch, elm, and poplar. [Iere the trail is scarcely more than a rut. Soon it becomes a three-hundred-foot toboggan slide as our team hurtles don n into the vane ~ But two miles au ay on the far horizon we can spot the Doukhobor village of Terpenie, thirty miles from Rosthern, the object of our visit. It lies at the top of a ravine on the opposite side of the v alley, at the end of a well-kept trail leading up from the river. A short time later we arrive. The village consists ok a single street, ha f as broad again as Winnipeg's Portage Avenue, lined u ith long, low yellow buildings, gabled and roofed with sod or ~hatch. The gable ends face the road and are separatedirom it by neatly railed gardens. Each building is fifty feet long, divided equal iv - the front half for humans, the rear f r animals. The thick mud u ails are smooth as plaster; the sods on the roof are laid like shingles; each yard is raked clean of debris. We enter one of the houses; a single room, fourteen by twenty feet, its floor of hard-packed earth smooth as a tabletop, the u ails u hitewashed. Too u indou s, each three feet square, are thick u ith house plants, some brought all the u as from BUtUfm. A large stove and oven dominate one corner. A bench runs round three sides of the room, broad ning into a sleeping she j big enough for entire families Coloured lithographs adorn the u ails. Here in the rolling Saskatchewan prairie, a little corder of Russia has been succ essfull~, transplanted. Terpenie is a prosperous village. In the rear of each house stands a neatly' scrubbed granarr u ith an adjoining implement shed stocked with harnesses, ploughs, mowers, and rakes. Most of the people here come from the alpine meadows of Kars, once part of the ancient kingdom of Armenia. The last to arrive in Canada, ther are better off than the others, having had funds of their own. Ther are also more independent, less entranced by religious communism Yet generalizations are impossible. For even here, where the trend is loo and individual ownership, there are those u ho hen to the old u avs and u ho listen to the words of Tolstov and Ver~gin as interpreted br that uncompromising zealot Nicholas Zibarov, who calls himself John the Baptist and who will short iv lead his Son.s of God barefoot across the frosty stubble of the prairie on a pilgrimage to non here. So powerful is the call that 80 members of this community of 280 u ill leave these prosperous, comfortable homes to join the multitude crying out for Jesus. Across the country the general attitude toward the Doukhobors was one of curiosity and good nature. After all, these were a persecuted people, refugees from a tyrannical government, and the sympathy of the general public was with them. The presence also of noblemen like Hilkoff, who had practised what they preached at considerable personal sacrifice, impressed Canadians. In Winnipeg, a delegation of leading citizens had arranged a welcome for the newcomers. In Yorkton, the crowd cheered their arrival, and local women helped with the feeding arrangements. In Toronto, Mary Agnes Fitzgerald, who wrote for the Globe as "tally Bernard," organized a national women's committee to aid the Doukhobors. Not everybody was so benevolent. Real estate speculators resented the huge blocks of land granted to the sect. Some labour leaders objected to the low wages paid them by the railway companies. Local retail merchants did not like their practice of buying land in communal packages. And there was general opposition among the Conservative party regarding their exemption from military service. The Opposition press fed these political flames, as it had in the case of the Galicians. Conservative newspapers sneered at the Doukhobors as "Sifton's paupers" and claimed the government was subsidizing indigent immigrants with public funds, an attack that forced Sifton's department to watch e\ cry dollar spent by McCreary. The virulence of some of these attacks was remarkable even for those freewheeling times. To the London Free Press, the Doukhobors were "a mass of ancient dunnage from the filthiest regions of Asia." The Halifax Herald implied that they were' illiterate unprogressive, lazy and criminal." The Ottan a Citizen, which called them "the most backward and ignorant people in the back concessions of Europe," went so far as to suggest that their initial well-scrubbed appearance aboard the Lake Huron had been carefully stage-managed by Sifton's minions: ".. . the horrid suspicion grows .. . that the little entrance was rehearsed .. . it looks just a little bit as if some enterprising person wiped the Doukhobours' noses, put on their Sunday clothes, fined 'em up at the bulwarks, and told them to 'make a joyful noise' when it would do the most good .. . the universal belief that no one ever saw a clean Muscovite gives color to the suspicion regarding such ostentatious cleanliness." The Doukhobors themselves quickly dispelled such calumny. By 1902 most of the opposition to them had ceased, and it was generally agreed that these strange people were excellent and *ugal farmers helping to bring prosperity to the prairies. And then, that fall, a stunning series of events occurred that would put the Spirit Wrestlers back on the front pages and for the rest of time made the name Doukhobor a synonym for terror, fanaticism, and lunacy. The In all his years on the prairies, Wcs Speers had never seen anything like Sons it, and knew he would never see anything like it again. of God He was standing on the open prairie, some thirteen miles north of Yorkton - a tall, rangy figure, Sifton's appointee as colonization agent for the West-waiting for the Doukhobors. They came upon him slowly like a black cloud, low on the prairie, densely packed, thirty to forty abreast. There were 1,160 in the first group, stretched out for three miles; six miles behind, another group advanced, 730 strong. The procession was headed by an old man with a flowing white beard, chanting and waving his hands. Behind him, two stalwart Russians led a blind man, followed by men bearing stretchers of poplar branches and blankets carrying the sick, and behind them a choir, three hundred strong. The chanting, doleful and sonorous, never stopped, the multitude repeating the verses of the Twenty-second Psalm over and over again: My God, rev GocI, u hr hast thou Jor.saken Inc? The date was October 27, 1902. In the weeks to come, this and similar spectacles would haunt the dreams of Charles Wesley Speers, the quintessential Westerner, the supreme optimist, the genial backroom raconteur. Years of service to the Liberal party had not prepared him for the extraordinary events of this month, but Speers was equal to them. A man of quick decision and awesome efficiency, he had been given the job by Sifton as a political reward; after all, it was Speers who had lent his name to the charade of a nomination meeting in Brandon in 1896, and it was Speers, following the script, who had graciously stepped aside in favour of his future master -but not before delivering a eulogy to the Young Napoleon of the West. This did not mean that Speers was unsuited for the post. His years as a Liberal wheel horse and organizer had not been wasted; his engaging personality, his natural bonhomie, his physical energy, and his tact had made him a valuable member of the Manitoba Liberal hierarchy. He was, as the saying went, "a good mixer." Now these talents were to be channelled into a different course. For the next fortnight, Speers would come head to head with the most stubborn, dedicated, and recalcitrant group of fanatics in Western Canada-the splinter group who called themselves the Sons of God. These people seemed intent on killing themselves in the name of the Saviour, not by any sudden action but simply from hunger and exposure on the frostbitten prairie. The government faced a dilemma: it could not allow the demise of close to nineteen hundred souls; neither could it be seen to thwart the religious aspirations of a devout and inoffensive religious sect. When the Doukhobors come, Speers told his people, treat them with firmness but also with kindness. There must be no violence: after all, they are intent on harming nobody but themselves. Methodically, the army of men, women, and children advanced on the colonisation agent. He knew it was useless to reason with them. They required nothing of him, they said. "We are going to seek Christ," they told him vaguely. Christ, apparently, was somewhere in the southeast, somewhere in the land of the sun, far from the windswept prairie, in a country where the fruit hung thickly on the trees and vegetables were cropped the year round, where it was not necessary to use a single animal for labour, food, or clothing. The pale prairie afternoon would soon turn to dusk. Speers knew that he must find immediate shelter for these people who believed, with a Gibraltar-like conviction, that God would look after them, feed them, protect them from the elements. Back he rode to Yorkton to arrange for accommodation in the immigration hall, the Orange Hall, an implement warehouse, a pool hall, a grain elevator. Some of the children were crying with hunger. The people were living on dried rose-hips, herbs, leaves, and grasses. The women of Yorkton would have to feed them-if they agreed to be fed. Speers was saddened by what he had seen. He liked and admired the Doukhobors, knew scores of them personally. Like most of his political friends he was a fervent Methodist (after all, his middle name was Wesley); his father had been a lay preacher in Ontario. It is not too much to say that Wcs Speers had an obsession with the destiny of Western Canada. He was one of a growing breed who, watching the West prosper, were convinced that the nation's future lay here in the rich soil of the prairie country, which Speers himself had farmed before this new job stole all his waking hours. Speers's feeling for the West amounted almost to a religion. In his eyes, the Liberal party's God-given duty was to fill the plains with people-stalwart vigorous men, like the Doukhohors, like Speers himself. Now that laudable policy was threatened by the aberrations of a fanatical splinter group. Speers had picked up the first rumours of trouble at the end of June when he got wind of a report that some of the Doukhobors in the Yorkton area were acting strangely. By August these reports were confirmed. Certain members of the community were freeing all their animals-actually turning their cattle loose on the prairies-burning their sheepskin vests and leather boots, making sandals from plaited binder twine, refusing to eat eggs, butter, or milk, abandoning their horses and hitching themselves as teams, and making no provision for the coming winter by putting up hay for their stock. What on earth was going on in these seemingly placid, squeaky-clean villages? All that Speers knew was what he was told: some of the Doukhobors had come to believe that it was a sin to exploit animals in any way. The government corralled the stray beasts120 horses, 95 sheep, 285 cattle -and sold them at auction, realizing sixteen thousand dollars for the Doukhobor trust fund. But why this unexpected and eccentric turn of events? The problem had its roots in the complex mind of Peter Verigin, languishing comfortably in Siberian exile and daydreaming of a pure Tolstoyan society, an ideal world, a paradise on earth-unattainable, no doubt, but pleasant to speculate over-a world in which the sun would always shine, where men would live on fruit and never exploit their animal brethren, where money would not be needed, and metal, the symbol of an industrial society, would be outlawed. Verigin did not transmit the specifics of his impossible dream to the brethren in Canada; his correspondence was more practical and prosaic. But he did communicate his ideas in high-flown letters to the idealists at the Purleigh community in Essex, where the expatriate nobleman Tchertkoff, without a by-your-leave, had them printed in a booklet in the Russian language. When, early in 1902, copies finally reached the literate elders of the Doukhobor communities in Canada, they caused a sensation. For more than fifteen years members of the sect had been without a pope to guide them. They were hungry for leadership, especially by 1902, when the Canadian government began to press upon them demands they could not accept. an ada wanted them to file individual titles to each 1 60-acre homestead. Now that the land was surveyed, the government was insisting on a resolution of this impasse. In addition, it wanted every Doukhobor to take an oath of allegiance to the state. Now, out of the blue, came an exhortation from the one man who could stand up for them against the same kind of authority that had forced their exodus from Russia. There was more, surely. There must also have been a longing for the kind of sunny paradise that Verigin dreamed of, where frost never fell, winds did not blow, and prairie w trite-outs were unknown. The exiled leader had talked of warmth and energy from the sun: "Man employing food raised by an abundance of solar heat, such as, for instance, raspberries, strawberries .. . tender fruits, his organism will be formed, as it were, of energy itself...." Slowly, a sect within a sect was forming. Its members called themselves the Sons of God. Self-appointed apostles began moving through the villages, spreading the new gospel. And when one of the most respected elders, Nicholas Zibarov, a huge bear of a man with a tangled mass of beard and hair, joined the movement and threw away his shoes, more than a quarter of the whole Doukhobor population was prepared to follow wherever he led. If Verigin was the Doukhobor Messiah, Zibarov was his John the Baptist, and that is how he began to refer to himself. On that night of October 27, the pilgrimage halted three miles north of Yorkton. Men, women, and children huddled together in a poplar bluff without a fire to warm them. The next morning, Wcs Speers, who had arranged accommodation, rode out to reason with the leaders. Shortly after, to the astonishment of the townspeople, the entire assembly straggled into the village. "What is it you want ?" one of the Yorkton men asked. "We are going to a warmer climate where we can live on fruit and will not need to use horses or be under any government," a Doukhobor woman replied, neatly summing up the three main reasons for the pilgrimage. Speers confronted the leaders and vainly tried to persuade them to go back to their villages. They refused. "We are searching for Christ and will seek till we find him," he was told. But Speers had no intention of letting the women and children go on. Almost every woman was carrying a child, and their cries of hunger threatened to drown out the endless chanting of the men. With the help of the Mounted Police, the colonization agent herded the resisting women into shelter. Some townspeople arrived with gifts of milk and biscuits, but these were refused, being the products of the labour of animals. When several hungry children tried to seize a biscuit, their mothers removed it, slapped their faces gently, and chided them for eating prohibited food. With the women under shelter and guarded by three Mounted Policemen and fifteen special constables, the men were free to continue their march. They spent the cold night outside the town, standing up, praying and chanting. The following day they set off once more. On they went, through Saltcoats, unaccountably throwing away the clothes they had bought in Yorkton, leaving behind a trail of boots, cloaks, and hats. They slept in ditches, lived on grasses and raw potatoes until their faces grew gaunt and their eyes feverish. Yet they still managed to walk twenty miles a day, their feet torn and bleeding from the frost-covered stubble. Six yards in the lead trudged their John the Baptist, Nicholas Zibarov, he of the burning eyes and flowing beard, a man who could neither read nor write but who had memorized great chunks of scripture in the Slavonic tongue. On his followers he exerted an almost magical effect: "The Christ!" he cried. "The Christ! I see him. He is coming to us. There, do you not see him? He is beckoning to us. Follow, follow on, children of the Lord." Speers, like an ineffectual shepherd, trailed closely behind, trying to get Zibarov and the other leaders to listen to reason. But the answer was always the same: "Jesus will look after us." On November 6, when the mob reached Shoal Lake, Manitoba, Speers, looking worried, worn, and exhausted, tried again to offer free train transportation home for the pilgrims. Again he was refused. Zibarov, who had walked for four days with scarcely any sleep or food, seemed near collapse. Many of his followers were reluctant to sleep because they feared missing the Messiah when he came. They bought small amounts of dry oatmeal and salt from local merchants along the way, but little else. They seemed to have no fixed destination in mind. A few collapsed. A handful accepted Speers's offer and returned home. Some listened to the blandishments and entreaties of other Doukhobors who had not joined the Sons of God but had followed behind to reason with their brethren. But when the pilgrimage reached Minnedosa on November 7, there were still 450 hard-core believers, temporarily housed in the town's skating rink, determined to continue on, though none knew quite where. Speers had no intention of allowing that. The thermometer was dropping and a fine snow was again falling. Two nights before, shivering in a cottonwood bluff, they had slept in six inches of snow. If they kept going, Speers knew, they would all die, and their deaths would be laid at the government's door. His fears were not only political. He was genuinely concerned with the fate of "these misguided people." To him they looked like hunted animals. They must be persuaded to go home -with force, if necessary, but with a minimum of violence. Out from Ottawa came Frank Pedley, Superintendent of Immigration, a bulky Liberal lawyer and the only man of Sifton's department who was not a Westerner. Pedley was a Newfoundlander who had practised law in Toronto for the best part of a decade before joining the department. Now he and Speers tackled Zibarov and the other leaders in the skating rink. There would be no more leniency, they declared; the Doukhobors must return to their villages. They made an interesting trio, these three pugnacious, determined men-the tall, stalwart Speers of the rugged features and firm jaw; Pedley, with his formidable moustache and heavy jowls; Zibarov, tall and haggard like an Old Testament prophet, his beard flecked with crumbs of dried oatmeal, his eyes flashing with the fervour of evangelism. Pedley, the Toronto lawyer, was no match for the eloquent Zibarov. They talked into the night for two hours through interpreters and got nowhere. In a shrewd and impassioned speech Zibarov defied the government forces. He and his followers would go on, he said, even if they froze to death on the prairie. Speers shook his head. They would go back to Yorkton the following day, he told the Doukhobor leader. An impasse had been reached. All night long, the Sons of God prayed and sang while the townspeople, expecting trouble, waited outside the rink. Early that morning the Doukhobors tried to rush the doors. Four escaped, but the Mounted Police forced the others back. At 4:30 that afternoon, a special train with twenty-three police arrived. At five, with dusk falling and a fine snow blowing, Speers stood up on a box and, through an interpreter, addressed the gathering: "We have shown you a lot of consideration. You must go with us now. Get your wraps and blankets and march." One of the leaders-probably Zibarov-tried to interrupt. Speers was on him in an instant: "It's men like you that have caused this trouble. If you don't keep quiet, I'll deal with you in a way you won't like. All of you get ready to come." About 150 followed Speers out of the rink but immediately turned from him and started to head east. "Head them off. Don't lose a man!" Speers cried, seizing Zibarov by the neck. The Doukhobor leader struggled to free himself, at the same time starting the familiar weird chant, which was taken up by the others. Speers now called for help, and about fifty of the townspeople answered. The resisting Doukhobors linked arms around each other and were pulled for yards across the frozen ground. A Herculean grain merchant named Arkwright broke the knot, and the squirming, kicking Russians were carried bodily to the waiting train. Zibarov struggled desperately, exhorting his followers to resist. Speers hailed a passing wagon, picked him up bodily, and hurled him into it. Soon the space between the train and the station was filled with flailing bodies. The entire town turned out to watch the struggle150 townsmen against 450 fanatics. The Sons of God refused to strike a blow against their captors. Instead they tried to turn their faces eastward and resume their march. It took forty minutes to pack them into the waiting cars, and then "the bloodless battle of Minnedosa," as the press called it, was over. That broke the back of the pilgrimage. The women and children had already been taken back to the railhead near their villages. They refused to ride the rest of the way and insisted on walking the full twenty-seven miles. Within two hours of their return they had their furnaces going, vegetable soup on the stove, and were hard at work scrubbing and cleaning their homes. For the Doukhobors, the pilgrimage left a bitter legacy. It turned public opinion against them just as the original criticism had died down and the country was beginning to applaud their energy and resourcefulness. The opposition press began again to rail against them, rarely bothering to make any distinction between the Sons of God and the majority of the newcomers. The Conservative party felt itself vindicated for the original attacks on "Sifton's Pets." As the AIontreal Star said: "At the time they were imported, the Conservatives protested against such indiscriminate immigration, without investigating in a rational way the causes of their leaving Russia .. . but the Liberals have acted like men demented in their frenzy to get certain lands taken up." One of the underlying reasons for the Sons of God demonstration had been the fear that the sect would shortly be forced out of the communal holding of land and that the government would insist upon individual titles as well as an oath of allegiance to the state. This fear was well founded. The urge to assimilate the Doukhobors-to turn them into carbon copies of Canadians -was just as strong as it was in the case of the Galicians. But the demand for what Zibarov's followers insisted were their "rights" caused widespread irritation, making it even less likely that the Doukhobors would be granted any special consideration. The Edmonton Bulletin, which believed that the difference between the fanatics and the majority was "only a difference of degree not of kind," wrote: "The pilgrimage is the limit. It puts them outside of reasons or excuse. The authorities will not hereafter be justified in dealing with them otherwise than as ordinary citizens." The Doukhobors would get the same treatment as the Mennonites and the Dunkards: "Beyond that, not a step, not a line." These were significant words, for they sprang from the pen of Frank Oliver, who as Sifton's replacement, would within three years have total control over the future of the Spirit Wrestlers. For the moment, however, the villages were at peace. Exhausted by their long travail, the Sons of God rested quietly, awaiting the imminent arrival of their leader, Verigin, released at last from his Siberian confinement. Wcs Speers, too, was exhausted. After the events of the month just past, he found it almost impossible to sleep. He could not lay his head upon his pillow, he declared, without having frightful dreams of unwashed hordes of the fanatics dancing before his vision. Peter It its a c ri.sp u inter afternoon in Winnipeg, three darts before Christmas, the 1902. We are standing on the CPR platform, 11 ailing il7?patientll for Lordiv the eastern train, u which is three hours late. A small knot of people has been here since noon and one, a banyan, has nailed since early morning. The apart hist Herbert Arc her its here that strange graduate from Purleigh u ho has cledic ated his life to the Doukhohor cause and whom Wcs Speers helixes has had as n7uch to do as an~bod r in stirring up the fanatics earlier this autumn. Crerar, the iml77igration agentirom Yorkton, is here too. Three Doukhobor elders, an interpreter, and one reporter (frOn? the Free Press, of course) make up the delegation. A t last the train hisses in. A c rou d of holidarers surges fore and to meet another c rou d of holidavers pouring front the c ars, their luggage stuffed Pith Christmas parcels. We crane our necks \,ain/v for the object of our long u aft At last ~ e.spot hint, towering one the throng. He alights from the coach and starts down the platform -a trig nian, half a head taller than hits fellow passengers, ~1 ith a lu.Yuriant blat k beard and dark, thoughtful eyes He its not dressed like the others under his short gabardine c oat ~ e can see leggings, c lose fitting, dark are ~ piped ~ ith blat k. He u ears a blat k fedora, and around hits net k, on a long cord dangle a silver ~ ale h and a gold pent il. The Human rushes toward hin?" Jo//ouccl hi her Doukhohor companions He drops his black nickel-studded \'alise, removes his hat, stretches out his arms to en7 brace her, and cries: "Annal" She is his sister. He its Peter Verigin. The ~ have not seen eat h other for Jifieen rears. She c rings to his arm as he u alh-.s c~uietl ~ fin muard the rest of the ret eption c on7/77ittee. We all repair to the in7n7igration building u here the at tiny c o/71/71issioner, Moffat, u ho has replaced the ailing Me Crearr (non enjoying a u ell-earned rest as Mentber of Parliament for Selkirh-), greets hint u~am71u " You'll be glad to be in a, ountrr u here there is religious and individualfreedon1,"sar.s MoJiat. "I haven't looked around ~ et, " re allies Peter Verigin in his sofi voice, "so / cannot r et tell u hether this its a Jree c ountrr or not. " Both the Doukhobors and the Immigration Department viewed Verigin as a saviour. The sect was convinced he would stand up for their rights. The government was hopeful he would calm the fanatics before further political damage was done. The Russians had released him suddenly-no one really knew why -on the understanding that he would go at once to Canada. Even his wife and son, who had loyally waited for him in the Caucasus, were not allowed to see him. He stopped off in Moscow to visit Tolstoy, who, having expected an illiterate peasant, found him much too poised and smooth to fit the stereotype. He visited Tchertkoff at Purleigh in England, then came directly to Canada. He wanted no ceremony, for he was impatient to be on his way. His first desire was to visit his mother, who lived in a village north of Yorkton. Much to his dismay, he was greeted at the Yorkton station by a crowd of one hundred. Delegates from the various villages shoved and elbowed their way toward him. He cut the reception short, moved on to his mother's village, and there, as his followers chanted psalms of welcome and bowed to the ground, he accepted the homage of his people. For the next three days, from early morning until late in the evening, Peter Vasilivich Verigin received deputation after deputation from each of the fifty-seven villages. Archer, the anarchist, was impressed. He found him "a man of remarkable intelligence and power [whose] .. . endurance is remarkable." Verigm talked on and on with the delegates "without any apparent diminution of energy." They called him Peter the Lordly, and the title fitted. Off he went on a tour of all the villages, seated in a six-horse sleigh, with a choir of maidens chanting psalms. This casual employment of animals as beasts of transport did not go unnoticed. Verigin was conveying a subtle message to the malcontents. The authorities were delighted by Verigin's immediate assumption of power and his apparently conciliatory attitude. "A great change has taken place in the Doukhobor situation in this district," Corporal Christian Junget of the NWMP reported. "Peter Verigin has succeeded in convincing them of their foolishness...." Early in January, Verigin met with immigration officials and quickly grasped the problem calf the Doukhobor lands. The registration demanded by the government was no more than a formality, he realized. His people could comply with that and still hold property in common. The time might come when the government would demand that each Doukhobor settle and build on the 160-acre homestead to which he technically held title, but that was at least three years away. Verigin had time to plan. He impressed everybody, including the railroad men with whom he bargained for those of his people who worked for wages. When one contractor offered 25.5 cents a cubic yard for grading, Verigin insisted on 27.5. The contractor told him that was the price the railway paid him; therefore he couldn't make a profit. "No company will profit by our work," Verigin told him. "I have known all along that you were getting twenty-seven and a half from the railway. Now you can take it or leave it." Workmen were hard to find. The contractor took it. Speers was delighted by the changes that Verigin wrought. When the Doukhobor leader arrived in Winnipeg with his committee to purchase stock, the colonisation agent noted that Nicholas Zibarov was a member and a willing follower: Zibarov! the very man who had once advocated giving up the use of animals! "These people are dressing like ourselves, they have expressed a desire also to conform to our customs, they are observing our holidays, they are accepting our calendar .. ." Speers reported to Ottawa. "Peter Verigin is a man of superior judgement and his influence is very great among the people." On this occasion Verigin told J. Obed Smith, the new immigration commissioner, that his people were now all Canadians and that spirit marches were a thing of the past. "Well," Smith retorted, "if you are going to be a Canadian, why don't you wear Canadian clothes and set your people an example?" Without a word, Verigin headed for the door. When he returned two hours later, he was all but unrecognisable in a tailored suit with a white shirt and turned-down collar, his long hair close-cropped, and his face clean-shaven except for a bristling moustache. He would, he said, give his children Canadian names such as Thomas, John, and William. Verigin made it a point to visit James Mavor in Toronto. The professor's impression was also favourable. Verigin, he noted, had a shrewd and able mind, understood his people's faults and weaknesses, and was determined to serve them "to the limits of his own powers.... He must often have been provoked and discouraged by the betises of his people, yet he never revealed to me any impatience of them." There was reason for provocation, for the community was split into three factions. The well-to-do farmers of the Rosthern Colony were opting, more and more, for independence and free enterprise. The radical Left, especially in the South Colony, nearest Yorkton, were activists who believed that only by overt demonstrations could the sect achieve its ends. In the centre was the great mass of Doukhobors whose main concern was to retain the communal system of central villages where personal possessions were all but unknown. This was Verigin's desire, but he became more and more unsure of achieving it in Saskatchewan. He travelled about like an Oriental potentate, in a six-horse sleigh in winter and a phaeton in summer, a silk hat on his head, accompanied by the inevitable choir of chanting maidens, with, at his side, a plump, blue-eyed brunette of eighteen, Anastasia Golubova, whom he called his wife. Yet in spite of this pomp, he must have felt his power dwindling. In May, 1903, the first of a series of small but highly visible protest marches began again, engineered by some of the same fanatics who had led the pilgrimage of 1902. These people-there were only about fifty-refused to register their lands and began to travel from village to village urging their fellows to resist temptation, turn their animals loose, and seek the sun. Verigin's fanciful description to Tchertkoff of a sunny Doukhobor utopia had returned to haunt him. To this latest protest the Freedomites (Svohodniki), as they now called themselves, or "Sons of Freedom" as the press nicknamed them, added two new rituals: first nudity, and later arson. The results, for Verigin, were catastrophic. The press was intrigued by men, women, and children who burned their clothes and marched naked on the chill prairie. The authorities stamped out all efforts to photograph the unclad demonstrators; one Saskatoon photographer was fined for taking their pictures and had his plates destroyed, while a luckless Mounted Police constable who actually posed with a dozen naked Doukhobor women (hoping, he claimed, to jolly them into quitting their demonstration) was given a month in jail. Why the nudity? The indefatigable Speers, who rode day and night for forty hours to break up the demonstration, asked that question and was told it was part of the Freedomites'religion-that they wanted to go to a warm country and live like Adam and Eve. Yet nudity, which was to dominate the Freedomite demonstrations for decades to come, was a new manifestation. Even though the numbers involved were always small, this and future spectacles received banner headlines in the newspapers. Perhaps that was the Freedomites' purpose. If so, it did not endear the Doukhobors' cause to the Canadian public. Some of the demonstrators went to jail, where they lived on raw potatoes and oatmeal. Others followed on charges of arson. Two were judged insane. One died in prison of malnutrition. And the headlines continued. The Doukhobors had no political power because, having refused to swear fealty to Canada, they could not become citizens and vote. But the squatters who moved onto unregistered Doukhobor lands, as well as the real estate men, had clout in Ottawa. In 1899 these lands had been unattractive; now, with tens of thousands of settlers moving into the West, the Doukhoborst holdings were positively alluring. As the pressures began to mount, an event occurred that doomed Verigin's last hopes of maintaining a communal Christian brotherhood on the prairies. Sifton resigned and Frank Oliver replaced him as Minister of the Interior. Backed up by the inevitable commission of investigation, Oliver made his move in 1906. The Doukhobors were to be treated like any other landowners, just as Oliver's editorial had once promised. They must, in short, conform to Canadian customs. There would be no exceptions in the West to the rigid regulations of the Homestead Act: each must obey its stipulations; each must build his house on his free quarter-section and farm it individually. As a result there could be no villages, no common tilling of the soil; houses would be scattered about, four to a section, in the Canadian fashion. If any Doukhobor continued to live in the villages, his land patents would be extinguished. James Mavor was one ol the few who protested this violent attempt at assimilation. But the Canadian public didn't care. Verigin had seen it coming, and Verigin had no intention of submerging his people's religion and lifestyle in an ocean of Canadian conformity. The short haircut. the clean-shaven face, the Western clothes had lulled the authorities into believing that the Doukhobor leader was just like everybody else. He was a far more complicated, determined, and farsighted man than outward appearances suggested. Already he had secured a massive war chest by sending male members of his flock out to earn money working on the railways. With these funds he determined to buy other lands, privately, in another province -in the Kootenay district of British Columbia -and start all over again. For the first and only time a substantial immigrant body rejected the Canadian dream en bloc and turned its back on the promised land. It was an incredible sacrifice. Everything the Doukhobors had slaved for since 1899 was to be abandoned: the neatly ploughed fields, the well-kept villages, the stacks of hay, the lofts bursting with grain. Not everybody agreed with Verigin's decision. Two thousand independent Doukhobors, members of the Rosthern community, took the oath and settled on their individual homesteads. Another thousand in the two colonies north of Yorkton also decided to remain. The rest more than five thousand-followed their leader to the new province. Suddenly, in June 1907, a quarter of a million acres of prime farm land, abandoned by the Doukhobors, came onto the market-free homesteads for any man who could fight for a place in the queues forming at the doors of the land offices. This was not raw land. Some of these homesteads, it was said, were worth from three thousand to ten thousand dollars. And so the stage was set for the last great land rush in North America. In Yorkton and Prince Albert, the scenes of mob violence exceeded in fury any of the demonstrations of the Sons of God. Line-ups formed daily at the land offices as township after township was opened for settlement. In Yorkton over the weekend of June I and 2, men waited for forty-five hours in the cold and rain for the office to open on Monday morning at nine. The town itself was crammed with real estate speculators. Hotels were bursting, and out-of-owners paid ten cents a night to sleep in haystacks. Far more people queued up each night than there were homesteads available. In Prince Albert on Monday, June 3, one group of thirty exhausted and shivering men, bone weary after more than twenty-four hours in line, found themselves muscled from their positions by a fresher party, who crushed them so tightly that some were shoved through the glass panes of the land office. Five policemen helped restore order with fists and batons. In Yorkton, Mrs. Jessie Harper of Westbourne, a farm woman well over seventy, flung herself repeatedly at the line of men being admitted to the land office until one finally allowed her a place. It turned out she already had a farm worth ten thousand dollars. By the first week in June the police estimated that five hundred strangers, the representatives of real estate men, were in town with orders to break into the queue at any cost. Due ing one night, a group of these entrepreneurs charged the line and struggled with the Mounted Police. "Mob the police! Mob the police!" they cried until the sergeant in charge called out the fire department and turned a hose on them. Even that did not deter the determined. Still dripping wet in the wan light of dawn, they clung stubbornly to their places in the queue. In this way the reign of Peter the Lordly came to an end on the prairies, with fists and truncheons, cries and catcalls, and the jarring cacophony of human beings in collision-a stark contrast to the soft chanting of the choir of maidens, now only an echo in the empty villages scattered along the verdant valleys of Saskatchewan. Chapter Four Isaac Barr's Lambs Barr's dream Quite a hustler Stormy passage Indignation meetings Trekking to Britannia Barr's ItisthelastHarof March, 1903, just heforenine in the morningandue dream are standing at the Liverpool dot kside in the midst of a jostling c rou d, hatching the spring. sun dappling the uater.s. Out in the harbour, u aitingf r the tide, is the Beaver Line's Lake Manitoba, a Boer War troopship, built to hold seven hundred souls hut non c bartered h v the Reverend I.M. Barr to convey 1,960 British eH, U'On?en, and children "the f70u er of England, " to quote a loca paper to Canada. There must be at least five thousand people here on the landing clock, all bidding one another goodb r e. Great lorries arrive by the minute, loaded u ith luggage labelled "Saint John, N. B. " Grandmothers are crating and praising, for ther realize ther' malt never see their families again. Ilandkerchiefs flutter, children sniffle, dogs destined for the passage sc uffie and u hine. Wholefamilies arrive by carriage to the cheers of Jriends and strangers, toting baskets of food, shotguns, umbrellas, bircis in c ages. The hand of the King's (Liverpool) Regiment, resplendent in scarlet and gold, strikes up a military air. The c rush on the landing stage hecome.s unbearable. What a croud this is-a cross-section of the British Isles (one hundred from Scotland another hundred from Ireland); men from the coal pits, cotton mills, stores and offices; fifty clerg~men's sons, five offspring of one Irish peer, families from John a' Groats to the To eed, Boer War veterans; butchers and bakers and even a fen farmers although these are in the minority -all turning their backs on Merrie England to start again in an unknou n land. Scores are dressed for the neu uar id or Jor their romantic vision of it in riding breeches, puttees, and broad-brimmed Stetsons, u ith hou ie knives at their hips and pistols at their belts. They are off to the great North West, the domain of the Red Indians, u here ther u ill hecomegentlemenfarmers, living the countrified life. The Reverend Mr. Barr has assured them that their neighbours u ill be others like themselves: no so eats Slars, German dirt farmers, or grubbing Yankees in the all-British colony nest of Batt/eford-on/~'proper Britons. At last the little black-and-uhite tug pushes the liner toward the dock. Great heaps of baggage bearing brightly coloured Beaver Line labels are hoisted aboard. The tide u an's for no nan; there is no time f or slings. Trunks and ho res are hauled onto the deck b r hawsers, and iJsome break open, .sl~illing their < Intents ins) the sea, that its to) had. NOH theganguav its loHerecl. THO thousand sours rush to~rarcls it, eager to start for the land of promise. For a Jest n?inute.s the rush around us is stifling. Then the hand strikes up "Auld Lang Svne" and " Till We Meet Again. " Up goethe gangirar, and the ship n?o\'es out into the harbour stern Jirst. The clock he ones a sea of ~vavi/?g handkerchiefs. We rush H ith the others ton and the prose of the Vessel to shout our last goodhres. With this n?ove/??ent forts arcl, the Lake Manitoba fur lies alarn?ingl ~ The < apt ai r oars out to the mate: "Get these people topside!" The long, irritating voyage has begun. We have all encountered men like the Reverend Isaac Montgomery Barr: dedicated enthusiasts with a missionary's zeal likeable, earnest, utterly believable. Their credentials seem impeccable, their dreams and visions bold, imaginative, convincing, their enthusiasms infectious. We warm to them, for these are selfless men, disinterested in personal gain, willing to give their all in the interests of the Great Plan. We defend them against their critics and place ourselves with total trust in their hands. Only later does it begin to dawn on us that they are not what they seem, that their dreams are gossamer, their plans impractical, their promises unfulfillable, their abilities wanting, their organisation hollow, their dedication suspect. They are charlatans, though they do not know it and cannot admit it, confidence men who have conned themselves. They are the Kings of the Gullible. In the end, the scales fall from the eyes of their followers; but they never fall from their own. They continue on through life, leaping from project to project, convinced after each collapse that they have been sabotaged by sinister forces not of their making. But they themselves are the saboteurs; and the innocent and the naive suffer for it. Such a one was the Reverend Mr. Barr, who arrived in England from North America in January, 1902, after a career that can only be described as cheque red A son ol the rectory, raised in Hornby, Ontario, he had in his early years served as a Church of England priest in a series of posts -but seldom for long. At both Woodstock and Exeter, Ontario, when he argued over the size of his salary, his parishioners made no real effort to seek his retention. His contract as minister to an Indian reserve at Brantford was terminated for the same reasons. In 1875, he accepted an appointment as missionary in Prince Albert but abandoned that charge after a few weeks on the excuse that his wife and son were both ailing-a defection that irritated the Bishop of Rupert's Land. Back in Ontario, at Teeswater he lost his job after denying the doctrine at the fall of man. He recanted, tried again to get a job in the North West Territories, but did not succeed. The next two decades were spent in the United States, where he held half a dozen posts, the last being in Whatcom County, Washington State. At this point he had been, by his own account, married and divorced three times, a fact that he apparently had been able to hide from the church. Barr was fifty-three when he arrived in London. His son had died of enteric fever while serving in South Africa, and the senior Barr had "a strong desire to take up my abode again under the old flag which I love so well." He had come to England to arrange for transportation of potential emigrants from Washington State who wanted to become farmers in South Africa after the Boer War ended. The Colonial Of flee was cool to that scheme, and Barr abandoned it. Instead he applied for a job as Canadian immigration agent in Washington, having "had some successful experience in locating people on land and have for years taken a deep interest in immigration and colonisation." These vague credentials did not commend him to William White, the inspector of emigration from the United States, who met Barr in London; nothing more came of it. Instead, Barr embarked on a scheme of his own: the establishment of an all-British colony of emigrants from the Old Country somewhere in the North West Territories of Canada. Barr had all but abandoned the church, but he received a licence to preach during the summer at St. Saviour's, London, and so was able to wear his clerical collar, a considerable asset, since it put the odour of sanctity on his project. He was a short, thickset man, with a broad moustache and plump, inland features. Although he was blessed with the voice of a bull he could, on first encounter, be soft spoken, courteous, and convincing. As one of his future colonists put it, "You could not help but trust him." But there were serious flaws: a lack of any sense of humour, an inability to accept criticism, a quick Irish temper, an autocratic bent. He was not able to delegate authority, and he had a tendency to gloss over unpalatable truths. Yet he had an imaginative mind, and he certainly had a way with words. Barr was intoxicated by words, and he knew how to use them to the best advantage. As far as he was concerned, once a plan took shape on paper it was half way to completion. As he scribbled away that spring and summer of 1902, churning out articles for no fewer than thirty-two publications, the grandiose scheme of an all-British colony in the Canadian West began to balloon in his mind. What a coup it would be! To place hundreds, even thousands of stout British yeomen and tradespeople, the finest stock in the world, in a colony all their own! No foreigners-no Slavs or Germans or Swedes, and certainly no Americans -would be allowed to creep in. This would be an Imperial undertaking. Barr had already built a town in his head, complete with shops, churches, schools, and post office grouped around a central park, with the homesteads of the settlers encircling it for miles. His enthusiasm was infectious. By August, having received two hundred written inquiries and one hundred personal calls, he was ready to produce a small pamphlet outlining his scheme. Building materials would be cheap because they could be purchased wholesale and in quantity. Horses, oxen, cows, implements, and seeds would all be arranged for in advance and available at the new colony for purchase. There might even be co-operative ownership of property and animals. And yes! There would be openings for tradesmen and teachers in the new settlement. Barr's hyperbole flowered like the daisies of summer. "Agriculture on the prairies is simple," he wrote enthusiastically, "the work not very hard...." He would welcome inquiries: prospective emigrants could write to him or even turn up on his London doorstep in person. He would be home Monday and Wednesday mornings and Saturday afternoons and evenings. If he could get some kind oi official sanction for his scheme the all-British colony would be well on its way. He shot off a draft of the pamphlet to the Canadian immigration office in London, asking for approval and also for a year's contract "at a very moderate salary" as well as an office, expenses, and free transportation to Canada to choose a site for the proposed venture. Most of those who had called him, he claimed, were either practical farmers or the sons of farmers. That was scarcely true, as events were to prove; as for his statement "I know the North well having labored as a missionary at Prince Albert in the North Saskatchewan in 1874," that was totally misleading. CF. Just, the deputy commissioner, could not give Barr what he wanted; that was up to his boss, W.T. R. Preston, who was that month in Canada. But Just thought there would be no difficulty getting free transportation from the Beaver Line and the CPR for Barr to visit Canada. In fact, Just was charmed and impressed by Barr. He wrote to Preston that he found him "a masterful kind of man" .. . "quite a 'hustler"' .. . "evidently a very capable fellow." Barr didn't waste a minute. In September, he produced a second, longer pamphlet, which suggested that he was a man with wide farming experience in the Canadian North West and that he had something resembling an official seal of approval from the Canadian Immigration Department: "Modesty suggests that I should not say anything of myself, but it seems necessary that I should.... First, then, before taking action I conferred with the Canadian Emigration Commissioner here in England, and I keep in constant touch with the Emigration Of Ece, although this is a perfectly independent movement. I was born on a large farm in Canada, and learned all branches of agriculture. With me, farming has always been an enthusiasm-l might also say a passion, and I have farmed both in Canada and the United States. I have been interested in Colonization for many years, have done some fairly good work as a colonizer, and am now anxious to build up my native Land, and keep it as much as possible in the hands of people of British birth...." Nobody in the government bothered to check into Barr's background. No one took the trouble to find out how much time this particular clergyman had spent in the North West. No one bothered to investigate his background as a coloniser. No one looked over the list of applicants for the all-13ri tish colony to see how many were bona fide farmers. No one really ~" anted to know. The British took Barr at his face value; how could a cleric of the Established Church treat them dishonestly? As for Preston and Sifton's deputy, James Smart, awaiting the promoter's arrival in Ottawa with Just's enthusiastic recommendations in their hands, Barr provided a heaven-sent opportunity for Clifford Sifton to get the Liberals out from under the blanket of criticism directed at them for bringing in the Galicians and the Doukhobors. The opposition papers had been in full cry, demanding to know why impecunious Slavs were being imported instead of well-to-do British farmers. It did no good to explain that well-to-do British farmers were perfectly content where they were and that, for the most part, the British who did want to emigrate were artisans, office-workers, and slum dwellers, city people unfit for the rig ours of the Canadian prairie. Now here was an imaginative man-a Canadian and a man of the cloth -prepared to bringin thousands of Britons, "very generally men of sufficient means," as he put it, men who would not be a burden on the country and who would not water down Canada's sacred Anglo Saxon heritage. Events began to take on a velocity of their own. Buoyed up by enthusiastic press comments and an equally enthusiastic response to his pamphlets, Barr was planning to leave for Canada on September 30 (both the Beaver Line and the CPR had come through, as Just predicted). Now, a few days before his departure, he was joined by another enthusiast-a man who could handle the details of his plan during his absence from Britain. This was the Reverend George Exton Lloyd, a tall, cadaverous Church of England cleric who knew a good deal more about the Canadian North West than Barr and who had just returned to England after an absence of two decades. One of the "muscular Christians" so typical of the late Victorian era, Lloyd rejoiced in a background romantic enough to entice the most phlegmatic Briton to the new country. A born Londoner, Lloyd had gone out to Canada at the age of twenty, a zealous young missionary dazzled by the example of the great David Anderson, first Bishop of Rupert's Land, whose son was vi caring Lloyd's London parish. Lloyd spent his first years in a poverty stricken backwoods Ontario community. In 1885, while a divinity student at Wycliffe College, Toronto, he rushed to the colours the instant the Saskatchewan rebellion broke out. At the Battle of Cut Knife Hill, with his last cartridge expended and a bullet piercing his side, Lloyd and a fellow Wycliffian* were saved by a last-minute rescue from certain death at the hands of Poundmaker's Crees. This episode brought Lloyd the chaplaincy of the Queen's Own Rifles and later a position as minister at St. George's Anglican Church, Winnipeg. In 1891 he founded a boys' school near Saint John, N.B. Now, at the age of forty-one, he was back in his native London as assistant secretary to the Colonial and Continental Church Society. Like Isaac Barr, George Exton Lloyd was a dreamer with Imperialist stars in his eyes. He believed implicitly in the rightness of the Imperial cause, whatever that cause might be (even when it involved killing Hoers, Metis, or Matabele), just as he believed in the evils of alcohol or the revealed truth of the Gospels. Upright, tenacious, relatively humourless but dedicated, he vitas a born leader, a good if dictatorial organizer, and, as it developed, an impractical businessman. He could and did inspire great affection, a quality Barr lacked; he could also drive people to paroxysms of frustration. Lloyd's companion, Edward Campion Acheson, later became Bishop of Connecticut and fathered Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's Secretary of State. A confirmed jingoist, Lloyd had penned several letters to the press, decrying the mongrelisation of the Canadian West. To The Tickles he wrote: "Might not the English newspapers do more than they are now doing to keep the magnificent area of wheat land in Western Canada thoroughly British by encouraging the emigration of English people to their own territories? .. It grieved me to see what is now a fine British province being settled so largely by Americans and foreigners. I am not a capitalist, or I would take a few thousand of good British blood to settle upon these fine farming lands I mean take some of those who are now treading on each other's heels in the old country, scrambling for a living. But why do they not go on their own account? Are they afraid they would be going from civilisation to barbarism in a wild unknown land?" Lloyd had struck a nerve. When he offered to answer any questions that prospective emigrants might have, he was not prepared for the deluge of letters that swamped him. At this point Britain was overcrowded. With the end of the Boer War thousands of veterans had returned home, seeking new horizons. The Victorian Age had reached its zenith, and the urge to bring British ideals to the untamed corners of the globe was inherent in every Englishman. In London, jobs were scarce; firms were failing; vacancies had to be made for sons coming into family businesses; but fewer and fewer vacancies existed. And with trade decreasing, labour was cheap, wages low. It was not the farmers who looked across the Atlantic but the huddled masses in Shelley's "populous and smoky" cities, who yearned for a return to the pastoral life of pre-industrialized Britain. In the open spaces of Canada, surely, that dream could come true; or so they wanted to believe. Charles Tweedale, one of those who responded to Barr's siren call, wrote that "most of us pictured our homesteads as picturesque parkland wit h grassy, gently-rolling slopes interspersed by clumps of trees, a sparkling stream or possibly a silvery lake thrown in, the whole estate alive with game of all kinds." But the Canadian North West was not the Cotswolds. Unable to reply to the flood of mail personally, Lloyd contrived a circular letter answering the forty-two questions most frequently asked and had it printed and mailed to correspondents. A few days later Barr knocked on his door, and the two joined forces. Lloyd and a secretary manned the small office that Barr had set up and began to take applications for the Britannia Colony. Barr himself left on September 30 for Canada. No one could argue with C. F. Just's description of Isaac Barr as "quite Quite a hustler." He had produced his first pamphlet in mid-August and a hustler rushed out his second in mid-September. By early October he was in Ottawa and by the end of that month he was one hundred miles west of Battleford selecting homesteads for his prospective colony. He was back in Ottawa in mid-November and after a fortnight's discussions with Sifton's staff returned to England in time to produce a third, more detailed, pamphlet before Christmas. It was his intention to bring out a shipload of settlers in early March not much more than a year after his original arrival in Great Britain. James Smart was impressed by Barr and agreed to hold the odd numbered homesteads in eight townships until February or later if Barr sent him a list of prospective emigrants with fees for their homestead registrations. Barr had also persuaded the CPR to reserve additional even-numbered homesteads in the same area for sale to the British. Smart, after meeting Barr, felt that "he is most enthusiastic and is also very clever and I am inclined to think that he probably stands a good chance of making a success of his work." Smart, the civil servant's civil servant, never tote fly committed himself to anything. He was invariably "inclined" to an idea, and he sprinkled his correspondence with "probablys." Others were less enthusiastic. W.J. White, then Acting Superintendent of Immigration, didn't think Barr would be successful. Barr's "propaganda has assumed such a magnitude and the many schemes he has in connection with it are so great and multifarious, I am afraid very little will come of it." Seymour Gourley, a Tory MP." who encountered Barr at the Russell House in Ottawa, dismissed him as a "sharper." T.G. Pearce, a successful colonization entrepreneur who had brought out three trainloads of immigrants to the North West in 1892, read about Barr's scheme and thought him inexperienced. After some correspondence with Barr in which he tried to offer suggestions, he came to the conclusion that Barr was an impractical man who didn't like criticism. In spite ol Smart's controlled enthusiasm, the government remained cautious It would not employ Barr, give him any expenses, or set him up in an office. But the press on both sides of the Atlantic had been captured by Barr's eloquence. The government was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Smart himself became nervous at the speed with which Barr was moving in London. T he reverend gentleman was actually talking about bringing his people out early in March! Pearce, the colonizer, had pointed out that when he had brought people to Alberta in April the weather was so bad the women and children all came down with flu. March was a month of storms, the worst possible time to impress prospective settlers. Smart was dismayed. The vision of the Doukhobors'disastrous wintertime arrival was still etched on his memory. He rushed a letter off to l'reston, who was back in charge in London, urging him to delay the departure of the colonists to May or June. Preston tried to reason with Barr. The clergyman, who disliked anybody tampering with his plans, grudgingly agreed to postpone the sailing date, but only until the end of March. Barr had moved so quickly that the government, even if it wanted to, couldn't wash its hands of him. He had arrived in Canada at the height of the Doukhobor troubles, a propitious moment for him. With the Conservatives demanding more Anglo-Celtic immigrants and fewer Slavic paupers, his enthusiastic interviews with the press were exactly what the Liberals needed. To have cut him off would have invited a public outcry. White, however, was right. Barr had let his fancy run away with him. In his new pamphlet, he proposed a variety of ancillary enterprises: a "Stores Syndicate," which would operate retail outlets at the colony; a hospital syndicate, which would look after the community's health; a transportation syndicate, which would convey the colonists and their effects comfortably from the railhead to the site. Was Barr in it for the money? "I am not on the make," he declared. Certainly profit was secondary to the Grand Scheme. On the other hand, he did not view the enterprise as philanthropic. He got $1.50 a colonist from the steamship company and commissions also from the CPR for the sale of railway lands, which the company agreed to withhold from the market unt it the scheme was under way. He also planned a five-dollar charge on homesteads for those prospective settlers who could not come out with the first grou ? but who wanted land reserved for themselves. Under the Homestead Act, that was illegal. In England, enthusiasm was building as a result of Barr's newest and longest pamphlet, which described his journey to Canada, outlined the areas reserved for the Britannia Colony, and explained that "those who wish to join us must decide at once and deposit passage money." Much of what Barr wrote was sensible and accurate. Some of it, however, was misleading. He managed to give the impression that fruit trees -apple and plum would grow easily in northern Saskatchewan; that the Canadian Northern Railway would reach the settlement "within a few months"; that timber was easily available because it could be rafted down river from Edmonton; that a good road existed between the railhead and the colony. These were wild exaggerations. Barr fudged on distances, intimating that a factory for producing sugar from beets was close by when it was actually three hundred miles from the settlement. He agreed that it was "sometimes very cold" but made much of the "invigorating and enjoyable climate" (as, indeed, the government itself did) and the "dry and highly exhilarating atmosphere." He did not say how long the winters were, nor did he give any details on the kind of sod, log, or frame houses the newcomers would have to build. He promised that "at Saskatoon there will be provided horses, waggons, harness and provisions for the j gurney, also coverings for the waggons, camp stools and other necessary things" and that for the women and children there would be a covered-wagon stage service all the way to Battleford, "where they would be suitably housed and cared for until the men could establish homesteads." These were paper promises, but they were believed. It was not possible, in England's green and pleasant land, to conceive of a country where a road was nothing more than a rut, a village a huddle of shacks, and a homestead a vast expanse of unbroken turf stretching off to the horizon. Englishmen were knowledgeable enough about settled Canada: cities like Halifax and Saint John, Montreal and Toronto even Vancouver were not unfamiliar. These had streetcars, six-storey brick buildings, banks with marble pillars, theatres, even opera houses. Had not Jenny Lind sung in Toronto? Was not Madame Albani a Canadian? Thousands of Britons knew of Canada from relatives or friends, or knew of somebody who had a relative or friend in Ontario, (Quebec, or the Maritime Provinces. The CIR with its palace cars and its burgeoning string of chateau-style hotels was advertised throughout the country. And Winnipeg! Traveller after traveller wrote of its miraculous growth, of its electric railway, its brick buildings, its block pavement. Winnipeg was the West, wasn't it? Few Britons realized that after Winnipeg, civilisation came to a stop; that Canada was split in twain, one half sophisticated, the other as wild and empty as the veldt In a country where it was rarely possible to travel without seeing a cluster of homes, it was difficult to imagine a realm where one's nearest neighbour was a quarter of a mile away. Who in crowded England could conceive of the vast distances west of Winnipeg? No map could convey the emptiness, the loneliness, the desolation. To most of Barr's prospects, the Britannia Colony was just around the corner from the nearest metropolis. By the end of January, Barr's scheme had, in his words, reached "immense proportions." He could, he told Preston, bring out as many as six thousand settlers in March, but since he couldn't handle that number he was closing off the movement. He would have some two thousand members for the colony; only the previous fall he had contemplated no more than a few hundred. But by this time Preston, too, was disillusioned with Barr; he no longer believed the clergyman had the qualifications to carry through an undertaking of such proportions. In Canada enthusiasm was snowballing to the point where Clifford Sifton realized he would have to step in and take hold to prevent a catastrophe. Smart was in London in February, still inclined to believe the Barr plan was likely to be a huge success. The pragmatic Sifton was less easily impressed. Barr had sent advance agents from England to the West with instructions to scout out supplies but with no money or authority to buy anything. Several Englishmen, members of the socalled Stores Syndicate, arrived in Winnipeg with grandiose plans to start businesses in the new colony but with scant funds. None had experience, and the leader, in the assessment of Obed Smith, the Commissioner of Immigration at Winnipeg, didn't appear "to be a practical man in any respect." It was quite evident, Smith reported, "that this Stores Syndicate is non est." That was March 10, two weeks before the Barr party was due to leave for Canada. Meanwhile, Charles May, Barr's advance agent, who had been sent to Battleford ostensibly to buy supplies, turned up in Winnipeg and revealed that he had no money to purchase anything. Barr cancelled May's authority and turned the responsibility over to W.S. Bromhead, who sailed from England, arriving in Winnipeg on March 18, to find that he, too, had had his authority cancelled. By March 19, he had been replaced by a third agent, John Robbins, another Church of England clergyman, who had, however, not yet reached Canada. As far as Smith could figure out, Barr up to this point hadn't spent a dollarin Canada. Sifton's frustration with his deputy in London can be seen in the cables he fired off, day alter day, to Smart: March 14: ".. . see Barr and bring him to his senses"; loo curs later: "Barr evidently misleading you." Finally, on March 18, a desperate cable came from Smith in Winnipeg: "Those out here must act now regardless of him. Time too limited for further delay." The sailing date was just one week away. Sifton now did take personal charge. He wanted two top farm instructors on hand to teach the newcomers practical agriculture. None but "absolutely first class men" would do, and he was prepared to pay top wages of one hundred dollars a month. He wanted at least three land guides on hand to help the newcomers locate their homesteads. He had no faith in Barr's arrangements. Wcs Speers would go immediately to Saskatoon to see that marquees, firewood, and fodder were spaced at regular intervals along the trail that led from Saskatoon to Battleford and on to the colony. Smart, meanwhile, had been vainly trying to push back the sailing date. Getting nowhere with Barr, he wrote to Sir Alfred Jones of the Elder-Dempster shipping company, owners of the Beaver Line, and urged a fortnight's delay. Sir Alfred met him half way. "Slight repairs," he revealed, would justify a delay until perhaps April 1. An angry Barr, who was bombarding his clients with circulars, sent out a special one explaining the delay was not of his making. But, in spite of all these difficulties, Barr's enthusiasm had not lessened. On March 21, in an interview with The Tinges, he managed to give the impression that all of his projects were thriving. Nor could he leave it at that: "Lumber yards, creameries, mills, grain elevators, schools, post office, a newspaper .. . will be established without delay." It was enough for Barr to say something would be done to make it an accomplished fact in his own mind. The truth, as reported by Obed Smith from Winnipeg, was bleaker. The Indians could not furnish lumber for the colony until mid-May, when it would be too late. The Battleford contractor charged with providing portable sawmills had refused to do so because Barr's plans were so indefinite. Barr's agent, Robbins, with his limited funds, was making purchases "which were altogether inexcusable from a business point of view." There was no provision for hay or oats at the settlement. And finally the last straw Barr's brother, Jack, who had gone to Calgary to buy two carloads of broncos for the so-called transport service, discovered that one carload had suffocated to death in transit. Yet even as his house of cards was collapsing in Canada, Barr and two thousand British colonists v. ere on the high seas heading for Saint John. Somehow this idealistic if incompetent clergyman had managed to pull off a coup. I le had slithered around the cautious Canadian bureaucrats, bedazzled two thousand generally unromantic Britishers with his wild vision, shocked the Canadian government into precipitate action, and bamboozled everybody into taking part in an adventure whose outcome was uncertain and, for some, would be horrific. Storing! A young Belfast Irishman stood at the deck rail of the Lake Manitoba passage with three newfound Irish friends, looking down at the waving crowd and, as the ship inched out into the harbour, thinking of the remarkable chain of events that had changed his life. Ivan Crossley was one of "Barr's lambs," as the colonists would soon call themselves. He was just eighteen years old but not without experience, for he had spent the previous year working on a fruit farm in Florida. Back in Belfast in January he had been kicking up his heels, wondering what to do with himself, thirsting for adventure, planning to seek his fortune somewhere in the Empire South Africa, perhaps, or Australia. And then his mother had received a letter from a relative in England, and a pamphlet had dropped out of the envelope describing the wonders of the Canadian West. So Ivan Crossley had written to Isaac Barr and received an enthusiastic letter by return mail and sent in his ten dollars and got his receipt, and here he was with the ship's horn blasting and the band playing "Auld Lang Sync" and the people on the dock waving goodbye with tears in their eyes. Just twenty-four hours before, he remembered with a pang, he had been part of a similar scene before boarding the channel steamer at Belfast, his mother praying and crying and singing "God Be with You Till We Meet Again." But they would not meet again, though Ivan Crossley could not know that at the time. He had said goodbye to her forever. Farther along the crowded ship's rail, young Robert Holtby felt a lump in his throat as he too realized that he and his family were bidding goodbye to Leeds and that, in all probability, he would not see his school friends again. The thought was too much for him; he could not bear the spectacle, and so turned away and made his way down to one of the holds. When dinner came, the food was so awful he forgot one misery and replaced it with another. The Lake Manituba was a reconverted troopship from the South African war. According to the British Board of Trade, it was supposed to carry seven hundred passengers, but there were close to two thousand crowded on board. The steerage passengers were divided into sections, each with its own cook: single men in one hold, married couples in others. The more affluent travelled in second-class cabins. There was no first class. Paul Sylvester Hordern, the thirteen-year-old son of a dry goods merchant from Coalville, Leicestershire, scrambled about with his father looking for their bunks. They finally found themselves in the forward hold with seven hundred others. At first sight, as they made their way downward, the setting seemed shipshape, the walls painted gleaming white. Only later, when the big waves hit and the whitewash peeled off the walls, revealing a layer of manure, did the Horderns realize this had been a cavalry ship. The holds, dark, smoky, and fetid, had two or three tiers of bunks. A second-class passenger, Stanley Rackham, a younger brother of the famous English illustrator Arthur Rackham, visited one of the holds to locate his vast array of luggage he was travelling with 350 pounds -and thanked his Maker he didn't have to spend much time below. Rackham had crossed the Atlantic before on an earlier trip to Canada. What would it be like, he thought, when the weather grew rough and the people crammed into these bunks grew seasick? He shuddered to think of it and decided never to go below again. Almost everybody was seasick. Paul Hordern was overcome so suddenly in his upper bunk that he didn't have time to shout a warning below. Fortunately somebody across the way shouted, "Duck!" and the man below jumped aside, reproaching Hordern. "Why the devil didn't you holler?" he asked. "How can I with my mouth full?" Hordern replied. There was a six-inch layer of sawdust below his bed to handle such emergencies. Robert Holtby was so sick he wished somebody would come along and pitch him overboard. When, after a few days, he recovered enough to swallow solid food, he found he could not face eating in the hold, with its smell of soup, potatoes, and sour sawdust and with a foot and a half of bilge water slopping back and forth. He shovelled some food into a plate and went up on deck where he found a hundred people like himself, sniffing the salt air and trying to balance their plates on their knees. And here, when the weather was fine, they could hear the strains of a portable organ and youthful voices piping familiar hymns. Choirbovs? A close approximation, certainly. For here was Miss Laura Sisley, a banker's daughter from London, and her charges, a dozen underprivileged boys from the church club she ran in the inner city. She had come into a small fortune on her father's death and was using the funds to bring them all out to the new land, where she hoped to settle them together in their own community near the Barr reserve. Miss Sisley's organ was a welcome diversion from the sombre side of shipboard life. For now, during this voyage, the disillusionment with Barr began. He was the least diplomatic of men, and by the time the ship reached Saint John he had managed to antagonize a good percentage of the passengers, especially those in steerage. One of these, Harry Pick, may have been exaggerating when he wrote that "it speaks well for British love of law and order to record that only eleven fights, seven incipient mutinies, three riots and twenty-two violent interviews with Barr .. . occurred during the voyage"; nonetheless, it was a stormy passage. Much of it was Barr's own fault. He had painted the rosiest possible picture; now, faced with reality, his flock turned on him. He did not mix with the passengers as Lloyd did but kept to himself in his cabin. Lloyd gave regular lectures on Canada, complete with question and answer sessions. In his dealings with scores of complaints from passengers he was tactful, clear, and forthright. More and more, as the voyage progressed, they turned to him as their natural leader. It was Lloyd that most of them had seen in London, not Barr. The latter seemed to have an aversion to contact with strangers. They made an odd pair, the squat, heavy-set Barr and the reed-thin Lloyd with his cadaverous features and his long side-whiskers. Lloyd was leaving England forever. With his wife and five children he would make his home in the new colony that would one day bear his name. When Barr did meet with the colonists he often lost his temper. Once, in a fury, he fled to the bridge and threatened to turn a firebase on the malcontents. No sea voyage in those days was a pleasant experience, but this vessel was so badly overcrowded that whole groups of families were squeezed together below decks, with little privacy. There were far more passengers than the lifeboats could accommodate, and there was not nearly enough fresh water. The colonists were forced to get along on partially distilled salt water, so brackish it ruined the tea. The food in steerage was dreadful; but then it always was-the British colonists probably fared better than the Galicians. The difference was that they were not used to it. The potatoes were rotten, the meat tough, the cutlery dirty. There was no butter and no bread, only ship's biscuit. In Ivan Crossley's words, "We didn't die but we damned near starved to death." Crossley and his Irish comrades sat at a long table in steerage; when the steward arrived with a basket of hard-boiled eggs he would roll them down the table, the diners grabbing at them as they whirled by. Many of the stewards who had signed on for the voyage quit before the ship sailed when they heard the Lahe Manitoba was carrying immigrants. Barr was forced to hire replacements from among the passengers, but not before some ugly scenes occurred. Lloyd was called to one dining room to settle a fracas between a group of Boer War veterans and a covey of stewards. One of the ex-soldiers had thrown a pot of jam at a diminutive red-faced waiter, and the two were spoiling for a fight. "Sure, I threw the jam tin at him," the veteran barked.... "What, a little fellow like that ?" said Lloyd mildly. "You might at least help him to scrape the jam off." Without further ado, the soldier complied and the two shook hands. Barr was the kind of man who always ran from trouble. Driven half crazy by passenger complaints, he shut himself up in his cabin and refused to see anybody. Ivan Crossley and a group of friends went to his cabin and demanded that he come to the dining room to see how bad the food was. Barr agreed, and that night in the hold he stood up on a wooden box and tried to explain that he was doing his best to improve both the meals and the conditions aboard ship. At that point somebody threw a ship's biscuit at him. It was three inches thick and the size of a saucer, and it hit Barr squarely on the nose, knocking him from his box and touching off a melee. When the ship's crew finally rescued the hot-tempered clergyrrtan, he retired to his cabin for the rest of the voyage, crying out that his charges were nothing but a bunch of savages. The Sunday service conducted by Lloyd on April 5, when the ship was twelve hundred miles out of England, provided a contrast to the hurry-burly of the dining rooms. William Hutchison, a twenty-seven year-old colonist from Southey (preen, near Sheffield, thought it the most interesting and impressive service he had ever attended. It was held in one of the holds, with the men sitting on their cots or leaning on the rails of the bunks, smoking their pipes and listening as three violinists accompanied the hymns. Looking about him, Hutchison could not help observing the incongruous ness of the surroundings: the gun cases, coats and hats, kit bags hung on nails, boxes, trunks, bundles of rugs and bedding strewn about -an improbable setting for an impromptu evensong. Few of these men were farmers, in spite of what Barr had told the Canadian government. But then one of Barr's problems was that he was inclined to tell people what they wanted to hear. That flaw lay behind the hyperbole in his pamphlets and the rosy interviews he continued to give to the press. Those few colonists with farming experience were surrounded by a knot of men eager to learn the fundamentals of agriculture. As one remembered: "Very few had the remotest conception of what conditions actually were or what difficulties would have to be overcome, but trusted blindly to our leader and all his promises...." During the voyage Barr urged his people to pick out their homesteads, sight unseen, from a large map. It would, he said, save time and confusion, and besides, the terrain was so uniform it didn't matter where they settled: every quarter-section was like every other one. This was a bald lie. When one man, a stonemason, asked for a homestead with "enough rocks on it to build a house," Barr cheerfully agreed. "I've got just the thing i or you," he said, marking out a quarter-section on the map. But Barr had earlier told Lloyd that "not a stone would be found in the new colony that was bigger than a walnut," a remark that Lloyd had reason, later, to curse. The Lake Manitoba reached Saint John harbour on April 10, 1903. To the passengers' dismay it could not dock, for this was Good Friday, a sacrosanct holy day. That was not Barr's fault; he had made it clear that the delay in sailing was the Beaver Line's doing. Now a group got together and raised a purse of three hundred dollars to buy Lloyd a buggy and two ponies, but for Barr there was no gift. The passengers' tempers flared when it was learned that Barr had had eight thousand loaves of bread baked and intended to sell them at double the going price. "The old rogue is trying to make some money out of us," Robert Holtby wrote in his diary. On Saturday the distraught immigrants found they faced days of waiting while customs officers inspected a mountain of luggage. And what luggage! Few had conceived of a country where vans and lorries did not shuttle back and forth between communities. Barr had promised a transport service; Barr's lambs took him at his word and brought their worldly goods to C'anada; one colonist brought a ton of baggage. There were at least half a dozen pianos, heaps of furniture, cases of books. There were bathtubs, jewellery, banjos, bicycles, gramophones, sewing machines. There were vast wardrobes of clothes, including formal wear. There were parrots and canaries in cages, and, these immigrants being English, welH,ver a hundred dogs, all tied up on the afterdeck and howling to be exercised. At this juncture, Barr vanished; he simply couldn't take the responsibility. Lloyd went directly to the CPR, which was as eager as anyone to get the trains moving, and managed to have the customs inspection waived. The ship docked at 5 ann. on Easter Sunday. At nine the first of four trains left for the West. It was not possible to sort out the luggage. Piles of boxes and trunks jammed the freight shed to the point where the owners could not squeeze between them. Everything was trundled onto the baggage cars to be identified later at Saskatoon; that included the blankets the passengers had brought. A pile of blankets purchased for sale by the Stores Syndicate, however, was on the dock. Lloyd proceeded to dole these out to his shivering charges, keeping a careful record of those distributed. Just before the last train left, at midnight, Barr turned up, apparently drunk, and got into a screaming altercation with his partner, implying that Lloyd was stealing the blankets. He even tried to sell some at four dollars apiece but in his fuddled state had difficulty counting the money. Ivan Crossley watched in amusement as Barr tried ineffectually to make change. When Barr gave him back two dollars too much, Crossley returned it. "You're the first honest man I've seen in the community," Barr told him. Typically, Barr did not travel with his charges but left for Saskatoon on the regular CPR train. The two Horderns, father and son, refused to buy Barr's bread and stocked up instead at local grocery stores, having learned that food was difficult to get aboard the trains. They bought cheese, beans, and canned goods, which they ate cold because the one small stove on each of the crowded colonist cars was in constant use by women brewing tea. The train swayed so badly one night that young Paul, in the top bunk, was thrown directly across the passageway onto two sleeping colonists. "Where did you come from?" one asked. "Leicester," said Paul Hordern sleepily. For once the newspapers, whose reporters greeted the trains at every major stop, had no reservations about the new arrivals. The Americans, still burning with the idealism of the revolution, might make a virtue of welcoming the huddled masses and downtrodden of Europe, but Canadians preferred their own kind. The ott aHa Citizen, so vicious in its condemnation of the Galicians and Doukhobors, was delighted that everyone spoke English. The Glohe found them "a splendid class," the Winnipeg Tribune "a fine looking lot, above the average." To the Manitoba Free Press they were "strong, manly, clean, well dressed, intelligent." The Toronto Nens pulled out all stops in describing the women of the party: "Rosy-checked English farmers' help, sinewy and graceful, and with a glitter of gaiety and intelligence about their eyes, they filed through into the platform yard, to carry with them into the unknown West the destiny of a nation. The hands that rock the West's cradle will be strong enough to rule the world of Canada in a few years " Sifton's people, determined that there should be no further bad publicity as a result of Barr's dereliction, watched over them like shepherds. In Winnipeg the party was astonished to discover that the immigration offices had been kept open all night to greet them and that Obed Smith was actually at work at four in the morning when one section pulled in. Here, two hundred bachelors left the trains to seek work. But in spite of the diversions the journey offered-a herd of five thousand antelope crossing the tracks and barring the passage, sportsmen potting gophers, prairie chickens, and rabbits from the train windows Barr's lambs were uneasy. Stanley Rackham, climbing back onto his car after a tram ride through the streets of Winnipeg, noted a general feeling of unrest among his countrymen. What lay ahead, after Winnipeg'." Disquieting rumours began to circulate. At Brandon during a twenty-minute stop Rackham cheered up a little after talking to an old settler who, after describing the hard times he'd had, explained that he'd come through all right and told the colonists they'd do the same if they just stuck to it. But after Portage and Brandon, the real West began to unfold. The colonists gazed out at the limitless prairie, the coarse brown grass covering the tough sod-flat, treeless, hedge less For many, this was their first inkling of the future; at last they began to comprehend the dimensions of the land of promise. Here, in this dun-coloured realm, the villages, mere clusters of log shacks or hovels of corrugated iron, were dumped down as if by chance-not perched on a hillside or nestled in a valley as in England but stark on the level plain. It was not what they had expected, but then what had they expected? Barr had never told them that the Canadian West was a replica of the English countryside; like the Canadian government's own pamphlets, his had ignored that kind of descriptive detail and discoursed instead on the promise of the future. He had let the colonists dream their own dreams, conjure up their own visions. Like all good con men, Barr had allowed them to con themselves. The bulk of the Barr contingent arrived in Saskatoon on the morning Indigof April 17, a steaming hot day with the temperature at 85 F. The nation Reverend Dr. Robbins, Barr's agent, was on the platform to greet them "meetings and to introduce them to a big, inroad-shouldered man with a weatherbeaten face and a brisk moustache. This was C.W. Speers, veteran of the previous fall's Doukhobor pilgrimage. The colonisation agent chose the occasion to indulge in a morale-building address, which Stanley Rackham thought was more than a little flowery. "I have a vision of teeming millions in the great valley to the West where you are going, and you are the forerunners," he cried in his deep voice. "You will not be disappointed. The alley contains the richest land in the Dominion and the Government has provided you with shelter here and will see you safely settled. March westward ho! There are your tents, march!" The government had not waited for Barr to supply shelter. Speers had arranged for additional bell tents and marquees-a wise precaution, because most of Barr's tents were on the baggage cars, running more than a day behind the main trains. To the newcomers, used to cosy English villages with ivy-covered cottages, Saskatoon presented an unprepossessing appearance. Young Paul Hordern was bitterly disappointed. He had heard a lot about Saskatoon from Canadians at the various station stops. "Oh, that's some town," they told him. "That's a big town!" But a big town in Canada was not like a big town in the Old Country. There wasn't even a cobblestone on the wet and muddy main street down which Hordern splashed his way. Saskatoon was scarcely a year old: another huddle of shacks with two small hotels and a few stores, "large boxes rushed up without regard to architecture or comfort," as another colonist commented. A single stone building, the Windsor Hotel, stood out incongruously. A year before, fewer than one hundred people had lived here; now the town harboured six hundred permanent residents and close to two thousand transients. T his was the West, raw and new-a few houses clustered around a grain elevator and a railway station, the core of a community no different from scores of others springing up along the line of prairie steel. But Saskatoon, like so many other Western villages, was on the verge of a boom that would see entire streets constructed in less than three weeks. Now, with tents blossoming everywhere, with cowboys, Mounted Police, Indians, and Englishmen in broad sombreros crowding its single wooden sidewalk, it took on the atmosphere of a carnival. The new arrivals had other matters on their minds. Those who had paid Barr four dollars for a tent found for the first time that they must pay an extra dollar for shipping costs from Saint John. That Saturday they held the first of a series of indignation meetings. Because Barr had not yet arrived in camp it came to nothing, and so they paid the surcharge reluctantly and scheduled a second meeting for Sunday. By then the protectors were in another frenzy about their luggage, which finally arrived, jammed into eighteen cars, with nobody to sort it out. Some was still on the train, some lay in heaps dumped alongside the tracks. The protest meeting lasted two hours while Barr, now on hand, pleaded for patience. But he made the mistake of warning the crowd that the Mounted Police would fire on any who tried to rush the baggage cars. From this point on, the wretched clergyman could do nothing right. A brief, wild rush for the baggage cars destroyed the Sunday quiet, blows were struck right and left, and goods captured and retaken, even as other colonists prepared for the morning service. We are kneeling, this hot April Sunday, among the crush of suppliants beneath the filtered sunlight in Barr's big restaurant marquee, listening to the cir one of an A nglic an service. Saskatoon has never seen anything like this. A sea of dainty hats meets our cres as the neat iv gloved Lumen in their tailored suits how their heads. Beside them, their menfolk mumble the responses, sober in broadcloth and treed uithiresh linen, white ties, and neat iv polished boots. The text of the lesson seems appropriate since it deals with the rebellion of the children of Israel against Moses. "Thou hast not brought us into a landilouing with milk and honey to kill us in the wilderness, except thou make st those j a prince offer us, " the curate reads and goes on to describe how the rebellious ones were blasted by fire and swallowed by the earth-a passage not calculated to soothe the rebellious colonists fresh from their altercation with Barr. Nou'a cheerful little man, bearded and sunburned, gives us the text for his sermon: " The u ildernesA and the soli tar r place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and bloom." This is Archdeacon Mackay, veteran of twenty theirs in the North West, u hose diocese includes all the Saskatchewan district. He welcomes his temporary congregation uares against faintheartedness c unnsels perseverance, talks of the pluck and grit needed to u rest a fortune from Saskatcheuan's sol. The service ends. On go the sombreros, fedoras, and boo lers. There is even a silk hat in evident e. Who but an Engli.shnan u ould bring a silk hat into the Testy We might be u al king out into the green and manicured English countryside rather than the yellow prairie. But this is not England. On the u est side of the tracks, one hundred acres oJ'u~hite canvas greet our eves c lose to five hundred bell tents and marquees, a flapping of flags, a labyrinth of pegs and gay ropes over which men and Lumen trip and stumble. The tents are pitched every, which uarin the elbow clothe South Saskatcheu an, a river red with mud and barred Groin access by the gigantic blocks oJ'blue ice throw n up on its banks. Sc ores are chopping au as at these bloc ks, for the v are the owl r sours e of fresh u~ater in this overt row deaf c omn?unit~: Others are struggling to erect additional cameras with more energy than craft, for man v have never seen a tent before; maHr more do not knou how to use an axe. A group of Boer War veterans helps the former, a handful of tounspeople the latter. And so this Lord's Day rolls along, the air alive with the souncis oJ'axe and hammer, of wagons creaking and oxen lousing, children c rring, men cursing dogs yapping. Then, as dusk falls, an ominous g/ou lights up the ski This is not the sunset but a prairie Jire, the /7ames leaping higher and higher as it roars ton and the c amp. Wegape and uander, for we have not imagined anything like this. Are we, too, to be immolated like the rebellious children oJ'/srael? But the old-timers reassure us: the village road will act as a firebreak. For the moment at east we will be spared the ravages of nature in the great North West. The colonists were impatient to get moving toward their new homes but Barr was not yet ready. All that week the indignation meetings continued. There was anger over the prices charged for food and equipment, although this was not entirely Barr's fault. He had no control over the merchants of Saskatoon who, hearing tales of the newcomers' enormous wealth, were determined to make a good thing out of them. Again Barr showed he could not face criticism. He tried to evade a mass meeting but was forced to attend by the indomitable Wcs Speers. Here he was assailed on all sides. Why was he now trying to charge the colonists a guinea each for the privilege of joining the party? Why was he trying to take money from late arrivals for holding their homesteads for ~hem? Why was he charging young girls ten dollars each for future homesteads? Why was he taking a commission from the leading Saskatoon merchants? Barr made little attempt to be conciliatory. He told the meeting it was nobody's business, flung out of the tent, returned to the platform, cried out that he wasn't making a cent of profit, and called one man a liar. These outbursts increased the pandemonium. Some wanted to toss Barr into the river, others to kick him out of the camp. Not all the colonists attended these meetings and not all were equally incensed with Barr. Some of the malcontents were tenderfeet, unused to rough conditions, who tended to magnify the smallest troubles and were seeking a convenient scapegoat. Barr was an easy target. It is doubtful that he made much money out of his project. On the other hand, there is more than a little evidence to show that he tried. Some of the Saskatoon merchants showed a Torontu Star reporter letters from Barr demanding a 10-per-cent commission on goods sold to the colonists. Barr himself admitted as much. Much was made of the fact that he bought up all the oats in town for 40 cents a bushel and sold them for a dollar when the going rate was only 23~/2 cents. The Calgary Herald published a comparison of Barr's charges for horses, livestock, wagons, and equipment with those in the Canadian Handbook and found Barr was getting between 20 per cent and 100 per cent more than the established rate. On the other hand, J.A. Donaghy, a student missionary with the party, thought the colonists' troubles were often of their own making, pointing out that when Barr put up a team of horses for sale, rival purchasers bid up the prices unnecessarily. Lloyd's statement the following year that Barr suffered from inordinate greed and "wanted to make a dollar out of everything he sold them" was undoubtedly coloured by Lloyd's bitter enmity toward his erstwhile partner. Barr himself made little effort to come to terms with his critics. On Thursday, 140 colonists petitioned James Clinkskill, the Member of the North West Legislative Assembly for the district, to discuss the situation. The meeting was held in the Barr restaurant tent with the government's permission, the government having supplied the tents. But Barr would have none of it. He shook his fist in Clinkskill's face, called him an "infamous scoundrel," told him that the meeting was being held for political purposes, and ordered him off the premises. The meeting broke up. Barr, Barr, wily old Barr [the colonists sang] He'll do you as much as he can. You bet he will collar Your very last dollar In the valley of the Saskatchewan In the midst of this "constant turmoil and excitement" (Speers's words), two things were being made abundantly clear to the government agent: first, that most of the colonists had no farming expertise, and second, that many did not have enough money to run a homestead. Something would have to be done or the Liberal government would end up with a political black eye. Having received no co-operation from the leader, who warned him to "kindly leave my people alone," Speers took matters into his own hands and called another meeting to determine who was destitute, who required more funds to continue, who needed work to earn more. Close to fourteen hundred people turned out. Two hundred men, Speers discovered, had less than ten pounds left apiece. He went to work immediately, setting up an employment bureau which secured jobs for 135 in Moose Jaw and 50 more in Prince Albert. He placed the remainder with local surveying parties. For the others he arranged practical talks on farming from government instructors. The major Canadian newspapers by this time had reporters in Saskatoon. The correspondents were astonished by the naivete of some of the colonists. Thus, the for onto Neu s reported: "Women who spend their time in dressing and kissing ugly little pug dogs talk of going out to earn money the first year by working in the cornfields, quite blind to the fact that there can be no' cornfields there until they sow the first crop in 1904. A pork packing factory is projected while, as a Westerner points out, there isn't a hog nearer the colony than Battleford." J.J. Dodds, a Western farmer in charge of the government horses, was scathing in his criticism. Not one man in twenty, he discovered, knew how to hitch a team; Canadian schoolboys could learn the work faster. Paul Hordern was convinced that the number of bona fide farmers could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The Horderns were preparing to quit Barr. A few days after arriving in Saskatoon they packed their goods and located on a homestead near Dundurn, south of Saskatoon. Mrs. Hr~rdern, who was handling the dry goods store back home in Coalville. sold the business in 1904and brought the rest of the family out to join her son and husband. Half a century later, when Saskatchewan celebrated its fiftieth jubilee, Paul Sylvester Hordern was still in Dundurn to join in the festivities. He died in Saskatoon in 1983 in his ninety-fifth year. But not all were as practical as these. The government and, indeed, the country were beginning to wake to the fact that Barr's rosy promises about stout English yeomen were so much eyewash. It its Tuesdar' April 21, 1903. Wcs Speers is Forking in his tent, planning his em ply omelet agent ~ u hen a shirt r -Ji v e- ~ ear old Englishman enters, obvious in distress. Behind hint c owes his u if e, slender and darker~ed, cuddling a tiny fox terrier in her arms. Speers recognizes her at once, for she has been the talk of the camp, gambolling about, caressing her dog, crooning to it as she u ould to a child She is a romantic, sees herself as a brave pioneer's u if e, a heroine helloing her husband to ultimate Jortune. Her husband is not so sanguine. He has sunk his model in Barr's stores.sr~ndicate. If he hurts a The of oxen, a wagon, and a breaking plough he will have no snore than seven pounds to his name. "I cannot live on seven pounds for a v ear and a half, " he tells Speers. " What am I going to do for food, for a house, for barns and horses?" " Wh r, hire course j out to Mr. Barr to break sod, "says Speers. "Mr. Barr says he will give you three dollars an acre for the u ork. " "But I cannot break sod, dontchaknou I never did it before." " You can learn. " "And u here u ill I live?" "Build a sod house." "What's that?" "A house of sod, built in a ravine side "I don't think I c only possibly' do it. " "Yes, you could. Go ahead and buy your oxen and take your stuff out there. Make some money c arr ving another man's goods along u ith you. " Whom shall I get to drive these oxen?" "Driveten7 rourse4!" The Engli.shn? an lo ok.s dun ?hfcJ undecl. "Ccn77e on don n ton?orro~ and u e'll pie k out ~ our cattle for lOU, " .sar.s Speers. She ~ ill he kind to the oren, the bile sars. they still be like household pets. She tt'ill feed then bread and butter. Dicl she say bread and butter? Yes, she did! A reporter for the Toronto Star ~ ho has been vied ing the sc ene scribbles the ~ orcl.s in his notebook. Speer.s suppresses a senile. Ills n?indgoes back to the afar tthen he c based a yoke of oxen up a fur ron ~ ith a cord ~ ood stir k. " You'll have enough to do to feed yourself bread and hut ted he snorts. "And He shall have sone delightful little piggies," she burbles. "l shall go out and hustle in the harvest field ~ ith my dear husband. " It is all too touch for Wcs Speers. "Go and he r those oxen and roar plough,"hesarsshortl~ "Andgo ahead if you haven't got a load of bread left. The coverunent of this country isn't going to et anvhoUv starve." In the hurry-burly of the great tent city, as each family bought its equipment and its animals and prepared for the long trek to Battleford and the Britannia Colony, a few bizarre incidents stood out. Here were a dozen women cooking for their husbands, and all wearing gloves. Here was a six-foot Englishman bathing a fox terrier in a dishpan. Here was one wretched woman, half drunk, rescued from the open prairie by the Mounted Police. rushing through the camp shrieking that Indians had been trying to abduct her. There was more: a crush of three hundred crammed into the tent post office waiting for mail; when it arrived, there were just forty-three letters.. tan Englishman spotted invading the male preserve of the local bar and calling, vainly, for an "arf en' arf". and another, struggling with an ox, striking it in a sudden fury, then begging the animal's pardon, saying he didn't mean it. By Friday the first of the colonists were ready to move out. The news was not propitious. Barr's transport service had collapsed. There would be no wagon stages for the women and children. Charles May, Barr's former agent at Battleford, admitting the failure of advance arrangements, had quit and was taking up a homestead of his own. And Barr's pioneer party, sent out to prepare the new site, had returned in disarray, its members having lost their way on the prairie, lost their transport cattle in the muskegs, and starved for three days before reaching civilisation. Trek-ting Barr's original scheme had called for convoys of twenty or thirty If) wagons to cover the two-hundred-mile distance between Saskatoon Britannia and the new colony, with the women and children travelling separately. Now the colonists were forced to strike out individually, without guides or freighters. Each had to find his own way, work out his own salvation in slough or muskeg, and care for his family at nightfall. Many would be driving horses and oxen for the first time. Some had pocket charts showing that part of the animal's anatomy where the harness should be attached. Others actually used marking chalk to sketch diagrams directly on the horses' hides. Most colonists spent the best part of a week searching out and bargaining for animals, wagons, harnesses, farm equipment, and supplies. The first party managed to get away on April 23, but the last stragglers didn't set off until May 5. Thus, for the best part of a month, ~ - 'at; ~^~ All ' - _ ~,paskatoon~ I = DISTRICT OF ASSINI&OIA 'l The grail to the Barr Colony the trail that led to Battleford and then westward to the Britannia Colony was dotted with wagons. Stanley Rackham planned to leave on the twenty-third but found the wagon he had chosen had been sold to someone else. By then no more wagons were to be had, and Rackham had to wait until the CPR freight arrived with more. He got away at ten o'clock the following morning, a blistering hot day, found his oxen very soft after an idle winter, indulged in a long rest at noon (as much for the animals as himself), and by four was stuck fast in a bog. A Russian immigrant turned up and helped haul him out. Rackham's experience was repeated again and again that Friday. Even before they found themselves out of sight of Saskatoon, a dozen wagons were mired. Matthew Snow, one of the experienced farm instructors hired by Sifton, helped pull them out. But this was only the beginning. Barr's "road" wasn t anything more than a deeply rutted trail through the scrub timber made by the Red River carts of the Metis freighters, bringing in furs from Battleford. The entire country in spring was a heaving bog, dotted by sloughs, little streams, and ponds left by the rapidly melting snow. William Hutchison of Sheffield, whom we last met attending Lloyd's church service on the Lake Manitol:'a, took the advice of old-timers and delayed his departure until prices came down and the ground was firmer. A day's delay in Saskatoon, he was told, would mean a gain of two days on the trek. As a result, he and his brother Ted reached Battleford without mishap in a fast five days. Just five miles out of Saskatoon he came upon four teams of oxen, all stuck fast in the mud, exhausted from trying to pull themselves out and now, having given up the struggle, "looking around with wistful eyes for something to eat." A local farmer took time off from his spring seeding to pull them out. Hutchison's own ordeal was yet to come. The colonists had been warned not to carry more than a thousand pounds per wagon; a team of oxen could manage no more. But cart after cart was overloaded -a ton, a ton and a half, even, on occasion, two tons. Some looked like gigantic Christmas trees, hung with lamps, kitchen chairs, oil cans, baby buggies, plough handles, bags, parcels, tools, women's hats, dogs, and even pianos. Jolted over the uneven terrain, flour sacks burst and coal oil spilled into the foodstuffs. Because of the heavy loads, the women and children could not ride and were forced to walk the entire distance. A bitter wind sprang up; half an inch of ice formed on the ponds; after the heat of early April, it was the worst spring weather in the memory of the oldest freighters. The women trudged numbly onward; the children cried with the cold. Wagon after wagon sank to its axles in the white alkali mud of the bogs and sloughs. When that happened, the entire load had to be taken off while the drivers, wading through the gumbo, found a dry spot. Then the team was re hitched to the rear axle and the wagon hauled out with a logging chain. These frustrating delays gobbled up the best part of a day. There were other problems: the horses, up to their knees in mud, would often lie down and die in the swamps. Many more succumbed from lack of feed and overwork at the hands of men who had never handled a team. One freighter counted eighteen dead horses on the trail to Battleford. As J.A. Donaghy, the student missionary, put it, "some never seemed to realize how much a horse must eat to live, and the whole country was full of the finest pasture along the trail. It was painful to see horses staggering under the weight of the harness until they dropped." There was at least one runaway a day. Some settlers were so fearful of losing their horses that they tied them to trees, but with such a short rope that they could not graze properly and so starved slowly to death. Barr's plan to have marquees with fresh baked bread and newly butchered meat all along the route had also collapsed. Now Sifton's foresight in arranging for large tents at regular intervals saved a great deal of misery. The early birds crowded into these marquees, wolfing tea and porridge, the main provender on the trail. Latecomers had to unload and pitch their own tents nearby. It was spring in England, but here in this drab land, blue patches of old snow could still be seen in the bluffs of naked poplars. The settlers grew homesick. Robert l{oltby, trudging along, mile after mile in the drenching rain-twenty-five miles a day behind the family's wagon thought nostalgically of the cricket field at home, green as emerald. Stanley Rackham stared at the brown grass, bleached by the frost, and at the gaunt, lifeless trees, and realized that it was May Day back home; into his mind came a familiar vision of primroses, violets, and cowslips surrounding the Japonica-covered cottages in his native Mayfield. Yet spring was on its way, a fact made terribly clear by the water gurgling down the slopes and coulees and into the swelling sloughs that barred the route. For latecomers, there were purple anemones poking out of the grasses and in June the sweet perfume of briar rose in the night air. Frogs chorused after dark and wildfowl burst from the willow groves. The crack shots feasted on rabbit, duck, and prairie chicken. Suddenly, in the heart of this wilderness rolling brown hills, white alkali, scrub willow-an astonishing spectacle greeted the trekkers. William Hutchison could scarcely believe his eyes: here, surrounded by furrowed fields, was a Russian village, the houses of trim logs, carefully plastered, neatly arranged along a wide street, their verandahs all gaily painted. This was a Doukhobor settlement, and here the travellers rested. The hospitable Slavs took the women and children into their homes and fed them on fresh eggs and butter. Hutchison came upon a party of children walking two by two to Sunday School. In their brightly coloured dresses they looked like a living rainbow, and he was reminded, not without a tremor of nostalgia, of a children's ballet at a Christmas pantomime. He and his brother were impressed by the Doukhobors' progress: solid buildings and barns, droves of fat cattle, piles of equipment. If these people could make it, so could they! Before they left they took careful note of what they had seen, storing it in their minds for the day when they might benefit from the lesson. Not far ahead lay the dreaded Eagle Creek ravine. Here was a vast chasm, five miles from rim to rim, with a raging torrent at the bottom, and sides that seemed to be as steep as the wall of a house. Robert Holtby, gazing at it in awe, thought it must have been torn up by a gigantic earthquake. Down this dizzy incline ran the semblance of a track at an angle so steep it seemed impossible to negotiate. Few wagons had brakes. Some tenderfeet actually hobbled their oxen before attempting the descent. As a result, the careering wagons rammed into the rumps of the terrified beasts, overturning the whole and scattering the contents on the slope. The more experienced drivers locked their rear wheels with chains and stood by with long poles to spray the front wheels should the wagon get away. The upward ascent was equally dismaying. Some wagons required four horses or three teams of oxen to haul the heavy loads up to the rim. Here Holtby and his family came upon a pitiable sight: a horse had struggled to the top only to drop dead of exhaustion, the ants and hawks already transforming the cadaver into a skeleton. By the time the family reached the government tent at ten that night, Robert was so tired he could scarcely finish his tea, but the incessant squalling of young children kept him awake. At last Battleford, the midway point on the trail, came into view. Here, in this historic community, the colonists got a glimpse of the old West, of fur traders and Indians, now vanishing before the new invasion. Here were the Mounted Police barracks, white and trim, the Hudson's Bay post with its pink roof, and the native school across the river. The little community, untouched until now by successive immigrant waves, sat on the flat tableland between the North Saskatchewan and Battle rivers. A government marquee was already in place; the overflow was quartered in the nearby agricultural hall. Some of the colonists did not venture farther, preparing to homestead in the neighbourhood. The others caught their breath, reorganised their loads, and pressed onward to the colony, nearly one hundred miles distant. Now they entered wilder, emptier country, the haunt of Indians and animals. Forty miles out of Battleford lay the farm of Peter Paynter, an ex-Mounted Policeman. From that point west there was no white settlement (save for the new colony) for three hundred miles-only undulating hills, little lakes, scrub willow, prairie grass, and pea vine. Barr reached Battleford on May 2, the day a large contingent of colonists took off for Britannia, one hundred miles to the west. He spent four days in Battleford, harried constantly by indignant colonists, many of whom flew into a violent rage at the mere mention of his name. Barr was now perceived as a dictator who wanted the absolute right to assign each man a homestead and compel him to accept it. Few now believed his shipboard assurance that all the land was of equal fertility. That was clearly fantasy. Some was flat, some rolling; some was wooded, some bald; some was fertile, some stony. Barr had insisted that all settlers wait until he personally reached Britannia to dole out homesteads. But R. F. Chisholm, the Dominion Lands Agent, told them to ignore Barr, move on to the settlement, contact George Langley, his sub-agent there, and choose their own land. Barr was furious. "If there is bloodshed and destruction of the colony as a result I throw the whole blame on you," he shouted. Chisholm told Barr he had no authority to tell anybody where to settle. On May 6 the embattled clergyman, accompanied by Lloyd and travelling light, left for Britannia, and reached it on May 9. But Lloyd, dismayed by the number of his charges returning to Battleford in disgust, began working back along the trail to encourage the trekkers and trying to dissuade them from quitting the project and going home to England. These people were bitterly disappointed. They had reached the colony ahead of Barr and found nothing except three large marquees, two of them government tents, the other occupied by Barr's Stores Syndicate. There were no buildings and not a stick of lumber to be had. Contrary to his promises, Barr had made no arrangements to supply doors and sashes and float them down the Saskatchewan. There was no post office; the mail had been dumped on the floor of the Stores tent. And the prices Barr's advance party was charging were so prohibitive that many packed up and left. They had bought oats from Peter Paynter at a quarter of the Barr price. For the hundreds of outfits strung out along the dreadful trail between Battleford and Britannia, the Paynter farm, which employed a dozen hands, was an oasis. Here were herds of horses and cattle, flocks of turkeys, grunts of pigs. The Holtby family stayed at Paynter's for two days to give an exhausted horse time to rest. Mrs. Paynter, whose kitchen was full of women and children warming themselves, let Mrs. Holtby use her oven to bake bread while the men put up the tents. Ahead lay devastation. Fires had charred the land, leaving a wilderness of ruin, a monotony of blackness. No sliver of green could be seen through the ashen world that greeted those travellers who had the good fortune to escape the flames. Some lost everything-tents, wagons, horses, supplies-everything but their lives. We halve stopped u ith the 7iveeda/e part r beside a shallow slough several cars out of Battlefurd. It its the second Reek of Mat Hot u Bather and strong u inds have turned the prairie grass to under. A hear v pall of'sn?oke has blotted out the sun and is driving ton and us, it has been groping in intensity all dar, and non He find ourse/~,es choking and gasping in the funes. There is no tine to be /ost. Use drive the lean? and Wagon into af at of u ater, unhitch the oxen, tie then? sec urel ~ to the u heels, c over their heads Pith net sacks, soak the uagon's canvas coffering, and then build a hat Of ire to create a gourd, heating it out at the edges u ith a .spacle. Dusk falls heJore He finish our task. Non the horizon ahead is rimmed u ith J7ame - a great f Dickering line n?o"'ing ton arcs us. The air is thick u ith sn?oke and .si~arks; birds go shrieking past; gophers, rabbits, eaten antelopes dash h ~ in panic. Non the fire is ain?ost upon us. We u ade into the slough, coffering our heads u ith u et sac ks as it reaches US, roaring and crackling. The heat is so intense we can sc arc e/r breathe. Our oxen hellcat and tear at the ropes. In n?minutes the Jire hats racecl past us and on to be Jar horizon, but u e n?ust u aft until the blat kened grass has c oo/ect and the sn?oke died don n before u e can rend\ e our covering and cr au l out of the slough. In the eerie light of the retreating f lances u e can Lieu the hat or the fire has c ausecl mile union mile of 'charred, sn?cJulclering prairie. Next clam H e travel through an ocean thrash. There is scarcely ant feed left for the o Yen, on! r a fen patches o f 'clead grass left behind in the fire's n tad haste. En?ac ia ted horses lie dead on the trail as u e pasts, starved for lack of focicler. And all because a carefree settler-one of' Barr's lan?bs-did not have the sense to extinguish hits can?phire. In this glum terrain, the sloughs and bogs were the worst the colonists had yet encountered in spite of the hot weather. The Hutchison brothers, who had managed to avoid every swamp on the trail from Saskatoon, were stuck fast on three occasions. With their wagon mired to the axles and tilted on its side in the muddy bank of a small torrent, they were struck by a blizzard that blocked their passage for four days. In all that time the brothers were never dry, their clothing, greatcoats, and blankets drenched and encrusted with mud. From Saturday night to the following Thursday they lived on starvation rations: a plate of boiled rice and one pancake made from flour, water, and snow per meal. When they were able at last to push forward at a leaden pace, very little else was moving. They passed scores of tents pitched in the snow beside the trail, their occupants depressed and sick, many of them trying to sell their ploughs and equipment to earn enough to pay their passage home. At the settlement, Barr was the focus of every complaint. Ivan Crossley watched while one group demanded to know what had happened to all the fresh meat he'd promised. Barr seized an axe and knocked down one of his own oxen. "There's fresh meat for you all now!" he cried. "Help yourselves." And they did. Barr left the colony on May 13, taking with him the three nurses brought out for the abortive hospital syndicate. On May 15 he was back in Battleford, where he encountered more angry demonstrations. Two Boer War veterans lit into him over their purchase from him of CPR land in the colony. The railway's Battleford agent had no record of the transaction; the homesteads in question had already been sold. Barr blustered, but when threatened with violence he gave them their money back. It was obvious to all that he had been on the make. He had not only tried to sell supplies at exorbitant prices and collect money for CPR land without authorisation, he had also charged absentee Englishmen five dollars apiece to reserve their homesteads; he had extracted ten dollars from single girls in England, promising to settle them later; he had tried to collect a premium of five dollars or more from every settler; and he had taken another five dollars from each member of a hospital syndicate that he knew was collapsing. It was the end for Isaac Barr. On May 16 in Battleford, a mass meeting took away any control he had left and appointed Lloyd in his place as head of a twelve-man committee, quickly dubbed the Twelve Apostles. Barr, in a final moment of bluster, shouted that they were all ruffians and brandished a revolver. Then he meekly gave in, surrendered his accounts, resigned all claims to a homestead for himself, and turned over everything of value to the community which, all agreed, would be named Lloydminster. Barr returned to the settlement, where he spent most of his time returning money to those indignant colonists who felt they'd been cheated. He left forever in mid-June, narrowly escaped being pelted by eggs by some of his former charges in Regina, and tried in Ottawa to get the bonus the government paid to all colonisers. The department turned him down on the grounds that he had not only caused it more expense than the total payments would allow but had also tried to squeeze money illegally from the British settlers. That was the end, in Canada, of Isaac Barr. He married his secretary (his fourth wife, thirty-five years his junior), became an American citizen, and for the rest of his life dreamed unfulfilled dreams of settling people in the far corners of the Empire. He died in Australia in his ninetieth year, still scribbling away in the end papers of a book he was reading, building more paper communities in non-existent promised lands. Chapter Five The Problem of the English No Englishmen need apply Remittance men Lloydminster The odyssey of Ella Sykes Don't come back, Dad No When the Liberals took office in 1896, it was generally agreed in the Englishmen West that the ideal immigrant was a white Anglo-Celt with farming need apply experience, preferably English or Scottish. Outside of Quebec, the people of Central and Eastern Canada thought of themselves as British first and Canadian second. Few took issue with the common cant that Britain was not only the greatest nation on earth but also the greatest nation that had ever been on earth. The British were colonisers and civilisers. They were "just like us." With the British there could be no future problem of assimilation; how could there be, in a British colony? Only the presence of large numbers of English farmers would prevent the destruction of the national fabric. As Dr. George Landerkin declared in the Senate in 1903: "Take the Englishman and place him where you will, he is equal to the immigrant from the United States and superior to the immigrant from any other nation in the world." No wonder then that Sifton's department strained every effort to attract English and Scottish farmers. By 1897 immigration agents in the United Kingdom were delivering a thousand lectures a yea ring small farming communities in England and Scotland. One agent reported that he had held meetings in one hundred small towns, attended fifteen summer fairs, visited farmers, blacksmiths, and cart wrights in seventy-three communities, and turned up at twenty-one hiring fairs, distributing pamphlets, guidebooks, and reports and giving lantern-slide lectures. Posters proclaiming the wonders of Canada were on the walls of every English post office. The CPR and other steamship companies advertised Canada in the newspapers and with posters and pamphlets. English reporters were invited to visit Canada. And those English farmers who had emigrated earlier were induced to send back testimonials and newspaper articles to convince others to come over. Yet few came over. In its campaign to pull Englishmen off their farms, the department found itself up against a stone wall. There was no mystery about the English farmers' refusal to emigrate; they had no need to. They were well off in the Old Country and becoming better off every year. Because they were a diminishing class, their profits were constantly increasing. By April 1899, Sifton had despaired of attracting British or Scottish farm labourers to Canada and was quietly turning his attention to the American midwest. For it was farmers Sifton wanted: not the clerks, the shopkeepers, or even the artisans who were emigrating to the United States in quantity. The country, however, was up in arms. Why was the government bringing in Galicians and Doukhobors instead of British farmers? A note of panic crept into the press reports when the United States was mentioned: with its polyglot immigrant masses, it was seen as a mongrel nation. Why on earth would any Englishman want to go there in preference to a British colony? Was Canada purposely rejecting the English in favour of a less desirable immigrant mix, to become (in the words of the Canadian magazine) "as rude, as uncultured, as fickle, as heterogeneous, as careless of law and order and good citizenship as the United States?" This attitude, fostered by the Conservative press, explains the genuine enthusiasm with which Barr's immigration scheme was greeted and also the letdown that followed when it was realised that few of his charges were farmers. Nor did the extreme newspaper examples of the colonists' foolishness and stubbornness help the stereotype of the typical Englishman as a comic figure and a snob that was beginning to form in Western minds. After 1903, the year of the Barr onslaught, demands for increased emigration from the United Kingdom began to abate, and Canadians adopted a curious kind of doublethink where the English were concerned: at a distance they were admired, even venerated, but on a personal level they came to be cordially disliked. Basil Stewart, an Englishman who worked in railway construction camps and later as an assistant engineer on the Grand Trunk Pacific, wrote how shocked his countrymen were "to be told that, in a country which flies the same flag, the Englishman is held of less account than the lowest type of immigrant from Europe." Even the despised Galicians, Stewart found, were preferred on the land to his fellow countrymen. In Winnipeg, a man applying for a job with the Associated Charities was kicked right out of the office when it was learned he was English. The words "No Englishmen Need Apply" attached to newspaper advertisements became a kind of slogan in the West. One advertiser, Stewart reported, explained that he excluded the English "because those who were capable were too good for the work and would soon throw it up and go elsewhere to better themselves; the others would too soon give in." Stewart thought the explanation "a little Thin"' but recognized that it was a symptom of Canadian disgust with the English that couldn't be ignored. If the English were blind to Canadian conditions, Canadians were equally myopic about England Shakespeare's jewel-like nation supposedly populated by the finest stock in the world-and about the English. It was not easy to separate the myth from the reality because the myth was part of the cultural baggage of most native-born Canadians. They were beguiled by the image of the gallant Englishmanupstanding, courageous, adaptable -planting the standard of justice and freedom in the soil of less cultivated nations, civilising the world from Mombasa to Hong Kong, harvesting coffee in Kenya, tea in Ceylon, sugarin Jamaica, coconuts in Fiji, cocoa on the Gold Coast. Then why not wheat in the Canadian West'? (But it was not English farmers who planted the rice or tapped the rubber trees; they left that to the natives.) Settled Canada owed a debt to the English. With the French and the Scots they had founded and formed the Canadian nation. In Ontario, where British soldiers had twice saved the country from the Americans, theirs was the dominant bloodline. Schoolchildren memorised the names of all the British monarchs, and all the English heroes from Hereward the Wake to Cecil Rhodes. Indeed, as much English history as Canadian perhaps more was taught in the schools, while American history was ignored. The Union Jack formed the frontispiece of more than one elementary reader, with the accompanying Imperial slogan, "One flag, one fleet, one throne." Every map proudly showed the world bespattered with Imperial red. What had gone wrong'? Why didn't the English who arrived in Canada live up to their Kiplingesque billing'? Surely they were not, c could not be, typical! The general feeling in Canada was that somehow the country was getting the wrong kind of Englishman, that somewhere in that land of neat hedgerows and country lanes there existed a different breed: stalwart yeomen, the very backbone of Empire. Was there an English plot to jettison the peter-do-well younger sons of the gentry, the lazy, snobbish aristocrats, and the unreliable clerks and office workers by shipping them off to Canada? Worse yet, was Canada being used as a waste bing for convicts and paupers, the off scourings of the London slums? Suspicion deepened in 1905 when charitable societies in Britain began to pay passage to Canada for an increasing number of English while others were subsidized by public funds under the Unemployed Workmen's Act of that year. In one case, it was revealed, the master at a workhouse received twelve shillings for every inmate he sent to Canada. By 1908, when 70 per cent of all deportations from Canada turned out to be British, the government enacted an order-in-council refusing entry to anyone whose way had been paid by a charitable organization it had not officially approved. The belief that Great Britain was dumping her undesirables in Canada is inherent in J.S. Woodsworth's book Strangers Il ithin Our Gates. Woodsworth told the story of an English magistrate reprimanding a youthful criminal: ""You have broken your mother's heart, you have brought down your father's grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. Youare a disgrace to your country. Why don't you go to Canada?" "England," Woodsworth declared, "has sent us largely the failures of the cities." In his book, the same man who was to occupy the pinnacle of the pantheon of socialist saints showed a harsh pragmatism: "We sympathize with these poor people, but we are glad the Canadian government is taking steps to prevent the 'dumping' of these unfortunates in Canada." He was eclually firm in his opposition to the emigration of Dr. Barnardo's destitute children. "Children from such surroundings with inherited tendencies ~' exit [my italics] are a very doubtful accluisition to Canada." But it was not the slum dwellers who couldn't adjust to life in Canada. It was the middle and upper classes who, Woodsworth believed, stubbornly refused to adapt to Canadian conditions and suffered from "a certain arrogant superiority and exclusiveness." The English were seen as snobs who criticised everything in the West because it wasn't like the Old Country. In 1905, the London Standard's reporter, HR. Whates, covering the immigration boom, was bluntly told: "The Englishman is too cocksure; he is too conceited, he thinks he knows everything and he won't try to learn our ways." Almost every English writer who visited the West during that period found the same thing. The Scots, and to a lesser extent the Irish and Welsh, were welcome. The English were not. Basil Stewart's advice, arrived at after he worked on the railway, was that prospective immigrants should keep their opinions to themselves, never tender advice unless asked, and try to show a willingness to learn. But the English -or some of them -did not find it easy. Seduced by the roseate literature of the steamship companies and the immigration agents, they expected too much of Canada. English girls were told they could get wages of twenty dollars a month as domestic servants. Clerks were told they could get good positions in stores and factories. Prospective labourers were enticed with tales of forty-dollar-a-month wages on Western farms at all seasons. None of these promises held much water. As a result, many English men and women were disillusioned and openly scornful of their adopted country. They felt themselves entitled to better treatment; after all, they had been brought up that way. Every newspaper, every book, every hour of schooling had drilled it into them: the English were superior, the colonists were inferior These people brought the English class system with them, or tried to. Reporters who visited the Barr tent town in Saskatoon were taken aback to discover that even under those conditions the English had separated themselves into distinctive groups based on class. Everybody had talked of the need for assimilation and the ease with which the English could melt into the Canadian ethnic landscape. Now it dawned on Canadians that the Englishman was no more assimilable than the Galician, perhaps even less so, given his native stubbornness and his general air of superiority. This should have come as no surprise, since for all of the Victorian era English colonists from Kenya to Kashmir had refused to conform to local customs and to learn local idioms, preferring instead to create a little bit of Old England, walled off from native contamination in the jungles, vel ds and coral strands of Empire. In short, they weren't all that different from Kipling's empire builders who had worn wing collars in the South Pacific and kept clear of the natives in Poona and Shanghai. Now the Canadians were being treated as wags and fuzzy-wuzzies, and they didn't like it. It was only natural that they should retaliate by scoffing at the Englishman, turning him into a comic figure. The "green Englishman," the remittance man, the aristocratic snob, caricatured and satirized from Montreal to Calgary (by Arthur Racey, the cartoonist of the Montreal Star, for instance, or Bob Edwards in the Calgary Eve Opener) contributed to the stereotype. There was some truth in it. In Britain, paperback manuals, endorsed by colonial outfitters who had an interest in selling outlandish gear to emigrants, pictured Canada as a foreign nation full oi wild animals and wilder Indians; some emigrants fell for it and arrived armed to the teeth, to the amusement of the natives. Other would-be farmers contributed to the folklore of the country with incredible gaffes. "Some Englishmen who come out are terribly green," one homesteader wrote home in 1907. "Did I tell you the story about one living ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ :~ ~J-i: ~ ~ ~ ~ THE EI9GLISHMAN IN CANADA. Clarence! the Younger Son and Dead Game Sport of the de Bronn Jones FamilY, Decides to Go to Canada. His Parents Sorrowfully Give Their Consent THE ENGLISHMAN IN C ADA 2 He Straightway Secures a Number of Canadian "Souvenir" and "Guide" Books Compiled by Authors With More Imagination Than Patriotism. not far from us who thought that bran was very good food for cattle, so he bought three bags of it and SOWED it in the ground; he also SOWED three bags of oatmeal, so as to grow his own porridge. This is not romance, for it actually happened." In spite of this calumny there is strong reason to believe that the stereotype of the immigrant Englishman as a snob and a greenhorn was highly exaggerated, in much the same way that the stereotype of the Galician as a dirty, lazy subhuman bore little relation to reality. Between the two census years of 1901 and 1911, more than 150,000 English immigrants made their homes in the West. The largest number settled in Manitoba, where the anti-English feeling was strongest. Could it be that, in Canadian eyes, their crime was the same as that of the Galicians and Doukhobors'." Like them, the English resisted the pressure to assimilate, to conform, to become "real Canadians." For they too were strangers; they too were "different": they dressed funny and they talked funny and, like so many others who came to the West in those years, they refused to reject the roots of the culture in which they had been nurtured. The extremists among them clung desperately to the old ways; the wonder is that so many others adapted themselves to the new. In the summer of 1905, two young Welshmen, Evan Davies and David Remit James newly arrived in Canada were strolling down the main street lance of Winnipeg, disconsolate because they could find no work, when they men fell into conversation with a young Englishman. His name was Jack Ball. He was just twenty-four, tall and thin, fair of complexion, and wearing, of all things, a pince-nez. The eyeglasses made him stand out in the crowd, made him seem a little more distinguished. "I swear that only an Englishman would dare emigrate in such a thing," is the way Evan Davies put it. They were glad to know him, for on board the boat the other English had tended to treat the Welshmen as foreigners. Ball was well educated and likeable. In London, he'd been a civil servant. Fed up with the sedentary life, he'd emigrated to Canada two years before, had worked on a farm at Estevan, and had now decided to homestead for himself. After he'd explained to his two new friends the method of obtaining free land, the trio decided to throw in their lot together. Off they went to Saskatoon, endured the crush at the counter of the land office and, with the amiable Jack Ball's initiative, found a teamster to take them to their homestead -a stony patch of prairie so unlike the green and hilly country they had imagined before leaving Wales. They were the first settlers in the township, and the loneliness, "so grim, so terrifying," brought the three together. They built their sod house, fought prairie fires, broke turf to the plough. Evan Davies's young brother joined them, and all four became close friends as well as partners. Yet there was a gap between the three Welshmen and Jack Ball that had nothing to do with racial differences. "We had one thing against him -he was a remittance ,77an." In his memoirs, Davies italicized the epithet as he might had Jack Ball been a homosexual or a convicted felon. "He regularly received money from his mother. She sent it to him in a parcel, which usually included books .. . and a ball of wool. That was all. The ball of wool was the important item, for inside the wool Jack invariably found a river. It is difficult to explain why we should have held this gift against him. I suppose we felt that, because of it, he was not obliged to struggle for his living as we were. The anxiety, which bred a determination to see it through, was one stage removed from him by comparison with the rest of us. In spite of his amiable qualities, we never quite felt he was one of us." The interesting thing about this account is that Jack Ball wasn't really a remittance man. He did not could not live on the pittance his mother sent him. Moreover, unlike the stereotyped remittance man, he was a worker, not a wastrel. Yet so strong was the feeling against the English remittance man in the Canadian West that even this young farmer, receiving an occasional river from the Old Country, could not escape the stigma. There were many like him. The remittance man is part of the enduring mythology of the Canadian West, a kind of human artifact, as significant as the Red River cart or the sod house. There were remittance men in most British colonies at the century's turn the name was coined in Australia but in Canada, more than in any other country, the spectacle of the English black sheep eking out the final days of each month with borrowed funds until his remittance arrives from home forms part of the folklore of every committed Westerner. He was a figure of fun and also of scorn, in the words of the Manitoba Free Press "a useless incumbrance [sic] to the country not to be mentioned in the same class with the average Galician or Doukhobour, whom he no doubt regards as inconceivably inferior...." The remittance men gravitated naturally to the ranching country of Alberta. "Ranching" had a glamorous upper-class ring; "Yarming" did not. Here the remittance men could be seen in the lounges and bars of the hotels, clad in riding breeches and Norfolk jackets and wearing round, soft felt hats with enormous brims. These were the superfluous sons of well-to-do English families who, in the words of an English reporter, had "neither the capacity nor the will to make for themselves acceptable careers in the Old Country." Bob Edwards, the irrepressible editor of the Calgary E'e Opener, took a sardonic pleasure in skewering the remittance men. For this purpose he invented a character, Albert Buzzard-Cholmondoley, whose letters home were a popular feature in Edwards's weekly. Albert was seen each week contriving another ingenious trick to squeeze money out of his father in England: "I am married to a half breed and have three ornery looking copper colored brats. We are all coming over to visit you at Christmas when you will be having the usual big house party at Shootingham Hall. 1 shall so like to see the dear old place again and my wife is most anxious to become acquainted with her darling husband's people and obtain a glimpse of English society. The Hall will be quite a change for her from the log shacks and tepees she has been used to all her life. "If I had only about a thousand pounds just now with which to start afresh, I would invest it all in cattle right away, settle down to business and forego the pleasure of a trip home and remain here. But I do not know where to lay my hands on that amount...." Edwards's satire was not so farfetched. The West abounded in stories of how English ne'er-do-wells schemed to squeeze extra funds out of their families back home. For instance, there was the tale of Dickie Bright, grandson of the scientist for whom Bright's disease was named, who squandered his entire remittance on riotous living in Calgary instead of investing in a ranch and livestock as his father supposed. Bright kept sending home florid stories of the profits his ranch was making until he received an alarming dispatch that his father was on his way to Canada to visit him. In desperation, it was said, he persuaded a neighbouring rancher to lend him a thousand head of cattle for a single night. When the elder Bright arrived, his son assured him that the visible stock was only a sample of the thousands he had roaming the range. Bright senior was so delighted he gave his son $10,000 to increase his business and boasted of how the boy had built up one of the biggest stock ranches in the Canadian West. It is hard today to understand the antipathy and scorn reserved for the English remittance man. It can be explained only by reference to the Western work ethic, the Western concept of a classless society, and the Western rejection of Imperial and colonial attitudes. The Westerner was already beginning to think of himself as a new breed of Canadian, freed of Eastern prejudices and concepts, breathing the pure air of the prairies where every man was equal and success depended on hard work. The West was peopled by self-made men who had started from nothing and prospered. They had little time for those who, born to privilege, lived on a stipend, refused honest toil, and looked down on their fellows. As one English traveller discovered, "There is only one class on the plains, and that is the working class." Hard work was the criterion by which newcomers were judged in the West. Time and again, British writers advised their readers that they must be prepared lor backbreaking toil during their early years in the new land. But the remittance man was not capable of work -or at least that was his image-and it was this that raised the hackles of editors like Bob Edwards: "Were he good at even ONE thing he would be all right. His dilettante training precludes all idea of his getting a job in a store or in a bank -he does not know even enough for that. With machinery or mechanics he naturally is unfamiliar, only knows live stock from the saddle of an Irish hunter, couldn't hold a job in a newspaper office longer than ten or fifteen minutes, has not had sufficient savvy to go breaking on the railroad, is too gentlemanly to canvass books and finally has to seek aid from the local English clergyman as a preliminary to going on to a farm to work for his board. "What can you expect from young men brought up in a hunting and shooting atmosphere?" These cultured but improvident Englishmen often lived in abject poverty. Frank G. Roe. who came to Alberta in 1904, worked on the railways, and eventually became a distinguished Western historian, visited two remittance men-one the son of a mayor of Crewe, the English railway town, the other of a distinguished of ricer of the Indian Army who had "sunk to an unimaginable depth of squalor and filth, physical and moral." They lived in a shack built of pieces of stolen scrap lumber, roofed with a jumble of shingles, pieces of tarpaper, and kerosene cans hammered flat. It looked, Roe said, like a great square packing case dumped on the prairie, "truly .. . a thing of shreds and patches," un swept and filthy with coal dust. Yet many hid their penury behind a masquerade of sartorial bravado Some kept wardrobes of formal clothes and dressed for dinner; others hired tailcoats for an evening and were photographed with their cronies, the pictures to be sent home to England as "a few friends I entertained at the ranch recently." Roe remembered men who could not ride anything "but the most docile sheep of a horse" who ventured into town on a wagon, parked it on the outskirts, then donned Stetsons, chaps, and neckerchiefs "to camouflage the degrading contamination of wheels and harness." The calumny heaped upon the remittance men belongs to another era. These eccentric hangers-on formed a tiny minority in the great mass of British immigrants, but, like the Sons of Freedom, they were highly visible. As such they became convenient targets, the focus for much of the anti-British antipathy in Canada, their reputation blown up out of all proportion to their numbers. Many an innocent Englishman, genuinely seeking work, suffered from the stigma. In retrospect it's hard to view the remittance man without a certain affection as a colourful footnote to the saga of the opening of the West. For the remittance man, more than any other, refused to conform. In the great scramble to adapt to the Western style and the Western spirit, he stood apart. It is difficult not to admire the eccentricities, the ingenuity, and the panache of a non like Robert Dixon, who lived near Edmonton as Rattlesnake Pete, who did indeed carry a live rattlesnake, deranged, inside his shirt, who dressed the part sometimes in buckskin jacket, chaps, and moccasins, sometimes in derby hat, checked suit, and spats, whose cuffs were prominently and fashionably displayed two inches below the edges of his sleeves, and who, when prospecting in the bush, insisted on fashioning an instant set of them each morning out of toilet paper. He was nothing if not dramatic. When faced with a girl who refused his advances in a canoe, he knew just how to conduct himself. Without a moment's hesitation, Rattlesnake Pete the remittance man flung himself into the chilly waters of Cocking Lake. All the qualities of the British in general and the English in particular - Llo r dtheir amateurism, their clannishness, their endurance and stick-to- I'?inster itiveness-can be seen in the microcosm of Lloydminster's formative years. For Lloydminster was unique; it was the only colony in the West that was 100 per cent British-its leadership entirely English, its outlook Imperial. Lloydminster and the Britannia Colony started out with every disadvantage: an incompetent and dilatory leadership; an utter lack of practical farming methods among its people; a refusal and an inability to learn from other immigrants. And yet, in the end, Lloydminster prospered. There were many reasons: the richness of the Saskatchewan Valley; the coming of the Canadian Northern Railway; the general growing prosperity of the Canadian West. But not the least of these reasons was the peculiarly English habit of being able to hang on and muddle through. In exchanging the leadership of Isaac Barr for that of the Reverend Mr. George Exton Lloyd and his twelve-man committee, the colonists weren't out of the woods. Lloyd was a likeable but hopelessly incompetent leader and businessman. George Langley, the land agent, called he Twelve Apostles "one of the most incapable bodies of men ever got together." Donaghy described Lloyd as "the blind leading the blind." Speers reported an absence of all business methods among Lloyd and his council. The hospital plan collapsed; the Stores Syndicate went out of business, paying its investors twenty-five cents on the dollar. Free enterprise replaced co--operative effort. Power went to Lloyd's head, and like Barr, he became autocratic. The Mounted Police inspector at the settlement thought he would have made a Grand Inquisitor in an earlier age. One problem was Lloyd's jingoism. He and his committee insisted that nobody other than Englishmen be allowed to locate in the colony, a policy originally established by Barr, who had declared: "We hope to keep the colony free from any foreign admixture, even of American people.... I think it not wise to mix that people with this colony. I hope to keep it British hi actuality as well as in sentiment." As a result, the English tenderfeet had no practical farmers from Iowa or Nebraska as neighbours to help them by example and advice but only novices like themselves. The colony's doctor, who had stayed behind when the hospital syndicate folded, found that his work was constant but pretty monotonous. His biggest daily chore was stitching up axe wounds. Scores of colonists had never before had an axe or hatchet in their hands. This lack of experience and of knowledgeable neighbours held up the development of the colony for at least a year and caused untold hardships. Langley reported that the buildings being erected on the new homesteads were some of the poorest in the North West. Some were almost useless, and many \vere so badly built there was danger of the roofs collapsing. To comprehend the magnitude of the problem facing these green arrivals, let us go out onto the empty prairie with Ivan Crossley and see what he and his three friends were up against. The land agef It has brought the n7 here, /oc ated the .sur\'e r posts, and leg th eff7 standing he.sicle their it age'? on their neu hon7e.stead640 acres of unbroken? prairie soffle /fre/1e /f7iles southeast of the colony It its a lonely scene -not a Siff7 of hUn?af7 hahitatiOf?" nothing as far as the else can see, Save Stir the prai'ie, blackened he fire, and a fet1 skeletal copses ok charred catta'71100el.s. The scene is not unique. It hats already Been repeated thousands of tiff leS in the often counter that lies hetv~een the Red Rier and the Rockies It u ill he repeated thou."a'7c.f.s of tic 77es f mire hef re the plains are broken and tensed. A nd it H ill ret Hail t engra\~ed on loran Crosslev's flenlorl icJr all ok his life, as bell as on the n7en?0ries of thousands of others-British, America'7, Herniae, Scandinavian, Slant and Dutch. None Will e'terJorget these Jirst despairing nioff7cf7ts on the limitless ocean of the prairie. This its hone. This its it here 11 e must line. This hard turd on it which t1 e stand, as tough as him7a'7 gristle, u ill he our building material. Before "1e can pro. spe heJore tie plant a single grain, 11 e n7u.st attack it, break it, turn it over' rip it apart, and Jinallr nurture the black soil beneath. This is thetolk me/florr of the West, the glue of prairie natic7f7alis'7?. Cro.ss/e~, knotr~s that sof77e of the if cof77patric7ts, Jaced With the magnitude of tl7e challenge ha\'e al read ~ pat ked up and fled. he and his partners are a/f7?0St. broke; hut ther are unencumbered hit gives and children, and they ha\'e the enthusias n? and energr of youth. they pitch their tent, unload their tvallcing plough, and go to uork. The r haste a sketch ~ idea of ho~v to build a sod house, thanks to the gO\'erf?fflef1t'$' Jaf'f77 if?StrUCtiOn in Saskatoon. So their set to trork ploughing long strips of various lengths and dragging them to the site on a stone boat built oJJire-killed trees. Their learn by trial and error. Their house is to be.si.rteen feet ht tl1e/ve. They Sif??p/~' ff7ark out a space, lay a rfJr1 ofsocisarouncl it, and continue to build until the Halls are eight Jeet high. There tVi he no tVif?CIOtl'S; g/a.~.s is une7htai'?able. But they make a door out of. split poles anti c ore' i/ 11 ith blankets. They fashion a roof of sorts out at Sf7?all poplar pole.", laid e lose together af?d shaped to shed the rain. The r pile n70re sods on top blithe poles and chink then? u ith earth. That u ill haste to do, e"'en though it is not Watertight; no sod house is. There is a earing in the West that iJ'it rains three days outside, it rains for to o Reeks inside. Ther n7ust get used to that. Theta install their Toe, build hunks out of' more poles, make mattresses of'hranches. It ~voulcl, as Crossle~msa~s, take a lot of' imagination to c all this hovel a house. But it will he their O/?/l' shelter in the Hinter to eon7e, and before n7aHr weeks have crept by they hill start to think writ as hon7e. It was one thing to throw up a house of sorts, quite another to begin practical farming. Crossley and his friends tried to plant a garden in the bare spot where the sods had been stripped away, only to discover, too late, that they had also removed the best soil. The vegetables withered and died, and the men were forced to go to work for wages. Scores left the colony to seek jobs. Scores more would have gone had Lloyd and his committee not persuaded them to stay, promising jobs in the town itself; alas, these never materialised. Others sat on their homesteads, attempting to break the land, with little success. Matthew Snow, the government farm inspector, had great difficulty getting the colonists to move quickly to break the land and prepare it for the following year's crops. The breaking season was quickly passing, yet 70 per cent had no chance of getting a crop in the following year, let alone in the summer of 1903. Teams stood idle, some animals straying away because their owners were so lackadaisical. They did not seem to realize that the prairie could be broken only in the summer. Many thought, in their ignorance, that they could work late into the fall, after their houses were finished. In fact, these middle-class Englishmen from Leeds and Birmingham, London and Manchester had no comprehension of the harshness of the prairie climate. They had never experienced a Western winter, never faced a blizzard or a white-out, never felt their eyelids freeze together or their skin peel off when pressed against icy metal. The Slavs and Scandinavians, the Nebraskans and Iowans were used to such conditions. The English weren't. By fall it was apparent that the average amount of farmland broken to the plough, let alone planted, was less than two acres a homestead. That winter, in the course of a snowshoe patrol, Sgt. D.J. McCarthy of the Mounted Police happened upon a curious spectacle some miles southeast of the community. Here was one of the Barr colonists, crouching in his shack with the door partially open, sitting close to his stove, wearing all his outer clothing including his cap and mitts, and calmly reading Shakespeare. The door would not close because he had pushed a long tree from the outside into the door of his stove. When the fire died down he simply pushed the tree farther in. He seemed quite cheerful, invited the policeman in for "a spot of tea," and revealed that he was the son of the former British ambassador to Turkey. In sharp contrast was the example of those who had farming experience. These people prospered. By July 22, for instance, William Rendell, whose family had farmed in England for two centuries, managed to break and plant three acres of oats, an acre and a half of barley, another acre and a half of potatoes, and a quarter-acre of vegetables. His family bungalow, the largest in the settlement, was within two weeks of completion, even though Rendell had to haul the lumber thirty miles. But Rendell was one of the few who knew his business. He had refused the homestead Barr offered, chosen another one, and started to plough the day after he arrived. That winter his wife, Alice, wrote her friends in England an enthusiastic letter: "I would never advise anyone to come out here who is afraid of work. They are better off at home. There is room to breathe in this country and if the work is hard the freedom, which is the indispensable attribute of the life here, makes one far less susceptible to physical fatigue.... Here, one feels that each week's work is a step forward, whilst in the old country oftentimes a year's hard work brought nothing but disappointment...." The Rendells were in a minority. Less than 10 per cent of the community had farming experience. By October, Wcs Speers was concerned at the prospect of serious hardship and destitution that winter. He called a meeting to try to discover who would require government aid but was hampered by the pride and reserve of the English. As one woman told him: "I will not become the object of charity. " Speers was appalled at the conditions among some of the destitute families. The worst example was that of J.G. Bulmer, whose ailing wife was the mother of eighteen children, one no more than three weeks old. While Speers was visiting the family, she fainted dead away. Bulmer had a fine piece of land, but he hadn't broken a foot of ground. Speers packed the entire family off to Battleford. An equally pathetic case was that of Alexander Carlyle-Bell, who had somehow dropped his wallet, stuffed with two hundred dollars in cash, on the prairie, and then lost an endorsed bank draft for five hundred dollars. The wretched Carlyle-Bell could do nothing right. He had managed to break seven acres on a quarter-section of land only to discover it was the "~ rang 4uarter-section. The last straw came when his wife fell off the wagon and broke her arm. "Unaccustomed to work," Speers wrote against his name, and that was the last the colony saw of the Carlyle-Bells. E. W. Thomson, a special correspondent for the Boston Tanst rips, visited the settlement in November and reported on it as he might a strange colony in the wilds of Africa. The inability of the colonists to prepare for the Canadian winter both dismayed and charmed him: "It is impossible not to like their curious, dauntless demeanour. Going about among them one is strongly affected by their spirit. He half believes all will come right in the end -that once again the English will 'muddle through." And so they did. Somehow they made it through the winter. Some of the men had taken jobs during the cold weather, not always successfully. One group, which took a contract to grade twenty-five miles of the Canadian Northern roadbed, had managed to complete no more than two miles by April. Speers was frustrated at the evidence of the settlers' inaptitude. Very little of their land was yet broken by June, 1904, three-quarters of their horses were dead of exposure, and the rest were spavined and mangy. He was by this time fed up with Lloyd and his town-bred committee, who thought in urban rather than rural terms. Speers was convinced that Lloyd and his council were wasting the colonists' time at planting season with endless meetings, organisations, and subcommittees, all planning in the most optimistic fashion for a glorious future -discussing taxes, lot sizes, and all the petty details of municipal organization, "troubling about small things that should give them no concern .. . trying to build up a commerce without cultivating their good lands...." The rugged Speers practical farmer, apostle of the West, committed Liberal -had his patience sorely tried that winter. Like all Canadians he had welcomed the idea of British immigration, a politically popular strengthening of the Protestant Anglo-Celtic mix that had, in his view, built Canada. But now these people, in their own way, were proving as maddening as the Doukhobors. What were these English doing organizing musical societies, tennis clubs, theatrical enterprises, and literary circles in the town when they ought to be out in the fields, building up their quarter-sections'? In Speers's view, pioneers could not afford such indulgence. What these people lacked, he thought, was not culture but common sense. And yet they were beginning to prosper. The impossible cases had been weeded out; those left behind were learning slowly, by trial and error, to meet the demands of the Canadian prairie. In 1905, the colonists broke more land than they had during the two previous years combined, though many, in Speers's opinion, were "sticking too closely to Lloydminster, listening to the dreams and prophetic forecasts of the leaders of the community." But by November, with Lloyd out of the way -promoted to Archdeacon of Prince Albert -Speers was able to announce a decided improvement. It was spurred by the arrival in the area of Americans and Canadians with farming experience and in the fall of 1905 by the coming of the Canadian Northern Railway (two years later than Barr's prediction). By February 1907, W.R. "Billy" Ridington, the local immigration agent, was able to report that Lloydminster had surpassed all expectations. In 1908, the Lloydminster Board of Trade felt justified in putting out a pamphlet boosting the town as "The Banner District of the West." By then all the heartache and controversy that had marked the settlement's early days were forgotten. E.J. Ashton, late of Norfolk, a bank teller turned Boer War veteran, was to recall at the end of his life that "strangely enough, as the years rolled by, it was apparent that several among the most successful settlers were men who had no previous farming experience." This was true of William Hutchison, who by 1905 was able to write on "How to Become a Farmer" for his home town paper, the Sheffield Weekir Telegraph. Stanley Rackham did so well that he was able to make regular trips home to the Old Country. But he never left the site of the Barr colony and was still in Lloydminster in 1937 when, at the age of sixty, he died. Like many others, Ivan Crossley alternately farmed his homestead and supplemented his income by taking temporary jobs. When he needed money he'd go to work ploughing another man's acreage or taking a winter mail contract from Battleford or Saskatoon. In between he'd go back to his homestead, break ground, work on his shack, put up a barn, until he owned the land outright. In 1906 he ran into Robert Holtby, bringing a load of hay into town for sale. Robert Holtby's pretty sister was sitting astride the load. Crossley took her to lunch and soon became a regular visitor at the thriving Holtby homestead seven miles out of town. They were engaged that fall, married in Lloyd's log church the following spring, and enjoyed forty-eight years of married life, the memories of those early struggles on the long trail from Saskatoon slowly fading as the years wore on and Lloydminster prospered and the grandchildren of that pioneer union began to arrive. The In the fall of 1910, Miss Ella Constance Sykes, a high-born Englishodyssev of woman of redoubtable energy and enterprise, was struck forcibly by a Ella Svkes letter to The Times, which reminded her of the hard future faced by so many of the million surplus women in the United Kingdom. Too often, the writer suggested, educated women found themselves a drug on the labour market; indeed, it was almost impossible for any English working girl to support herself comfortably let alone put anything aside for her old age. The answer? Surely it lay in the Overseas Dominions. Miss Sykes, in spite of a sheltered upbringing, was by middle age no delicate Edwardian flower. She was one of a small but distinguished company of adventurous ladies, so typical of the late Victorian era, who thought nothing of dashing off to the far corners of the Empire on voyages of adventure and inquiry. In 1899 she had been the first woman to ride from the Caspian Sea to India and the first to visit Persian Baluchistan, where her brother, a Sandhurst-trained officer in the Dragoon Guards, was British consul. It was an invigorating experience. In her book Through Persia on a Side Saddle she revelled in the "sense of freedom and expansion which quickened the blood and made the pulse beat high." Now Miss Sykes determined upon a second adventure: she would set off for the Canadian West to try to assess the prospects for an educated Englishwoman working as home help in the new world. She outlined the plan to a friend, who made a blunt suggestion: if she really wanted to find out how the English were treated in Canada, wouldn't it be more effective if she disguised herself as a potential job-seeker? Miss Sykes demurred; the idea was not only distasteful but also she, who had grown accustomed to the attention of twelve servants in Persia, had no experience of being a servant herself. "Ah," said her friend, "evidently you wish merely to dip your fingers in the water; you shirk at taking a plunge that might prove of real service to the women you say you want to help!" That did it. Ella Sykes determined to take the plunge even though she saw herself, like so many others of her class, as "an incompetent amateur, trained to do nothing properly the country wanted." On shipboard, she met several English families returning to their Western Canadian farms after a winter spent in the Old Country. "We could never live in England now, after having been in Canada," she was told over and over again, but when she talked to the women she began to understand the dimensions of the problems that even the wives of successful homesteaders faced. One woman told of her first experience when her fiance wrote that he had a home at last and she went out to Winnipeg, loaded down with household goods, to marry him. "I remember asking him what was the colour of our bedroom paper, as I wanted to get a toilet-set to match it. He didn't say much then, but I shall never forget my feelings w hen I found our new home was just a one-roomed wooden shack, divided in two with a curtain, and not papered at all. It was an alZinl shock to me...." "But now that you are well off your life is much easier isn't it?" Miss Sykes asked. The reply astonished her: "I had less work when I began my married life as a poor woman than I have now." It was, she said, the farmer's passion to buy more and more land: "They will sacrifice everything to that and the house and its comforts have to come last. My husband buys every acre he can get and of course has to engage hired men to work his farms; and the more men there are, the more work it is for a woman...." Miss Sykes understood the problems, but she also realized that the life her shipboard companion described would be far harder on an Englishwoman fresh from a comfortable home than it would be on a Canadian or on a European peasant. In Winnipeg Miss Sykes checked into the Home of Welcome. In this government-subsidized frame house as many as fifty single women could be packed. The first night's lodging was free, courtesy of the Immigration Department. After that Miss Sykes paid five dollars a week for a single room. The matron who registered her and listened to her background looked at her sadly. "What a pity it is that Englishwomen are taught to do nothing properly," she said. Miss Sykes agreed. At the YWCA, where she went for information, she was advised to put a classified ad in the Free Press: Educated Englishwoman, inexperienced, wishes to assist mistress of farm in housework. Job offers came in immediately, but Miss Sykes was realistic enough to know that she couldn't handle them. How could she wash, cook, and clean for the pregnant mother of four children for only fifteen dollars a month? Canada, in its own way, was as foreign as Baluchistan. She trudged disconsolately through Winnipeg's bustling streets, depressed at her inability to cope. She was accustomed to the leisurely pace of settled England. But here in this raw new country, everything seemed to be moving at the speed of those gigantic CPR locomotives, which roared headlong out of the prairie stations. Even the funeral processions dashed along at an unseemly trot, as if the mourners were in a hurry to fling the coffin into the grave and get back to work. At church, the choirs sang at such a brisk pace she could hardly keep up with the psalms and hymns. She had thought of trying to get a job as a waitress, but she heard again and again that English waitresses were too slow and were swiftly hustled out of their posts by alert Canadians, who seemed to her to do their work at lightning speed. This was a country for the young and the energetic; the streets seemed to be empty of old people. Am I a fool to have started on this absurd adventure? she asked herself. Back at the Home of Welcome she caught herself starting to criticise the food and the women she shared it with, and felt ashamed. Others at the table were running down Canadians, whom they thought of as merciless taskmasters, even though their wages were at least double those they would have received in England. Miss Sykes understood the problem: in Britain servants were specialists; but they could not understand that in Canada they must be able to turn their hands to anything to be cook, house-parlour maid washerwoman, even baker and dairymaid all rolled into one. It wasn't entirely their fault. No one had bothered to tell them about Canadian conditions-and they hadn't bothered to find out. Many of these young women, Ella Sykes discovered, did not understand the meaning of hard work and, lacking the strength, self reliance, and money needed in the new land, could not resist the idea of finding a man to fend for them. Some were prepared to hurl themselves into marriage. They crowded into the local matrimonial agency, one or two even going all the way to Vancouver to marry men they had never seen. Others confessed they had deserted an English husband and expected to find a fresh one in Canada. Many, in their innocence, were bitterly disappointed. "Before I came out to Canada," one girl at the hostel told her, "I read that I should find a number of men on the Winnipeg platform waiting to propose to us girls, but, would you believe it, when I got out of the train not a single man even spoke to me?" Miss Sykes began to realize that in order to make their way in the new land, English men and women must divest themselves of Old Country prejudices and keep their personal views to themselves. Why, one servant girl had actually objected because her employer sat down at the table in his shirt sleeves! Canadians, she was learning, especially Westerners, were intensely proud; when the English criticized their country, it got their backs up. In this assessment she was not alone. Half a dozen perceptive English journalists were making the same point. Six years before, John Foster Fraser, a British travel writer, had reported that Englishmen were not welcome in Winnipeg because they continually made comparisons to Canada's detriment-"astonished that the conditions of life are not the same as in England, a thing that ruffles the fur of every Canadian." At last Miss Sykes found a job she thought she could handle, as companion to a farm widow on the Saskatchewan prairie at ten dollars a month. As it turned out, she couldn't. The first night after supper she realized she didn't even know how to wash dishes properly, putting all the crockery into the pan with the cutlery and the greasy plates. Everything, in fact, was strange, including the method of arranging pillows on the bed. In England she had been considered a capable woman; here, at every moment, it was impressed upon her that she was the reverse; she telt humiliated, out of her element, exhausted. Is this really me'? she asked herself, as she cleaned each floor on her hands and knees, scrubbed clothes on the washboard, ironed the hired men's shirts, replenished the "voracious stove" with chunks of wood, made the porridge, and fried the bacon that was the staple meat twice a day. Her headquarters was a fly-infested kitchen, which she thought of as the Black Hole of Calcutta. And yet when she woke one morning to find the spring wind blowing, the snow melting, the birds singing, her depression vanished. She stayed one week. Her employer, Mrs. Robinson, who was friendly and understanding to the last, gave her notice within a day of her arrival. Like so many Canadian farm women Ella Sykes observed, Mrs. Robinson seemed to have lost the habit of repose. She was unable to stay still for a moment. She would sweep the kitchen and shed and shake out all the carpets after every meal, ply the broom between times when it wasn't necessary, "forever goaded by a malignant dream of unrest." When the time came to leave, Miss Sykes received from Mrs. Robinson a little homily on the subject of her untidiness and then a pat on the back for what she had learned. She accepted it all in humble silence, clutching her wages in her hand. What an immense effort it had been to earn a few dollars! All together, Ella Sykes took five positions in Canada. Her last job on the prairies was in Alberta. She arrived in Calgary to find the YWCA full but managed to get a room at a women's hostel where once again she was presented with evidence of the jealousy between the English and the Canadians. One of the lodgers, a Miss Bates, told how she had applied for a job in a Calgary home only to be told: "We don't want any English here." To that she retorted: "If I had known you were a Canadian I should never have applied .. ." and flounced out. The remark so struck the fancy of her would-be employer that she called after her, saying she'd like to engage a woman of spirit, but Miss Bates proudly refused to go back. Some of the inmates of the hostel, in Ella Sykes's opinion, had no right to be in Canada at all. They had been intrigued by overenthusiastic literature, had seen the country through rose-coloured glasses, and were now bitterly disappointed. One frail elderly lady had bought her passage after a single conversation with an enthusiastic Canadian who had spoken vaguely of "crowds of openings for women." She was between jobs, being worn out with work, and when Miss Sykes met her several months later on her return from the West Coast, her health was broken. Another, a former governess who was also an accomplished milliner, refused to work in a shop because asking for such a job, she said, was abhorrent to her. "I want to live in a home and arrange the flowers and help the lady of the house with her correspondence," she announced. Miss Sykes tried to explain, in vain, that no such post existed in the Canadian West. It was not enough to be able to cook, iron, and sew; one also had to scrub floors and do heavy washing. Another of Miss Sykes's table mates who had been considered highly capable as a governess felt herself stupid and incompetent in Canada. Miss Sykes recognized in her the same feeling of depression and helplessness that she herself had suffered. Nevertheless, Ella Sykes was game to try again. She had attempted to peddle books from door to door in Calgary but found that she too easily took no for an answer. T hen a satisfactory reply came to her advertisement, and she went off to work for a fortnight on a large dairy farm, handling the housework and serving the meals to the farmer and his wife-a Mr. and Mrs. Brown-their three children and their three hired men. The fastidious Miss Sykes was taken aback at first to find that meat, potatoes, vegetables, and dessert were all served on the same plate, but relieved later to realize that this meant nine fewer dishes to wash. The three children she found "rough, manner less and unruly" and ascribed these failings to the fact that, as in many similar cases, their parents were simply too busy, toiling from dawn to dusk, to pay much attention to them. Mrs. Brown was comparatively young, but she looked older than her years, worn out by ceaseless toil. Again Miss Sykes noted that the habit of work was so deeply en grained in her that she was not able to be still. She cualcln't rest and take things easy. Mrs. Brown was happy with her husband, but she told Ella Sykes that had she known what she, a young English schoolteacher, was in for she would never have married him. In their early years they had been sod busters to use the vernacular, and she had hated it. "I haven't a single good word for the prairie," she said, "and I got to hate the very sight of a man when I was there." Why? "Because a man meant preparing a meal...." In shearing time, when they kept sheep, she had had to feed fifteen men five meals a day. She had no time to visit her neighbours-the nearest lived four miles away. "I just got into the way of thinking of nothing but how to get through the day's work." This was a revelation to Ella Sykes. "Aren't there some women who love the life?" she asked. "In England we hear so much of' the call of the prairie." "There may be some but I never met them. All my friends hated the loneliness and the lack of amusement and the same dull round day after day. Do you know, if I ever sat down and wrote, or did some sewing, Kitty [her daughter] would come up to me to ask whether it were Sunday, so astonished was she to see me resting, as on weekdays I was on the 'go' all the time." But surely, Miss Sykes said, she didn't need to work hard any more. The family were well off; she could afford to rest in the afternoons or visit the neighbours. Mrs. Brown replied sadly that it was too late. She was so wound up she had to keep going all day, and she had lost all desire for social intercourse. When her fortnight's stint was ended, Ella Sykes felt guilty about leaving Mrs. Brown, who had clearly enjoyed hercompanyand felt in her presence a welcome respite from her days of drudgery. But it was time to move on. She ended her trip in Victoria, and here among the rose trellises and rock gardens she experienced for the first time in Canada a leisurely pace reminiscent of home. But Canada was only an interlude in a crowded career. Back in England she produced a "plain, unvarnished record" of what she had seen during six months in Canada. "I ardently desire that British women shall help to build up the Empire," she wrote, "and the sisters of men who are doing such splendid work in the Dominion are surely fitted for the task." A few years later, she set off on another adventure to another distant corner of the globe. With her brother, Brigadier General Sir Percy Molesworth Sykes, she travelled to the roof of the world through the oases and deserts of Central Asia into Chinese Turkestan, becoming the first white woman to cross the dangerous passes leading to and from the high Pamirs that lie north of the Afghanistan and Indian frontiers. It was an exhilarating experience, full of high adventure at high altitudes-a far cry from the toil, trouble, and humiliation of Canadian farm life in the Golden West. Dun 't In spite of the prejudice against them, it is clear that the majority of the come back, English who came to Canada were, in their own way, as industrious as Dad the equally despised Galicians and Doukhobors. The story of the Shepherd family of Ramsgate can stand for thousands of similar tales of middle-class English families who, down on their luck in the first decade of the century, sought a new life in the Canadian West. The family was no stranger to hard work. William John Shepherd was a butcher, but not a successful one. He had operated shops in Canterbury, Deal, and Ramsgate. There, the entire family worked ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, and barely held their own. American packing houses like Swift's, selling Texas beef, were undercutting English butchers. What could they do'? England seemed barren of possibilities. To young George Shepherd, the second son, the country seemed poky, and when Mrs. Shepherd first broached the idea of emigration it was taken up enthusiastically by the family. Faraway lands seemed glamorous. The Shepherds considered America, Africa, and Australia, but decided at last on Canada. Canada was closest and Canada was British. There was land to be farmed there, and on the map the country looked imposing and Imperial. all tinted red with the words "The Dominion of Canada" spread out across it. It was a typically English decision: decide first, investigate later. The Shepherds sent off for literature. It came and, as they later realised, was more than a little on the optimistic side. They read it faithfully, called a family council to discuss ways and means, and decided that William Shepherd and young George would go out first to get a toehold on the land. Will, the t ldest brother, would help his mother operate the family butcher shop. He, his mother, and the others would follow when the men were settled. And so, with their goods packed in trunk-sized wicker baskets, father and son set off after enduring the agonising moment of farewell that every emigrant faced. George Shepherd would never forget that scene: his young brother Charlie, aged sixteen, putting his head through the open carriage window, seizing his father by the hand, and crying out: "Don't come back, Dad, don't come back!" It was those words, more than any other, that kept the elder man from becoming discouraged by his difficulty in adapting to the strange new country. For it ~ as strange. "A welcome awaits you in Canada," the literature had promised. But there was nt\ welcome only hurry and bustle. The train engines astonished both father and son-great raucous brutes pulling colonist cars that seemed more like moving houses. And the sleeping accommodations! Everyone slept fully clothed, two by two, on wooden slats below or on a wooden tray that pulled down from above. (Young George Shepherd smiled when he was told there would be no charge for sleeping room.) When the engineer turned down the heat at midnight everybody shivered in Manitoba's zero weather. In Winnipeg's immigration hall, where they slept on the floor in their greatcoats and blankets, it was warmer. Strolling down Main Street, rubbing elbows with a variety of nationalities, they felt very un--Canadian in their English clothes. But they didn't complain; all this discomfort, they realized, was part of the business of emigrating. They had put down their names for work on a farm and a day later found themselves in another immigration hall in Brandon. The following day they signed a contract with a farmer a few miles out of town, and that was the end of the Canadian government's responsibility toward them. The contract was hard. The two Englishmen must work on Jim Hale's SOO-acre farm for the seven summer months at ten dollars a month for both. That, Hale told them, would give them the experience they would need to homestead. But there was a catch: if they didn't work the full seven months they would be paid nothing. For Hale this was good business; he had little to lose and cheap labour to gain. They stuck it out for six weeks, cleaning Jim Hale's barns seven days a week, and then, unable to take it any longer, they quit and went back to Brandon without having earned a nickel. It was the low point of their lives. They were trudging gloomily down Brandon's main street when they spotted a sign: "READ THE LAND MAN." And: "For Sale, A Half-section of Land in Central Saskatchewan 320 Acres, No Money Down and Twenty Years to Pay." William Shepherd's face lit up. This looked like the real thing! They'd had six weeks of farm experience; why work for others when they could farm for themselves? For reasons they could never understand, Read the Land Man took a personal interest in this English butcher and his son. He offered to pay his own way to Girvin, Saskatchewan, to conduct them to the half-section in question. Off the trio went by train to Girvin and by team and democrat six miles to the homestead. But when he saw the property, young George's heart sank. Here was nothing but bare prairie, not a stick or a stone standing, neither building nor well, not even a fence post. How could two inexperienced Englishmen hope to cultivate this endless expanse of turf? He persuaded his father to abandon the idea. They went to work as farmhands once again. At summer's end William Shepherd opened a small butcher shop in Girvin. It didn't look as if they could last long in Canada. Suddenly, in September, an astonishing thing happened. The rest of the family turned up in Girvin Mrs. Shepherd and George's four brothers and his sister, Kit. What had caused this sudden decision? Nobody quite said it, but George was pretty sure his father had written home suggesting it might be better if they both went back. That did it. His mother had no intention of staying put. Mrs. Shepherd had simply sold the business and loaded her family aboard a ship sailing for Canada, taking with her everything she felt they would need in the wild C'anadian West including a Boer War army rifle, two double-barrelled shotguns, another single-barrelled gun, a bowie knife, a naval cutlass, and a pole-axe, all presumably for standing off an attacking band of redskins until the Mounted Police dashed to the rescue. She also had the presence of mind to bring a keg of five-inch railroad spikes for nailing logs together and a piano, which cost twenty-five dollars in freight charges but which all agreed was worth its weight in gold that winter. The family worked hard. Mr. and Mrs. Shepherd ran the butcher shop, George toiled as a farmhand, three of his brothers, Will, Harry, and Geoff, laboured at hauling and shovelling grain. Charlie got a job as a well digger. Kit, aged fifteen, worked in the Girvin hotel waiting on tables. By midwinter none of the Shepherds considered themselves green Englishmen; in fact, they tended to scoff at a fussy little Englishwoman who came in especially to warn Mrs. Shepherd of the blizzards. They had made good and were now trusted hired men. What would the next step be? It's clear that the family catalyst was Mrs. Shepherd. It was she who had first thought of emigrating, she who had summarily pulled up stakes and come out to Girvin. Now, as George put it, she was bitten by the free-homestead virus. Why wait? Why not act before spring came? Nothing would do but she and her husband must take the train to neighbouring Davidson to visit the land agency, pore through the township books, and return with a handbook of homestead regulations and a good idea of the free land available in the area. Another family council followed. It was impossible to locate land while the snow was so deep, but it was agreed that everybody would make himself familiar with the Homestead Act and keep in touch with the land office in Davidson to learn what cancellations and changes were being recorded by the government agent there. This vigilance paid off. At Long Lake, some twenty-odd miles east of Girvin, three quarter-sections suddenly came open, relinquished by a land company that had failed to live up to its agreement with the government. The Shepherds learned of it immediately through their contacts with the agent, who offered to hold on to it for a day. Will, George, and Charlie went to Davidson at once and "filed blind," that is, without inspecting the land. What was good enough for a land company, they figured, was good enough for them. That done, they went down to the station to return home. The train was nine hours late. They couldn't wait, and so off they trudged down the track ten miles on foot in the bitter cold. When they reached Girvin it was dark and the thermometer had dropped to forty below. It didn't matter. As they stumbled into the family shack behind the butcher shop and relaxed, they couldn't hide their triumph. Out came the homestead receipts as the entire family gloated. They were land holders at last, with almost five hundred acres to their names, and they felt on top of the world. They couldn't help but remark on the fortuitous chain of events that had led them to this moment. If they hadn't decided to send father and son to Canada .. . if those two hadn't happened on the office of Read, the Land Man .. . if Mrs. Shepherd hadn't insisted on keeping in touch with the land office in Davidson! It seemed as if some guardian angel was fluttering just above them, leading them through various trials and travails to this moment of jubilation. That spring they moved their house and their butcher shop by sleigh to the new homestead. It took two days, perhaps the most trying of their lives, for the loads were so heavy they kept veering off the trail of packed snow. But it was a momentous anniversary, for they arrived on the site on March 20, 1909, exactly one year to the day after George and his father had left liverpool They had four oxen, a little equipment, scarcely any cash, but considerable experience. They were healthy, ambitious, and not afraid of work. To hold the land they would have to follow the homestead regulations put up buildings, break the sod, raise crops. But some of them could also work tor others, and they were prepared for long hours, few holidays, and no vacations. Will and George worked as labourers on a fifteen-thousand-acre farm in the district. Charlie stayed home that first summer and helped break ninety acres of virgin prairie. Mr. Shepherd managed to get a mail contract. When a C'anadian Pacific branch line came, two of the boys laboured on the construction gang. They worked as a family unit: all their wages and profits went into a central fund to improve the farm. There was a closeness here that others, lonely on the prairie, must have found enviable. In George Shepherd's memoirs, written fifty years later, one gets a glimpse of it: Mrs. Shepherd seated at the piano, her bell-like voice joining the others grouped around her singing "Old Black Joe" and "My Old Kentucky Home." It was a remarkably successful transition. In Kent, the "Garden of England," the family had led a sequestered urban existence. To adjust so swiftly to a raw and foreign rural environment was not easy, especially for the parents. Yet they did not complain. While Canadians were poking fun at "blooming green Englishmen," this family and thousands of others like them were going sturdily about their business enriching the Dominion by the sweat of their brows. In England' the Shepherds could hardly make ends meet; in the Canadian West they thrived. Mrs. Shepherd was the most amazing of all. Within four years of her arrival she was writing articles for the Grain Gr"~"Z,ers, Guide giving advice to farm women on how to raise chickens. She became such an authority on poultry that she took to public speaking. In Moose Jaw, when the Grain Growers held their annual convention, she was chosen as the leading woman speaker. Ramsgate, by that time, must have seemed as distant as the moon. Chapter Six The American Invasion Will White thinks big Catching the fever Keeping out the Blacks Loosening Imperial ties Will It was Clifford Sifton's original belief that "the best settlers are those White whose condition in the land from which they come is not too rosy, and thinks who are content in coming here to get along in a humble way at first." trig It was hopeless, he believed back in February 1896, to expect to fill the country with well-to-do farmers; this was his rationale for bringing in peasants from northern and eastern Europe. Well before the turn of the century, however, the pragmatic minister had softened his policy. Public opinion was forcing him to restrict Galician immigration. British farmers didn't seem to want to come. But south of the border were tens of thousands of well-to-do Americans who might jump at the chance of selling out at a high price and buying in at a low one. Sifton shifted his sights and concentrated his main thrust on these people. The results were wildly successful. In the powerful and carefully orchestrated campaign that followed, every technique was used and honed to a fine point. Between 1898 and 1906, the department spent two million dollars-more than a quarter of its budget-to convince Americans that they should come to Canada. They didn't come cheap. It cost an average of $3.22 to bring in an Englishman, but the government spent $5.35 for every American who crossed the border. Sifton obviously thought it was worth the money. By 1902 he was able to warn an audience of British businessmen in Montreal that "Americans now own the Canadian Northwest." Yet the real invasion had scarcely begun. There were at that time fewer than 40,000 American-born settlers on the prairies. In another ten years the number had jumped to 217,000. Only about 10,000 settled in Manitoba; the majority took up homesteads in Saskatchewan and Alberta. Sifton turned his propaganda campaign in the United States over to W.J. "Will" White, his old crony from the Brandon Sun. White was the perfect choice -a "go-getter," in the phrase of the day, assigned to a nation of go-getters. Back in 1881, chafing at the lack of opportunity in Exeter, Ontario, where he was editor of the weekly Tinges, he encountered a local boy, Torn Greenway, just returned from Manitoba and bursting with enthusiasm for the West. White, the hustler, took Greenway's advice and hustled off to Winnipeg by way of Michigan, Milwaukee, and St. Paul (for the CPR was not completed). So did Greenway, who was destined to become Premier of Manitoba. In Winnipeg, White learned that there were plans afoot to start a newspaper in the CPR'S new divisional point in the Brandon Hills. On he hustled, again as far as the steel would take him, a few miles west of Portage la Prairie. Then, in a driving rainstorm, he trudged the remaining thirty-five miles on f Got to Brandon. Two days later he was walking the sawdust-strewn streets of the new community. Shortly afterwards he launched the weekly Sun. It was a one-man operation. White set the type himself, cranked the press, peddled the paper on the streets for a nickel a copy, sold the advertising, wrote every word that appeared, and even swept the floors. As the Sun prospered and the West made news, White prospered with it. When Louis Riel touched off the Saskatchewan rebellion in 1885, White began to churn out extras, hiring gangs of boys to turn the press and upping the price to a quarter. Soon he acquired shareholders, Clifford Sifton and James Smart, among others; the Sun was always ruggedly Liberal. White thought big. When Brandon was about to be incorporated as a town, he discovered it cost no more to call itself a city. Why not go for the bargain? Think big, he told the city fathers; vote yourselves a city! They took his advice. Now, as Sifton's propaganda chief for the United States, White was again required to go on the hustle. He was in his fifties now, at the height of his powers. And, as he set up his network of agents south of the border, he continued to think big. He had as many as twenty-one immigration offices operating in the most productive U.S. centres, each manned by a salaried manager and a staff. In addition he had twenty-seven travelling agents moving about the country and, by 1901, 276 subagents -farmers and railroad employees, mainly-who received a bonus of three dollars for every man, two dollars for every woman, and a dollar for every child they secured for Canada. The job of this army of salesmen was to tout Canada as a land of promise where the weather was bracing but never exhausting; where British law, order, and justice prevailed; where the land was rich, cheap, and available; and, above all, where everybody who got in on the ground floor and worked hard could become wealthy and successful. The agents blanketed the American midwest with lantern-slide lectures and stereopticon views of the Canadian prairies. They devised a chain letter system to get the names of interested farmers and then deluged them with a rain of pamphlets and information. They placed maps and atlases in the schools and persuaded teachers to give geography lessons on the Canadian West. They talked women's clubs, which were eager to study almost anything, into studying the prairies. They buttonholed clergymen and suggested they extol the virtues of the Canadian moral climate. They held street meetings which, for their evangelical fervour, competed easily with the itinerant medicine shows and Saturday-night corner sermons. They squired leading farmers on free junkets to Canada and got them to write up their adventures for the local paper or the department's pamphlets. They turned up at state and county fairs with displays of Canadian wheat. They were everywhere, it seemed. When a land rush was touched off in Oklahoma by the opening of a Comanche Indian reservation in 1902, the Canadians were on hand in a tent to make sure that those land-hungry settlers who didn't get a homestead would have an alternative. As a result, three hundred families pulled up stakes and left for Alberta. But the immigration agent was more than a propagandist. He was the farmer's friend, companion, land agent, and travel expert. White's people handed out thousands of "settlers' certificates," each of which allowed the holder to travel on the CPR from the American border to his destination for the ridiculous price of one cent a mile. If many used these certificates for nothing more than a pleasure jaunt, White didn't care. The country canted visitors who would return with glowing reports of the golden land west of Winnipeg. The immigration agent stood ready to help out with advice, to suggest the best land, to arrange for train tickets, and if a farmer set off alone, to make the necessary arrangements for his family to follow. As a practitioner of hype, Will White deserves to stand with the best of the modern hucksters. Newspapermen were even easier to buy in those days than they were in later decades. A free junket did the trick, especially if there was a prolonged stop at the spas of Banff or Lake Louise. Trainloads of compliant editors, lubricated by good whiskey and warmed by the best CPR cuisine, raced across the prairies at government expense, stopping at wheat fields and handsome farms (carefully selected) or for banquets at the major cities. The Minnesota editors came first, then the Wisconsin editors, and then the National Editorial Association, all six hundred of them, representing a thousand newspapers. When the editorial junkets began to strain the public purse, White traded free trips in return for free advertising. The press swallowed the bait. The Michigan Press Association was so eager that it offered to give two or three dollars worth of ads for every dollar Canada expended -and all in advance of each junket. To secure the co-operation of the Western American press. White also dangled the carrot of paid advertising. The placing of the most minuscule ad was enough to soften up most newspapers and put them strongly in the Canadian camp, producing glowing accounts of the Western prairies and attacking those interests who were opposed to American emigration. By 1902, Canada was advertising in seven thousand Western American papers-but only in the slack seasons when the farmers had time to read. White didn't have things all his own way. Midwestern leaders were appalled at the exodus to Canada and took desperate steps to counteract it. At the height of the boom it was estimated the Americans were bringing between $50 million and $60 million a year into Canada in cash and equipment. Peter Muirhead of Oklahoma City, to take one example, arrived in Calgary in 1902 with six carloads of animals, two carloads of equipment, and enough ready cash to buy a three-thousand-acre ranch. That constituted an enormous drain on the small American community he had deserted. No wonder, then, that White found himself in a battle with American land companies, business men, politicians, railways, and real estate interests. In Wisconsin, the anti-Canadian campaign was so virulent that the Canadian agency was driven right out of the state. The Wisconsin Central Railroad bought off the Canadian sub-agents as quickly as they were appointed. Wealthy Wisconsin lumbermen, who owned millions of acres of cleared land in the state, fought so hard against the resident agent, James MacLachlan, that he asked for a transfer. Business and real estate officials pressured county fairs to reject his exhibits, and he was reduced to operating from rented stores near the fairgrounds. White made no headway with the local paper in Wausau, where the Canadian immigration office was located. It refused all Canadian advertising and published features on disgruntled American farmers returning home from Canada disillusioned. White suspected that Wisconsin land promoters had actually sent fake farmers disguised as settlers into Canada with orders to return with stories of personal hardships and broken government promises. The last straw came in the summer of 1903, when MacLachlan, arriving one morning at his office in Wausau, found a small package tied to the knob of his door. It contained a condom filled with cotton batting and a card attached with this message: "Suck this, it's good enough for a canuck why cant [tic] you work in your own country?" That winter, White threw in the towel and transferred his agent to South Dakota. But White's most formidable opponent was the powerful railroad magnate James Jerome Hill, whose successful completion of the Great Northern from St. Paul to the Pacific was hailed as the greatest feat of railway building on the continent. Hill's was the only transcontinental railroad in the United States built without government subsidy and without financial scandal. A garrulous, one-eyed former Canadian, Hill had also been in on the birth of the Canadian Pacific. But now he had no intention of seeing the hard-won profits of his line diminished by a massive loss of customers to Canada. If he could best EH. Harriman and keep the Burlington line out of Chicago, why couldn't he just as easily defeat his former countrymen, Sifton and White? Hill's headquarters, St. Paul, became a hotbed of anti-Canadianism. The St. Paul Cliche, which Hill controlled, bristled with features purporting to show that Canadian soil conditions were inferior to those below the border. Every effort was made to snatch prospective emigrants away from the Canadians and redirect them to American homesteads. As a result, White's men had to keep them under tight scrutiny as soon as they reached Hill's city. They "should be closely looked after, taken to my office and guarded every moment they spend in this city," the local agent told Ottawa. Jim Hill was no stranger to the Canadian North West. His closest friend and former partner was Lord Strathcona, who, as plain Donald Smith, had been Member of Parliament for Selkirk, Manitoba, and who was still a major shareholder in Hill's railway. But Hill had no compunction about manipulating the facts to his own advantage; he had done it before when, as a consummate Ic~bbyist, palm-greaser, and propagandist, he had turned a bankrupt railway into a thriving success. Now his efforts were channelled into depicting Canada as an arctic nation whose soil was poor and whose grain yield was pathetic. In a remarkable and widely reported speech in Bismarck, ND., in 1903, the leonine Hill was at his most pugnacious: "I am not saying much about the area of their land up there, and I am not so much frightened about their climate or the quality of their soil. They are pretty near where Sir John Franklin met his misfortune, that is somewhere near the North Pole. I have seen fields of their wheat .. . it would not yield a bushel to the acre. It is a handsome growth with nothing in it. I knew these things when I was interested in the Canadian Pacific. Our people who have gone there will, a great many of them, come back." Hill's attempts to depict the Canadian wheat fields as "somewhere near the North Pole" were taken up by friendly American newspapers, one of which went so far as to publish the tale of a Manitoba postmaster pursued by man-hungry wolves to within a mile of Winnipeg and saved only by the fleetness of his team. The story was not short on colourful details: so close was the ravenous pack, the paper announced, that the beasts tore to pieces the buffalo robes hanging over the back of the cutter! Yet the anti-Canadian campaign failed. Each year, it seemed, the number of Americans flooding into Canada doubled. In both Alberta and Saskatchewan, the American-born soon outnumbered the English by a ratio of two to one. In both provinces they formed the largest single immigrant group, their numbers even exceeding the combined immigration figures from all British possessions. Alberta was by far the more Americanized with 80,000 native-born Americans, 67,000 British, and 58,000 Slavs-figures that give a clue to its present-day personality. In spite of these statistics, Jim Hill didn't abandon his campaign. As late as 1912 he was still vainly battling away. With his blessing and support the northwestern states held a convention in Seattle designed to organize one last-ditch attempt to stop Americans from moving north. Alas, on the very day the convention opened, the delegates were embarrassed to open their Seattle Tinges and discover a large advertisement from Canada showing a Canadian wheat field with a furrow two miles long. "We ought to be ashamed of ourselves to permit such a thing!" cried the president of the Seattle Commercial Club. The convention came to nothing. Jim Hill had by then won his battle with his crafty rival Harriman. But he had not been able to compete with the attractions offered by the Canadian West or nullify the hard sell of Will J. White. In the case of the Americans, Clifford Sifton had no need to defend his Catching policies to the Opposition or to the public. Most Canadians, especially the Westerners, welcomed American immigration, and with good reason. fever The Americans were not paupers; on the contrary, they brought money into the country. More, they were practical farmers with years of experience under conditions very similar to those on the northern plains. They were white, the majority were of Anglo-Saxon extraction, and they all spoke English. In the eyes of the Westerners, the Americans were everything the English were not. They were go-getters who were willing to work. They did not keep to themselves but mixed easily with their neighbours. They adapted swiftly to Canadian ways. They did not poor-mouth the country but welcomed the Canadian lifestyle with its emphasis on order and security. Almost every man who crossed the border from Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, or Minnesota was a walking success story before he arrived. The Americans had sold their farms for fancy sums, and now they were picking up new land in Canada for a song160 acres free, the rest for as little as a dollar an acre. They loved their adopted country, melted easily into the national fabric, and became patriots. More than any other group, they acted as a spark to touch off the prairie land boom. Small wonder, then, t hat the press was ecstatic. "Desirable" was the mildest adjective used to describe them. "Absolutely the pick of two continents," was the headline in the winnil7cg Tribune in 1906. The Lethbridge Herald went into paroxysms of hyperbole over the American invasion: "This class of immigration is of a top-notch order and every true Canadian should be proud to see it and encourage it. Thus shall our vast tracts of God's bountifulness .. . be peopled by an intelligent progressive race of our own kind, who will readily be developed into permanent, patriotic, solid citizens who will adhere to one flag-that protects their homes and their rights -and whose posterity .. . will become .. . a part and parcel of and inseparable from our proud standards of Canadianism." So let us wait, for a day or two, on the CPR platform in Calgary and watch the Americans pour in. It is Marc h, 1906. The depot's baggage roan?" the in?n?igratiOH hall, and the adjacent hotels and restaurants that straggle along the rail line are jangled u ith neu C oners. The u ooclen p/atJOrn? is c romped ~ ith Ca/garr businessmen, here to Is e/c once "the nest extraordinary n?ove ment of substantial settlers" ever recorded in the toll n. There are no sheepskin c oats here, no babushkas, no riding breeches or Stetsons. These are uell-turned-unt entrepreneurs in expensive suits, pith hatch chains draped across their "'ests. Only their faces, Leathered hr sun and u and, tell us they do not be/On" in the cities. A fugue of regional accents ripples across the platform?: the flat tuang of loua, the soJier sibilance of Missouri. These people have brought theirtamilies; they intend to .sta~ Small boy s in caps and knee breeches dash about. John M. RoHan if Randolph, Nebraska, is heading for Olds u ith e/even children. Marmacluke O'Maller of Pilot Knob, Missouri -a lean Southerner u ith a drooping n?oustache and chin u hiskers has four of Jspring and doesn't c are u here he /oc ales as long as the c ountrr is as good as advertised. Marr Co/u~in of Camchester, Oklahoma, a veteran of the Cherokee Strip land rush and a victim of the suh.sequent drought, has sod out and is starting afresh pith her three bo~,s-the eldest harelip sixteen-an erect little uidou Pith aJace burned bro un hr the Oklahoma sun. The trains steam into the depot, section after section, too hours apart, each section containing seven to eleven cars. Captain Jimn?v Wine, the inu7?igrati