The Great Depression (47 page)

In spite of the hour, a large crowd turned up to chat with the trekkers as they lounged on the grass, knapsacks at hand, waiting
for the train to be made up. An anxious mother threaded her way through the crowd seeking her son, trying to persuade him to stay behind; nobody could find him. A well-dressed youth appeared with a suit of clean overalls and a sweater for his brother. One man rushed up at the last moment to announce he’d walked forty miles to join the trek. A small boy proudly announced that his father was joining up. “I have twelve brothers and sisters at home,” he explained, “and daddy hasn’t been able to get a job for over a year.” As the train prepared to leave, a group of Calgary women arrived with twenty-four hundred sandwiches and a side of beef to feed the trekkers on the next leg of the journey. Another group of fifty women offered to accompany the trek to provide solace for the men – an intriguing suggestion that had to be rejected.

Railway police held the crowd back as the various divisions swung aboard on Cosgrove’s signal, packing the roofs of fifty boxcars. As marshal of the trek, Cosgrove had maintained an iron discipline. Like so many of the leaders, he had survived the Great War, having joined the army at fourteen and served the entire four years at the front except for a brief absence to recover from wounds received at the Somme. Now he ordered the unit captains and their deputies, standing at each end of their allotted boxcars, to check each man’s strike card to make sure that no strangers tried to infiltrate. That done, he climbed aboard the tender behind the locomotive, waved to his grey-haired mother standing in the crowd, and they were off.

A late spring storm lay ahead. For fifty miles the freight chugged on through sheets of cold, driving rain. The men clung to the catwalks, wet to the skin, huddling together for warmth. At Medicine Hat, the advance party had washboilers full of hot coffee to warm up the shivering crowd, which included the two O’Brien sisters, who stepped off the train “looking like drowned rats” and were not heard of again.

The trekkers slept that night in Athletic Park on the outskirts of town. Steve Brodie, helping to keep the fires going, suddenly spotted a dark figure emerging from the shadows at the park entrance. “Well,” somebody announced, “here’s Arthur.” Evans had persuaded the WUL to let him return.

To Brodie, Evans seemed “absolutely bone weary, almost staggering from tiredness and weakness. Because of the fire burning
in him all the time, he never had an ounce of fat on him and this night he looked like a living skeleton.” Evans’s face was black with soot, his eyes red from cinders and fatigue.

“Steve, for God’s sake give me a cup of that coffee, please,” he said. He had spent hours trying to outmanoeuvre the RCMP, who he was convinced were intent on stopping him from going east. Brodie was never sure whether Evans had really spotted Mountie spies: “Time after time in Arthur’s life he saw policemen who weren’t there.” But it was also true, as Brodie said, that “they hounded that man unmercifully.” A study of the RCMP’s own records shows that every time he had made a public appearance an undercover man was on hand to take down everything he said.

At Swift Current, Matt Shaw tried to get the city to put up $250 in exchange for a promise that the trekkers would bypass the town. The mayor refused to submit to this blackmail – the town was bankrupt, anyway – but did issue meal tickets for local restaurants. The freight obligingly waited for fifteen minutes to allow the men to be fed.

At Moose Jaw a rumour spread that if the men weren’t given food they’d smash up the town. Local policemen and members of the Junior Board of Trade, who pitched in to act as waiters in three Chinese restaurants, were flabbergasted to observe the iron discipline under which the trekkers operated. Steve Brodie thought the spectacle hilarious – a minister, a school teacher, and a storekeeper crying out: “Okay, send in 10 more men, we’ve got these tables cleaned.” Again, the CPR was requested to hold the train until the men were finished. “They fell over backward to assure us we weren’t going to go hungry,” Brodie remembered. “They had been fed so long on their own propaganda that they believed it.…”

By this time the word was out. The government had no intention of allowing the trek to continue past Regina. In the words of justice minister Hugh Guthrie, the trekkers were “a distinct menace to peace, order and good government” – the sturdy phrase that served to mask so much repression in the thirties.

But to carry out his intentions, the Prime Minister was forced to make another about-turn and ignore all his earlier attempts to evade responsibility for the problem. For months, Bennett and his deputy had been telling Duff Pattullo that the maintenance of law and order was up to the province. As late as June 11, he had told John Bracken, the Premier of Manitoba, that his hands were tied
in the matter of the trek. Colonel S.T. Wood, the assistant commissioner of the RCMP in Regina, had been specifically warned that he could not act unless requested to do so by the attorney general of the province. The RCMP in Saskatchewan, having been contracted out as provincial police, were not under federal jurisdiction. Now, to reverse himself, Bennett would have to invoke the Railway Act, which would return the RCMP in Saskatchewan to federal government control. But before he could make this move, Bennett had to receive requests for protection from both the CPR and the CNR. Of course he got what he wanted. The presidents of both railways suddenly came to the conclusion that the trekkers were trespassing on company property. For the best part of a fortnight, the CPR had been leaning over backward to accommodate them. Now, the general manager, W.A. Mather, in a hasty letter to James Garfield Gardiner, Saskatchewan’s Liberal premier, had decided that they threatened to become a menace. The same day, Colonel Wood received instructions from Ottawa to patrol both the railway yards and the trains to prevent the trek from continuing.

Gardiner, who had bounced back into power the previous year, was furious. Highly partisan by nature, he had no love for the Bennett government. He was short (five feet, four inches), barrel-chested, and tough. He had worked as a labourer, a farmer, and a schoolteacher, perfecting his oratory by remaining after classes to address empty desks. Since 1914 he’d been a hard-nosed politician and a champion of prairie interests.

The last thing he wanted was fifteen hundred or more jobless men – angry, now – dumped on his doorstep with no place to go. He shot off a blunt wire to Mather pointing out that the trekkers could scarcely be called trespassers since the CPR had supplied cars for their use. He added that they’d done nothing in his province to warrant police action. But they didn’t belong in his province, Gardiner said: move them out.

Gardiner was even angrier at Bennett’s high-handed methods. The attorney general of Saskatchewan hadn’t asked for help, as Bennett had always insisted he must before Ottawa could move. The RCMP was paid by the province and was supposed to take orders from the province. Yet here was Bennett issuing orders to the RCMP. As of June 12, the province of Saskatchewan lost control of its police force.

The trekkers, now two thousand strong, reached Regina on June 14, eleven days after the first lot left Vancouver. The province had already agreed to allow them to bed down in the Exhibition Grounds and to give each man two meal tickets a day. Here, too, the citizens were heavily on the side of the newcomers. A hastily formed Citizens’ Emergency Committee, incorporating a dozen organizations from the CCF to the Ministerial Association, pledged “to make the stay for the boys as comfortable and pleasant as possible.…”

The trek was scheduled to leave Regina on the evening of Monday, June 19. Mass rallies, picnics, and the arrival of another three hundred men from the camp at Dundurn had raised morale. Ottawa wanted to prevent a potentially dangerous confrontation with the police at the rail yards, especially with both citizens and strikers in their present mood. Besides, Bennett’s plan was to delay – to keep the trekkers in Regina long enough to cool them down. A series of stalling tactics would, he hoped, tire everybody out until the movement collapsed.

To that end, he sent two Cabinet ministers to Regina to “negotiate” with Evans and his committee. R.J. Manion, Minister of Railways, and Robert Weir, Minister of Agriculture, arrived on Monday morning, and a long wrangle followed in the basement of the Saskatchewan Hotel. The two ministers found Evans and his associates far more tractable than Premier Gardiner, whose attitude “was very ugly and not very helpful.” Gardiner pooh-poohed the idea of a revolution. It wasn’t the first march on Ottawa, he told Manion: a thousand Saskatchewan farmers had invaded the capital in 1910 and three thousand in 1922, and there’d been no revolution. If the men boarded the train that night and a riot ensued, he would call out the local police and arrest both the RCMP and the trekkers, since, in his view, both would be equally guilty.

When Evans presented the trekkers’ demands, all of which had been publicized over the past six months, Manion insisted with a straight face that he’d never heard of them before. Since he could not let the trek proceed, he made a counter offer. If Evans would head a delegation to Ottawa to present those demands to Bennett, the federal government would provide the army of men with three meals a day – at twenty cents, not fifteen – while they waited in Regina for the outcome of the meeting.

Evans knew at once that he’d been outmanoeuvred. He could not reject the offer. The press and the public would turn on him, for he had been demanding just such a meeting for months. But the delay would be demoralizing. When he put the proposition to a volatile mass meeting that afternoon, the trekkers damned the offer as a ruse; there was no possibility that Bennett would meet those demands. But they knew they had no choice but to accept. That evening eight thousand people gathered outside the Saskatchewan Hotel while the negotiators ironed out the final details. The trek was temporarily sidetracked, to the relief of Colonel Wood of the RCMP, who did not yet have enough men in Regina to prevent two thousand trekkers from forcing their way aboard a train.

The eight delegates selected to go to Ottawa (the group included Evans, Savage, Walsh, and Cosgrove) left on June 18, travelling first class – “on the cushions,” to use the current phrase. Red Walsh noted with astonishment that the dining-car waiter laid three sets of cutlery before them. In the Ottawa hotel where the delegation stayed, he saw his first bathtub in five years.

They met with Bennett and Perley on June 22 in a room so small that Doc Savage (who took his nickname from a popular magazine) likened it to a janitor’s closet. A curtain was drawn over one corner and Savage always maintained he could see a pair of Mountie boots sticking out from under it.

The scene that followed resembled an old and oft-remembered play of which everybody has memorized the script. Bennett’s New Deal did not include any negotiating with men he considered to be dangerous revolutionaries. Evans again outlined the trekkers’ demands. Bennett shot them all down. “Work and wages,” he declared, were beyond the capacity of the country. Food and shelter at the camps were adequate; there was no compulsion to join and no discipline. The daily twenty cents wasn’t a wage, it was a gift. The real problem was agitators “representing … Communism, which we will stamp out in this country.” He hit out at the strike leadership: “You have not shown much anxiety to get work.… What you want is this adventure in the hope that the organization which you are promoting in Canada may be able to overawe the government and break down the forces that represent law and order.”

Shortly after that an acrimonious exchange took place between Bennett and Evans.

“I come from Alberta,” Bennett said. “I remember when you embezzled the funds of your union and were sent to the penitentiary.”

To that Evans angrily replied, “You are a liar!” He had been charged with converting funds, not embezzling them. “I used the funds for hungry people, instead of sending them to Indianapolis to a bunch of pot-bellied business agents,” Evans said. As for Bennett, he declared in a burst of anger, he wasn’t fit to run a Hottentot village.

The meeting was a waste of time, for neither side budged an inch. The delegation left Ottawa on June 23, making a series of platform speeches before reaching Regina on the twenty-sixth. There Evans learned that Ottawa intended to open a temporary camp at Lumsden, Saskatchewan, to house the trekkers until they went back to the camps or to their homes.

Evans now realized that the strike of the relief camp workers, which had begun on April 4, was virtually at an end. They had, in fact, come much farther than anyone had expected, but that did not lessen the disappointment. He put on a bold face when he addressed an enthusiastic meeting of citizens that evening. If the strikers couldn’t go by rail, he announced, the trek would continue by road. He appealed to people with vehicles to come forward to take the men to Winnipeg. This was sheer bravado. The Trans-Canada Highway was not completed. The farthest east any motorcade could get would be Kenora, near the Manitoba-Ontario border.

But Ottawa had no intention of letting the trek move on by any method, even if that meant bending the law. Two days before, Colonel Wood had received a telephoned command from his superior, MacBrien, that all motor cars, buses, or trucks carrying relief camp trekkers east were to be stopped by the police and the drivers and passengers arrested. If worst came to worst, the government would proclaim a national emergency.

This was a remarkable order. Ordinary citizens were to be denied the use of the King’s Highways. There were no legal grounds for it, although MacBrien, as an excuse, used the “peace, order and good government” clause in the Relief Act to justify the action.

Wood told Gardiner that the directive had been approved by order-in-council. That wasn’t true. There never was such an order; in fact, the Cabinet couldn’t pass one while the House was in session. A web of confusion was now woven around the police instructions. T.C. Davis, the province’s attorney general, was led to believe that the non-existent order prevented the citizens from rendering assistance of any kind to the trekkers. Wood, apparently, believed this himself, for he told the Regina
Leader-Post
that anyone in Regina or its neighbourhood who assisted the trekkers was liable to prosecution – and that included offering food and shelter.