The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (10 page)

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 Humeniuk family has arrived in Winnipeg. In the colonist car, they and the others sit quietly in their seats as they have been told, peering curiously out of the windows at the equally curious crowd on the platform peering in. Suddenly they spot a familiar figure – a Galician searching about for acquaintances. His name is Michaniuk, and he soon spies his old friends
.

“Neighbours!” Mr. Michaniuk shouts, “where are you going?”

There is a commotion in the coach. Where
are
they going? Nobody seems to know
.

“Don’t go any farther,” cries Mr. Michaniuk to his former townspeople. “It is good here!”

One of the men in the coach rises to his feet and addresses the assembly
.

“There is our neighbour, Mr. Michaniuk. He came to Canada last year. He says it is good here. Let us get off the train.”

A stampede follows. Men seize the doors, but they are locked. They try the windows, but these too are fastened. Several, in a frenzy, pick up their handbags, smash the glass, and begin to crawl through the openings, throwing their goods ahead of them. The Humeniuk family is borne forward by the press of people onto the platform
.

Up runs the conductor, accompanied by an interpreter
.

“What are you going to do now?” the interpreter cries out. “We have good land for you near Yorkton. There are no free good homesteads for farming left in Manitoba.”

But the newcomers cannot be convinced. A spokesman replies: “We are not going any further. Our Old Country friend has been here one year. He says it is good where he settled.”

No one can persuade them to go on to Yorkton. The dissidents are moved to the immigration hall where the women begin to cook food, launder the clothes, and tend to the children. The men follow Mr. Michaniuk to the Dominion Land Office to file for homesteads near Stuartburn on the Roseau River, where thirty-seven Galician families are already located. It turns out that some land is still available, and it is there that they settle. Most will still be there more than half a century
later, when Nykola and Anastasia Humeniuk, surrounded by grandchildren, celebrate their golden wedding anniversary on the farm they filed 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. W.A. 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 most of the labourers were Galicians – “naïve, 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 Horne, 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
Independent
“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
Bulletin
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 Canada’s Anglo-Saxon heritage. Hugh John Macdonald, the son of Canada’s 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 sub-humans with violent criminal tendencies, subject to avarice and uncontrollable passions. Mackenzie Bowell 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 minister.

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
Telegram
reported the murder of Mrs. Robert Lane of Brandon and identified her assailant as Galician. The real culprit, of course, in the
Telegram’s
eyes, was the man who had brought the “foreign scum” into Canada.

ANOTHER SIFTONIAN 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 door-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 168 were foreign born. Of these latter only nine were Galicians.

3
The Galician vote

In 1904, the attitude toward the Galicians began to change, and for a very practical reason. Suddenly, the newspapers and politicians who 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
Telegram
, 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 Galicians 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.