The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (15 page)

It is a crisp March morning in 1902 and we are driving west from Rosthern in a two-horse cutter along the wedge of land that lies between the two branches of the Saskatchewan. Dawn is a lemon-coloured streak on the horizon, and the lower edges of the purple clouds are tinged with rose. This is new country, the haunt until recently of Métis, Indian, and fox. Five years 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 willow saplings and the occasional gnarled oak. The scattered buildings tell the story of Western settlement: the original homestead shacks have been turned into henhouses and the first log cabins are used now as granaries. Beside the cabins, more substantial frame, and even brick, dwellings signal the progress of the German and Scandinavian settlers who came here in ’96, ’97, and ’98
.

As we 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 Hills rise gracefully – a golden saffron in the morning light, striped with white snow and brown belts of timber, intersected by purple ravines. Before us lies the great trench of the North Saskatchewan with the frozen ribbon of the river at its bottom, fringed with birch, elm, and poplar. Here the trail is scarcely more than a rut. Soon it becomes a three-hundred-foot toboggan slide as our team hurtles down into the valley. But two miles away 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 valley, at the end of a well-kept trail leading up from the river. A short time later we arrive
.

The village consists of a single street, half as broad again as Winnipeg’s Portage Avenue, lined with long, low yellow buildings, gabled and roofed with sod or thatch. The gable ends face the road and are separated from it by neatly railed gardens. Each building is fifty feet
long, divided equally – the front half for humans, the rear for animals. The thick mud walls 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 walls whitewashed. Two windows, each three feet square, are thick with house plants, some brought all the way from Batum
.

A large stove and oven dominate one corner. A bench runs round three sides of the room, broadening into a sleeping shelf big enough for entire families. Coloured lithographs adorn the walls. Here in the rolling Saskatchewan prairie, a little corner of Russia has been successfully transplanted
.

Terpenie is a prosperous village. In the rear of each house stands a neatly scrubbed granary with 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, they are better off than the others, having had funds of their own. They are also more independent, less entranced by religious communism. Yet generalizations are impossible. For even here, where the trend is toward individual ownership, there are those who hew to the old ways and who listen to the words of Tolstoy and Verigin as interpreted by that uncompromising zealot Nicholas Zibarov, who calls himself John the Baptist and who will shortly lead his Sons of God barefoot across the frosty stubble of the prairie on a pilgrimage to nowhere. So powerful is the call that 80 members of this community of 280 will 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 “Lally 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 every 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
Ottawa 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, lined ’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 frugal 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.

4
The Sons of God

In all his years on the prairies, Wes Speers had never seen anything like it, and knew he would never see anything like it again.

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, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

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 back-room 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 wheelhorse 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 colonization 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 Wes 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 Doukhobors, 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 beasts – 120 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. Canada wanted them to file individual titles to each 160-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 white-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.…”