The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (16 page)

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, Wes 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 struggle – 150
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
Montreal 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.

Wes 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.

5
Peter the Lordly

It is a crisp winter afternoon in Winnipeg, three days before Christmas, 1902. We are standing on the
CPR
platform, waiting impatiently for the eastern train, which is three hours late. A small knot of people has been here since noon and one, a woman, has waited since early morning. The anarchist Herbert Archer is here – that strange graduate from Purleigh who has dedicated his life to the Doukhobor cause and whom Wes Speers believes has had as much to do as anybody in stirring up the fanatics earlier this autumn. Crerar, the immigration agent from Yorkton, is here too. Three Doukhobor elders, an interpreter, and one reporter (from the
Free Press,
of course) make up the delegation
.

At last the train hisses in. A crowd of holidayers surges forward to meet another crowd of holidayers pouring from the cars, their luggage stuffed with Christmas parcels. We crane our necks vainly for the object of our long wait. At last we spot him, towering over the throng. He alights from the coach and starts down the platform – a big man, half a head taller than his fellow passengers, with a luxuriant black beard and dark, thoughtful eyes. He is not dressed like the others: under his short gabardine coat we can see leggings, close fitting, dark grey, piped with black. He wears a black fedora, and around his neck, on a long cord, dangle a silver watch and a gold pencil
.

The woman rushes toward him, followed by her Doukhobor companions. He drops his black nickel-studded valise, removes his hat, stretches out his arms to embrace her, and cries: “Anna!” She is his
sister. He is Peter Verigin. They have not seen each other for fifteen years
.

She clings to his arm as he walks quietly on toward the rest of the reception committee. We all repair to the immigration building where the acting commissioner, Moffat, who has replaced the ailing McCreary (now enjoying a well-earned rest as Member of Parliament for Selkirk), greets him warmly
.

“You’ll be glad to be in a country where there is religious and individual freedom,” says Moffat
.

“I haven’t looked around yet,” replies Peter Verigin in his soft voice, “so I cannot yet tell whether this is a free country 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.” Verigin talked on and on with the delegates “without any apparent diminution of energy.”