The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (2 page)
Read The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
But, oh, the waste! For two days, Dr. Oleskow’s train plunges through the blackened forests of the Precambrian Shield. To him these vast stretches of burned timber are a painful sight – a forest cemetery. No one, apparently, bothers to extinguish the gargantuan blazes that despoil the land. In the professor’s native Ruthenia, wood is the most
precious of commodities, to be husbanded and hoarded. But these Canadians destroy their heritage mercilessly. Why he discovers, when they clear the land, they actually toss the stumps into the nearest ravine!
The train leaves the blackened desert of the Shield and bursts into the prairies. Here are other wonders. The Canadians have an axe with a curved handle that fits the shape of the hand. Oleskow tests it and wonders why his own countrymen have, in the course of several centuries, failed to improve the design of their own implements. As the train passes through the grain fields of Manitoba he notes that nobody uses a sickle or a scythe. Machines, not men, harvest the wheat, and if a man doesn’t own a machine, he can always rent one from a neighbour. At Portage la Prairie, the professor watches these marvellous machines following one another in a staggered row across the wide fields and marvels at the horses that draw them – not the skinny miserable nags of his native Carpathians but big husky animals with real leather harnesses
.
But the land is so empty! The only city of any consequence is Winnipeg. From Portage the plains roll westward, unfenced and unploughed, the buffalo grass still waist high, broken only by a thin skein of trails – mere ruts, really – and the occasional river valley bordered by cottonwood and wolf willow. Indians in brightly coloured blankets squat in picturesque groups on the station platforms. Mountains of buffalo bones line the track in the far west. But farms are few
.
Strung out along the railway is a series of tiny settlements – clusters of frame buildings lining wooden sidewalks. Regina, the capital of the North West Territories, the so-called Queen City of the Plains, has fewer than two thousand people, scattered in huddles of wooden shacks that straggle for two miles across a sere plain, flat as a kitchen table. Saskatoon scarcely exists at all – a railway station and a few houses, nothing more. Calgary, with four thousand citizens, is a glorified cow town, Edmonton a glorified trading post
.
These are primitive settlements. Calgary’s dusty streets stink of horse manure. Regina is redolent of the stench of the hotel slops that drench the main street. Edmonton echoes with the piercing squeal of ungreased Red River carts drawn along Portage Avenue by oxen and ponies. In the smaller villages, cows, pigs, and chickens wander loose
.
These islets of civilization are lost in the great sweep of the plains – wave after wave of grassland rolling west toward the foothills, so that the whole of the prairie country from the Red River to the Rockies
resembles a prehistoric ocean that has somehow congealed. But, as Dr. Oleskow notes, the earth is everywhere rich and black. His own countrymen are starved for land. This empty realm could be 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,
his
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 teachers’ 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 over-populated 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 proselytizers like Oleskow. The landowning 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
1
The new broom
What are we to say of Clifford Sifton? That for almost a decade he was the most powerful politician in Western Canada? That he was a visionary 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 quit 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 organizer? That he had no political philosophy other than the philosophy of maintaining power? That 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 Alberta 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 is the night of November 25, 1896, and we have joined the boisterous
crowd of Liberals on the
CPR
platform at Brandon, Manitoba, braving the bitter thirty-below weather, waiting to greet the city’s favourite son. D’Alton McCarthy has been persuaded to relinquish the riding; Sifton is slated to take it unopposed
.
The train is an hour late. The faithful stamp their feet and beat their hands together. Moustaches are frosted; eye glasses mist up. It is eleven-thirty before Sifton steps down from the sleeper to acknowledge the crowd. Cheers break out. Fireworks explode. Two hundred torches are lit. As the new minister is escorted to a waiting carriage, a brass band strikes up a lively march. It is so cold that the valves in the trumpets freeze and the music dies as we all shuffle off up Ninth Street and across Rosser Avenue toward Princess, where a roaring bonfire lights up the city hall
.