The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (21 page)

But in spite of the diversions the journey offered – a herd of five thousand antelope crossing the tracks and barring the passage, sportsmen potting gophers, prairie chickens, and rabbits from the train windows – Barr’s lambs were uneasy. Stanley Rackham, climbing back onto his car after a tram ride through the streets of Winnipeg, noted a general feeling of unrest among his countrymen. What lay ahead, after Winnipeg? Disquieting rumours began to circulate. At Brandon during a twenty-minute stop Rackham cheered up a little after talking to an old settler who, after describing the hard times he’d had, explained that he’d come through all right and told the colonists they’d do the same if they just stuck to it.

But after Portage and Brandon, the real West began to unfold. The colonists gazed out at the limitless prairie, the coarse brown grass covering the tough sod – flat, treeless, hedgeless. For many, this was their first inkling of the future; at last they began to comprehend the dimensions of the land of promise. Here, in this dun-coloured realm, the villages, mere clusters of log shacks or hovels of corrugated iron, were dumped down as if by chance – not perched on a hillside or nestled in a valley as in England, but stark on the level plain. It was not what they had expected, but then what
had
they expected? Barr had never told them that the Canadian West was a replica of the English
countryside; like the Canadian government’s own pamphlets, his had ignored that kind of descriptive detail and discoursed instead on the promise of the future. He had let the colonists dream their own dreams, conjure up their own visions. Like all good con men, Barr had allowed them to con themselves.

4
Indignation meetings

The bulk of the Barr contingent arrived in Saskatoon on the morning of April 17, a steaming hot day with the temperature at 85°F. The Reverend Dr. Robbins, Barr’s agent, was on the platform to greet them and to introduce them to a big, broad-shouldered man with a weather-beaten face and a brisk moustache. This was C. W. Speers, veteran of the previous fall’s Doukhobor pilgrimage. The colonization agent chose the occasion to indulge in a morale-building address, which Stanley Rackham thought was more than a little flowery. “I have a vision of teeming millions in the great valley to the West where you are going, and you are the forerunners,” he cried in his deep voice. “You will not be disappointed. The valley contains the richest land in the Dominion and the Government has provided you with shelter here and will see you safely settled. March westward ho! There are your tents, march!”

The government had not waited for Barr to supply shelter. Speers had arranged for additional bell tents and marquees – a wise precaution, because most of Barr’s tents were on the baggage cars, running more than a day behind the main trains.

To the newcomers, used to cosy English villages with ivy-covered cottages, Saskatoon presented an unprepossessing appearance. Young Paul Hordern was bitterly disappointed. He had heard a lot about Saskatoon from Canadians at the various station stops. “Oh, that’s some town,” they told him. “That’s a big town!” But a big town in Canada was not like a big town in the Old Country. There wasn’t even a cobblestone on the wet and muddy main street down which Hordern splashed his way.

Saskatoon was scarcely a year old: another huddle of shacks with two small hotels and a few stores, “large boxes rushed up without regard to architecture or comfort,” as another colonist commented. A single stone building, the Windsor Hotel, stood out incongruously. A
year before, fewer than one hundred people had lived here; now the town harboured six hundred permanent residents and close to two thousand transients. This was the West, raw and new – a few houses clustered around a grain elevator and a railway station, the core of a community no different from scores of others springing up along the line of prairie steel.

But Saskatoon, like so many other Western villages, was on the verge of a boom that would see entire streets constructed in less than three weeks. Now, with tents blossoming everywhere, with cowboys, Mounted Police, Indians, and Englishmen in broad sombreros crowding its single wooden sidewalk, it took on the atmosphere of a carnival.

The new arrivals had other matters on their minds. Those who had paid Barr four dollars for a tent found for the first time that they must pay an extra dollar for shipping costs from Saint John. That Saturday they held the first of a series of indignation meetings. Because Barr had not yet arrived in camp it came to nothing, and so they paid the surcharge reluctantly and scheduled a second meeting for Sunday.

By then the protestors were in another frenzy about their luggage, which finally arrived, jammed into eighteen cars, with nobody to sort it out. Some was still on the train, some lay in heaps dumped alongside the tracks. The protest meeting lasted two hours while Barr, now on hand, pleaded for patience. But he made the mistake of warning the crowd that the Mounted Police would fire on any who tried to rush the baggage cars. From this point on, the wretched clergyman could do nothing right. A brief, wild rush for the baggage cars destroyed the Sunday quiet, blows were struck right and left, and goods captured and retaken, even as other colonists prepared for the morning service.

We are kneeling, this hot April Sunday, among the crush of suppliants beneath the filtered sunlight in Barr’s big restaurant marquee, listening to the drone of an Anglican service. Saskatoon has never seen anything like this. A sea of dainty hats meets our eyes as the neatly gloved women in their tailored suits bow their heads. Beside them, their menfolk mumble the responses, sober in broadcloth and tweed with fresh linen, white ties, and neatly polished boots
.

The text of the lesson seems appropriate since it deals with the rebellion of the children of Israel against Moses: “Thou hast not brought us into a land flowing with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, except thou makest thyself a prince over us,” the curate reads and goes on to describe how the rebellious ones were blasted by
fire and swallowed by the earth – a passage not calculated to soothe the rebellious colonists fresh from their altercation with Barr
.

Now a cheerful little man, bearded and sunburned, gives us the text for his sermon : “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and bloom.” This is Archdeacon Mackay, veteran of twenty years in the North West, whose diocese includes all the Saskatchewan district. He welcomes his temporary congregation, warns against faint-heartedness, counsels perseverance, talks of the pluck and grit needed to wrest a fortune from Saskatchewan’s soil
.

The service ends. On go the sombreros, fedoras, and bowlers. There is even a silk hat in evidence. Who but an Englishman would bring a silk hat into the West? We might be walking out into the green and manicured English countryside rather than the yellow prairie
.

But this is not England. On the west side of the tracks, one hundred acres of white canvas greet our eyes – close to five hundred bell tents and marquees, a flapping of flags, a labyrinth of pegs and guy ropes over which men and women trip and stumble. The tents are pitched every which way in the elbow of the South Saskatchewan, a river red with mud and barred from access by the gigantic blocks of blue ice thrown up on its banks. Scores are chopping away at these blocks, for they are the only source of fresh water in this overcrowded community
.

Others are struggling to erect additional canvas with more energy than craft, for many have never seen a tent before; many more do not know how to use an axe. A group of Boer War veterans helps the former, a handful of townspeople the latter. And so this Lord’s Day rolls along, the air alive with the sounds of axe and hammer, of wagons creaking and oxen lowing, children crying, men cursing, dogs yapping
.

Then, as dusk falls, an ominous glow lights up the sky. This is not the sunset but a prairie fire, the flames leaping higher and higher as it roars toward the camp. We gape and wonder, for we have not imagined anything like this. Are we, too, to be immolated like the rebellious children of Israel? But the old-timers reassure us: the village road will act as a firebreak. For the moment at least we will be spared the ravages of nature in the great North West
.

The colonists were impatient to get moving toward their new home, but Barr was not yet ready. All that week the indignation meetings continued. There was anger over the prices charged for food and equipment, although this was not entirely Barr’s fault. He had no
control over the merchants of Saskatoon who, hearing tales of the newcomers’ enormous wealth, were determined to make a good thing out of them. Again Barr showed he could not face criticism. He tried to evade a mass meeting but was forced to attend by the indomitable Wes Speers. Here he was assailed on all sides. Why was he now trying to charge the colonists a guinea each for the privilege of joining the party? Why was he trying to take money from late arrivals for holding their homesteads for them? Why was he charging young girls ten dollars each for future homesteads? Why was he taking a commission from the leading Saskatoon merchants? Barr made little attempt to be conciliatory. He told the meeting it was nobody’s business, flung out of the tent, returned to the platform, cried out that he wasn’t making a cent of profit, and called one man a liar. These outbursts increased the pandemonium. Some wanted to toss Barr into the river, others to kick him out of the camp.

Not all the colonists attended these meetings and not all were equally incensed with Barr. Some of the malcontents were tenderfeet, unused to rough conditions, who tended to magnify the smallest troubles and were seeking a convenient scapegoat. Barr was an easy target. It is doubtful that he made much money out of his project. On the other hand, there is more than a little evidence to show that he tried. Some of the Saskatoon merchants showed a
Toronto Star
reporter letters from Barr demanding a 10-per-cent commission on goods sold to the colonists. Barr himself admitted as much. Much was made of the fact that he bought up all the oats in town for 40 cents a bushel and sold them for a dollar when the going rate was only 23½ cents. The Calgary
Herald
published a comparison of Barr’s charges for horses, livestock, wagons, and equipment with those in the
Canadian Handbook
and found Barr was getting between 20 per cent and 100 per cent more than the established rate.

On the other hand, J.A. Donaghy, a student missionary with the party, thought the colonists’ troubles were often of their own making, pointing out that when Barr put up a team of horses for sale, rival purchasers bid up the prices unnecessarily. Lloyd’s statement the following year that Barr suffered from inordinate greed and “wanted to make a dollar out of everything he sold them” was undoubtedly coloured by Lloyd’s bitter enmity toward his erstwhile partner.

Barr himself made little effort to come to terms with his critics. On Thursday, 140 colonists petitioned James Clinkskill, the Member of the North West Legislative Assembly for the district, to discuss the
situation. The meeting was held in the Barr restaurant tent with the government’s permission, the government having supplied the tents. But Barr would have none of it. He shook his fist in Clinkskill’s face, called him an “infamous scoundrel,” told him that the meeting was being held for political purposes, and ordered him off the premises. The meeting broke up.

Barr, Barr, wily old Barr [the colonists sang]

He’ll do you as much as he can.

You bet he will collar

Your very last dollar

In the valley of the Sask-atchewan.

In the midst of this “constant turmoil and excitement” (Speers’s words), two things were being made abundantly clear to the government agent: first, that most of the colonists had no farming expertise, and second, that many did not have enough money to run a homestead. Something would have to be done or the Liberal government would end up with a political black eye. Having received no co-operation from the leader, who warned him to “kindly leave my people alone,” Speers took matters into his own hands and called another meeting to determine who was destitute, who required more funds to continue, who needed work to earn more. Close to fourteen hundred people turned out. Two hundred men, Speers discovered, had less than ten pounds left apiece. He went to work immediately, setting up an employment bureau which secured jobs for 135 in Moose Jaw and 50 more in Prince Albert. He placed the remainder with local surveying parties. For the others he arranged practical talks on farming from government instructors.

The major Canadian newspapers by this time had reporters in Saskatoon. The correspondents were astonished by the naïveté of some of the colonists. Thus, the Toronto
News
reported: “Women who spend their time in dressing and kissing ugly little pug dogs talk of going out to earn money the first year by working in the cornfields, quite blind to the fact that there can be no ‘cornfields’ there until they sow the first crop in 1904. A pork packing factory is projected while, as a Westerner points out, there isn’t a hog nearer the colony than Battleford.”

J.J. Dodds, a Western farmer in charge of the government horses, was scathing in his criticism. Not one man in twenty, he discovered, knew how to hitch a team; Canadian schoolboys could learn the work faster.

Paul Hordern was convinced that the number of bona fide farmers could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The Horderns were preparing to quit Barr. A few days after arriving in Saskatoon they packed their goods and located on a homestead near Dundurn, south of Saskatoon. Mrs. Hordern, who was handling the drygoods store back home in Coalville, sold the business in 1904 and brought the rest of the family out to join her son and husband. Half a century later, when Saskatchewan celebrated its fiftieth jubilee, Paul Sylvester Hordern was still in Dundurn to join in the festivities. He died in Saskatoon in 1983 in his ninety-fifth year.