The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (27 page)

Many of these young women, Ella Sykes discovered, did not understand the meaning of hard work and, lacking the strength, self reliance, and money needed in the new land, could not resist the idea of finding a man to fend for them. Some were prepared to hurl themselves into marriage. They crowded into the local matrimonial agency, one or two
even going all the way to Vancouver to marry men they had never seen. Others confessed they had deserted an English husband and expected to find a fresh one in Canada. Many, in their innocence, were bitterly disappointed.

“Before I came out to Canada,” one girl at the hostel told her, “I read that I should find a number of men on the Winnipeg platform waiting to propose to us girls, but, would you believe it, when I got out of the train not a single man even spoke to me?”

Miss Sykes began to realize that in order to make their way in the new land, English men and women must divest themselves of Old Country prejudices and keep their personal views to themselves. Why, one servant girl had actually objected because her employer sat down at the table in his shirt sleeves! Canadians, she was learning, especially Westerners, were intensely proud; when the English criticized their country, it got their backs up. In this assessment she was not alone. Half a dozen perceptive English journalists were making the same point. Six years before, John Foster Fraser, a British travel writer, had reported that Englishmen were not welcome in Winnipeg because they continually made comparisons to Canada’s detriment – “astonished that the conditions of life are not the same as in England, a thing that ruffles the fur of every Canadian.”

At last Miss Sykes found a job she thought she could handle, as companion to a farm widow on the Saskatchewan prairie at ten dollars a month. As it turned out, she couldn’t. The first night after supper she realized she didn’t even know how to wash dishes properly, putting all the crockery into the pan with the cutlery and the greasy plates. Everything, in fact, was strange, including the method of arranging pillows on the bed. In England she had been considered a capable woman; here, at every moment, it was impressed upon her that she was the reverse; she felt humiliated, out of her element, exhausted.

Is this really me? she asked herself, as she cleaned each floor on her hands and knees, scrubbed clothes on the washboard, ironed the hired men’s shirts, replenished the “voracious stove” with chunks of wood, made the porridge, and fried the bacon that was the staple meat twice a day. Her headquarters was a fly-infested kitchen, which she thought of as the Black Hole of Calcutta. And yet when she woke one morning to find the spring wind blowing, the snow melting, the birds singing, her depression vanished.

She stayed one week. Her employer, Mrs. Robinson, who was friendly and understanding to the last, gave her notice within a day of
her arrival. Like so many Canadian farm women Ella Sykes observed, Mrs. Robinson seemed to have lost the habit of repose. She was unable to stay still for a moment. She would sweep the kitchen and shed and shake out all the carpets after every meal, ply the broom between times when it wasn’t necessary, “forever goaded by a malignant dream of unrest.” When the time came to leave, Miss Sykes received from Mrs. Robinson a little homily on the subject of her untidiness and then a pat on the back for what she had learned. She accepted it all in humble silence, clutching her wages in her hand. What an immense effort it had been to earn a few dollars!

All together, Ella Sykes took five positions in Canada. Her last job on the prairies was in Alberta. She arrived in Calgary to find the
YWCA
full but managed to get a room at a women’s hostel where once again she was presented with evidence of the jealousy between the English and the Canadians. One of the lodgers, a Miss Bates, told how she had applied for a job in a Calgary home only to be told: “We don’t want any English here.” To that she retorted: “If I had known you were a Canadian I should never have applied …” and flounced out. The remark so struck the fancy of her would-be employer that she called after her, saying she’d like to engage a woman of spirit, but Miss Bates proudly refused to go back.

Some of the inmates of the hostel, in Ella Sykes’s opinion, had no right to be in Canada at all. They had been intrigued by overenthusiastic literature, had seen the country through rose-coloured glasses, and were now bitterly disappointed. One frail elderly lady had bought her passage after a single conversation with an enthusiastic Canadian who had spoken vaguely of “crowds of openings for women.” She was between jobs, being worn out with work, and when Miss Sykes met her several months later on her return from the West Coast, her health was broken. Another, a former governess who was also an accomplished milliner, refused to work in a shop because asking for such a job, she said, was abhorrent to her. “I want to live in a home and arrange the flowers and help the lady of the house with her correspondence,” she announced. Miss Sykes tried to explain, in vain, that no such post existed in the Canadian West.

It was not enough to be able to cook, iron, and sew; one also had to scrub floors and do heavy washing. Another of Miss Sykes’s table mates who had been considered highly capable as a governess felt herself stupid and incompetent in Canada. Miss Sykes recognized in her the same feeling of depression and helplessness that she herself had suffered.

Nevertheless, Ella Sykes was game to try again. She had attempted to peddle books from door to door in Calgary but found that she too easily took no for an answer. Then a satisfactory reply came to her advertisement, and she went off to work for a fortnight on a large dairy farm, handling the housework and serving the meals to the farmer and his wife – a Mr. and Mrs. Brown – their three children and their three hired men. The fastidious Miss Sykes was taken aback at first to find that meat, potatoes, vegetables, and dessert were all served on the same plate, but relieved later to realize that this meant nine fewer dishes to wash. The three children she found “rough, mannerless and unruly” and ascribed these failings to the fact that, as in many similar cases, their parents were simply too busy, toiling from dawn to dusk, to pay much attention to them. Mrs. Brown was comparatively young, but she looked older than her years, worn out by ceaseless toil. Again Miss Sykes noted that the habit of work was so deeply engrained in her that she was not able to be still. She
couldn’t
rest and take things easy.

Mrs. Brown was happy with her husband, but she told Ella Sykes that had she known what she, a young English schoolteacher, was in for she would never have married him. In their early years they had been sodbusters, to use the vernacular, and she had hated it. “I haven’t a single good word for the prairie,” she said, “and I got to hate the very sight of a man when I was there.” Why? “Because a man meant preparing a meal.…”

In shearing time, when they kept sheep, she had had to feed fifteen men five meals a day. She had no time to visit her neighbours – the nearest lived four miles away. “I just got into the way of thinking of nothing but how to get through the day’s work.”

This was a revelation to Ella Sykes.

“Aren’t there some women who love the life?” she asked. “In England we hear so much of ‘the call of the prairie.’”

“There may be some but I never met them. All my friends hated the loneliness and the lack of amusement and the same dull round day after day. Do you know, if I ever sat down and wrote, or did some sewing, Kitty [her daughter] would come up to me to ask whether it were Sunday, so astonished was she to see me resting, as on weekdays I was on the ‘go’ all the time.”

But surely, Miss Sykes said, she didn’t need to work hard any more. The family were well off; she could afford to rest in the afternoons or visit the neighbours.

Mrs. Brown replied sadly that it was too late. She was so wound up
she
had
to keep going all day, and she had lost all desire for social intercourse.

When her fortnight’s stint was ended, Ella Sykes felt guilty about leaving Mrs. Brown, who had clearly enjoyed her company and felt in her presence a welcome respite from her days of drudgery. But it was time to move on. She ended her trip in Victoria, and here among the rose trellises and rock gardens she experienced for the first time in Canada a leisurely pace reminiscent of home.

But Canada was only an interlude in a crowded career. Back in England she produced a “plain, unvarnished record” of what she had seen during six months in Canada. “I ardently desire that British women shall help to build up the Empire,” she wrote, “and the sisters of men who are doing such splendid work in the Dominion are surely fitted for the task.”

A few years later, she set off on another adventure to another distant corner of the globe. With her brother, Brigadier General Sir Percy Molesworth Sykes, she travelled to the roof of the world through the oases and deserts of Central Asia into Chinese Turkestan, becoming the first white woman to cross the dangerous passes leading to and from the high Pamirs that lie north of the Afghanistan and Indian frontiers. It was an exhilarating experience, full of high adventure at high altitudes – a far cry from the toil, trouble, and humiliation of Canadian farm life in the Golden West.

5
Don’t come back, Dad

In spite of the prejudice against them, it is clear that the majority of the English who came to Canada were, in their own way, as industrious as the equally despised Galicians and Doukhobors. The story of the Shepherd family of Ramsgate can stand for thousands of similar tales of middle-class English families who, down on their luck in the first decade of the century, sought a new life in the Canadian West.

The family was no stranger to hard work. William John Shepherd was a butcher, but not a successful one. He had operated shops in Canterbury, Deal, and Ramsgate. There, the entire family worked ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, and barely held their own. American packing houses like Swift’s, selling Texas beef, were undercutting English butchers.

What could they do? England seemed barren of possibilities. To young George Shepherd, the second son, the country seemed poky, and when Mrs. Shepherd first broached the idea of emigration it was taken up enthusiastically by the family. Faraway lands seemed glamorous. The Shepherds considered America, Africa, and Australia, but decided at last on Canada. Canada was closest and Canada was British. There was land to be farmed there, and on the map the country looked imposing and Imperial, all tinted red with the words “The Dominion of Canada” spread out across it.

It was a typically English decision: decide first, investigate later. The Shepherds sent off for literature. It came and, as they later realized, was more than a little on the optimistic side. They read it faithfully, called a family council to discuss ways and means, and decided that William Shepherd and young George would go out first to get a toehold on the land. Will, the eldest brother, would help his mother operate the family butcher shop. He, his mother, and the others would follow when the men were settled.

And so, with their goods packed in trunk-sized wicker baskets, father and son set off after enduring the agonizing moment of farewell that every emigrant faced. George Shepherd would never forget that scene: his young brother Charlie, aged sixteen, putting his head through the open carriage window, seizing his father by the hand, and crying out: “Don’t come back, Dad, don’t come back!” It was those words, more than any other, that kept the elder man from becoming discouraged by his difficulty in adapting to the strange new country.

For it
was
strange. “A welcome awaits you in Canada,” the literature had promised. But there was no welcome – only hurry and bustle. The train engines astonished both father and son – great raucous brutes pulling colonist cars that seemed more like moving houses. And the sleeping accommodations! Everyone slept fully clothed, two by two, on wooden slats below or on a wooden tray that pulled down from above. (Young George Shepherd smiled when he was told there would be no charge for sleeping room.) When the engineer turned down the heat at midnight everybody shivered in Manitoba’s zero weather. In Winnipeg’s immigration hall, where they slept on the floor in their greatcoats and blankets, it was warmer.

Strolling down Main Street, rubbing elbows with a variety of nationalities, they felt very un-Canadian in their English clothes. But they didn’t complain; all this discomfort, they realized, was part of the business of emigrating. They had put down their names for work on a
farm and a day later found themselves in another immigration hall in Brandon. The following day they signed a contract with a farmer a few miles out of town, and that was the end of the Canadian government’s responsibility toward them.

The contract was hard. The two Englishmen must work on Jim Hale’s 800-acre farm for the seven summer months at ten dollars a month for both. That, Hale told them, would give them the experience they would need to homestead. But there was a catch: if they didn’t work the full seven months they would be paid nothing. For Hale this was good business; he had little to lose and cheap labour to gain. They stuck it out for six weeks, cleaning Jim Hale’s barns seven days a week, and then, unable to take it any longer, they quit and went back to Brandon without having earned a nickel. It was the low point of their lives.

They were trudging gloomily down Brandon’s main street when they spotted a sign: “R
EAD THE
L
AND
M
AN
.” And: “For Sale, A Half-section of Land in Central Saskatchewan – 320 Acres, No Money Down and Twenty Years to Pay.” William Shepherd’s face lit up. This looked like the real thing! They’d had six weeks of farm experience; why work for others when they could farm for themselves?

For reasons they could never understand, Read the Land Man took a personal interest in this English butcher and his son. He offered to pay his own way to Girvin, Saskatchewan, to conduct them to the half-section in question. Off the trio went by train to Girvin and by team and democrat six miles to the homestead. But when he saw the property, young George’s heart sank. Here was nothing but bare prairie, not a stick or a stone standing, neither building nor well, not even a fence post. How could two inexperienced Englishmen hope to cultivate this endless expanse of turf? He persuaded his father to abandon the idea.