The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (8 page)
Read The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
But Sifton was ever the businessman. For his newspaper suddenly to change its advocacy of reciprocity would be embarrassing and damaging; the
Free Press
would lose not only its hard-won prestige in the West but also circulation. So Dafoe was allowed to continue his support of the official Liberal platform. As a result, the paper gained credibility among the Western farmers, Dafoe went down in history as a fighting editor who was no man’s servant, and Sifton’s own image was immeasurably polished as a man of principle, broadminded enough to give a great journalist his head.
The fact that one editor had actually been permitted to take a different line from his political master was so startling in those days that it became a
cause célèbre
. Nothing like it had ever happened before, certainly in Western Canada. And, in Dafoe’s case, nothing like it happened again. A year after this indulgence Sifton was again giving orders to Dafoe, and Dafoe was following them. Here is Sifton, gently rapping his editor’s knuckles on the matter of the Grand Trunk Pacific, at that time the Liberal party’s pet railway but certainly not Sifton’s: “Now I want to be perfectly plain with you. So far as I can remember you have sheared off of making any attacks on or serious criticism of the Grand Trunk Pacific. You have always been ready enough to strike the
CPR
or the
CNR
[Canadian Northern Railway] but apparently for political reasons you are very loathe to say anything about the
GTP
. That policy will have to be dropped.” And Dafoe dropped it.
None of this is in the least surprising. Editors were hired because their publishers knew in advance what political opinions they held. Dafoe’s views rarely differed from those of Sifton. Some journalists who professed to know said that Dafoe did not care for his employer, but there is no documentary evidence of that. His biography of Sifton, in fact, borders on the sycophantic; in it Dafoe was not above glossing over certain disagreeable facts and inflating favourable ones to put his publisher in the best possible light. But that, too, was the way of politics and journalism in the early years of the century.
Dafoe was not the first editor, nor the last, to jump with both feet into party politics. The difference was that his subsequent stature as a leading Canadian editor and an international figure made his close political ties seem acceptable to others who followed. The link between the Liberal party and a new generation of respected journalists surely begins with the Dafoe example. Such partisan newspapermen as Grant Dexter, Blair Fraser, and Bruce Hutchison were to carry it forward into the mid-century. Fraser, for one, was so close to being an apologist for the Liberal party during his years as Ottawa editor for
Maclean’s
that, when the government changed, he found his sources had dried up.
*
And Bruce Hutchison, while editor of the
Vancouver Sun
and Winnipeg
Free Press
, actually wrote speeches for Lester B. Pearson. Thus, like so much else that happened in the West during those yeasty years, the pact that was sealed in 1901 between the ambitious young newspaperman and his hard-headed publisher created a ripple that was not without effect half a century later.
*
Arthur Irwin, the former editor of
Maclean’s
, told me in 1983 that he had always believed the story that Dafoe had a contract with Sifton guaranteeing editorial independence. No such contract existed.
*
To
Maclean’s
editors, Fraser played down the rising importance of John Diefenbaker, referring to him as “a lightweight, not destined for power.” It was almost certainly his influence that prompted the then editor, Ralph Allen, to commit to type in 1957 an editorial on another Liberal win before the actual election took place. To Allen’s embarrassment, the Liberals lost.
Chapter Two
The Sheepskin People
1
The long voyage
In the mountain trenches of Galicia, the land was too precious to be wasted. The furrows of the strip farms ran to the very edges of the houses. Cows and sheep dotted the pasture land on the lower flanks of the mountains. Oats, rye, and potatoes sprouted up from the valley floor. Above the huddle of thatched roofs the great peaks rose, clothed in oak, beech, and fir, each ridge effectively sealing off one village from the next, maintaining a peasant culture that was frozen in time.
Since there were no fences – only corner stakes to identify personal holdings – each fertile Carpathian valley resembled one gigantic farm under a single management. Appearances were deceptive. Each peasant required fourteen acres to provide for himself and his family, yet 70 per cent of the farms were no more than half that size. Some families, in fact, tried to subsist on a single acre.
Wages were as low as five cents a day, but the price of land for those who could afford it was high. The mean was eighty dollars an acre, but some land fetched as much as four hundred dollars. Taxes were among the highest in Europe. Under these depressing conditions thievery was common and alcoholism endemic. The wealthy
pahns
(lords) owned not only the forests, meadows, and villages; they also owned the taverns, of which there were more than twenty-three thousand in Galicia. It was in the interests of the ruling class to keep the peasants drunk and underpaid. The consumption of liquor was stupendous: twenty-six litres a year for every man, woman, and child. One of the commonest words in the language was
beeda
, meaning misery. To the question “How is everything?” the usual reply was “Beeda.”
No wonder, then, that Josef Oleskow’s pamphlets were so successful. Across the ocean lay a promised land where 160 acres of fertile soil could be had for the asking. Thus was initiated the great emigration of Poles and Ukrainians from Austria-Hungary. Until the Great War, Canadians lumped them together as Galicians because so many – 150,000 – came from that region. To save confusion, that is what we will call them in this book. It was these people that Clifford Sifton was describing when, more than twenty years later, he talked of “a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat.”
It is a spring morning in 1897, and in the Galician village of
Ghermakivka the Humeniuk family is packing to leave for Canada on money borrowed from relatives and friends. Everything they own takes up no more than twenty cubic feet and will be carefully stored away in a green wooden trunk built by Nykola Humeniuk himself. His wife, Anastasia, puts the winter clothes, blankets, and bed sheets at the bottom; next come the holy pictures, packed between pillows; and on top of that the family’s dress clothes for Sunday church (for surely there will be a little church with an onion-shaped spire in whichever community they reach). Then, another covering, and twenty-five little cloth bundles of garden seeds – onions, garlic, horseradish, dried ears of corn – and above that some religious articles: candles, chalk, a bottle of holy water. Four precious books will also be taken: a prayer book, a history of the Ukraine, a school primer, and a collection of Bible stories. And finally, Nykola’s carpentry and farm tools: hammers and planes, axe and draw-knife, saws, bits, chisels, sickles, scythes, hoes, rake, and flail
.
Great excitement! The task is done. Anastasia ties up some food for the trip in a cloth bundle as the neighbours and relatives pour into the house to say goodbye. What a commotion, with everybody talking at once! There are smiles at first; then, suddenly, some of the women begin to cry. They hug and kiss Anastasia, apologizing for things left undone, past offences real and imagined. The children start to cry, too, and then some of the men are seen to wipe tears from their eyes
.
Somebody shouts for silence and then, as all bow their heads, he begins to recite a prayer, asking God to bless the Humeniuks and their two small children, Petryk and baby Theodore, and give them a safe voyage, prosperity, and good health in the strange land across the ocean. Write soon, everybody cries, write as soon as you arrive!
The wagon and team are waiting for the journey to the station. Four men hoist the big trunk onto the back as the family climbs aboard. But Anastasia Humeniuk stops and turns back, her baby in her arms. She walks to the doorway, makes the sign of the cross, kisses the frame, and then, in one last gesture, picks up a small lump of Galician earth, wraps it in a rag, and puts it in her hand valise, a memory of a land she will never see again
.
Professor Oleskow’s plan had been to bring to Canada only the best farmers, the most productive and educated elements of the population – those who owned enough land to finance the long journey overseas and the first hard years on a Canadian homestead. But
Oleskow’s plan was never acted upon. The steamship agents, to whom each peasant paid a fee, and their myriad subcontractors wanted to sign up as many as possible. It was the ignorant and the innocent who came to Canada, their naïveté exploited shamelessly by those who stood to make a profit from emigration.
We have on record a graphic example of the kind of exploitation suffered by the peasants as a result of the machinations of an agency in the Galician town of Oswiecim, now part of Poland. Its operators, Jacob Klausner and Simon Herz, were masters of the art of bribery and corruption. They fixed all the local officials, including both the police and the railway conductors, in order to achieve maximum emigration. They overcharged shamelessly for ocean passage, cheated on the exchange rate, and sold worthless advertising cards in lieu of tickets. If a man was of military age, subject to conscription and thus legally unable to emigrate, they charged double to smuggle him out of the country, even though the advertised risks had been eliminated by bribery. And whenever anybody was incautious enough to object, he was locked in a barn and beaten.
One Polish agent, Abraham Landerer, invented a fake telephone on which he received spurious “information.” It was only an alarm clock, but when it rang, Landerer claimed it was an inquiry about passage. Later, when the clock rang again, he would charge the peasant a special fee for its use. Sometimes he would use the alarm clock to ask “the American Emperor” whether he would allow the prospective emigrant to enter his country. That, of course, involved another fee.
One swindler dressed as a doctor invariably “failed” prospective emigrants for reasons of health but was happy to accept a bribe and pass them at a subagent’s suggestion. Another had a store full of clothing that he sold to peasants at inflated prices, claiming that they would not be allowed to wear their native dress on the other side of the water. At ports of departure, especially in Germany, scores were told they would have to wait for a boat and were deliberately held in boarding houses, hotels, and taverns where they were cheated for lodgings and food.
In order to increase their commissions, the steamship agents peddled fantastic stories that were generally believed by their unworldly victims. One group from Bukovina arrived at Winnipeg’s immigration hall in May 1897 protesting bitterly that misrepresentations had been used to induce them to come over. They had been told that the “Crown
Princess of Austria” was in Montreal and would see that they were given free land with houses, cattle, and farm equipment. All they had to do was telegraph her if these promises went unfulfilled. Many of the newcomers, therefore, refused all offers of employment in Winnipeg and sat tight in the crowded hall. With five hundred more newcomers arriving, the police attempted to move them out, and a small riot ensued. Many of the newcomers flung themselves on the floor until they were dragged or carried off, the women “yelling, crying and shrieking” in the words of the long-suffering immigration commissioner, William McCreary, ex-mayor of Winnipeg, who narrowly escaped being felled by a boot flung at his head.
McCreary, who had been working from six in the morning until nine at night, had managed to negotiate a special low rate on the railway to Yorkton, Assiniboia. In addition, he had arranged for fifty days’ work on the same line for those who were destitute. That did not suit the new arrivals, who were still intoxicated by the steamship agents’ promises and so refused to board the train. Some upset the baggage carts. Some, with their goods on their backs, started marching north. Others squatted on the street or seized vacant houses near the track. In the end they capitulated. McCreary supplied them with some sacks of flour and a few bushels of potatoes and finally settled them on homesteads in the vicinity of Saltcoats, Assiniboia, where, eventually, they forgot about the non-existent Austrian princess. It was exactly this kind of fraud and exploitation that Professor Oleskow had sought to avoid.
If some immigrants were disillusioned and rebellious when they reached Canada, it was understandable. Apart from the false promises, there was the long journey across Europe from their home villages, then the stormy ocean voyage in the holds of immigrant ships, and finally the trek first by rail and then by ox cart to their prairie homesteads.
The first stop in Europe, usually after a twenty-four-hour train journey, came at a control station between Galicia and Germany, where men, women, and children submitted to a medical examination before being allowed to proceed. These stations – there were thirteen – had been established as a result of the cholera epidemic in Hamburg in 1892. They were maintained by the steamship companies as the result of a compromise with the German authorities, who had blamed the epidemic on emigrants from Russia and originally wanted to seal off the border. Now, everybody entering Germany from Austria-Hungary or Russia en route to North America was subjected to a medical inspection.