The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (9 page)

We have arrived at the control station at Myslowitz at the junction of the German, Austrian, and Russian borders. A uniformed official leads us from the Krakow train through a long hall to a desk behind which stand three more officials: a steamship agent and, in uniform, a Russian policeman and a German officer. We give up our rail and steamship tickets to the agent; then, clutching our baggage, we are led into two large halls, where the Galicians and Russians are separated
.

Our hall has a tiled floor, painted walls, a high ceiling, and windows of coloured glass. It is ringed by wooden benches, under which we stuff our baggage. As many of us as can find space sleep on the benches; the rest stretch out on our baggage or on the floor – men, women, and children all crammed together. The walls are alive with vermin
.

We are prisoners. No one is allowed to leave the building until the next train arrives. The only available food is sold at a canteen, but the canteenkeeper is drunk (as are the watchmen and porters), and, in spite of a long price list on the wall, the stock consists mainly of beer, wine, and liquor, tobacco, bread, and sausage. Neither tea nor coffee is available
.

More officers arrive with more immigrants. We demand breakfast but are told only the canteen can supply our wants. At nine, the wife of the canteenkeeper turns up and makes some coffee. At noon, for twenty-five cents we get a dinner of soup, boiled beef, potato salad, and bread. (To Galician peasants this is an exorbitant price; many cannot afford it.) Even as we eat, the price goes up. Indeed, prices continue to fluctuate without reason in three currencies. Getting correct change is entirely a matter of luck
.

A Russian lays a half-mark on the counter, orders a glass of beer, and waits for his change. He gets none. An argument follows. The waiter insists he has been given a different coin and pretends he cannot understand the language. More arguments follow. For three hours customers and canteenkeeper keep up a constant verbal battle over coinage
.

At two in the afternoon a doctor arrives. We have been waiting almost twenty-four hours to be inspected, others much longer. We are driven into another room, pass in single file before the doctor, and wait for our clothing and baggage to be disinfected. Then our tickets are returned and we are packed aboard the train. (By this time most of the
passengers are drunk. Liquor is the one thing that is available for the journey.)

We are faced with a twenty-hour journey across Germany. The third-class coach is so crowded that many have to stand for all of that time. At Hamburg another medical examination takes place. But now, all of us who have paid steerage fees are told there is no more room on the ship; we must wait another ten days or pay an additional thirty marks for a third-class ticket. Some can afford neither the additional fare nor the expense of waiting: cheated by agents who lied to them that their rail fare had been prepaid, they have already been forced to part with their meagre funds; they cannot even afford the expense of a telegram home. Now a flurry of counting, consulting, borrowing, and lending takes place. At last we all decide to pay the extra fare and go on across the angry ocean, gambling that we will not be rejected on the other side for lack of funds
.

For most emigrants, the ocean voyage was a nightmare. Jammed into tiered bunks in the stifling holds of ancient vessels, vomiting from seasickness, half starved, terror stricken by hurricane-force gales, men, women, and children were flung together under conditions that made a mockery of privacy. One woman agent of the American immigration service made such a journey disguised as a European emigrant with a counterfeit passport and described her voyage out of Hamburg:

“During these twelve days in the steerage, I lived in a disorder and in surroundings that offended every sense. Only the fresh breeze from the sea overcame the sickening odors. The vile language of the men, the screams of the women defending themselves, the crying of children, wretched because of their surroundings … irritated beyond endurance. There was no sight before which the eye did not prefer to close. Everything was dirty, sticky and disagreeable to the touch. Every impression was offensive. Worse than this was the general air of immorality. For fifteen hours each day, I witnessed all around me this improper, indecent and forced mingling of men and women who were total strangers and often did not understand one word of the same language. People cannot live in such surroundings and not be influenced.…”

These were the words of an American civil servant. Undoubtedly, the Slavic peasants, long used to cramped quarters, were less fastidious. To them, the real horror of the ocean crossing was not the lack of privacy but the storms that raged across the North Atlantic. One of these emigrants, Theodore Nemerski, has left a graphic account of his
own experiences aboard the ancient vessel
Christiana
in the spring of 1896. Nemerski was one of the first Galicians to be influenced by Professor Oleskow’s pamphlet
O Emigratsii
. He got a copy fresh from the press and with eight other members of his family boarded the ship at Hamburg in April. At first, the journey was bearable, but four days out of port, the storm broke:

“Good Lord! What fear grips one here. You look, and here from the side there appears a great opening. The water has drawn back and the whole ship simply flies into that void, turning almost completely over on its side. And here all of a sudden a huge mountain with a great roar and clatter of the waves tears into the ship, spilling over the top onto the other side. This is no place to be!…escape inside.

“Inside you find complete panic … all are silent … whispering prayers … awaiting the end.…

“Some tied their eyes so as not to see this terror, while they hung onto the bed so they would not fall out. Suddenly water is coming in to the inside from the top, splashing from wall to wall. The people are in lament. Some cry, some complain: Did we need this? It was good for us to live in the old country. This is all on account of you … I listened to you and now we shall all perish.…”

On the
Arcadia
, another ancient sailing craft with an auxiliary engine, the crew herded the passengers below and locked the hatches when the storm struck. Fifteen hundred Galicians clung to the four tiers of iron beds, praying and vomiting, the stench so ghastly that those stewards who ventured in were themselves taken sick. An old man and a child died before the storm abated, but that was not the end. The ship struck an iceberg, and when the hole in her side was repaired, the captain discovered he was beset – locked in the grip of the frozen ocean. All of the passengers were herded back up on deck and required to race from side to side – back and forth, back and forth – on signals from the ship’s whistle until the
Arcadia
was finally shaken free from her icy embrace. By this time, most of the baggage was soaked and ruined. One month after they had left their home villages, the hapless passengers finally landed at Quebec City.

For those who were able to eat, the steerage food was generally execrable: filthy water, rotten herrings, dirty potatoes, rancid lard, smelly meat, eaten from unwashed dishes and cutlery. The staple meat was pork – not the best remedy for a queasy stomach. Thirty years after his ordeal, one immigrant wrote: “To this moment I cannot face the warm smell of pork without sweat starting on my forehead.”
Another, who travelled steerage on the
Bavaria
in 1904, claimed that he was served pig’s feet three times a day and “had visions of millions of pigs being sacrificed so that their feet could be given to the many emigrants leaving Europe.”

The more fortunate travelled third class, which was a notch better than steerage, although it did no more than provide decently for the simplest human needs. As one woman put it, “to travel in anything worse than what is offered in the third class is to arrive at the journey’s end with a mind unfit for healthy, wholesome impressions and with a body weakened and unfit for the hardships that are involved in the beginning of life in a new land.…” Yet tens of thousands of sturdy men, women, and children, who quit their tiny Carpathian farms to make a new life in a world of strangers, endured it all and somehow managed to survive and prosper.

2
“Dirty, ignorant Slavs”

The Galicians who arrived at Halifax or Quebec City after a month of hard travel presented a sorry and bedraggled appearance. Few had any conception of distance. Until this voyage, scarcely any had ventured farther than twenty-five or thirty miles from their home villages. Thus they had not realized the need for changes of clothing; everything was packed away in trunks, boxes, and valises to be opened only when they reached their prairie homes. These were a people obsessed with cleanliness, used to scrubbing themselves regularly, but now, suffering from a lack of washing facilities on train and steamship, they looked and felt unclean.

Maria Olinyk, a nine-year-old girl from the western Ukraine, remembered how the crowd on the dock at Halifax stared at her and her shipmates, some out of curiosity, some out of contempt. Here were women in peasant costumes, and men in coats of strong-smelling sheepskin wearing fur hats, linen blouses, and trousers tucked into enormous boots, their long hair greased with lard. The Canadians, Maria noticed, stopped their noses. These first impressions helped to encourage the wave of anti-Galician feeling that was fed by the anti-Sifton newspapers.

Thus Sir Mackenzie Bowell, a former Conservative prime minister and leader of his party in the Senate, was able to write in his newspaper,
the Belleville
Intelligencer
, that “the Galicians, they of the sheepskin coats, the filth and the vermin do not make splendid material for the building of a great nation. One look at the disgusting creatures after they pass through over the C.P.R. on their way West has caused many to marvel that beings bearing the human form could have sunk to such a bestial level.…”

To many newcomers, the new land, at first glimpse, seemed equally appalling. Dmytro Romanchych, who came out from the mountains of Bukovina as a result of reading Professor Oleskow’s pamphlet, never forgot his first sight of Quebec City – streaks of dirty grey snow lying in the ravines. The sad, uninviting landscape made him feel that Canada was sparsely settled and inhospitable. Dmytro felt depressed, for he had left a land whose meadows and glens, three weeks before, had been green with the promise of early spring. Ottawa with its granite Parliament buildings was more impressive, but across the river the land seemed wild, with the bare rock banks and sickly trees making an unpleasant impression.

But these vistas were cheerful compared to the despair that seized the newcomers when the colonist trains rattled and swayed across the Precambrian desert of the Canadian Shield. Theodore Nemerski, barely recovered from the storm that tore at the
Christiana
, was shaken by the possibility that this gnarled expanse of granite ridges and stunted pines might in fact be the actual promised land that Oleskow had described. His companions “turned grey with fear.” What if there were no better soil than this in Canada? they asked. “Here the heart froze in not a few men … the hair on the head stands on end … because not a few think, what if they get into something like this?”

This was not an isolated instance. When the Humeniuk family came out the following year, 1897, the women in their car began to sob and cry out that “it would have been better to suffer in the old country than to come to this Siberia.” Two years later Maria Olinyk felt the same shock of apprehension. “The heart of many a man sank to his heels,” she remembered, “and the women and children raised such lamentations as defies description.”

There were other problems. In Montreal, the Galicians were met by hordes of small-time entrepreneurs trying to separate them from their funds, charging exorbitant prices for food, hawking useless goods, and urging them not to venture farther west. The situation became so serious in the spring of 1897 that immigration authorities were forced
to call in the police and confine the new arrivals to sheds until they could be put into railway cars with their final destination clearly marked and the tickets in their hands.

The exploitation resumed in Winnipeg, the jumping-off spot for the prairies. Here, a group of Winnipeg real estate agents collared six Galicians, discovered they had twelve thousand dollars among them, and talked them out of leaving Winnipeg, saying it was too cold in Alberta and that the very horns on the cattle froze in the winter. The real estate men were a little too persuasive. Four of their victims immediately bought tickets and returned to Europe.

There were other disappointments. Maria Olinyk and her family were among those who took one of the special trains to the Yorkton area where hundreds of their fellow countrymen were homesteading. A friend who had come out the year before had written to them, boasting of his prosperity, describing his home as a mansion, telling of his immense cultivated fields and how his wife now dressed like a lady. He depicted Canada “as a country of incredible abundance whose borders were braided with sausage like some fantastic land in a fairy tale.”

The family hired a rig and after a thirty-mile journey north through clouds of mosquitoes finally reached their destination. What they found was a small log cabin, partially plastered and roofed with sod, a tiny garden plot dug with a spade, a woman dressed in ancient torn overalls “suntanned like a gypsy,” and her husband, his face smeared with dirt from ear to ear, “weird, like some unearthly creature,” grubbing up stumps. Maria’s mother broke into tears at the sight, but, like so many others, the Olinyk family hung on and, after years of pain and hardship, eventually prospered. Maria became Dr. Maria Adamowska, a noted Ukrainian-Canadian poet, who, when she died in 1961 at Melville, Saskatchewan, left behind a literary legacy that included her vivid memories of those lean, far-off years.