Learning to be Canadians
OUT ON the prairie again we ride, by the old freighting trail from
Battleford to Saskatoon. But we only meet one freighting outfit all the
way, a wagon drawn by two plodding oxen. “It was a big business, that
freighting,” says a Scottish blacksmith who has built his shack and
smithy beside the trail, “but it didn’t last long. The freighters made
good money from the time settlers began to come in thick, but now the
railway is open the trail is dead.” He might have said “barred and
buried,” for it is not a surveyed road, and again and again we find
ourselves charging into a wire fence and have to turn aside and make the
circuit of some new farm.
He is a townsman, this swarthy smith; he has about as little farm
experience as cash; but he is the sort of man that makes a successful
farmer all the same. He is rich in brain and in brawn. From the mating
of these, all wealth and welfare spring. The blacksmith put in a few
acres of oats and potatoes last year, in the intervals of shoeing
freighters’ teams, and then went off to work at his trade all winter in
a lumber camp north of the Saskatchewan; this winter he will do the
same—“and when I come back to the farm with a bit of money I’ll make
things hum, as the Yankees say.”
The wife smiles, rocking her little girl to sleep. “Do you never wish
yourself back in Scotland?” I ask, thinking of her winters spent alone
with her infants in the prairie shack. “Never!” says she. “We’re all so
much better in health out here, and going to be better off too, in good
time. Look at this lassie. She was always ailing, over there, and now
she’s nearly as strong as the rest.”
There’s no such medicine in all the drug stores as the life-giving air
of the West.
The hamlet of Saskatoon, where I found a bare hundred inhabitants four
years ago, has three thousand now in 1905, and dreams of 30,000—a dream
that we shall see come nearly true before our story ends. The town is a
“jumping-off place” for hundreds of home-seekers bound for points
south-west, where paper railways will presently be turned into steel.
Every railway station, for the matter of that, is a jumping-off place
for new settlers. Here is one with neither a station building nor even a
platform; just a siding; yet a couple of Norwegians are loading up
wagons with furniture from a box car, while their wives cook dinner on
the turf and a dozen children play in and out of two little tents. These
people speak pretty good English, for they have spent five years in
Dakota since they left their motherland. South-east of Edmonton there is
already a large colony of Norwegians, a “New Norway” in fact.
As we ride west and north-west, however, we find ourselves among folk
who know no English. “Galicians,” or “Galatians,” they are commonly
called. Some of them come from Galicia in the Austrian Empire, but
others are Ruthenians or Ukrainians from South-western Russia, and many
from Poland, too. They belong, like the Serbs and Croats and
Montenegrins, the Czechs and Slovaks, and nearly all the Russians, to
the great Slavic Race.
But who are the Slavs? Just a branch of the same white race that we
ourselves belong to. Their ancestors, like ours, poured through Europe
in waves of barbaric invasion from some far eastern home, but settled in
Russia and neighboring lands, as our forefathers had passed on to settle
on the shores of the Atlantic. The very name “Galician” reminds us of
the real kinship between the Galicians of Austria-Hungary, the Galatians
of Asia Minor to whom St. Paul wrote his epistle, the inhabitants of
France whom Julius Cæsar describes as Gauls, and the Celtic Gaels of the
British Isles.
Long separated from us, they have come to join us again. They come poor
in money, as nearly all our fathers did; but having to work up “from
nothing” is the best guarantee that they will work up to something. It
was only in 1894 that the first Galicians arrived, nine families in all.
They sent home such good reports of the country that now in 1905 there
are 75,000 of them thriving here. Thriving in spite of their poverty?
No—because of it.
Here is one just beginning. His home is a long low hovel, one end built
of poplar logs roughly plastered over with brown mud, the other part
made of sods, with grass sprouting from every joint and growing freely
all over the roof. The owner, a tall good-humored Galician, has to stoop
coming out of the door to welcome us. A distaff is under his arm; we
have caught him spinning linen thread for a shirt, which he badly needs.
The one and only door leads into the stable; we have to pass through
this to reach the solitary living room, where the furniture consists of
a home-made table and a bedstead of round poplar logs covered with a few
scraps of blankets. But he is a bachelor.
The ordinary Galician is a well-married man with a large family. The
walls of his house are smoothed and white-washed; the high-pitched roof
is of straw thatch, and rises in a series of steps at the corners.
Beside one of these picturesque cottages we find the owner, with a red
fez on his head, reaping oats with the primitive “cradle,” a scythe with
three or four sticks projecting from the handle to catch the stalks as
they fall. Most of the men, however, are still away; for the poor
Galician, as soon as he has built his house, and perhaps dug up a little
garden, goes off to earn money, generally on railway construction. His
wife and children, having neither plow nor beast to draw one, do the
best they can with the spade, and raise a little crop of oats, rye and
potatoes.
The father’s earnings will buy an ox and plow, and with these he really
begins to farm. Many a Galician farmer already has from 20 to 200 acres
under crop, and from 10 to 100 head of live stock. In winter, he fills a
rough box sleigh with grain and sets out for the nearest market, no
matter how far it is. At night, he saves hotel or “stopping place”
charges by sleeping on the snow beside his sleigh. I have heard of men
who thought nothing of a fortnight’s journey of this sort. In three or
four years, such a man is poor no longer.
These people raise practically everything they eat. Their clothing, like
their furniture, is of the simplest. They go bare-foot all summer, and
in winter they wear shoes out of doors only—sometimes not then. Of
ventilation they know nothing except as something cold to be shut
out—an idea not peculiar to Galicians! To tell the truth, Cousin Slav
is much more like his English neighbors than he is different from
them—and a difference is not always a defect.
A saddle girth breaks as we near a village, and one of us (I won’t say
which) rolls over on the ground. It’s an ill wind that blows no good.
The hour we spend held up in that village is one of surprise and
delight. This is no haphazard collection of dwellings, with untidy
little shacks and ambitious modern houses putting each other to shame.
There is no distinction here between rich and poor; there are no rich
and no poor; or rather, all are rich, though not one has more than
trifling possessions.
The whole village has been built on an intelligent design, not allowed
to spring up anyhow. The houses are symmetrically arranged in two long
rows, with a broad avenue between. Each cottage, standing on its own
lot, comprises “a but and a ben,” as they say in Scotland. The gable of
the ben, or better end, faces the street, while the doors open sideways
into the yard. The walls, substantially built of logs, present a neatly
smoothed surface of white-washed earth. The roofs also are covered with
earth, but even they are clean and neat. A raised ledge of earth runs
along the foot of the wall, under the wide overhanging eaves, to form a
sort of veranda seat. A little red and green pattern over each window
adds a pleasant touch of color to the whole. Just outside the village is
a ring of hard smooth earth, with a mound in the middle; this is the
flax-breaking floor, the flax straw being crushed by a big wooden roller
with small logs nailed lengthwise on its surface like cogs on a wheel.
They are a pleasant folk, these villagers. A woman, embroidering linen
at her cottage door, rises to welcome us. She is ignorant of our tongue,
and we of hers, but we both know the ancient universal language of
signs, invented long before words. She guides us to the community
saddler, and while he fixes the girth she takes us home and spreads
before us bread, from an enormous rye loaf, butter, wild raspberry
preserve, and milk—a royal feast.
Jutting out from one corner of the room is the great clay oven, which
projects into the next apartment too, and has sleeping accommodation on
the top. A shining table and benches, with a long bench around the wall,
are the only furniture. Everything is marvellously clean: we might eat
our dinner off the floor.
Music floats in at the open door; seven girls have come to entertain us,
sitting on the ledge outside and singing hymns while we eat. For this is
a village of Doukhobors.
We have all heard of the little gang of fanatical extremists bearing
that name, who now and then make trouble for the police. The members of
the Doukhobor community, as a whole, are distressed by such proceedings,
for which they are often blamed. The saddler, when we go for the mended
girth, expounds their views in quite good English. “When a criminal
lunatic calls himself a Presbyterian or Catholic,” he protests, “you
don’t hold up your hands and cry ‘Oh, those dreadful Presbyterians and
Catholics!’ I know we have peculiar ideas, and we have suffered for
them; but we are not criminals and we are not mad.”
They are like our Quakers in their opposition to fighting, and in the
simplicity of their religious observances as well as their daily life.
Each family has its little personal belongings; but the land, live stock
and implements are owned by the community. “The co-operation that we
preach they practise,” an observer says, who knows them well, “and we
should be honestly thankful to them for trying to live up to high ideals
in a too materialistic age. Though they cultivate an almost primitive
simplicity of life, in the cultivation of the ground they are by no
means primitive, but keen to adopt the most scientific methods, which
their strong co-operative organization enables them to practise with
admirable success. They are industrious workers. Their cleanliness and
good health are remarkable. The value of all this to our country is so
great that it should not be impossible, with sufficient good-will and
elasticity of law on our part, to allow them to work out their system
side by side with our own—especially as their number is not large, for
many leave their community rather than submit to its rules and
restrictions.”
But the bugles are calling at Edmonton; we must be up and away. It is a
long, long ride, and we can hardly resist the temptation to stop and
chat with new settlers by the way. Here, for instance, is a farmer who
keeps a stopping place—a common practice along trails where there is
nothing like a hotel. Fifteen cents for a “noon” and twenty-five cents
for a square meal, that seems the regular tariff.
These are evidently people of taste. The old gentleman and his
grandchildren have already taken time, in the intervals of chores and
attendance on hungry travellers, to lay out a garden, where asters,
poppies and mignonette bloom in a setting of elk horns and buffalo
skulls. In the parlor of the comfortable log house is a well-used
library of a hundred books, including Dickens, Kipling, and a strong
contingent of religious authors.
What a story of age-long adventure it is, the history of that family.
The man has a French name, though he speaks no language but our own. His
distant ancestors, hunting with chipped stone spears like our Indians,
and moving on as they did from one hunting ground to another, wandered
through Europe till they came to the Atlantic and settled on the coast
of France. Centuries passed; America was discovered; two centuries more,
and the family, good civilized French folk, continued the westward
migration of their pre-historic tribe whose course had been barred by
the sea. They settled under the English flag in North Carolina. Another
century, and one of them made his way inland to Tennessee, where our
friend grew up. Presently he moved north-west to Illinois, where he
married; west again to Kansas, where his children were born; south-west
into Oklahoma; and north-west at last to Alberta, where he is so much
better satisfied than in any of his former homes that he is ready to
sing, “Here all my wanderings cease!”
That is the story of thousands of Western families, mostly of the
British, Scandinavian and German branches of our race. They come over
from Europe, settle on the Atlantic sea-board, pull up stakes and strike
inland; pull them up again to go farther in, and so on indefinitely;
halting perhaps for a year or two, perhaps for generations, but always
moving westward and generally northward too.
Among the old-timers, in a well-settled district that we presently pass
through, is a Nova Scotian who has been farming up here for a dozen
years. “My grandfather,” he says, “was a United Empire Loyalist. He had
been a leading citizen of New York, and lost everything in the
revolution. He knew nothing of country life beyond his garden in
Manhattan. But he never kicked; he got right down to it, and when some
poor West Highlanders came in, more used to fishing than farming, it was
the city man that showed them how to build log houses and clear the Nova
Scotian forest.
“I thought of him one day, soon after I came up here, when I butted in
to a family of newcomers from England. There were three brothers, all
university graduates, who had never done a hand’s turn of work except in
their sports, I reckon. Now they were trying to work three quarter
sections, in partnership. They weren’t baching it like some high-toned
‘remittance men’ I’ve seen, who wouldn’t sweep out the shack or make a
bed once in a year, for all the elegant way they’d been raised. No; one
of them had a wife, and, though she’d been used to servants doing
everything, she got down to it like a good one and kept the house as
clean as her baby. But the men were trying to farm before they learnt
how, which is a mistake.
“Well, I saw one of them plowing with a team of oxen, and there was
something wrong with the plow and he couldn’t find out what, let alone
make a straight furrow. The others were picking up stones and carrying
them quite a ways, and the skin was almost flayed off their tender
hands. I fixed the plow, and told ’em to wear gloves, and helped ’em
make a stone-boat. Of course they must have me stay for supper—dinner,
they called it. I opened my eyes, I tell you, when they all came to
supper dolled up in evening dress, London style; and her ladyship served
up a dinner to match, winding up with black coffee and cigars. But they
didn’t let their ‘style’ interfere with their work. That first year they
broke 200 acres and had the luck to raise enough wheat for seed, besides
oats enough for four horses; and the second year they had a splendid
crop. There never was any doubt about their success, from the word go.
They were good mixers—no starch, except in their shirts—they made
themselves liked; and to-day, if you please, it’s those city boys that
show half the newcomers around them how to live in the West.”