CHAPTER XII

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.”