Read The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
They called him Peter the Lordly, and the title fitted. Off he went on a tour of all the villages, seated in a six-horse sleigh, with a choir of maidens chanting psalms. This casual employment of animals as
beasts of transport did not go unnoticed. Verigin was conveying a subtle message to the malcontents.
The authorities were delighted by Verigin’s immediate assumption of power and his apparently conciliatory attitude. “A great change has taken place in the Doukhobor situation in this district,” Corporal Christian Junget of the NWMP reported. “Peter Verigin has succeeded in convincing them of their foolishness.…”
Early in January, Verigin met with immigration officials and quickly grasped the problem of the Doukhobor lands. The registration demanded by the government was no more than a formality, he realized. His people could comply with that and still hold property in common. The time might come when the government would demand that each Doukhobor settle and build on the 160-acre homestead to which he technically held title, but that was at least three years away. Verigin had time to plan.
He impressed everybody, including the railroad men with whom he bargained for those of his people who worked for wages. When one contractor offered 25.5 cents a cubic yard for grading, Verigin insisted on 27.5. The contractor told him that was the price the railway paid him; therefore he couldn’t make a profit.
“No company will profit by our work,” Verigin told him. “I have known all along that you were getting twenty-seven and a half from the railway. Now you can take it or leave it.” Workmen were hard to find. The contractor took it.
Speers was delighted by the changes that Verigin wrought. When the Doukhobor leader arrived in Winnipeg with his committee to purchase stock, the colonization agent noted that Nicholas Zibarov was a member and a willing follower:
Zibarov!
the very man who had once advocated giving up the use of animals!
“These people are dressing like ourselves, they have expressed a desire also to conform to our customs, they are observing our holidays, they are accepting our calendar …” Speers reported to Ottawa. “Peter Verigin is a man of superior judgement and his influence is very great among the people.”
On this occasion Verigin told J. Obed Smith, the new immigration commissioner, that his people were now all Canadians and that spirit marches were a thing of the past.
“Well,” Smith retorted, “if you are going to be a Canadian, why don’t you wear Canadian clothes and set your people an example?”
Without a word, Verigin headed for the door. When he returned two
hours later, he was all but unrecognizable in a tailored suit with a white shirt and turned-down collar, his long hair close-cropped, and his face clean-shaven except for a bristling moustache. He would, he said, give his children Canadian names such as Thomas, John, and William.
Verigin made it a point to visit James Mavor in Toronto. The professor’s impression was also favourable. Verigin, he noted, had a shrewd and able mind, understood his people’s faults and weaknesses, and was determined to serve them “to the limits of his own powers.… He must often have been provoked and discouraged by the bêtises of his people, yet he never revealed to me any impatience of them.”
There was reason for provocation, for the community was split into three factions. The well-to-do farmers of the Rosthern Colony were opting, more and more, for independence and free enterprise. The radical Left, especially in the South Colony, nearest Yorkton, were activists who believed that only by overt demonstrations could the sect achieve its ends. In the centre was the great mass of Doukhobors whose main concern was to retain the communal system of central villages where personal possessions were all but unknown. This was Verigin’s desire, but he became more and more unsure of achieving it in Saskatchewan.
He travelled about like an Oriental potentate, in a six-horse sleigh in winter and a phaeton in summer, a silk hat on his head, accompanied by the inevitable choir of chanting maidens, with, at his side, a plump, blue-eyed brunette of eighteen, Anastasia Golubova, whom he called his wife. Yet in spite of this pomp, he must have felt his power dwindling. In May, 1903, the first of a series of small but highly visible protest marches began again, engineered by some of the same fanatics who had led the pilgrimage of 1902. These people-there were only about fifty – refused to register their lands and began to travel from village to village urging their fellows to resist temptation, turn their animals loose, and seek the sun. Verigin’s fanciful description to Tchertkoff of a sunny Doukhobor utopia had returned to haunt him.
To this latest protest the Freedomites (
Svobodniki)
, as they now called themselves, or “Sons of Freedom” as the press nicknamed them, added two new rituals: first nudity, and later arson. The results, for Verigin, were catastrophic. The press was intrigued by men, women, and children who burned their clothes and marched naked on the chill prairie. The authorities stamped out all efforts to photograph the unclad demonstrators; one Saskatoon photographer was fined for taking their pictures and had his plates destroyed, while a luckless
Mounted Police constable who actually posed with a dozen naked Doukhobor women (hoping, he claimed, to jolly them into quitting their demonstration) was given a month in jail.
Why the nudity? The indefatigable Speers, who rode day and night for forty hours to break up the demonstration, asked that question and was told it was part of the Freedomites’ religion – that they wanted to go to a warm country and live like Adam and Eve. Yet nudity, which was to dominate the Freedomite demonstrations for decades to come, was a new manifestation. Even though the numbers involved were always small, this and future spectacles received banner headlines in the newspapers. Perhaps that was the Freedomites’ purpose. If so, it did not endear the Doukhobors’ cause to the Canadian public. Some of the demonstrators went to jail, where they lived on raw potatoes and oatmeal. Others followed on charges of arson. Two were judged insane. One died in prison of malnutrition. And the headlines continued.
The Doukhobors had no political power because, having refused to swear fealty to Canada, they could not become citizens and vote. But the squatters who moved onto unregistered Doukhobor lands, as well as the real estate men, had clout in Ottawa. In 1899 these lands had been unattractive; now, with tens of thousands of settlers moving into the West, the Doukhobors’ holdings were positively alluring. As the pressures began to mount, an event occurred that doomed Verigin’s last hopes of maintaining a communal Christian brotherhood on the prairies. Sifton resigned and Frank Oliver replaced him as Minister of the Interior.
Backed up by the inevitable commission of investigation, Oliver made his move in 1906. The Doukhobors were to be treated like any other landowners, just as Oliver’s editorial had once promised. They must, in short, conform to Canadian customs. There would be no exceptions in the West to the rigid regulations of the Homestead Act: each must obey its stipulations; each must build his house on his free quarter-section and farm it individually. As a result there could be no villages, no common tilling of the soil; houses would be scattered about, four to a section, in the Canadian fashion. If any Doukhobor continued to live in the villages, his land patents would be extinguished. James Mavor was one of the few who protested this violent attempt at assimilation. But the Canadian public didn’t care.
Verigin had seen it coming, and Verigin had no intention of submerging his people’s religion and lifestyle in an ocean of Canadian
conformity. The short haircut, the clean-shaven face, the Western clothes had lulled the authorities into believing that the Doukhobor leader was just like everybody else. He was a far more complicated, determined, and farsighted man than outward appearances suggested. Already he had secured a massive war chest by sending male members of his flock out to earn money working on the railways. With these funds he determined to buy other lands, privately, in another province – in the Kootenay district of British Columbia – and start all over again. For the first and only time a substantial immigrant body rejected the Canadian dream
en bloc
and turned its back on the promised land.
It was an incredible sacrifice. Everything the Doukhobors had slaved for since 1899 was to be abandoned: the neatly ploughed fields, the well-kept villages, the stacks of hay, the lofts bursting with grain. Not everybody agreed with Verigin’s decision. Two thousand independent Doukhobors, members of the Rosthern community, took the oath and settled on their individual homesteads. Another thousand in the two colonies north of Yorkton also decided to remain. The rest – more than five thousand – followed their leader to the new province.
Suddenly, in June 1907, a quarter of a million acres of prime farm land, abandoned by the Doukhobors, came onto the market-free homesteads for any man who could fight for a place in the queues forming at the doors of the land offices. This was not raw land. Some of these homesteads, it was said, were worth from three thousand to ten thousand dollars. And so the stage was set for the last great land rush in North America.
In Yorkton and Prince Albert, the scenes of mob violence exceeded in fury any of the demonstrations of the Sons of God. Line-ups formed daily at the land offices as township after township was opened for settlement. In Yorkton over the weekend of June 1 and 2, men waited for forty-five hours in the cold and rain for the office to open on Monday morning at nine. The town itself was crammed with real estate speculators. Hotels were bursting, and out-of-towners paid ten cents a night to sleep in haystacks.
Far more people queued up each night than there were homesteads available. In Prince Albert on Monday, June 3, one group of thirty exhausted and shivering men, bone weary after more than twenty-four hours in line, found themselves muscled from their positions by a fresher party, who crushed them so tightly that some were shoved through the glass panes of the land office. Five policemen helped restore order with fists and batons.
In Yorkton, Mrs. Jessie Harper of Westbourne, a farm woman well over seventy, flung herself repeatedly at the line of men being admitted to the land office until one finally allowed her a place. It turned out she already had a farm worth ten thousand dollars. By the first week in June the police estimated that five hundred strangers, the representatives of real estate men, were in town with orders to break into the queue at any cost. During one night, a group of these entrepreneurs charged the line and struggled with the Mounted Police. “Mob the police! Mob the police!” they cried until the sergeant in charge called out the fire department and turned a hose on them. Even that did not deter the determined. Still dripping wet in the wan light of dawn, they clung stubbornly to their places in the queue.
In this way the reign of Peter the Lordly came to an end on the prairies, with fists and truncheons, cries and catcalls, and the jarring cacophony of human beings in collision – a stark contrast to the soft chanting of the choir of maidens, now only an echo in the empty villages scattered along the verdant valleys of Saskatchewan.
Chapter Four
Isaac Barr’s Lambs
1
Barr’s dream
It is the last day of March, 1903 just before nine in the morning and we are standing at the Liverpool dockside in the midst of a jostling crowd, watching the spring sun dappling the waters. Out in the harbour, waiting for the tide, is the Beaver Line’s
Lake Manitoba,
a Boer War troopship, built to hold seven hundred souls but now chartered by the Reverend I.M. Barr to convey 1,960 British men, women, and children – “the flower of England,” to quote a local paper – to Canada
.
There must be at least five thousand people here on the landing dock, all bidding one another goodbye. Great lorries arrive by the minute, loaded with luggage labelled “Saint John, N.B.” Grandmothers are crying and praying, for they realize they may never see their families again. Handkerchiefs flutter, children sniffle, dogs destined for the passage scuffle and whine. Whole families arrive by carriage to the cheers of friends and strangers, toting baskets of food, shotguns, umbrellas, birds in cages. The band of the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment, resplendent in scarlet and gold, strikes up a military air. The crush on the landing stage becomes unbearable
.
What a crowd this is – a cross-section of the British Isles (one hundred from Scotland, another hundred from Ireland); men from the coal pits, cotton mills, stores and offices; fifty clergymen’s sons, five offspring of one Irish peer; families from John o’ Groats to the Tweed; Boer War veterans; butchers and bakers and even a few farmers – although these are in the minority – all turning their backs on Merrie England to start again in an unknown land. Scores are dressed for the new world – or for their romantic vision of it – in riding breeches, puttees, and broad-brimmed Stetsons, with bowie knives at their hips and pistols at their belts. They are off to the great North West, the domain of the Red Indians, where they will become gentlemen farmers, living the countrified life. The Reverend Mr. Barr has assured them that their neighbours will be others like themselves: no sweaty Slavs, German dirt farmers, or grubbing Yankees in the all-British colony west of Battleford – only proper Britons
.
At last the little black-and-white tug pushes the liner toward the dock. Great heaps of baggage bearing brightly coloured Beaver Line labels are hoisted aboard. The tide waits for no man; there is no time for slings. Trunks and boxes are hauled onto the deck by hawsers, and
if some break open, spilling their contents into the sea, that is too bad
.