The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 by Pierre Berton

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,