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

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 forcedto 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.
    The Galicians did not care to settle on the bald southern prairie. They preferred the wooded valleys of the Saskatchewan. This baffled the immigration authorities. “These Galicians are a peculiar people,” McCreary wrote to James Smart in the spring of 1897. “They will not accept as a gift 160 acres of what we consider the best land in Manitoba, that is first class wheat growing prairie land; what they particularly want is wood; and they care but little whether the land is heavy soil or light gravel; but each man must have some wood on his place.…”
    There was reason for this. Wood was precious in the Carpathians – so scarce that it was bought by the pound. In some areas the harvesting of wood was a monopoly: it was a crime to cut down a tree. Thus in Canada the Galicians were allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to settle on marginal lands while other immigrants, notably the Americans, seized the more fertile prairie to the south.
    It is June of 1897, and the Humeniuk family has arrived in Winnipeg. In the colonist car, they and the others sit quietly in their seats as they have been told, peering curiously out of the windows at the equally curious crowd on the platform peering in. Suddenly they spot a familiar figure – a Galician searching about for acquaintances. His name is Michaniuk, and he soon spies his old friends .
    “Neighbours!” Mr. Michaniuk shouts, “where are you going?”
    There is a commotion in the coach. Where are they going? Nobody seems to know .
    “Don’t go any farther,” cries Mr. Michaniuk to his former townspeople. “It is good here!”
    One of the men in the coach rises to his feet and addresses the assembly .
    “There is our