Trains of Recollection / Drawn from Fifty Years of Railway Service in Scotland and Canada, and told to Arthur Hawkes

by D. B. Hanna

The deputation went away as little satisfied with the prospects of this intrusion as they were when they came. The superintendent turned to more customary duties.

A couple of hours later the chiefs of the deputation returned to retract their objections to the Galicians. From shirts, and from stockings above the unfeminine-looking footgear, there had been brought forth enough cash to buy two thousand dollars’ worth of supplies from Dauphin merchants; and faith and charity had begun to work up to lively hope among the stores that this was a mere shadow of things to come. The might of economics in social life never received a more vivid vindication than was furnished the superintendent on that day.

In case it should not be convenient to recur to this question of the settlement of non-English-speaking farmers in the West, let me go back upon and ahead of my story. In the Saltcoats region of the Manitoba North Western a farm instructor for British newcomers was appointed in the person of Tom MacNutt, an old Ontarion who has been Speaker of the Legislature at Regina, and M.P. and chairman of the Liberal caucus at Ottawa. During the Sifton immigration regime Galicians were planted in MacNutt’s constituency of Saltcoats, where, in 1911, ten thousand non-English-speaking natives of Europe were living, of whom about half were from Austria-Hungary. He tells how a Scotchman became a leading champion in the press of the exclusion of these “undesirable” foreigners.

Among the MacNutt civic functions was that of coroner. He was obliged to hold an inquest on a Galician boy, accidentally killed. Driving to the farm with a doctor he asked what arrangements had been made for an interpreter, and was told that Mrs. Wilson would translate the evidence.

Mrs. Wilson proved to be a perfect interpreter, and as pretty as she was efficient. The coroner, seeing the ease with which she took in all that was said by the witnesses, remarked to himself that she must have been a school teacher, and wonderfully quick to pick up so much Galician, while she was teaching a little English. Afterwards Mrs. Wilson told the coroner that she was herself a Galician, and introduced him to her husband—the Scotchman who had tried to dam the Galician tide.

The Canadianization of these people is a question into which one must not be tempted to stray. Having so largely entered into their labours we owe it to ourselves, at least, to understand something of what their contribution to the West, and therefore to the East, has been. They arrived with very little but the will to work, and the ability in handi-craftsmanship which is shown in their buildings, and the excellence of their gardens and farms. The women remained on the homesteads, tending the cows and hens and doing what they could in heavier work, while the men earned money in railway construction gangs, with which to buy cattle and gear. We had them for year after year, beginning with the line between Dauphin and Swan river. Without them the settlement of many of the best sections of the West would have been retarded.

Their names were no doubt written accurately in the payrolls; but pronunciation of them was not easy to engineers who had received only a Toronto University education. To save time and prevent complications each man was given a number. When the Galician constructionist presented himself at the paymaster’s tent, he was required to say, besides his number, the name of the boss he worked under—not always an easy thing, for even our names are not all as simple as our characters. For all the Canadian Northern life, our chief tracklayer was Joe Work—truly a prince at his job. His only blemish was an absent eye. It often happened that when a Galician came for his pay and was asked for whom he worked he would shut an eye, and smile.

While we were doing our best to develop the Dauphin country, during the first year of operation, the line was extended to Winnipegosis. We had no access to Winnipeg; but this did not prevent our proprietors from buying the charter for a railway east of Winnipeg—the Manitoba and South Eastern. Once more, I think, there was no clear conception of the extensions that were to follow. But there was the urge to the place whence they go down to the sea in ships. At the end of our second season—1898—we opened the first section of the line to Lake Superior—forty-five miles from St. Boniface to Marchand, in the bush, west of the Lake of the Woods, the first time table of which, typewritten for economy’s sake, also hangs in my Toronto office.

At the beginning of my connection with the line, I continued on duty for a time with the North Western, and made my headquarters once more at the Portage, though my family remained in Winnipeg. But, at the end of 1898, with one line west of Lake Manitoba, and another going east to the Lake of the Woods, I became more or less of a shuttle—and have been shuttling ever since across a loom of steel, which never seems to have decided how wide a fabric it would evolve.

As the nineteenth century was dying, cordwood was still a considerable aid to Winnipeg comfort; and the rather swampy Marchand region its most convenient source of supply. Our eastern line was started as a cordwood carrier—and more. We set up a woodyard and sold scores of trainloads of tamarac, poplar and jack pine—ninety per cent. of our traffic. Our terminal was at St. Boniface; so that, literally we were at the gate of good things—this institution that looked so feeble, and was indeed feeble in body, whatever its daring was in mind. We were able to place our cars in the Winnipeg C.P.R. yards. The C.P.R. was kind to us, as the mighty knows how to be to the meagre.