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 [a]Cleanliness and Simplicity] 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 [a]A “Stopping Place”] 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. [a]The Long Migration]
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.