Dominion Day, 1897

My great-grandparents Prokop Nikota and his wife Katrina stepped off the train in Yorkton on or about July 1,1897. With them were two sons, Shefam, age 3, and George, an infant.

I say on or about because I found no record of the exact day they arrived in Yorkton, a village on the eastern edge of a vast territory called Assiniboia. A few years later Saskatchewan would be carved from part of it. Immigration records indicate the passenger liner Armenia, carrying the Nikotas, landed in Montreal on June 24. They boarded a westward-bound train, and it would have taken about a week to reach the end of the rail line, though not the end of their journey. They still had another fifty kilometres to trek, on foot and by wagon, into the wilderness to find the piece of land that had brought them half-way around the world.

I wonder what Katrina thought about her fate and that of her children that day in Yorkton. She had thrown a snowball at Prokop when he rode into Toutry, a village in Bukovina, a province at the butt-end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a cavalryman in a fine blue uniform who had caught her eye, and she wanted to catch his. She did. And now this. Standing on a platform somewhere beyond any experience she had known with two small children. She could not have foreseen that in three or four years they would be dead, in some measure victims of this passage. But the future was unknowable. As God wills, so it shall be. The snowball had found its mark.

It is a terrible thing to be a refugee, as so many Canadians have been, forced from one life into another by terrors not of their making. But surely, to trade home, family, friends, garden and livestock for a leap into the unknown – that too must have been hard. What motivation could there be?

Perhaps it lies in the words of the Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko:

You’ll plough again as master of your own free soil,/Your own land’s rightful lord!

Franko was a nationalist, and his vision was of a land liberated from Russians and Poles, Ottomans and Hapsburgs. A nation called Ukraine. For Prokop Nikota, who was illiterate, the idea of a nation was an abstraction. But Franko’s words could be taken literally. In Canada, Prokop would be master of his own land, his life.

In the 1890s, immigration fever came over the largely Ukrainian-speaking eastern provinces of the Hapsburg lands. It sounds like an affliction, but it was more a mania, leading tens of thousands of families to emigrate to Canada, the U.S. and South America, even Siberia – the stick’s short end for sure. A generation earlier these people had been serfs. Having been given a taste of freedom, they wanted more.

Three pairs of my great-grandparents caught the fever. The Nikotas’ journey was typical: selling all they owned to raise cash for the venture, tearful good-byes in the village church, a wagon ride from Toutry to the railway station forty kilometres away in Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi), Bukovina’s capital, a crowded, slow-moving train to Ternopil, a regional centre, sitting on their baggage – wooden benches cost more – a change of trains to Lemberg (today Lviv), the capital of Galicia, another change, and, Ukrainian-speaking lands left behind, crossing into Polish territory, then Germany. The journey to Hamburg was 1,500 kilometres.

Police and border agents entered the trains to check documents. They demanded to see how much money emigrants carried. Immigration agents in the village suggested they have 1,000 florins, or $400 Canadian. Prokop arrived in Canada with $150 in his pocket (about $4,500 in today’s dollars), bribes and scams likely having depleted what he started out with. Passenger lists of the shipping companies who delivered the immigrants recorded their resources on arrival in Canada. Some families landed with less than $10.

In Hamburg, officials herded immigrants from the train into sheds. They were given a medical examination, allowed to bathe, and their belongings were disinfected.

The Nikotas boarded their ship early in June. The North Atlantic crossing took up to three weeks, depending on weather and icebergs at that time of year. Bergs had the right of way, as Titanic passengers were to discover fifteen years later. Immigrants slept below decks in open cabins filled with wooden or iron bunks in stacks of up to four. They survived on beans, bread and herring, supplemented with garlic and onions to ward off seasickness. Some brought a small keg of whisky.

People died. Their bodies were tossed overboard. No priests accompanied the migrants, so rudimentary burial services were left to the captain, crew and any among the passengers who remembered the words to ceremonies for the dead.

Bukovinian family in Quebec in 1897, on their way to west. (National Archives of Canada)

The train left Montreal for Ottawa and the valley extending westward where villages became smaller and then disappeared. Outside their windows, the immigrants were confronted with an unending green corridor punctuated by rock, swamps and lakes. Far from finding what they saw scenic, it filled them with dread. This was not farmland. “Many started to cry, wondering how they could possibly live in such a terrible environment,” Nicholas Lewchuk, a Yorkton-bound settler, remembered in a memoir. People felt they were victims of a cruel deception. They cursed the agents back in the village who had sold them a dream turned into a nightmare.

And the immigrants were cursed in turn: “…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…” So said The Belleville Intelligencer.

In Winnipeg there was a day or two to rest up. For some, it seemed as far as they could go. They would have returned to Europe, but they lacked means. Some managed to stay in Winnipeg where they formed the nucleus of the city’s burgeoning north end. Others climbed back on the train, more than reluctantly: “If I had not used force, locked them in the cars, got the police and so forth, there would not have been one at Yorkton yet,” W.F. McCreary, Ottawa’s commissioner of immigration in the city, wrote of a trainload earlier that year.

And so, Yorkton.

In 1897, Canada’s national holiday, on July 1, was called Dominion Day because the country was still a child of the British Empire.

The word “dominion” suggests control – of Britain over Canada, and of the strong over those who were unable to resist. The two governments had allowed the clearing from Assiniboia of the buffalo and they had forced Indigenous peoples onto reserves. And they gave Prokop his 160 acres of land, an extent barely imaginable in his former life. His dominion.

The Nikotas would have been unfamiliar with the celebration of a civic holiday such as Dominion Day. They had as yet no experience of a nation. Their holidays were of the religious kind. They arrived late in the year. The birth of George had delayed them for weeks. It would now be possible to plant no more than a garden. They could not stay in the village.

They would have been unaware that Yorkton’s board of trade had issued a proclamation welcoming the newcomers and had invited them to take part in Dominion Day festivities. It was a calculated move by the merchants, who would lend them money and sell them equipment. Here were future customers. Here was profit. But here too, surely, was a pool of goodwill, however shallow. Welcome to Yorkton! Welcome to Canada!

Katrina and Prokop Nikota near the end of their lives, in 1949.