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The wall was the wall of the waiting room in the Winnipeg CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway) station, sometime in the 1890s, perhaps. Here is the station, circa 1905. It’s an impressive edifice. A nation-building edifice.
The intended reader of the writing on this particular wall was my great-grandfather, Wasyl Antonichuk, a young man at that time. He was part of the first great wave of Ukrainian immigration to Canada. As the Canadian Encyclopedia tells us, “The initial influx came as the Canadian government promoted the immigration of farmers….The first major immigration (170,000 rural poor, primarily from Galicia and Bukovina) occurred between 1891 and 1914.”
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