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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.”
Wasyl’s family emigrated to Canada without him. He stayed behind in Ukraine—which part of Ukraine, my memory of our family story does not tell. Could they not afford his passage? Or was he lucky enough to be lucratively employed, so that it would have made sense for him to save up a bit, and come later? I don’t know; perhaps no-one now living knows.
In any case, at that time, communication was slow and uncertain. The story told by Wasyl’s grandson, my mother’s brother, goes like this: Wasyl came across to Canada some years after his parents and siblings, with no way to locate them. But he knew what all emigrants from eastern Europe at that time knew—that people took the train west until they found a good place to settle. He took the train west.
(my earliest memory is of taking the train west, from Toronto; it must have been December 1960, because my younger sister was a baby—my mother, at 28, was taking her children to visit her parents and brother on the farm for Christmas. The sound of the train whistle wakes me up in the middle of the night. I am sleeping in a lower bunk—I can see out the window, endless fields of snow. From the bunk above me come the sounds of a baby crying, my sister, a few months old, and of my mother soothing her. I go back to sleep. I am two and a half years old.)
In the late 1890s, then, or perhaps the early 1900s, Wasyl Antonichuk was on the train going west. He got out at every station, because that was what one did, and he checked the bulletin board. There was one in every station, covered with messages; it was the only way for him to find his family.
The way my uncle related the story, it sounded matter-of-fact, practical, even inevitable that Wasyl would have found his family this way. To me it seems miraculous. Wasyl read message after message, on bulletin board after bulletin board. Admittedly, north and west of Lake Superior there aren’t that many railway stations…and as it turned out, he only had to travel as far as Winnipeg.
On the bulletin board of the waiting room in the Winnipeg CPR station was the message Wasyl had been looking for, in Ukrainian of course (as I am certain many of the messages were): To Wasyl Antonichuk. We are in Rossburn. Father and Mother.
Wasyl made it to Rossburn—the story I remember my uncle telling gives no details. But we know, from family memory and from records on the internet, that he lived out his life and died there—I found a photo of his grave, and hope to visit it some day.
How did Wasyl make his living, in Rossburn, Manitoba, from about 1900 to 1936 when he died at the age of 55 (or thereabouts—the different internet sources I tracked down were by no means in agreement as to details)? I don’t know; perhaps no-one now living knows, but I think I should try to find out.
At any rate, he married Solomaya Hrankowski, my great-grandmother, in the early years of the new century, since we know that their first child, my grandmother Irena Antonichuk, was born in 1906. As a child I was told of their ten children, of whom six? seven? survived to adulthood. There is a family photo of my grandmother and two of her sisters in 1932.
Irena had been married for five years already, and had borne her four children—my mother, born that same year, was the youngest. I have written elsewhere about my grandfather, Nicholas Pankiw, himself a more recent immigrant from the Old Country. He and Irena were married in February 1927. Their first child was born before the end of the year.
Irena and Nicholas do not, to my modern eye, look very comfortable or well acquainted, posing stiffly in the parlour—perhaps her father’s?—on their wedding day. Twenty or so years later, on the farm they homesteaded south of Winnipeg, they look much as I remember them.
Ukrainian was the language of their home, the language my mother and her siblings were raised in. The third generation—mine—has now lost the language, for the most part. It’s an all-too-common pattern. But I feel sure that all of us fifteen grandchildren have strong ties to Ukrainian culture still, including those, like me, whose ancestry is half rather than all Ukrainian. It’s a powerful culture; it shapes a person. I am now trying to learn the language—finally.
The story of Ukrainian settlement on the Canadian prairies is long and complex. I have had to leave out, in this short piece, any more than a passing mention of the sombre backdrop against which my great-grandfather’s narrative unfolds. The figures moving on that backdrop spoke, and still speak, Ojibway and Cree. Their story is far from over.
Nor is the story of Ukrainian-speakers in Western Canada over. A new wave of Ukrainians is now on the way to Canada, refugees fleeing the senseless war that started on February 24th, 2022. We hope many of them will be able to return home. But that first wave of Ukrainians, the ones who came to farm, dug in, quite literally, and stayed, and made Western Canada what it is today. For our family, it all started with that writing on the wall.
With many thanks to Tanya for the family photos
This is for Tanya and Tia
References
Canadian Encyclopedia Online. (2022). Retrieved 3 April 2022 from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/
