by Scott Kraft
Los Angeles, California
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Western Canada was sold as a fiction. Advertising the vast open prairies as “the new Eldorado,” [1] official Canadian government posters across Europe painted the West in glowing hues: “Homes for everybody.” [2] “Easy to reach.” [3] “Nothing to Fear.” [4] “Protected by the Government.” [5] The immigration agents and their colourful fliers offered “Wheat Land. Rich Virgin Soil. Land for Mixed Farming. Land for Cattle Raising.” [6] Under explicit government instruction not to mention the winter temperatures, the advertisements instead challenged: “This is your opportunity, why not embrace it?” [7]
Winnipeg was the “gateway” to this land of opportunity, and while many used the booming settlement at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers as the “jumping off point” to the Canadian breadbasket, a large number stayed, fueling Winnipeg’s turn-of-the-century immigration boom. The settlement’s population exploded from a mere 300 souls in 1870 to nearly 175,000 in 1919.
Today, the Winnipeg of the great westward migration, from the arrest of Riel to the suppression of the 1919 “Great Strike”, is part of Canada’s national mythology. The spread of the immigrant’s myth is due, to a great extent, to Winnipeg’s writers. How did the authors who lived through this prewar immigration boom see, remember, recreate or invent the Winnipeg of that time? What did the neighbourhoods, buildings, and landscape mean to them and their stories?
The Reverend Charles William Gordon, who wrote with stunning monetary and critical success under the pen name Ralph Connor, was the first truly famous writer to set a novel in Winnipeg. Born in Ontario in 1860, Connor was part of an early generation of Winnipeg immigrants, and among the new city’s earliest writers and greatest boosters. In his 1909 book, The Foreigner, the Toronto- and British-educated missionary described Winnipeg as “the cosmopolitan capital of the last of the Anglo Saxon Empires ...” His tone is romantic and epic, with a grand, almost messianic sense of purpose befitting a turn-of-the century missionary.
Out of breeds diverse in traditions, in ideals, in speech, and in manner of life … one people is being made. The blood strains of great races will mingle in the blood of a race greater than the greatest of them all … [I]n the Unity of our world-wide Empire, we fuse into a people … for the honour of our name, for the good of mankind, and for the glory of Almighty God. (chap. 1)
It is as if Connor is calling forth the New Jerusalem upon Winnipeg’s wide muddy streets. Connor’s book leaps through the European history of Winnipeg in multi-decade strides. “A hundred years ago, where now stands the thronging city, stood the lonely trading-post of The Honourable, The Hudson’s Bay Company.” (chap. 1) This fort and small settlement drew the “half-breed trapper and the Indian hunter.” (chap. 1) Fifty years later “a little settlement had gathered—a band of sturdy Scots … [d]our and doughty pioneers” (chap. 1) who “planted” their homes on farms, “rampart[s] of civilization against the wide, wild prairie, the home of the buffalo, and camp ground of the hunters of the plain.” (chap. 1)
Twenty five years later, “a little city had fairly dug its roots into the black soil” and “holding on with abundant courage and invincible hope, had gathered to itself what of strength it could, until by 1884 it had come to assume an appearance of enduring solidity.” (chap. 1) Winnipeg would indeed survive and thrive.
This “little city” of the 1880s is the city into which Laura Goodman Salverson, the well-known chronicler of Manitoba’s great Icelandic immigration, was born. A bit more earthbound than Connor, Salverson referred to her youth in Winnipeg’s “plebian mudhole days.” [8] Her debut novel, The Viking Heart, published in 1923, takes place in this young Winnipeg.
Salverson’s Icelandic immigrants arrive in Manitoba in the late 1870s and see out the turn of the century and the beginning of the Great War. Like Connor, Salverson steeped her book in tradition and mythology, but perhaps more true to Winnipeg, hers is a melting pot of antecedents. Salverson melds the Norse Sagas of her ancestors with the Anglo- Saxon canon, quoting by turns Skaldic Eddas, the Old Testament and Shakespeare, Burns and Longfellow. It seems an intentional melding, meant to reclaim the Icelander’s place in Anglo-Saxon-dom. To Salverson the Icelanders are long lost cousins who deserve inclusion in Canada’s neo-British culture.
The Viking Heart’s Canadian immigrants are not drawn to the prairies by colorful posters; they are driven there by volcanic eruption. The Icelanders came to Winnipeg in the ’80s, before the railroad has been completed. They make their journey to the Red River Settlement by boat. Salverson describes the Icelandic arrivals seeing Connor’s newly rooted city for the first time:
To the two tired people straining their eyes toward shore it was not an impressive sight. Just a few dim, glimmering lights along the low sloping bank, and as they grew closer to where the two northern rivers meet, a silhouette of low buildings, and down on the waterfront, a long ambling shell of a house rightly named the “immigration sheds.” (30)
They have landed at the convergence of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers, the birthplace of Winnipeg, known still as “the Forks.”
The Forks, from a map of the Hudson’s Bay Company Reserve showing the proposed route of the Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway, January 1887.
Source: Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, A.72/9 fo. 1.
Salverson’s invented memory of the city a dozen years before she was born focused, not surprisingly, on the Forks and its immigrant sheds. Whether arriving by boat, like the first immigrants of Salverson’s Icelandic community, or later on the Colonist trains, the immigrant sheds were often the first “neighbourhood” the new arrival experienced, both in reality and in fiction.
Behind the Fork’s immigrant sheds “the stockade and squat buildings of the Hudson’s Bay Company stood out, solemn and grim. A little forward towards the fork of the rivers the company mill shot its smoke into that wondrous sky.” (36) The sky may have been wondrous, conditions below were less so.
The novel’s elderly Mr. Hafstein suffered from employment circumstances very similar to those that Salverson’s own father endured. He “practically killed himself trying to earn enough money to keep his family and pay back his passage money.” (109) Hafstein eventually did die from his labours, after toiling as a harness maker from “six in the morning to ten or eleven at night” in a converted skating rink—“an insufferable hole, cold and unsanitary …” (109) Even the cheap squalor of the sheds was not economical enough for the new arrivals:
This family had taken a shack down in the neighborhood known as Number Six, because it was cheap at four dollars a month. But when you come to reckon that the income was usually an average of eighteen dollars a month and that six or eight dollars of this had to go for fuel in the winter time, it left them only six dollars a month to sustain life and respectability on after the rent was paid.” (110)
As the years passed, the landscape of the forks also changed. Point Douglas, the name for the original Scots and Irish settlement near the now bustling corner of Portage and Main Streets, became a mix of industry and residential housing:
The Hudson’s Bay mill was no longer sending its smoke into the prairie sky. It had become obsolete … when the Ogilvie Company built their modern plant down on Point Douglas. The old trading fort was also changed. In place of the long, low log buildings was a goodly two-story frame store built a little farther north ... Main Street, too, was changed. A team might now travel its entire length through the town and not be in danger of wallowing up to its haunches in adhesive mud. New industries and stores were steadily springing up and the town was spreading north and westward. (126)
With the mill gone, the Icelanders went north and west with the city, leaving the “little colony of shacks” on the “’flats’, as the low sloping river bank, running from what is now Water Street to the junction point of the two rivers, was called.” They moved northward to the area of Alexander and Ross, the “Icelander’s Main Street.” (126) Some residents remained, including the poor Hafstein family.
Business houses, mostly of the wholesale nature, replaced this poor man’s town on the flats … But down on Number Six, situated about warehouse Number Six of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and in the location of Water Street to-day, several humble families of various races lived in the miserable shanties and houses straggling down toward the river.
Here, in a dingy two-room hovel, the widow of Tate Hafstein was bravely fighting her battle for existence. (126)
Tenement House on Grove Street, north of the CPR depot, 1909. Each door and window represents the home of one family. (The image is a double exposure. Can you see the very faint faces of three women?)
Source: Archives of Manitoba, Winnipeg - Streets - Grove 1.
The Icelanders, though among the first, were not the only immigrants driven or drawn to Winnipeg. Connor gives a typically colorful description of the next wave of arrivals and their effect on the city:
With these, at first in small and then in larger groups, from Central and South Eastern Europe, came people strange in costume and in speech; and holding close by one another as if in terror of the perils and the loneliness of the unknown land, they segregated into colonies tight knit by ties of blood and common tongue. (chap. 1)
The immigrant communities Connor describes were the next wave of newcomers, most of them driven from their Eastern European homes by social rather than environmental disasters. These immigrants arrived by train, rather than boat, and the location, if not the condition, of their homes reflected that change:
Already, close to the railway tracks and in the more unfashionable northern section of the little city, a huddling cluster of little black shacks gave such a colony shelter. With a sprinkling of Germans, Italians and Swiss, it was almost solidly Slav. Slavs of all varieties from all provinces and speaking all dialects were there to be found: Slavs from Little Russia and from Great Russia, the alert Polak, the heavy Croatian, the haughty Magyar, and occasionally the stalwart Dalmatian from the Adriatic, in speech mostly Ruthenian, in religion orthodox Greek Catholic or Uniat and Roman Catholic. (chap. 1)
Already, by the early 1880s, the Slavic immigrants were getting the most attention. It would be these Central and Eastern European immigrants who would become synonymous with the Winnipeg immigration boom.
In Connor’s time the immigrant colony was still relatively small, but already there were the beginnings of the ramshackle houses, pressed together, with boarders crowded into every room.
There they pack together in their little shacks of boards and tar-paper, with pent roofs of old tobacco tins or of slabs or of that same useful but unsightly tar-paper, crowding each other in close irregular groups as if the whole wide prairie were not there inviting them. From the number of their huts they seem a colony of no great size, but the census taker, counting ten or twenty to a hut, is surprised to find them run up into hundreds. (chap. 1)
This is the most commonly known origin myth of Winnipeg: the “men in sheepskin coats,” the “garlic eaters,” and the “slavs” arriving to huddle dozens to a room in the heart of Anglo Winnipeg, where they fight disease, prejudice, poverty and lack of education in order to make themselves “more Canadian”—and Canada more “immigrant” in the process. From the evidence of these early Winnipeg writings, it seems the myth may not be so far from the reality.
In his 1970 memoir The Boy From Winnipeg, James H. Gray, a Canadian-born banker turned writer, recalls growing up in Winnipeg around the time of the First World War. “[W]hat a marvelous, exciting, and wonder-filled world it was for small boys!” he recalled. “[S]eldom have two decades been more wonder-filled for growing up in than the first twenty years of our century.” (1) Gray’s North End seemed little changed from the neighbourhood Connor had written about, forty or more years earlier:
The Anglo-Saxon immigrants spread west from Sherbrook Street, the Icelanders and Swedes gathered into their own community along Sargent Avenue. The Anglo-Saxons who did move north usually leap-frogged over the Jewish-Ukrainian-Polish area to the old area around St. John’s Cathedral and St. John’s college. Gradually as the years passed the ethnic and national groups tended to collect into homogeneous communities; but in the beginning the so-called foreigners occupied one gigantic melting pot north of the C[anadian] P[acific] R[ailway] tracks. (3)
Even the habit of misidentifying the newcomers seemed not to have changed:
In pre-war Winnipeg, nobody paid much attention to the racial or national origins of the foreign immigrants. The official practice was to identify them with their native regions in the Austro- Hungarian Empire. Thus the census tables listed Ruthenians, Moldavians, Bukovinians, Serbians, Slovakians, and Galicians. (3)
This story of Winnipeg’s immigrant “melting pot” was not told only by the “English” Canadian-born writers. Vera Lysenko was born in the North End of Winnipeg in 1910 to Ukrainian Protestant parents. She authored Men in Sheepskin Coats, probably the first history of the Ukrainians in Canada written in English by a Ukrainian-Canadian. Her 1954 novel Yellow Boots, although set nearly 20 years after Gray’s memoir, in the years of the great depression, describes a Ukrainian farm-girl’s first view of a big prairie city that, while unnamed, is obviously Winnipeg, in similar terms:
The raw young city of the Red River Valley lay on the Manitoba prairie like a temporary intruder, a guest on that immensity only recently snatched from the wilderness. Faces on the streets of the city could provide a study in racial contrasts, for the population was one of the most cosmopolitan on the continent – Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Icelanders from the great Northern lakes, Scottish Canadians, Metis, Mennonites, Hungarians, even gypsies. These people, through living together, through vital experiences shared—marriages, births, deaths, the land, harvest—dreamed common dreams, forged common bonds, built the foundations of the city. (237)
In some ways, these views of this melting pot were as romantic as Connors’s. Lysenko saw Winnipeg as “full of longing young people, aching with the ache of youth for life, trying to find themselves here in the city of the plains, not quite of the old world and yet not entirely accepted by the new.” (237) Despite the dislocation, poverty, xenophobia and harsh climate, these writers embraced, or at least accepted, the vision of the North End as a melting pot where opportunity, if it did not exactly abound, did exist. A place where dreams could be chased and industry was rewarded.
However, not everyone saw the North End in such glowing light. In John Marlyn’s novel, Under the Ribs of Death, young Sandor Hunyadi is obsessed with escaping the North End and the foreignness it represents. The Hunyadi’s lived on Henry Avenue, a small street crammed between Logan Avenue to the south and the CPR tracks to the north. To Sandor, Henry Avenue itself seems to reflect the social and economic wasteland of the Hungarian immigrant’s young life:
The street was quiet now. His footsteps beat a lonely tattoo on the wooden sidewalk. The wind behind him ruffled his hair. Above him the lights went on, and over the face of Henry Avenue, halfhidden the moment before by soft, fraudulent shadows, there sprang into view an endless grey expanse of mouldering ruin. (9)
As Sandor walks through his North End neighbourhood, with its smell of “coal gas and wood rot” he dreams of the day “he would grow up and leave all this … and never look back, never remember again this dirty, foreign neighbourhood and the English gang who chased him …” (9)
Six blocks south of Sandor’s fictional house was James Gray’s first Winnipeg home. (19) His first memory of Winnipeg “is of standing on the back fence at 606 William Avenue watching a couple of roosters fighting in the yard next door.” Gray was an Anglo-Canadian kid whose father’s drinking problem kept them bouncing from more middle class British neighbourhoods and the mixed streets of the North End. His experience of the immigrant neighbourhood, while perhaps no less dire in economic terms, did not scar him in the same way it did Marlyn’s young Sandor.
Winnipeg’s immigrant sheds, circa 1888.
Source: Archives of Manitoba, Elswood Bole Collection 6, N13803.
While the recurring theme in most of the immigrant stories of the period is the need or desire for the foreigners to adapt the “Canadian”—read Anglo-Canadian—life style, in Gray’s recollection, his family adapted the immigrant way, and fairly easily at that. “When we lived in the North End we ate pretty much the way our Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish neighbours ate. We went light on meat and heavy on bread, vegetables, and dairy products.” (113) But young Mr. Gray was well aware of the hardships the immigrant families faced, made worse by the outbreak of the war.
Nevertheless, despite the low price structure, life was very hard for our immigrant neighbours with large families. And it was soon to get very much worse. Not long after the Great War started the “enemy aliens” began to get the critical attention of the home front. Before the war immigrant families managed to make some degree of economic progress when husband, wife and children worked. The men got all the dirty jobs – street cleaners, construction labourers, railway car sweepers, and shop wipers. The women cleaned offices at night, worked as chambermaids in hotels and hospitals, went out house-cleaning by the day.” (117)
The North End owed its entire existence to the CPR tracks that sliced across Winnipeg just north of Higgins Street. The tracks not only created a physical boundary – actual tracks for the North End to be on the wrong side of – they also served to insure that many immigrants stayed in the vicinity. The CPR and the Weston depot nearby employed, or at least provided the promise of employment, to thousands of Winnipeg residents. As a result, there were areas to the south of the tracks, like Sandor’s Henry Avenue or Gray’s William Avenue house, that still belonged to the North End.
The heart of the North End was the CPR station at the corner of Higgins and Main Street, less than a dozen blocks from the Hunyadi house. Connor describes the scene on the platform, circa 1880, before a fire took down the first station house:
The station platform at Winnipeg was the scene of uproar and confusion. Railway baggagemen and porters, with warning cries, pushed their trucks through the crowd. Hotel runners shouted the rates and names of their hotels. Express men and cab drivers vociferously solicited custom. Citizens, heedless of every one, pushed their eager way through the crowd to welcome friends and relatives. It was a busy, bustling, confusing scene. But the stranger stood unembarrassed, as if quite accustomed to move amid jostling crowds, casting quick, sharp glances hither and thither. (chap. 4)
The North Enders of Connor’s novel had no need for solicitous cabs. One of the key attributes of the neighbourhood was that it was in walking distance of the station, and more importantly the yard and its jobs, just beyond. When Michael Kalmar Sr. arrives from Russia, he walks from the station:
[N]orthward across the railway tracks and up the street for two blocks, then westward they turned, toward the open prairie. After walking some minutes, Simon pointed to a huddling group of shacks startlingly black against the dazzling snow. “There,” he cried with a laugh, “there is little Russia.” “Not Russia,” said Joseph, “Galicia.” (chap 4)
Reverend Charles W. Gordon (aka Ralph Connor, second from right) enjoys a game of curling with fellow clergymen (L-R) J. W. McMillan, J. C. Walker, and C. McKinnon.
Source: Archives of Manitoba, Foote Collection 1076, N1876.
The Russian’s walk would have taken them west on either Jarvis or Dufferin, probably not much farther than Salter Street, which, by the time Sandor Hunyadi is on the scene, hosts a bridge over the CPR tracks.
The Salter Street Bridge plays a part in one of the defining events in Marlyn’s novel, and Sandor Hunyadi’s young life. The son of a complacent Hungarian barbershop and sauna’s janitor, Sandor has perhaps only one redeeming quality in his own young eyes: he was born on Victoria Day. As a result, all the flag-waving parades, parties and excitement seem to be especially for him.
The Victoria Day described in the novel is triply special. It is Sandor’s birthday, he had won the Victoria Day essay contest at school and he has been invited to Mary Kostanuik’s Victoria Day party. Mary and Sandor go to school together. Until recently the Kostanuiks had been Sandor’s neighbours and good friends. But they had done well and moved to a new house further north in the North End.
A Canadian immigration poster from 1884 promised Dutch immigrants to Manitoba such delightful pastimes as buffalo hunting, deer shooting, and salmon fishing.
Source: Archives of Manitoba, Advertising 86, N11763.
On his way to the party, Sandor robs a little lost “English” kid and steals not just his pocket change, but his silk Canadian flag as well. Sandor then swings by the park and picks a few flowers, roots and all. A buddy’s brother had told him that flowers are a good gift for a party. But the quest for the flowers puts Sander in grave danger: it took him into the heart of the “English gang’s” (32) territory.
As he “passed the steps that led down to Higgins Avenue … he became conscious of the sound of running footsteps ahead of him.” (32) The English gang. “They were all carrying little flags in their hands; the sound of nickname was on their lips—’Ya, Ya, Hunky, Hunky, Humpy Ya Ya.’” (32)
Sandor escapes the gang, first by climbing up on the rail of the Salter Street Bridge and making as if to throw himself off, and then by scampering through empty boxcars. He tears his Sunday best pants but it doesn’t matter. “He was safe and it was still his birthday and he was still going to the party. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to spoil this day for him.” (34)
Sandor stops on Connor’s Jarvis Avenue, washes up in a horse trough and continues north to the Kostanuik’s new house. His appearance at the party ends in humiliation and Sandor races from the house and doesn’t stop until he finds himself back at the Jarvis horse trough, in the familiar environs of “his” North End. As he settles in with “the gang” in their hideout behind the freight sheds, Sandor “felt a lump in his throat. He loved them. This was where he belonged. He had reached home.” (44)
And indeed, the North End is destined to be Sandor’s home, no matter how much he tries to escape it. By the end of the novel he has changed his name to Alex Hunter and married Mary Konstaniuk. They are expecting a son of their own. And already Sandor is plotting his boy’s escape. “We’ll be living in the South End by the time he’s born, he thought.” But by the time their son is born, Sandor is unemployed, living in a small North End house and resisting an invitation to move back in with his parents on Henry Avenue.
While the urge to leave the North End is simply unfulfilled for Marlyn’s hero, for another of Winnipeg’s literary characters it has more tragic results.
Dorothy Livesay (1909-1996), circa 1992.
Source: British Columbia Protocol & Events Branch.
Like Gray, poet Dorothy Livesay spent some of her early years among the immigrant families of the pre-war North End and its slightly better heeled northern neighbour, St. John’s. Livesay published a fictionalized account of her childhood, Winnipeg Childhood, in 1973. The book’s main character, Elizabeth, is clearly a stand-in for Dorothy. The book, collected from a series of short stories, seems more memoir than fiction.
In her Winnipeg memories, Livesay starts with the houses. “There were seven houses, each one larger than the last. Like the first box in a Chinese game, you could not be sure how it was going to fit in with the others. Only at the end would you see the years from infancy to maturity fitting into many parts, each one larger than the last, each one branching into a new garden.” (1) The first house, a “pumpkin-colored house with a sharply pointed roof” (1) was on Inkster Boulevard, technically north of the North End in the more affluent, but still very mixed neighbourhood of St. Johns.
Her Granny’s house was a close walk, and Elizabeth loved to go there. “Although she was familiar with her father’s house [the fictional memoir is written in the second person – writer’s note] and the people in it, she never felt so completely comfortable there as at Granny’s house.” (29) This was not due to any “luxury” at Granny’s. “Far from it. The neighbourhood, if anything, was tough; the neighbours were poor and hard-working; her two uncles rented empty lots in summer to grow the winter’s supply of potatoes, corn, tomatoes and green beans.”
The Livesays had moved from the Inkster house further south by the time her father’s good friend Aaron Hoffman held a party to mark his move away from the North End. The Hoffmans had lived in London and Paris and Mrs. Hoffman in particular found Winnipeg unsuitable. “In Winnipeg, she could never imitate that life of elegance and concert-going; but at least, she said, she didn’t have to live in a dumpy frame house.” (62) Aaron’s wife finally convinces him to move from the “down-at-heels neighbourhood where they had begun their Winnipeg life.” (62) So Aaron “was moved to decide on a lot amongst the oak trees, near the Red River” on the Eastern edge of St. Johns.
The Livesay’s are invited to the housewarming. They “jammed into the crowded street-car, passing the toboggan slide and rink with scarlet, blue and green toques flashing in the sun; on along Portage Avenue through the centre of the city; and out towards St. John’s.” (63) While they may have already moved south of their old North End digs, clearly they were not prepared for the opulence of the Hoffman’s new home.
Walking up the broad new steps, painted red, and using the brass knocker instead of a doorbell, hearing the sound of singing within, Elizabeth felt a glow of excitement. Instead of the square boxlike sort of house to which she was accustomed, or the huge, mysterious houses of the rich, with their turrets, gables and huge verandahs, this was a New England style of house, with green shutters and small-paned windows. “In very good taste,” Father said … (63)
The Hoffman’s success was short-lived, however. “But by next morning, everything had changed. The telephone had rung in the middle of the night and Wilma was on the line crying frantically to father: ’Come quick. Come quick! I think Aaron’s dead!’” (65) To young Elizabeth, it appeared that the move from the down-at-heels neighbourhood was fatal. “He was dead of a stroke, the doctor said later. ’Must have had too much excitement over his new house.’” (67)
While Anglo-Canadian writers, like Connor, Gray and Livesay tried to enter, if sometimes ever so slightly, the world of the “foreign” immigrant, to others the North End remained a distant, exotic place. In Douglas Durkin’s 1923 novel The Magpie, which chronicled the effects of the First World War, the grain market crash, and the General Strike of 1919 on a Manitoba born wheat trader, the “English” characters refer to the North Enders vaguely and in passing as if they were some monolithic creature to be feared or avoided by turns.
Like Durkin, Craig, the son of a local farmer and central character of the novel, is somewhat sympathetic to the striking immigrant workers, but in the book, the closest anyone gets to the North Enders is when Craig comes upon a strike rally at Victoria Park, which, while not actually in the North End, served as Winnipeg’s answer to London’s Hyde Park and its orators and was a gathering place for strike leaders and other firebrands.
The actual North End is never entered. It is mentioned a mere three times in the entire novel—as a place to rent a cheap theatre for an “English” avant-garde theatre company (71) and the home of “ranting foreigners” (227) who, if they rally together, would give Winnipeg’s industrialists a “free fight” (232). The Magpie’s geography is along the wide, busy streets of Winnipeg’s financial heart: the grain market.
The Broadfoot party of settlers stands at the intersection of Portage and Main in this June 1872 photo by James Penrose.
Source: Archives of Manitoba, Winnipeg - Streets - Main 1872 1-1, N5774.
Craig’s world centered around Main Street south of the train station, especially the famous Winnipeg Grain Exchange at the corner of Portage and Main. By the time Craig, newly returned from the war, was gazing out his seventh floor office window, Main Street south of the CPR depot had changed incredibly since Salverson’s Icelanders had first moved come upon it’s streets in the 1880.
At some point after 1886, when the new City Hall was built, Salverson’s Borga Lindal took the train back into Winnipeg.
[She] could hardly believe her eyes when she stepped out of the train in the new depot at Winnipeg. Where was the snake-like muddy road? Where were the tumbledown houses? What was all this hustle and bustle and noise? This rattling of swift-moving traffic on hard smooth streets? Winnipeg was not a village - not a town. It was a city! Its streets were reaching out hungrily over incredibly large areas. Its business houses, its banks, its hotels, were everywhere. She was as one in an Arabian Night’s dream when she fell upon Finna’s welcoming bosom. (159)
Even in those few short years, the city had become all but unrecognizable.
“Why Mrs. Johnson, can this be Winnipeg?” She stared stupidly at the street cars and the hotel busses. She looked in vain for the little creek which had cut through the town near Market Square. Why, there was no sigh of any water! In that spot where the awful, marshy pond had been after the great flood in 1880 was as splendid building.
“Sure, dear,” Finna told her as she point to it, “that’s the city hall.” (159)
Main Street was, perhaps, an Arabian Night’s dream of businesses, banks and hotels, but to James Gray the stretch of road was something much more ominous.
Main Street, between the railway stations, therefore, became the gauntlet every immigrant, every Christmas-shopping farm family, every going or coming harvester, had to run. By their sheer numbers, the bars were an impossible temptation for the bush workers and railway builders who hit the town with their season’s pay cheques burning holes in the their pockets. (9)
This gauntlet was of particular concern for Gray as his father fought a constant, and often losing battle with the bottle. And Winnipeg “as crime-ridden a city as there was in Canada” with liquor fueling the debauch, was no easy place for the Gray family. To Gray the entire length of Main Street reeked with the stench of booze.
From Higgins Avenue to Portage Avenue pedestrians were never beyond the range of the aroma of booze that wafted through the windows and doors of the hotels. On several intersections there were hotels on three or the four corners. On the east side of Main Street in the six blocks between the C.P.R. and Market Street were the Alberta, Nugget, Mansion House, Albion, Occidental, Imperial, Belmont, Brunswick, Strathcona, Grand Union, Manitoba, and Iroquois hotels. On the opposite side of the street were the Manor, Maple Leaf, Oriental, Bell, Avenue, Club, Exchange, and McLaren.
Gray goes on to list another two-dozen bars and hotels on the nearby side streets. Undoubtedly, Craig would have grabbed a glass with one of his war buddies in one of these Main Street drinking establishments.
Booze was not Winnipeg’s sole vice. By 1911 the northern part of Point Douglas, the site of Salverson’s modern Ogilvie plant, had been taken over by “bawdy houses.” (7) It was a move orchestrated by the police, who had contacted the biggest Winnipeg madam and “asked her to pass the word around” (7) that MacFarlane and Annabella Streets had been selected for the new red light district. Eventually the brothel owners bought out fifty houses. “Soon the respectable citizens were having their meals and slumbers interrupted by drunks blundering into their houses for sexual service stations.” (7) Even worse, it seems, they were at times “afflicted, they said, by the sight of the girls, naked to the waist, riding horse-back up and down Annabella Street in mid-afternoon.” (7) According to Gray “[i]t was conservatively estimated … that two hundred prostitutes plied their trade in these two short city blocks.” (7)
This red light district, by accident or design, appears to have been carved out from the heart of the Jewish area, which Gray recalled, “concentrated in the Point Douglas area between the C.P.R. main line, the Red River, and Main Street.”(6) Over time, more Jewish immigrants moved into Winnipeg and the community spread “until the Jewish district stretched clear down to Powers and later to Arlington Street and as far north as St. John’s Avenue,” the heart of the immigrant North End.
The City Water Works at the northwest corner of the exclusive neighborhood of Armstrong’s Point is visible in this 1900 view.
Source: Archives of Manitoba, Winnipeg - Streets - Armstrongs Point 1.
The North End was defined as much by what it was not as what it was. And what it was not was the “South End”—the Anglo-Canadian communities that also began in Point Douglas, but moved south along and across the Assiniboine in response to the influx of immigrants. Although physically only a few miles from the North End, the South End seemed an entirely different world. Gray’s first experience of the South End came as a paperboy:
When I began my deliveries at the first house on Eastgate, I entered into a world as new and as magnificent as any in the Arabian Nights. Indeed, there were no houses in Eastgate or Westgate or Middlegate. There were only castles, huge castles three full stories in height, some with leaded glass windows, and all, certainly with dozens of rooms. They were built in an assortment of architectural styles and peopled by names from Winnipeg’s commercial and industrial Who’s Who. (119)
Sandor Hunyadi’s first exposure to the South Side was through a part time job as well. In his case, the local priest had set him up with prospective employment as a gardener. Martyn describes Sandor’s first trip to the South End.
Freshly washed and scrubbed, dressed in a clean blouse and his Sunday pants, Sandor sat impatiently dangling his legs in the Academy Road streetcar. (68)
The car clattered over the Maryland Street Bridge, taking Sandor onto the south bank of the Assiniboine River, more than likely for the first time. Even by South End standards, Crescentwood, the neighborhood tucked in a tight turn along the river, was wealthy and elegant. Sandor, too, was transported to a storybook world.
Soon, he thought, and looked imploringly across at the conductor. He had been doing so ever since they had crossed the bridge, and at every glance the conductor had winked and motioned to him to remain seated. But this time he nodded and pressed the buzzer. Sandor sprang to his feet. The car ground to a stop. He got off, walked a short distance up the street, and suddenly he stood still. It was as though he had walked into a picture in one of his childhood books, past the painted margin to a land that lay smiling under a friendly spell, where the sun always shone, and the cleanwashed tint of sky and child and garden would never fade; where one could walk, but on tip-toe, and look and look but never touch, and never speak to break the enchanted hush. (68)
Sandor’s streetcar ride had taken him to a real, live fairytale land. The Crescentwood neighborhood was not only impressive to a galic-scented North Ender. Even Craig, despite his worldliness, despite having fought in Europe, despite his Grain Exchange office and his fancy car, didn’t hide his awe at his father-in-law’s Crescentwood manse.
As westerners reckon time, the house of Gilbert Nason was an old house. It had been on of the first houses built in that section of Winnipeg that lies to the south of the Assiniboine River and west of the point where the river describes a crescent before it joins the historic Red a scant half mile away. Gilbert Nason’s house was a monument to those two qualities that were supreme in his Personality ... There was no fence, no wall, not even a hedge along the front of the plot of ground on which the house stood. A wide drive made a half circle which was cut in two by small clumps of shrubbery placed rather too precisely on either side of the walk. The house itself was almost majestic with its three full storeys topped by a roof of red tile and flanked on one side by a small wing composed mostly of windows, and on the other by a stone porch which served was a shelter for visitors entering the house from automobiles. At the back of the house stood a garage for the accommodation of the three cars, and beyond, a sloping tree-covered bank that fell away to the river. The windows in the house were all large and Craig had never seen the shades drawn, even at night. It was as if Gilbert Nason wished it to be clearly understood that he had no secrets to keep from the world and disliked any man who had. (22)
As Sandor stood in Nason’s neighborhood, it seemed to him that not only were the buildings bigger and more elegant, the landscape itself was different.
There was the faint murmur of the city far in the background and overhead the whisper of the wind in the trees. The green here was not as he had ever seen it on leaf or weed, but with the blue of the sky in it, and the air so clear that even the sky looked different here. In a daze he moved down the street. The boulevards ran wide and spacious to the very doors of the houses. And these houses were like palaces, great and stately, surrounded by their own private parks and gardens. On every side was something to wonder at. There were waggons and toys lying on the lawns as though no one here had even considered that they might be stolen. (69)
For Sandor, this amazing journey only served to point up the terrible conditions of his own North End neighborhood:
He was at the car-stop looking back when unexpectedly there flashed before him the mean and dirty clutter of the street he lived on, as though he were seeing it for the first time, crawling with pale spindly kids, green-nostrilled, their mouths agape in the hot fury of play; and the battered houses with the scabrous walls and the shingles dropping and the walls dirt-stained and rainstreaked; like a silent herd of monstrous beasts stricken with some unnamable disease, slowly dying as they stood there, their members rotting and falling from them. That [the North End] was where he belonged, not here. (81)
Where does this literary map lead us in the search for Winnipeg’s immigrant history? Was Winnipeg really Connor’s “cosmopolitan capital of the last of the Anglo- Saxon Empires” or Lysenko’s “city ... so immense, so breathtaking, so indomitable in its youth and in the diversity of its population, that it flung a challenge to all the young people who came seeking there?” (238) Was it a place of endless possibility where rewards eventually came to the hardworking, honest “stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat ...” in the oft-quoted words Clifford Sifton, the minister for immigration at the turn of the century?
For some, perhaps. Lysenko’s Ukrainian farm-girl succeeds in the end, achieving musical success in Winnipeg and gaining re-acceptance by her immigrant Ukrainian community. Many of Connor’s Galician immigrants do not fare so well, ending up in poverty, prostitution, jail or the grave. But Russian-born, North-End-raised Kalman does become Anglo-Protestant enough to get the job and the girl, even if his transformation requires moving even further west. But most of the Winnipeg authors were a bit more pessimistic, and most likely realistic, about the lay of the land along the banks of the Red.
There is certainly no lack of tragedy for Salverson’s Icelanders. By the final chapter, Thor, now a young doctor has died. Salverson records this as a double tragedy. “To them it meant not only the loss of a promising countryman, it meant that there was lost to them one other opportunity to prove the merit of Iceland’s sons, wherever they may be.” (316) Yet even this tragedy does not leave Salverson’s community without hope. Sacrifices like this, Salverson seems to feel, is what binds the Icelanders to their new country. She ends the book with this line:
Out of the sore travailings of men and out of their quiet death, spring hope and faith, and that great love which, transcending the grave, revitalizes life and makes a nation indestructible. (326)
Despite the tragedy and realistic suffering, Salverson’s work, while in some ways carrying the social concerns of Sinclair’s The Jungle and other early century social realist works, is not a plea for the immigrant in general, but is, instead, an insistence that her community be included in Anglo-Canadian family. Salverson argues less for a “Norseification” of Canada than she asserts that the Icelanders are the British establishment’s cousins and therefore an immigrant community who arrived entitled to be seen as part of Connor’s “Anglo-Saxon empire.”
The Icelanders are as ready, willing and able to sacrifice for the greater common good. Unlike Martyn’s Sandor, Salverson’s immigrants do not aspire to be Canadian, they believe they are and wish only to be accepted as such. Her characters do not experience the sweeping transformation of Connor’s “Canadian foreigner” but instead gain their sense of belonging by doing just that: belonging. They do gain from their hard work.
The Anglo denizens of Winnipeg’s literary world seem most able to achieve Sifton’s dream. Livesay’s Anglo- Canadian family eventually moves from its itinerant, impoverished existence and heads off west. “The engine whirred, the car moved forward, backed up a side street, then tore around to a flying goodbye, goodbye to Lipton Street.” (105) For Livesay, the move involves an acceptance, not of her immigrant status, but of herself, alone.
So it wasn’t ... the street itself; nor the little white clapboard house: it was something of all these, whose loss she felt ... What she experienced was the sense of separation, the knowledge that she was no longer tied to anything; but was a human creature walking alone ...”(105)
By the end of his memoir, Gray’s life is not much better off. His hopes for engineering school are dashed at grade nine when his father once again falls off the wagon, and into the ranks of the unemployed. But even this setback can be overcome. Gray is lucky and hardworking (and Anglo?) enough to get a job on the Grain Exchange. A job that, it is noted on the book jacket, he parlays into a successful career as a banker.
Durkin’s Grain Exchange broker Craig escapes as well, not from the monetary poverty of the North End, but from the morally bankrupt corner of Portage and Main. He ends up back in the heartland on the western outskirts of Winnipeg, near the fields where he was raised, away from both the mercantile district and the South End of his in-laws and estranged wife.
For the other North Enders, the streets of Winnipeg were more clearly a dead end. Like the Icelander Hofstein before him, Livesay’s family friend, Mr. Hoffman, dies in his drive to escape. Sandor Hunyadi, whose first goal was always to escape the “battered houses and scabrous walls” (99) of the North End, ends up sitting in the window of his boyhood room in the Henry Ave. house, his newborn son on his knee. Sandor has not escaped the North End, and it seems, might never make his break. But with his son and wife and newfound understanding of his own father, this dream seems less important than it once had been.
If there is a common theme to these Winnipegger’s stories, it seems to be just that: acceptance of themselves and their place in society is the real “escape.” Connor’s Kalman comes to a decidedly Anglo-Canadian acceptance as he slowly realizes that he has been transformed into a “Canadian.” That acceptance is seconded, in as saccharine a scene as has ever played out on the prairies, as the decidedly Anglo-centric Marjorie professes her love for “the foreigner.”
“Yes,” continued Brown in a reminiscent manner, “I seem to recall how a certain young lady into these ears made solemn declaration that never, never could she love one of those foreigners.”
“Ah,” said Marjorie with sweet and serious emphasis, “but not my foreigner, my Canadian foreigner.”
Craig’s acceptances that he belongs back on the farm with his childhood sweetheart is no less pat, in its way. “’Well, it’s taken you a damn’ long time to get back where you belong,” said Farmer Lane.” (330)
“A short walk brought him to the gate at the end of the little path leading to an open doorway in which stood Marta Land with the sun in her hair. ’I have come back,’ he said as he came before her and gave her his hands. And together they went into the house and closed the door behind them.”(330)
Sandor reconciles with his father while cradling his son in the “accustomed place” (260) of his childhood home. Despite years of trying to escape her roots, Yellow Boots ends with Lilli singing to shouts of “She is ours!” from the multilingual audience as she “acknowledged her debt to her own people for what they had given her.” Lilli, too, reconciles with and transcends her roots at the same moment.
The outbreak of the First World War effectively ended the gilded age of Canadian immigration. Increasingly restrictive Immigration Acts, along with the two World Wars and the Great Depression insured that the heady numbers of newcomers would not be seen again for another thirty years. So it is the books mentioned above, among others, that are left to provide the literary lay of the land for this explosive era in the history of the “gateway to the West.”
All in all, despite being penned by writers from different immigrant communities, these books tend to present a map of Winnipeg that is fairly close to the “official” myth. A Winnipeg where Anglicization and assimilation is the goal. Though Sandor may not achieve it, and Salverson’s Icelanders may insist on gaining it on their own terms, in the end, the characters of these novels aspire to become Canadians.
Unlike Jurgis, Sinclair’s Lithuanian who finds his salvation, and America’s future, in revolutionary socialism, the literary denizens of pre-war Winnipeg find, or try to find, their salvation in being accepted as part of the society. Like Lysenko’s Lilli, they seek to bring themselves and Canadian society together. Ultimately, the combined vision is essentially assimilationist, and faithful to the sales pitch of the Canadian West.
Not that any of the authors, aside from Connors, was intentionally writing pro-Canadian, or pro-Anglo- Canadian at any rate, propaganda. But in the end, the stories they tell are of the survivors, the immigrants who came and stayed. These communities became and integral part of the Winnipeg map.
These were not, by any means, the only stories. By the end of the First World War Canada’s Age of Immigration was over, partly due to increasingly strict restrictions placed on the previously solicited would-be immigrants. Of the nearly two million immigrants who came to Canada in the first decade of the 20th century, over half later left.1 Many returned to their countries of origin defeated and disillusioned. Martyn himself was forced to quit Canada during the Great Depression, yet his Sandor stays to raise his son in Winnipeg.
But those that had arrived, and the many more that would trickle in over the next thirty years (until the 1950s, when immigration levels would again reach the rates of the first decades of the 20th century) did become fixtures in the Winnipeg map. Their contribution to the myth of the “last, best West” endures today. The characters of Winnipeg’s immigrant novels have become the clichés they set out to destroy: the stoic, Spartan Icelander, banding together in his insular community, the hustling, thuggish Hungarian businessman, the soulful Ukrainian singer, the “real” Canadian, who trades his Wheat Exchange success to return to his homesteader roots.
However, as in every cliché there is just enough truth to orient the reader to the actual and emotional map of Winnipeg between incorporation and the First World War. These books faithfully evoke the struggle and prejudice the immigrants, both foreign and domestic, found trying to “make it” in the Canadian West. As a body of work, they show how, in ways Connor never imagined, the stream of immigrants attracted by the government posters, did, indeed, build a “New Jerusalem” — as the North End was sometimes know — on the far flung prairies.
1. “The Canadian West,” Library and Archives Canada. www.collectionscanada.ca/canadian-west/052920/05292052_e.html, 7 September 2004.
8. “Laura Goodman Salverson (1890 - 1970),” gov.mb.ca/wd/ publications/whm2000_bios.html, Jan Horner quoting Ontario Library Review of 1930.
9. “The Peopling of Canada: 1891 - 1921,” University of Calgary. ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/canada1891/6frame.html. 22 September 2004.
Ralph Connor. The Foreigner. Project Guttenberg, gutenberg.org/etext/ 3466, September 2004.
Douglas Durkin. The Magpie. Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton, 1923.
James H. Gray. The Boy from Winnipeg. Toronto: Macmillian, 1970.
Upton Lewis. The Jungle. Project Guttenberg, gutenberg.org/etext/140, September 2004.
Dorothy Livesay. A Winnipeg Childhood. Winnipeg: Peguis Publishers, 1973.
John Marlyn. Under the Ribs of Death. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990.
Laura Goodman Salverson. The Viking Heart. McClelland & Stewart, 1975.
Page revised: 5 April 2022
