Long separated from us, they have come to join us again. They come poor in money, as nearly all our fathers did; but having to work up “from nothing” is the best guarantee that they will work up to something. It was only in 1894 that the first Galicians arrived, nine families in all. They sent home such good reports of the country that now in 1905 there are 75,000 of them thriving here. Thriving in spite of their poverty? No—because of it.
Here is one just beginning. His home is a long low hovel, one end built of poplar logs roughly plastered over with brown mud, the other part made of sods, with grass sprouting from every joint and growing freely all over the roof. The owner, a tall good-humored Galician, has to stoop coming out of the door to welcome us. A distaff is under his arm; we have caught him spinning linen thread for a shirt, which he badly needs. The one and only door leads into the stable; we have to pass through this to reach the solitary living room, where the furniture consists of a home-made table and a bedstead of round poplar logs covered with a few scraps of blankets. But he is a bachelor.
The ordinary Galician is a well-married man with a large family. The walls of his house are smoothed and white-washed; the high-pitched roof is of straw thatch, and rises in a series of steps at the corners. Beside one of these picturesque cottages we find the owner, with a red fez on his head, reaping oats with the primitive “cradle,” a scythe with three or four sticks projecting from the handle to catch the stalks as they fall. Most of the men, however, are still away; for the poor Galician, as soon as he has built his house, and perhaps dug up a little garden, goes off to earn money, generally on railway construction. His wife and children, having neither plow nor beast to draw one, do the best they can with the spade, and raise a little crop of oats, rye and potatoes.
The father’s earnings will buy an ox and plow, and with these he really begins to farm. Many a Galician farmer already has from 20 to 200 acres under crop, and from 10 to 100 head of live stock. In winter, he fills a rough box sleigh with grain and sets out for the nearest market, no matter how far it is. At night, he saves hotel or “stopping place” charges by sleeping on the snow beside his sleigh. I have heard of men who thought nothing of a fortnight’s journey of this sort. In three or four years, such a man is poor no longer.