The wife smiles, rocking her little girl to sleep. “Do you never wish yourself back in Scotland?” I ask, thinking of her winters spent alone with her infants in the prairie shack. “Never!” says she. “We’re all so much better in health out here, and going to be better off too, in good time. Look at this lassie. She was always ailing, over there, and now she’s nearly as strong as the rest.”
There’s no such medicine in all the drug stores as the life-giving air of the West.
The hamlet of Saskatoon, where I found a bare hundred inhabitants four years ago, has three thousand now in 1905, and dreams of 30,000—a dream that we shall see come nearly true before our story ends. The town is a “jumping-off place” for hundreds of home-seekers bound for points south-west, where paper railways will presently be turned into steel.
Every railway station, for the matter of that, is a jumping-off place for new settlers. Here is one with neither a station building nor even a platform; just a siding; yet a couple of Norwegians are loading up wagons with furniture from a box car, while their wives cook dinner on the turf and a dozen children play in and out of two little tents. These people speak pretty good English, for they have spent five years in Dakota since they left their motherland. South-east of Edmonton there is already a large colony of Norwegians, a “New Norway” in fact.
As we ride west and north-west, however, we find ourselves among folk who know no English. “Galicians,” or “Galatians,” they are commonly called. Some of them come from Galicia in the Austrian Empire, but others are Ruthenians or Ukrainians from South-western Russia, and many from Poland, too. They belong, like the Serbs and Croats and Montenegrins, the Czechs and Slovaks, and nearly all the Russians, to the great Slavic Race.
But who are the Slavs? Just a branch of the same white race that we ourselves belong to. Their ancestors, like ours, poured through Europe in waves of barbaric invasion from some far eastern home, but settled in Russia and neighboring lands, as our forefathers had passed on to settle on the shores of the Atlantic. The very name “Galician” reminds us of the real kinship between the Galicians of Austria-Hungary, the Galatians of Asia Minor to whom St. Paul wrote his epistle, the inhabitants of France whom Julius Cæsar describes as Gauls, and the Celtic Gaels of the British Isles.