Canada needed settlers to open the prairie west. By invitation from Clifford Sifton, Minister of Immigration, Wasyl Ksionzyk (1851-1932) persuaded fifteen families to leave their native villages and fields of Ukraine to immigrate to Canada. The first group of Ukrainian settlers arrived in the Dauphin area in 1896. They arrived by CPR at Gladstone, the end of the railway line, and from there on foot and by wagon across the Valley River and the Drifting River. Because the immigrants were recruited in groups, they were known as block settlers. Initial housing was in primitive clay-plastered log cabins. Their first settlement was named Trembowla after the district from whence they came. Picturesque villages, linked together by railway tracks and binder twine, sprang up with names like Valley River, Mink Creek, Deepdale, Ethelbert, Gilbert Plains, Pine River, Grandview, and Ukraina. A wagon trail was established atop a geological ridge, known by them as the "vall" that extended from Dauphin north to Ethelbert. Today it is Highway 10.
The Ukrainian Highlanders (Hutsulas) from the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains came next. More settlers arrived from towns such as Borschiv, Tartakiv and Krevchi of the Austrian-oppressed areas of Halychyna and Bukovinia in western Ukraine. As the rail lines pushed westward, settlers followed, some new and some relocating to better land. Ten thousand Ukrainians arrived in Canada in the next two years. By 1914 over 150,000 would make their way to Canada.
The fifteen-day sailing across the Atlantic commonly began in Hamburg. As many as 1500 passengers were loaded into steamships, like the 15-mph 400-ft Adria and the Arcadia of the German Hansa Line that docked in Halifax in the spring of 1900. They had steam engines as well as sails that were hoisted when favorable winds were blowing, most likely the Westerlies on the empty return.
Beneath the top deck were twenty-one deluxe cabins reserved for the 'city-coated gentlemen'. The galleys and the dining room were under the second deck. There were no cabins in the hold below water-level, only an open area with rows of iron bedsteads, three or four levels high. In the lower beds the women and children slept, and in the higher tiers, the men and the boys clutching their possessions. An iron ladder reached the upper levels. The Adria was sold to the Russian navy in 1905, and was totalled a year later when it ran aground off the coast of Ceylon.
The Settlement on the Plains
