Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  I am prospering in life but still I am so lonely. The boys are grown up all men. They loved theyr sister, but cannot mourn her loss as I do, for all the love of a warm nature was concentrated on her. Charley & George are runing on the same railway that I am working for and are boarding at the same house that I do, rooming in the same room when in Logansport … I was promoted on the 1st of Aprial, am forman of a gang of twenty men receving and shipping all the stores & material; have 20 men and locomotive engine under my charge. 55

  James Mouat Garriock fared even worse than Laing, despite coming from a relatively prosperous background in Shetland and having some training in medicine. In 1891, a year after he arrived in Vancouver, he wrote to his mother, expressing his bitterness at the misleading propaganda that had lured him to a city where there were up to 1,500 unemployed, wages were low, living costs high, and a succession of casual jobs had barely kept him above the breadline:

  The medical profession being a failure, I tramped the town in all directions searching for work of any kind. A month passed but nothing came of it. I applied to the C. P. Ry [Canadian Pacific Railway] for a situation & received a reply stating that my application had been received, & that it should be kept in mind, but tho’ I have several times applied at the different departments I have had no success.

  At last, after being about six weeks here, I struck a job for two days with the City Engineer in surveying & measuring the foreshores of the harbour & bay. After this I had an attack of fever induced by gases given off from the sewage & other decomposing matter lying about the shore. A week or two after recovering from the fever I managed to get out with a surveyor for a fortnight, but for this I only received my ‘keep’, but for this I was thankful, altho’ the travelling through the woods & underbrush was frightfully tiring in my not very strong state, & the felling of trees no joke.

  Although building tradesmen could make money in the summer, their savings were ‘swallowed up’ during the enforced idleness of winter, and Garriock had only survived when he was paid thirty dollars for curing his former landlady of ‘a bad leg & breast’. After she left for the United States, he and two fellow boarders had moved into a wooden shanty, but his companions — both English immigrants — were about to leave on a sealing trip to Alaska. Garriock, unable to join them on account of an eye condition, had spent his last dollar on the rent of the shanty, and was about to spend his last cent on posting his tale of woe. ‘I have little more to say,’ he concluded. ‘You need not mention to outsiders that you have received a letter from me. Had I better news to convey it would have been different, but the outlook is so dark that it is better to keep it to yourselves.’ 56 Garriock was never heard from again.

  Unlike their farming counterparts, artisans were rarely satisfied with their circumstances unless they could make and save money quickly. Such higher expectations may have generated more frequent and acute disappointment than was evident in the farming community, where success was measured primarily in terms of long-term prospects for the emigrant and his family. The nature of artisans’ work may also have made them prone to disillusionment, since they were at the beck and call of individuals and organizations that might be capricious, exploitative or downright fraudulent. Coal miners who were persuaded by Alexander McDonald, the Scottish miners’ leader, to go to the United States in large numbers in the 1860s, found that, although wages and housing conditions were better, working hours were longer than at home, while both safety legislation and unionization were less advanced. At times colliers and foundry workers were even recruited as strikebreakers, as were granite tradesmen in both the USA and Canada. A particularly notorious strikebreaking incident, involving granite cutters from Aberdeen, occurred in Texas in 1886. After the State Capitol at Austin burned down in 1881, the building syndicate hired to construct its replacement employed 500 convicts from state penitentiaries to cut stone for the new building, creating a massive backlash of public opinion in Texas and a bitter dispute with the American Granite Cutters’ Union about the use of cheap, non-unionized labour. When the union boycotted the project in a well-supported strike, the building syndicate sent its agent, George Berry, to Aberdeen, to recruit 150 cutters and fifteen blacksmiths to break the strike. His press advertisement and subsequent public meeting were disingenuous, for he made no mention of the strike, promising his audience of 300 a prepaid passage out and back and at least eighteen months’ work at wages of up to $6 a day, with cheap board and lodging, in a pleasant environment. The eighty-six recruits who accompanied Berry back across the Atlantic were totally unprepared for the reception that greeted them in New York, where they were intercepted by three officials from the American union and apprised of the real state of affairs. While twenty-four men agreed not to proceed further but to look for work in the New England granite yards instead, the others were allegedly ‘coaxed and coerced’ aboard the ferry for New Jersey, from where they proceeded by train to Austin. Some, like Alexander Greig, were optimistic and disinclined to believe the union’s warnings:

  While we were at New York, there were several of the society met us, and tried all that was in their power to get us to stop at New York; and I am sorry to say that there was a few fools amongst us who listened to what they had to say … You can tell anybody that asks about us that everything is right, and that we have been treated well. I was told that I was growing fat upon it. I am in first class health and intend to stick in. This is the most splendid country I have ever seen. I have seen nothing to equal it through all the States. 57

  But not all the recruits were of the same mind, particularly once the work actually began, and they found they were working in blazing sun, with no shade, in temperatures of over 100 degrees. The cutting yards were not at Austin, as they had been led to believe, but at Burnet, seventy miles away, and the quarry was at Marble Falls, a few miles from Burnet, in the middle of the Texan desert. The lodgings — a fenced enclosure at Burnet — were cramped and uncomfortable, with up to six men sharing a room ten feet square, and the food was described as, at best, indifferent. ‘Bitter feelings and homesickness are cropping out everywhere,’ reported the Galveston Daily News on 13 May. There was also financial disillusionment. The men had incurred unexpected extra expenses during their seven-day journey from New York, and their hopes of high wages did not materialize, for when it was found that many of them had no previous experience of granite cutting, they were unable to earn even $1 a day. By the end of October 1886 at least three emigrants had died, and by May 1887 only fifteen of the original recruits were still employed at Burnet. It was difficult for the Scots to get away, since their prepaid passages were to be repaid from their wages before they received a penny. Even if they absconded, as many seem to have done, their prospects of employment were bleak, at least in the granite industry, for they had been blacklisted as strikebreakers, and their names had been circulated to every branch of the American Granite Cutters’ Union. ‘Give them no work, and see that they get no work in your neighborhood’ was the order in a circular issued by the Austin Assembly of the Knights of Labor in August 1886, and when the Capitol contract ended a year later, the granite cutters were left to fend for themselves in a hostile labour market. 58

  Twenty years later Aberdeen granite tradesmen were involved in an equally bitter dispute in Canada, when Alexander Robertson, a trade union activist and former president of the Aberdeen Trades Council who had emigrated some years earlier, tried unsuccessfully to unionize the Toronto workforce of the Stanstead Granite Quarry Company, where he then worked. His demands were rejected by the company, which instead tried to persuade employees to sign long-term agreements and take out shares. When those who refused to do so were dismissed, the remaining workers came out on strike, both in Toronto and at the firm’s quarries at Beebe Plain, Quebec. Although Robertson and his fellow unionist James Duncan asked Aberdeen granite masons to ignore advertisements for work in Toronto, several were recruited by Stanstead Company agents who visited the city between 1906 and 1909, and
their strikebreaking activities caused particular acrimony at Beebe Plain, where many of the tradesmen who had downed tools were themselves emigrants from Aberdeen. The recruits were caught on the horns of a dilemma: those who refused to take up their positions were, like the earlier emigrants to Austin, indebted to the company for their prepaid passages, while those who carried on regardless were blacklisted by unions on both sides of the Atlantic. 59

  The pursuit of wealth took Scottish artisans all over the world, sometimes to a succession of destinations. In no industry was such itinerant fortune hunting more clearly seen than in the search for gold, as Scots joined with other nationalities in flocking to the gold fields of three continents between 1849 and 1900. Not surprisingly, optimism and disappointment were the hallmarks of their correspondence. James Thompson, whose objective in joining the California gold rush was simply to make enough money to finance a visit home and the subsequent purchase of a Canadian farm, ‘found some people making fortunes and others scarcely making their board’ when he arrived in Nevada City in 1850. After working briefly in the supply of lumber for building, he and two partners purchased a mining claim for $1,000. ‘I cannot give a very favourable report of my success, although the star of hope is still in the ascendent [sic],’ he wrote to his father in February 1851. By June 1852 the partnership had purchased several mining claims, which were yielding a modest income, although Thompson was making a living primarily at his original trade of baking. Ten years later, when he joined the Cariboo gold rush in the hope of supplementing the meagre income from his farm in Edwardsburgh, his letters reflected the homesickness of a married man who had received no letters from the family he had left behind. ‘Amidst all the toil and anxiety and privations experienced in this country that is hardest of all to bear,’ he wrote to his wife in July 1862, although his despondency was perhaps exacerbated by pecuniary disappointment and the prospect of returning home empty-handed, ‘to be laughed at into the bargain’. 60 More than thirty years later, Dunfermline emigrant James Dodds, writing from the Klondike, remained optimistic in the face of difficulties and sought to reassure his parents that his luck would turn. ‘I believe this to be as rich a gold field yet discovered,’ he wrote in March 1898. Although his partner had been taken ill, scurvy had affected ‘a great many people ’ in Dawson City and one miner was about to lose all his toes through frostbite, Dodds remained ‘thankful to the ruller of the universe for the health and strength I have been blessed with since comming in here’. 61

  Meanwhile, Scots gold seekers had also been attracted to Australia in large numbers after the precious metal was discovered in Victoria and New South Wales in 1851. Some of the gold camps, particularly in Bendigo, were recognizably Scottish, and the Scottish press devoted many column inches to the varied experiences of the miners. For established settlers such as Dr William Sutherland, gold fever was ‘a curse rather than a blessing’ because of the disruption it had brought to the labour market, although, as he confessed to his sisters, he was still tempted to try his luck himself:

  You are aware that the great want in this country has been the scarcity of labour but now servants are fast becoming masters and heaven alone knows how matters will terminate. Nearly all the people who can handle a spade or pick axe are going or gone to the diggings. This township is nearly deserted and were it not for the unprotected state of my family I should feel very much inclined to try my luck also. The other two medicos of this place have gone and left the whole field to myself … if we have not a most extensive immigration from home to make up for those leaving for the mines, we shall be at our wits ends. Female servants can scarcely be had for love or money. My poor wife, with four children to look after, and not at all strong, is obliged to do all the housework. We have only one little girl to whom we give £14 p. ann. whom you in Thurso would hardly give house room to. We are paying therefore dearly for our gold. The settlers or squatters are very much to be pitied, nearly all the shepherds having deserted their flocks for the mines. 62

  Like James Thompson in California, some Scots found they could make a more reliable income by following their own trade, capitalizing on inflated wage rates that paid carpenters, masons and plumbers from 25s to 30s a day. A correspondent of the Inverness Advertiser who emigrated to Geelong in 1854 to work as a shipping clerk for a Glasgow company documented the experiences of a long list of fellow passengers and other Scots ‘who are all doing much better than ever they could at home ’. Success was dependent on sobriety, according to another correspondent of the same paper, who, having abandoned his £90-a-year job as a shepherd to go to the diggings, had been too much ‘in love with John Barleycorn’ to make a fortune, although he still claimed to be better off than if he had stayed in Scotland. On the other hand, some who went to the gold fields painted an unequivocal picture of greed, lawlessness and squalor. ‘Nothing but money, money, make money, either by fair our foul means,’ wrote a store clerk at Mount Alexander to his friend in Forres in 1852: ‘Tis nothing unusual for a tent to be robbed, and unless you be the first to fire your pistol or gun and bring the villains down, you stand a poor chance yourself, for they will shoot you with as little compunction as they would a wild dog. I never lie down without my pistols and gun in working order.’ To make matters worse, the miners had been laid low by an outbreak of dysentery resulting from contaminated water, yet ‘the fact that a few are making fortunes, is a sufficient inducement for them to brave all sufferings and dangers — each one hoping that he will be as fortunate as his more successful neighbour’. 63

  While most artisans whose experiences have been documented emigrated from the Lowlands, gold miners came from all parts of Scotland and all walks of life. Since the activities of the Highland and Island Emigration Society coincided with Australia’s gold rush, it is not surprising that some of the emigrants sought their fortunes at the diggings, even though they were expected to replenish the labour that had been lost to the gold fields. Ewan ‘California’ Gillies was perhaps the most remarkable of these emigrants, at least in terms of his worldwide wanderings. One of thirty-six emigrants who left St Kilda for Victoria in 1852, he worked initially as a brickmaker. After six months he was dismissed for laziness and went to the gold fields, where over the next two years he made enough money to buy a farm, which later failed. Moving to Melbourne with his wife and children, he left them there while he dug for gold in New Zealand, returning within two years to discover that his wife had remarried. He then took ship for the USA, where he fought for the Union in the Civil War, deserting in 1861 to join a California gold rush, where within six years he made a fortune. After returning to Australia to claim his children, he went back briefly to his native island in 1871, but within four weeks returned to the United States, where he remained for the next eleven years. During another short spell in St Kilda he remarried, emigrating again to Melbourne with his second wife, whose homesickness prompted a return to St Kilda eight months later. But the St Kildans, who had turned against him on his return from America the previous year, forced the couple out and in 1889 they settled permanently in Canada. 64

  The female emigrant

  The vast majority of farmers and artisans were, of course, men, although female gold miners and homesteaders were not unknown. One sheep-farming squatter who ‘prospered exceedingly’ was Anne Drysdale, a middle-aged spinster from Kirkcaldy who had farmed in Scotland before she emigrated in 1840 with capital of £3,000. Despite disparaging comments by the Russell brothers, who joked with each other about her matrimonial prospects and thought ‘she should have invested her Money, and enjoied herself at home’, she took up a 10,000-acre run at Boronggoop, near Geelong, in partnership with Caroline Newcomb. By 1844 the women had 6,000 sheep, as well as a few horses and cows, and five years later they replaced their rather primitive cottage with a more substantial stone house. Janet Richardson (twenty-three), who kept a diary of her voyage from Scotland to Geelong in 1848 in company with her brother and sister, remembered the discomforts of Anne Drysdale �
�s first home:

  About 1 o’clock Miss Drysdale ’s phaeton came, and a note to me from her. The note assured us of a hearty welcome to her poor hut, such as it was: it also informed us that the heavy rains of the preceding day had flooded the house, so it was fortunate we had not come last afternoon … At last we stopped at the white gate, barking dogs announced our arrival, and a very stout lady hurried out to meet us. This was Miss Drysdale; she led us into the cottage: we tried to restrain our wondering looks at the badness of the hut, but when shortly she took us to our room, and left us to prepare for dinner, it would have been amusing for anyone to have noticed our disappointed faces: our bedroom was scarcely larger than our cabin in the ‘Hooghly’, and besides the furniture and conveniences of the place were so different from what we had expected that we looked quite blank at the prospect of remaining here some months. Mr. Aitchi-son had indeed many times warned us not to expect too much, but the place was many degrees worse than in our blackest moments we could have conceived. 65

  Despite problems with drunken shepherds and the loss of labour to the gold fields, the partnership continued until 1854, when Anne Drysdale suffered a fatal stroke, and the property was henceforth run solely by Caroline Newcomb. Most women emigrated in families or to work for wages. Some were well known. The eloquent Strickland sisters, Catharine and Susanna, English emigrants married to Orcadians Thomas Traill and John Moodie respectively, recalled the experiences of pioneering before an international readership in their respective accounts The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and Roughing it in the Bush (1852). Catharine, who was stricken with cholera at Montreal almost as soon as she had arrived in 1832, subsequently settled with her husband on a lakeside bush farm near Douro, in the same neighbourhood as her brother, Samuel Strickland. By 1834 they were mingling in a ‘highly respectable ’ society that