This essay recounts a set of rather unique train rides leaving rather than entering western Canada. They are the travels of approximately 10,000 Mennonites who left western Canada in the mid-1920s and late 1940s for rural settlements in Mexico and Paraguay. The emigration of the 1920s followed 1916 and 1917 school legislations in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, respectively, which compelled children to attend English-language, publicly inspected schools. The smaller “echo migration” of the late ’40s occurred after the introduction of war-time patriotic exercises in schools and urbanization threatened the Mennonites’ rural, pacifist ways.
Trains played a major role in these migrations. The Mexico-bound settlers of the 1920s chartered dozens of complete trains, taking passengers, machinery, household goods, and livestock; most departed from Gretna, Manitoba and headed south or southwest to El Paso, Texas, from where migrants proceeded south to Chihuahua City and then west to the small road siding of San Antonio (later Cuauhtémoc) in the Bustillos Valley of the northeastern Sierra Madre after being reloaded on to Mexican trains. A smaller group of Mexico-bound settlers left from Rosthern, Saskatchewan via chartered trains to El Paso, continuing through Chihuahua State to Nuevo Ideal in Durango State. Other migrants to Paraguay left from Niverville, Manitoba on smaller chartered trains (as they took no livestock and few household goods) or on regularly scheduled trains via Minneapolis, Chicago, and Cleveland to New York. Here migrants boarded ocean-going vessels for the lengthy voyage to Buenos Aires, Argentina, from whence they proceeded by riverboat up the Paraná and Paraguay Rivers, passed Asunción and went north almost to Brazil to the river port of Puerto Casado. From here they headed west into the heart of the Paraguayan Chaco by narrow-gauged company train and ox cart. The migrants to Paraguay in the 1940s also took chartered trains to the east; leaving Saskatoon and picking up additional passengers in Winnipeg, they continued to Montreal. From there they sailed via Buenos Aires to Asunción, and then travelled by trains into East Paraguay. The final legs of the trip were taken by cargo truck and ox cart.1
Descriptions of the train travel vary depending on which route one took and therefore which country’s trains are described. In studying these various descriptions, however, it becomes apparent that the experience of train travel does not differ much from the experience on other forms of transportation, be it the back of a cargo truck, on an ocean liner or riverboat, or even on an airplane—all technologies of migration of the 1920s and ’40s. What does matter is the medium in which a particular train story is told. The reason seems to be that references to trains relate not so much to the technology itself, but to the effect of this particular technology on habits of time and space. In the telling of fundamental changes to time and space brought about by train travel, it especially mattered if the story was related by the medium of diary, memoir, letter, or oral history.
These media suggest that the Mennonite train travellers viewed time in multi-linear ways, with a strong sense of the present as located in a continuum of the past and future—even the afterlife—and as related to abstract ideas of tradition or progress. Simply put, the diarist had an especially strong sense of the “present,” which isolated the day and compellingly juxtaposed it to “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” thus structuring a world in flux and paying special attention to distance covered, speed, fleeting images of the exotic other along the way, and to the restructuring of “Mennonite” community within the cars of the train.2 The letter announced the important events—those pertaining to life-cycle and life-shaping moments—of the immediate past, the week and month; it recounted the especially poignant moments of departure at train stations in the old Canadian homeland and the arrival at the strange “other” end. Memoirs written years after the trips spoke of teleological design, revealing an attempt to detach oneself from quotidian concern and evaluate a lifetime, especially with ideas of eternity in mind; in this instance, the train took on ontological significance as it carried people to a “promised land,” a territory of “salvation.” Finally, oral history stories recounted memories of a yesteryear, an epoch ago, a moment two generations earlier. These stories related train travel with reference to a momentous time, but in quaint and even quixotic language; they were anecdotal, stories told casually by the elderly about their childhood. It was as if each medium related train travel with a unique perspective, enveloping it with a distinctive sense of time.
This linkage of train and text with time, however, was intersected by other constructions of time that seemed especially relevant to migrants and the Mennonite train-riding migrants in particular. The diaries especially recounted new time imperatives, reflecting a demarcation between agrarian and industrial time, not unrelated to E.P. Thompson’s comparison of time when seen as “natural in a farm community” and a “time-discipline” that is “imposed” by technologized imperative. In the migrant diary’s depiction of uprooting and resettling, these two cultures of time were not sequential but interwoven, moving from one to the other and back to the former.3 The letters describing train travel spoke not only of recent events, but did so by reaching for a common vocabulary of time; here time was conceptualized with reference to epochs, especially those of the pre- and post-migration periods. The memoirs looked backward, too, but reflected Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of the “forthcoming,” described by one recent study as a conceptualization of it “not only as a future” but a compelling sense that a life was meaningful only as a collective and teleologically oriented struggle. Memoirs helped “people make sense of the current state of affairs” and certainly authenticated the sense of sacrifice sectarian Mennonites felt they were making in the south.4 The oral history stories also scan backward over a lifetime, but construct a romanticized yesteryear built on what the anthropologist Michael Jackson dubs a “site of selfhood,” one narrowly centred on the subjective “I” and created at the moment of the interview. Because storytelling arises from “one’s strategic struggle to…synthesize oneself as a subject in a world that simultaneously subjugates one to other ends,” it relates the travel experience to quotidian minutiae.5
The train, then, takes on different meaning depending on the concept of “time” with which a particular train narrative is constructed. Reflecting this argument, this essay moves spatially rather than chronologically, transitioning from the quotidian text (the diary) to the weekly or monthly text (the letter) to the epochal text (the memoir) to the life course text (the oral history).
The selected diary of train travel here is one kept by a female migrant, self- identified as “Frau Isaac F. Bergen” of Rosthern, Saskatchewan, who in 1948 migrated to East Paraguay with her family of ten children and husband by train, but also travelled by ocean liner, riverboat, cargo truck, and ox cart.6 Bergen’s published diary begins on 16 June 1948 with these words: “Late in the evening, as we had finished packing at our old place, we drove to…Johann Klassens’ to bid them farewell.” The Bergens took leave of neighbours, relatives, and church members over the next week. Finally, on June 21 they travelled from Rosthern to Saskatoon, and at once located the railway station and the chartered train that would take them to Montreal. Father and the boys spent the final night in the train, while Mrs. Bergen and the girls stayed in the apartment of Aunt Susie, an unmarried sister working in the city.7
More than anything else, the imperatives of train travel alter the familiar, agrarian world of the Bergens. The train dictates that time is suddenly recast, turned into a series of impositions; the words “must” and “need” and “should” now take over Bergen’s vocabulary. In addition, space is recast as the train narrative becomes intersected with descriptions of new places. On the morning of June 22, after taking breakfast at a Mennonite home in Saskatoon, Bergen “soon…had to pack up…as the Isaac Hildebrands were there to take us to the train station.” Here loved ones from the Mennonite farm districts had assembled and at “one o’clock the train finally departed.” Even though Bergen was delighted to discover an oven and washing facility on the train (allowing the resumption of domestic routine), overwhelmingly time now was measured by distance: Yorkton by nightfall, Gladstone at the first dawn, Winnipeg at noon. “Train time” was always an imperative: in Winnipeg father and “Ohm Jacob” disembarked to purchase food, but then as the “train was supposed to depart all the men were back except for father and Ohm Jacob; Aunt Sarah and I were deeply worried, and truly the train began to depart.” Worry ended only at the next stop when, surprisingly, “father and Ohm Jacob appeared in our car,” having caught up with the charter on a regularly scheduled train.8
The train did allow for a semblance of the familiar, cohesive community. Bergen writes that along the way the Saskatchewan travellers left their cars “to introduce themselves to the people from Manitoba” in their cars, and vice versa. She was delighted when “Uncle Jacob Elias suddenly dropped by to visit us with his two daughters.” But always the familiar was interrupted by the exotic. By the time the Mennonite train reached Port Arthur, Bergen “had seen a lot, including frightening images, such as the time another train suddenly overtook us and passed us by.” A full night of fast travel later, Bergen noticed a new and strange society as the people in “the city we came to...we could see, were French.” The trip ended with passage through a somewhat frightening “one mile long tunnel,” requiring that “they had to turn on the lights” in the cars.9
Significantly, the diary presents the train in no different terms than that of the ship that followed. The ocean voyage brought a similar range of imperatives and exotica. At the seaport in Quebec the travellers were told they could only board with the clothes they could wear and only as a complete family. To that end, the Bergens embarked wearing as many jackets each as possible and in order: “father went ahead, then all the [ten] children, and then, me, at the end.” On board, the Bergens faced more disruptions of familiar domestic space and time. For the night Frau Bergen, the girls and small boys were separated from father and the “big boys”; in the morning they were summoned precisely “at six o’clock” and told to “make our beds.” Meals could not be taken until the English command “it’s time for the second sitting”; even then, it was always “hurry up, eat, or we will remove the food.”10 The very passage of time and space seemed imposed by announcements from the loudspeakers; on June 28 Bergen writes that “we are supposed to be adjacent to New York, but land is no longer in sight,” and on July 9 they were informed that “at 1 o’clock we passed over the equator.” Over the course of the journey, time was also measured by the fleeting images of the unusual: on June 30 it was groups “of little fish that fly off from the water”; on July 3 in Trinidad “little negroes” peddling “large oranges, grapefruit and bananas”; on July 13, a day out of Rio de Janeiro, the sighting of “approximately 13 ships.” The ocean voyage ended on a Sunday in Buenos Aires, except that it “didn’t seem like a Sunday” as a command that “we would have to disembark very soon” was followed by a stress-filled re-embarking on a riverboat for the trip up the Paraguay River.11
At this point Bergen’s diary incrementally returns to communitarian familiarity, albeit in increasingly primitive conditions, documenting the reversal of progress and eventually the return to agrarian time. The riverboat was overcrowded and its toilets and kitchen dank and dirty; as Bergen noted, “in Low German we would say ‘prost.’ ” The transition to train travel in Asunción was related in a seamless narrative of time imperatives, descriptions of the new land, and hints of refashioned communitarianism. The train into the East Paraguay jungle was crude and rough, and only a sense of community made it palatable; on the train, for example, Bergen was comforted by “Aunt Derk Klassen...a good mother and grandmother.” The final sections of the lengthy trip—by cargo truck, ox cart, and on foot—slowed down the race through time and space. Bergen could bear the rough road by truck to Colonia Independencia, for it “was closer to our land” and it was a German-speaking community with plenty of fruit and familiar food. Another truck trip to Caaguazú was followed by a final day of travel by ox cart. And then the Bergens walked the entire night till 4 a.m., when they arrived at the newly grounded Sommerfeld Colony; six hours later, at 10 a.m., on December 18, they arrived at their village lot in newly named Waldheim, literally, “forest home.”12 Here at a place with “grass taller than my head” and not far from “clear, wonderful water,” Bergen “spread a blanket on the ground and we ate lunch.” By evening, three tents had been set up and the family retired, “exhausted.” Time slowed as agraria resumed with a series of familiar tasks—washing, cooking, visiting, and securing shelter.13
The trains in this narrative—the one from Rosthern to Montreal, and the one from Asunción to Independencia—were in their nature a little different than the other modes of transportation. Each was marked by observations of the strange and unusual, each dictated an inherent disruption to domestic routine, and each marked the quick passage of time, offering a modicum of reconstructed community along the way.
If the daily diary marked the significance of the train for its ability to disrupt quotidian rhythms and hurtle farm families through space, the letters composed days, a week, or even a month after a train trip saw its significance in strikingly different terms. Letters describing train travel were almost always by definition written by those witnessing weighty moments of departures and arrivals, or those travellers who had experienced both. Dozens of such letters describing the 1920s migration to Mexico were published in a German-language newspaper, the Steinbach Post, a bi-weekly that quickly ascended from a local to a transnational medium during the migration. The letters, written by ordinary subscribers, seemed focused on moments of commencement and completion. One from March 1922 announced the departure of the very first train to Mexico and spoke of broken social ties: “On the 1st of March the first train with Old Colony Mennonite emigrants left for Mexico. This occurs only with a great deal of pain, especially when one thinks of leaving all that one loves and taking bid from so many loving friends.”14 Other letters, such as one from October 1922, spoke of the hope of new settlement: “Concerning the migration to Mexico one can report that between 18 and 20 families have ordered [rail] cars for themselves so that they can leave on November 8 and by this time next winter will be happily living there.”15 Usually the reports held very precise information. The specific denominational label of one group of migrants was important to the writer of a November 1922 letter from Altona, Manitoba: on “Saturday the 11th a train left again from Altona with a group of immigrants for Mexico. These, however, were not Old Colonists, but Sommerfelders.”16 The specific identity of immigrants was important to a January 1923 writer from Gouldtown, Saskatchewan; he set out to “provide the names of the emigrants, as perhaps it might interest some folks,” and then listed twenty-eight families and explained, “these have loaded together a total of 17 [rail] cars with 3 cars reserved for the colonists themselves.”17
Soon, too, came letters reporting on the arrival of these chartered trains in Mexico. A few were written by Mennonites already in Mexico; one by an Abram Rempel noted the arrival in the border town of Juárez of a train, including five passenger cars: “[They were] full of Mennonites, large and small, old and young...all showing happy faces that they have finally arrived in Mexico.... And these 5 passenger cars were attached to an endless row of freight cars, I think there were over 30, with horses, cows, dogs, cats, geese and chickens and all loaded with all possible types of cultivation equipment and household goods….The whole train offered up quite a treasure and represented for Mexico no little matter. After completing their official formalities they will continue their trip, leaving at 10 p.m. for San Antonio [later named Cuauhtémoc].”18
Those who wrote about traversing of the American Midwest described the trip itself in almost clinical terms, a time in between, linking two nodes in a transcultural world. What they did emphasize was not the trip itself, but the weighty moments of departure and arrival. Rev. Abram Görtzen of Morse, Saskatchewan filed the following letter in July 1923:
We left for Mexico on 16 December 1922 from Herbert and Morse, Saskatchewan; 27 families with 17 freight cars. The trip took us somewhat over 11 days. We arrived at our destination...on the morning of December 28; the trip seemed slow, but God be thanks, everything went well. As we arrived we praised our heavenly shepherd by the singing of Song # 679 from the Old Songbook and then we began the unloading. By 2 p.m. everything was unloaded. The railroad company was very accommodating and allowed us three freight cars in which we could live as long as we wished. From there the long process of settling on the land began.19
Just as the 1922 move to Mexico became a central concern in letters published in the Steinbach Post, so too did the 1926 move to Paraguay. And just as letters from Mexico made short shrift of the trip itself, so too did those from Paraguay once they began appearing in the Post in April 1927, three full months after the migrants arrived at their southern destination. The first letters reported the late December 1926 arrival at Puerto Casado, the outpost on the Paraguay River, 400 kilometres north of Asunción and still 200 kilometres from the proposed settlement site west of the river in the Paraguayan Chaco. These first letters emphasized safe arrival at Puerto Casado and described immense difficulty at the river port. The trip itself—the train to New York, the voyage to Buenos Aires, the 1,000-kilometre riverboat trip north, past Asunción—was described in simple terms. In his April 1927 letter, A.A. Bergen noted the trip as a “very long” one that resulted in “much illness, of which I too was not spared.” Perhaps the “wonders on the trip were remarkable,” he noted, “but none of it interested me, and I gave no room for such thoughts.” In fact, he was certain that “on the next trip I want to take in a hot air balloon, as more misfortune I cannot endure.”20
Once the migrants moved inland, their letters emphasized the start of permanent settlement in the Chaco and not the 200-kilometre trip from the riverport. True, there were statements about the arduous twelve-day trip inland, the first ninety kilometres covered by narrow-gauge company rail, the last seventy by ox cart. In one letter published on 17 September 1927 the writer noted cursorily that the “little train has it very busy; oftentimes it takes three groups a week out” into the Chaco.21 Fuller descriptions, however, were reserved for the points of embarking and disembarking. For letter writers, these were the points of the newsworthy events.
A series of memoirs—some seemingly written with the help of a diary, others published as lengthy submissions to the Steinbach Post—describe in detail these various trips from western Canada. Unlike the diary and letters, the memoirs conceived of the relocation in religious terms, and the trains as divine instruments securing teleological promise. Typically written by an elderly or middle-aged person well after the event, the memoirs placed the migration within the narrative of a lifetime, and infused it with religious symbolism that assumed an eternal afterlife. In each case the backward glancing occurred with an intended affect of what will come, the anticipation of a “forthcoming” of cosmological significance.
The first of two memoirs examined was serialized in the Steinbach Post in 1946 by forty-two-year-old Jacob D. Harder of Weidenfeld, Paraguay. Significantly, it was penned a full two decades after the 1926 event and was written not only to describe the journey for the curious, but to attest to the trip’s wider, cultural meaning. Harder chose his beginning without equivocation: “For a long time I’ve had the idea to write something about my life, but haven’t had time; yet I’ve decided to write something about the migration from Canada to Paraguay and hope that the readers will overlook my many mistakes. My memories go way back, yes to Canada, and begin when I was only 23 years old.” Before offering further detail, Harder reached for higher meaning: “the reason our forefathers allowed themselves to be separated from their [old] homeland was this, because of their faith.” Only then did he commence the story, telling how on the day of departure a friend drove the family by sleigh to the railroad station in Niverville, Manitoba, and did so in a -30 degree snowstorm. Harder moved quickly to the actual departure, describing in romantic German terms how the locomotive lurched forward with “pfiff” and a shower of sparks, and with smoke stack belching it went “zisch, zisch, zisch, ever farther southward.”22
Poetic vocabulary, both secular and sacred, is interwoven with the text. Harder noted that the immigrants left Niverville “without any jubilation, just quiet conversation in Low German, a din mixed with the constant hum of the wheels under the cars.” Their trip eastward to New York bore sacred meaning: “day and night the train raced on with us, poor worms, over water and mountains.” Those very vistas reminded him twenty years later “how great God is and that God himself had said as he made the world, ‘see, it is very good....’” Leaving “the Canadian train” in New York marked a solemn moment: “all eyes looked up and there stood the ship of our voyage, which we were to board, with father, mother, grandparents, etc.”23
Like the diary, the memoir made little differentiation between train and ship. The memoir moved seamlessly from one mode of transportation to another. If trains travelled too fast, ships rocked too ceaselessly, causing Harder to describe seasickness with an English phrase: “a little sick, but not in the legs, only in the belly.” If trains brought moments of fear, so did the ship, a time Harder described in biblical language: the expanse of the ocean, for example, gave thought to many a parent, he noted, “to the biblical stories of the Apostle Paul being shipwrecked on the Mediterranean.”24 For the memoirist, the train travel, as well as the ocean voyage, was always more than simple relocation, it was a moment infused with deep significance.
The second memoir was written in the early 1960s, some four decades after the event it described—the 1922 trip of the immigrants to Mexico. The author, an Old Colony Mennonite minister residing in Mexico, Rev. Isaak Dyck, had outlined the background to the emigration in the first volume of the memoir, and he did so by employing overtly religious language, suggesting that the difficult decision to leave militaristic and assimilative but well-to-do Canada was nothing less than an act of religious faithfulness, a “suffering with Christ.” The second volume described the emigration itself, and the settlement in Mexico was similarly anchored to religious symbolism. Indeed the description of the train trip was presented with almost foreboding vocabulary.25 Taking leave of loved ones at the border town of Gretna, Manitoba had been difficult enough, but what followed was nothing short of frightening. Dyck’s description of the train trip itself commenced with a description of the crossing of the American Midwest, and just after the emigrant group had cleared United States customs at Neche, North Dakota:
The train began to double its speed and only seemed to go faster and faster…. We raced into the black night accompanied by the horrific noise of the two large locomotives. We were so afraid and anxious because of the high speed, the women especially, that we decided to talk to the engineer to see if they could slow the trains down, because we didn’t want to end up in a serious accident…. His casual response was that the train was not our responsibility and in any case they were in a race with the other railroad companies to see who could make it Mexico the quickest. And so we realized we had no other option but to put our trust in God.26
The arrival at El Paso, Texas, just four days later was met by Dyck with the relief—“oh how thankful we were to God and the engineer when we arrived.” But other apprehensions followed. “At this point we had to transfer to another train, a fact of which we were not previously aware…. And at once a feeling of fear swept over us, for once we entered Mexico it was as if we were the children of Israel,” trembling as they did when they first entered Canaan, the ancient “promised land,” albeit one filled with hostile forces.27 And then, while it was good that “our new train in Mexico travelled much more slowly than the previous one” in the United States, new fears arose at each stop as “Mexicans surrounded our train because they had never before seen Mennonites.” It made Dyck and his fellow passengers feel very “uncomfortable, for we had never seen such dark people…. These were to be our neighbours…. O how strange and unfamiliar everything was.” Then, as “we left the border town Juárez, about 20 heavily armed men boarded our train…as was the custom to protect us from hijackers. But [their presence] caused fear and timidity among our women and children.”28 Eventually the soldiers turned out “to be very friendly and benevolent,” allowing them to “grow accustomed to our new companions.”29 But then other apprehensions followed: from the vantage point of the train, the landscape of the U.S. with its “winter wheat standing in splendid green” now was replaced by the semi-arid Chihuahua landscape in which “everything appeared to be dead…the grass was totally dry, the cattle were skinny,” and so “we had to remind ourselves that [according to Psalm 74] it was God who set [things so]…that each land possesses its own character.”30 This sense of trust again gave way to “more anxiety and sadness” upon arriving in Chihuahua City:
The [railyard workers] began separating our train into two…because the rest of the trip was too treacherous for the train to make in its present state. We would have to travel over high mountains and through deep valleys, across high bridges, and there was no way that the long train could make it. And so the passenger cars were separated from the cattle and freight cars, and the latter train was hooked up to two locomotives. This aroused no small amount of worry and served as motivating force for us to entreat the Lord to lead us safely to our destination.31
The final leg of train travel was also the most fearful: “we drove through a dark tunnel” certain “that the mountain was going to collapse on top of us.”32 Then while crossing one mountain range the grade became “so steep that even after the engine had exerted all of its steam power, it still could not make it all the way up, so we were stuck near the top for a while.” At this point “many women came to where Bishop Franz Loewen and I were seated and confessed that they had not prayed enough in preparation for this important journey and it was because of them that we were having all these difficulties.”33 But Dyck thought to himself, “how can one sell oil to another when one’s lamp is almost dry and about to go out.” His only comfort at this moment was the poem which spoke of “the journey to blessed eternity [as] all the more difficult.”34 At dawn the train finally made it through the mountains, and Dyck was relieved to see that the freight train had made it to “our new home, the village of San Antonio, thankful and praising the Lord.” A final encounter with the train turned Dyck dour once again. Upon arriving, the tired and apprehensive migrants were met by “railroad officials [who] sternly informed us that we had [but] two days to empty our cars.”35 A new round of uncertainty began. The whole affair with the train had reminded Dyck that the only certainty in life was that in this world the true pilgrim would need to “suffer alongside Christ.” Ironically, the technological wonder of modern train travel had brought the Mennonite emigrants to a place in northern Mexico from which they could contest all that which was modern.
The final medium under consideration is the oral history narrative. In this study it is also the text constructed at a moment furthest removed from the event of relocation. In an oral history project undertaken in 1979, a Canadian graduate student, Ronald Sawatsky, interviewed two dozen Mennonites who had “returned” from Mexico to Canada, settling in southern Ontario.36 Sawatsky’s primary interest was integration into 1970s-era Canada, but the interviews with the more elderly participants (that is, those participants born in Canada) include questions about the migration from western Canada fifty to sixty years earlier. Sometimes Sawatsky’s questions pertained specifically to the train trip from prairie Canada to Mexico in the 1920s. The oral text produced, recorded with a tape recorder, was fundamentally different than the memoir, even though both were created a long time after the remembered event. The memoir written in a moment of contemplation and for public consumption presented the train trips with teleological significance; the oral history text was produced within a private conversation, in the company of a stranger, for the purposes of producing an archival holding. There were no sweeping statements of the wider significance of the train travel.
Most importantly, the elderly migrants, in recalling childhood, also recalled a child’s perspective. That perspective, similar to the outlook of the letter-writers, recalled poignant moments of departure and arrival. But a child’s life is more circumscribed than an adult’s and memories necessarily relate to that which the child sees and experiences at those points. Maria Voth, born in 1910 in Didsbury, Alberta, and twelve years of age when her family emigrated, was the oldest of Sawatsky’s oral history participants and had the most vivid memories of the adults on the trip. Voth recalled travelling from Saskatchewan where her family lived in 1922 to visit “my step-grandfather [who] was still alive and we stayed there for several days…. When the train came we took it. Got on there… at Easter.”37 She also possessed prominent adult-centred memories of the arrival in Mexico:
[Upon arriving] in El Paso we had to wait for a long time, something was going on but children can’t catch everything. I don’t know why. But my grandfather was a minister…. Ohm Isaak Giesbrecht. He got sick there. They planned to hold a church service there but he got sick so he couldn’t lead it…. [Then, in Chihuahua state] halfway [to our final place of settlement] there we had to [disembark and] sleep on the ground in the mountains in a strange place. I can still clearly remember that. We had to use horse-drawn vehicles, through the mountains, my sister and I, also my mother and youngest brother. It was just us four. The others were in cars…. I can’t remember that we were afraid. We finally arrived at our destination, Santa Clara. That’s its name.38
By coincidence and without prodding by the interviewer, each of the other interviewees, all somewhat younger than Maria, had faint memories not so much of people or places, but of animals they saw from the train, or animals encountered just before or just after the train trip. Cornelius Peters, born in 1913 in Hague, Saskatchewan, did recall the moment of departure from Gretna, Manitoba when he was ten with reference to adults: the train “started off very slowly and a lot of people walked with the train.” But in his description of the train itself, he quickly moved from people to animals: there were “47 cars on that train,” but there were “many fewer passenger cars than livestock transport cars” as the Mennonites “took horses and cows” and even “dogs and cats.”39 Anna Peters, born in 1915 near Gretna, Manitoba, also recalled the departure at age seven in 1922. True, her strongest memory was that during “the last evening in Manitoba when we were waiting for the train…. I was very thirsty; I’ll never forget that,” but Anna’s only other memory included the daily moment when the train stopped and she went “with my father…when he tended to the animals…[in] the livestock car.”40
Other interviewees who were even younger than Anna and Cornelius in 1922 had singular memories of these animals. Heinrich Voth had two memories of arriving in Mexico when he was nine: the first was of “one family’s horses, big horses for those days,” bolting when they were unloaded from the train, breaking “the halters and the rope” and galloping “east…. [So] glad to get off that train; Mexicans were sent after the horses on their horses; [and] they brought [the runaways] back.” Voth also recalled the dogs they brought with them. Arriving on the open fields of Valle Bustillos may have been “difficult for my parents” but for “my cousin and me, once we were off the train, we both had a dog…and we played with them, walking barefoot on that dry Mexican grass. Oi-yoi-yoi.”41 Peter Giesbrecht, born in 1917 near Gretna, Manitoba, was seven when his family moved to Mexico in 1923. He had a single memory of Canada and it too related to animals: how “my uncles rode on a sleigh pulled by dogs in winter.” Similarly his two memories of the train trip through the American Midwest was animal-centred: he recalled how “I and my father went into the livestock cars and attended to the animals”; and how “our dogs” which had been brought along from Manitoba “tried to jump from the train” and “some ran back” to Manitoba, in fact “I heard that they made it back to Manitoba.”42 Corny Friesen, born near Winkler, Manitoba in 1919 was only four when his family moved in 1923 and his single memory of the migration was “the dogs they brought with them…that interested me.” 43
Ironically perhaps, the text produced the longest time since the train trip turned attention not to day, month, lifetime, or eternity, but to fragmentary moments of the quotidian. More so than the diary, letter, or memoir, the oral history text turned attention from the meaning of the train trip to the experiential, and from an attempt to create any kind of coherent narrative to the circumscribed moment.
The travels of western Canadian Mennonite emigrants in the 1920s and 1940s took them on one of several extensive train trips: to northern Mexico across the vast American Midwest, to the eastern ports, to Montreal, or to New York. For all travellers the trains were imposing, representing the technology that uprooted them from western Canada and placed them on the way to strange lands in faraway places. But the nature of the train travel varied from country to country, from one migration to another. The U.S. and Canadian trains were faster and cleaner than those in Mexico or Paraguay. The chartered trains allowed for greater degrees of familiarity than those taken on regularly scheduled lines.
The greatest differences, however, lay not in the types of trains, but in the perspectives shaped by specific texts that were employed in the telling of the trips. Train travel was never merely a matter of crossing space, but of reordering time. The train took the Mennonite settler from close-knit agrarian communities at Swift Current, Hague, and Rosthern (Saskatchewan), and from Winkler, Altona, Gretna, and Steinbach (Manitoba), and thrust them into the mid-western U.S., the eastern seaboard, or central Canada before sending them into Mexico or to ships heading for South America. The meaning of this train-propelled uprooting and reordering of time depended not so much on just which train one took, as on the medium with which the story was told.
Diaries recording train travel noted the manner in which the quotidian imperative of yielding to nature’s cycle gave way to a new technologically driven imperative on daily life. The letter revealed a consciousness of significant events—those that compelled the letter to be written in the first instance—and thus focused on departures and arrivals, encapsulated with the common vocabulary of sweeping epochs, especially of pre- and post-migration. The memoir created a narrative of a lifetime or life-altering event, and thus the train trips here were cast in teleological language granting them cosmological and even eternal meaning, a text set within a context of the forthcoming. Memories recorded in oral history projects may have been the longest in the making, but given the conversational style of the discourse, were perhaps the most hastily constructed. And conjuring up long-past childhoods, they rendered train travel with the most minute details, referencing memories with the perspectives of one’s immediate milieu; for the child the strange technology of the train was anchored with the memory of the most familiar, parents and grandparents for some, but the farm animal for most.
The travellers from western Canada, as do travellers everywhere, clearly cultivated concepts of time to order their uprooted lives, giving meaning to them as they were lived in a space in flux and in a changing world. And, as for all travellers, time was relative. Ideas of time reflected the difference between the traveller and non-traveller. They also changed as the migrants moved from one world to another. But they especially differed depending on the particular manner in which the travelling was considered. It was as if different media of communication solicited different perspectives that produced a multi-linearity of the present.44 The trains that took the Mennonite emigrants from western Canada didn’t merely move a people spatially, they also introduced them to a complex constellation of time constructions. And just which particular construction of time prevailed depended on the particular text employed to tell the story.
1 For standard accounts of these migrations see entries for Mexico and Paraguay, Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, www.gameo.org, accessed 18 January 2013. Edgar Stoesz, Like a Mustard Seed (Harrisonburg: Herald Press, 2008); Calvin Redekop, The Old Colony Mennonites (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969); Harry Leonard Sawatsky, They Sought a Country: Mennonite Colonization in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Abe Warkentin, Strangers and Pilgrims (Steinbach, MB: 1987).
2 See Robert Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of Private Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).
3 E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 58, 90; for a critique of Thompson’s view see Mark M. Smith, “Old South Time in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 101, 5 (1996): 1432–1469.
4 Quoted from his book Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) in Anna Sofia Hedberg, Outside World: Cohesion and Deviation among Old Colony Mennonites in Bolivia (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2007), 28.
5 Michael Jackson, Introduction, Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2002), 13.
6 Frau Isaac F. Bergen, “Reisebericht der Frau Isaak F. Bergen,” in Unsere Reise Nach Paraguay, 1948, ed. Jacob H. Sawatsky (Sommerfeld: Paraguay, self-published, 2004), 20–37.
7 Ibid., 21.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 22.
11 Ibid., 23–25.
12 Ibid., 29–30.
13 Ibid., 30.
14 Steinbach Post, 8 March 1922.
15 Ibid., 18 October 1922.
16 Ibid., 15 November 1922.
17 Ibid., 3 January 1923.
18 Ibid., 25 May 1924.
19 Ibid., 11 July 1923.
20 Ibid., 20 April 1927.
21 Ibid., 4 September 1927.
22 Ibid., 7 August 1946.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Isaak M. Dyck, “Emigration from Canada to Mexico, Year 1922,” trans. Robyn Dyck Sneath, unpublished manuscript in possession of author. This book was published most recently as Die Auswanderung der Reinlaender Mennoniten Gemeinde von Kanada nach Mexiko 1970 (Cuauhtémoc: Imprenta Colonial, 1993).
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Mennonite Archives of Ontario, tape-recorded interviews by Ronald Sawatsky, Mennonite Archives of Ontario. Interviews translated and transcribed by Kerry L. Fast; hard copies in possession of author.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 34.