ANNA PICCOLI always washed her freshly picked radishes and spinach early in the morning because of the way they glistened in the cold water of the horse trough at that time of day. It was a quiet time in a very busy life, for it seemed that Anna could do anything. She could turn a tent into a kitchen and cook for twenty boarders or settle a colicky baby with a tender hand, a little olive oil and a pinch of camomile. Her Indian baskets full of doughnuts and fried chicken were essential to the success of every Scuttle Bay picnic. She spoke of Italy often and she was always singing. She wasn’t the first Italian woman in Powell River, but when she died in the prime of her life, her funeral was the biggest one the town had ever seen.
Not that Powell River had been around that long when Anna died in 1928. There’d been logging camps in the vicinity since the 1880s, but nothing remotely like a town until 1910, when the Powell River Company began construction on a pulp and paper mill and dammed the short river that fell from Powell Lake in a spectacular waterfall. The dam would power the mill that would go into production two years later.
Recruiting a large workforce to clear the site of old-growth trees and build the dam and the mill had been difficult given the isolation of the site, 135 kilometres and a six-hour steamboat ride up the mainland coast from Vancouver. Keeping the construction workers from leaving once they had arrived and recruiting and holding a permanent workforce to run the mill were even more difficult.
There had been Italians in the logging camps and on the construction crews and there would be Italians working in the mill, but like every other nationality in this multi-ethnic population, many of them were transient. Of the eighty-four Italians on the payroll in 1912, only sixteen were still there a year later. The rest of the 1913 Italian workforce—fifty-four out of a total of six hundred—were newcomers. Pietro Micheluzzi was one of the exceptions: he came for the construction phase but stayed to work in the mill and raise his family in Powell River. He was living in one of the tents the company erected for the construction crews close to the saltwater shore when his wife, Teresa Babuin, and their three children arrived from Italy.
When Teresa saw the tent that would be her first Powell River home, she sat down on her trunk and refused to unpack. But a woman who has brought three children halfway around the world on her own was not likely to succumb to despair for long. She was still living in that tent when the fourth of her six children was born a year later, but the family would soon move into a company house in Townsite.
Company-built Townsite with its proper houses and tree-lined streets seemed very desirable, but some Italians preferred to live where the company had less control. It is generally accepted that the first people to move to the more rural environs near Cranberry Lake, including several Italian families, did so to escape the control of the company. Cranberry, as the new settlement was called, was one of two communities—the other one being Wildwood—where many Italians lived. Both had their beginnings within a year of the mill going into operation.
Company housing surrounded the mill on three sides. Townsite was to the east and south of the mill. In Balkan Village, close to salt water on the north side of the mill, most of the workers in the 1920s—the single men in bunkhouses, the men with families in duplexes made from converted bunkhouses—were Italian. Inland from Balkan Village, into the 1930s, more and more Italian families and their single Italian boarders occupied houses on the tidy streets of Riverside.
Spray from the dam that loomed above Riverside nourished Italian vegetable gardens and flower boxes, but Riverside lacked the flavour of a Little Italy. The houses were too new and the streets too carefully laid out. There were no Italian businesses—no ice cream parlours with punchboards, no pool halls with backrooms, no grocery stores stocked with food from Italy—and none of the street life that usually went with them.
Riverside Italians did not have to go without familiar foods, however. Reno Bressanutti had worked at the company store since he was fourteen. It was his idea to let Italians in Riverside order their groceries directly. “[Italians] never bought two pounds of spaghetti. They bought cases. And olive oil . . . and big rounds of farm cheese.” His Italian customers would have bought wine grapes from him too, but Bressanutti refused to order them. They were too much trouble to import and handle, according to the young clerk. He ordered raisins instead—two or three hundred cases a year—and encouraged his Italian customers to make grappa, or “second wine.”
Bressanutti worked eight hours a day, seven days a week. He served customers at the counter, filled orders for the tugboats on Sundays and delivered groceries in wicker baskets twice a week by horse and wagon. His customers complained that the baskets offered sanctuary to cockroaches, but Bressanutti disagreed. He admitted there were cockroaches in the mill, the houses and the hospital, but he insisted there were none in the company store. He had personally set fires along the walls to get rid of the abhorrent pests. But his customers weren’t convinced. They refused to allow the grocery baskets inside their houses, choosing instead to leave them on their porches and take the food inside one item at a time. It looked like a situation ripe for a competitor.
The competition came in the person of Augusto Bosa, a young man from Treviso, Veneto, who had been working at the Britannia Mines on Howe Sound; he came to Cranberry in 1928 for a visit, liked what he saw and got a job at the mill. It was the start of the Great Depression, however, and Bosa’s mill job didn’t last very long. But he was a man who saw opportunity everywhere he looked. Some people say he got his start selling groceries out of the front of his house. Others say he delivered groceries in a handcart. Still others say he bought a piece of land even before he went into selling groceries. The land had a rudimentary building on it, a former pesthouse according to some, which he converted into rental bachelor suites. However he got his start, most people agree that despite being unable to read and write, he had an incredible head for business.
It wasn’t long before he saw an opportunity to lure customers away from the company store and its cockroaches. As Reno Bressanutti told it, “He said, ‘I’m going to fix you, Reno.’ He got a little truck and took all the business away from us.” Starting with that little truck, Bosa built a grocery empire out of a small store behind the billiard hall in Cranberry. After World War II he became partners with Pietro Micheluzzi’s sons Marino (Babe) and Albert, who had anglicized their surname to Mitchell. The Bosa and Mitchell Brothers’ store was prepared to import grapes so that customers could make “first wine,” which may have been the key to their success.
In the first decades of production at the mill, a steady intake of Italians supplemented a workforce consisting mainly of Americans and Britons. Italians worked in the grinder room, feeding blocks of wood between large sandstone discs, or as sulphite workers unloading scows of raw sulphur, or on the docks using two-wheeled wagons to load huge rolls of newsprint onto ships. Working in those places didn’t require a man to be skilled or even to speak English; it required him only to be strong.
Every Italian’s first job in Powell River was with the company and some of them stayed there for their entire working lives. But some saw opportunities for businesses of their own—groceries, bakeries, barber and butcher shops—beyond the mill gates, and others, such as Anna Piccoli and Giuseppe Errico, a.k.a. Calabrese Joe, started market gardens.
Like Micheluzzi, Calabrese Joe had come to work on the mill’s construction, but as soon as it was built he went into farming. He leased five acres from the company and had already cleared the land and pulled the stumps when the company said it wanted the land back for its Number Three and Four paper machines. So Calabrese Joe moved to a site twenty kilometres up Powell Lake on what became known as Dago Point. There he grew vegetables and raised two dairy cows that produced enough milk to supply everyone in the community.
But Powell River was still a one-industry town. In such towns, the company always knows what is best for everyone living there. The Micheluzzis’ fourth daughter, Mary Josephine, would say in later life that the company “made it comfortable for the people living here and . . . we enjoyed growing up in that atmosphere.” The company built housing, bailed out bankrupt businesses and gave away five-dollar gold pieces at Christmas, but the company also brought in French Canadians to break a successful but fledgling union, cut wages and fired employees for disloyalty.
POWELL RIVER was not the only place on the wild west coast of British Columbia where fresh water met salt water in waterfalls that promised an easy source of industrial power. At another such waterfall 345 kilometres farther up the coast, another pulp and paper company built a dam at about the same time as the one at Powell River. Off the Inside Passage east of Bella Bella, where thick coniferous forests cover all the land and their lower branches hover just above high tide, the wall of green was broken, at the head of Cousins Inlet, by a magnificent waterfall that dropped from Link Lake into the sea at Ocean Falls.
Dark mountains rise on either side of the deep inlet that hooks at the end to exclude even more light. The absence of roads linking it to the outside and the abundance of rain—over four metres a year—make Ocean Falls an oppressive place to live, but the need for labourers attracted Italians and other immigrants in large numbers. There were 150 people living there when the pulp mill went into production in 1912.
Anna Piccoli’s brother, Oliver Zorzi, was a foreman in the grinder room in the early days at Ocean Falls. Antonio Marti-gnaggo was a logger and then a boom man. He had come to British Columbia first when he was eighteen, then returned home to marry and fathered two children before he came back to join his brother in Ocean Falls. His brother liked the isolated town and would stay there until he retired, but when Martignaggo wrote to his wife, Angela, to tell her that he wanted his family to join him, his mother wouldn’t hear of it.
“Oh no, no, no,” she said to Angela. “Leave a poor lady who is eighty-three years old? Where am I going to go? I’m not going to understand anybody there. You’d better tell my son to come back home and not to stay in Canada.” So as soon as he had saved enough money to buy an eight-hectare farm in Italy, Martignaggo went home. Eight hectares is large for an Italian farm. He grew chestnuts, hay and grapes, fathered three more children and lived out his life in Italy, but he always talked about Canada and Ocean Falls: “It was hard work, a hard job, but for some reason...” He inspired his youngest child to emigrate many years later.
By the 1950s, when there were over three thousand people living in Ocean Falls, the writer George Woodcock heard a resident say, “You get the feeling that those hills are crowding in on you, and you know there’s no escape except by leaving altogether.” But when Luciano Culos arrived a few years after Woodcock, the rugged terrain, the deep fjords and the absence of human beings beyond the boundaries of the town fascinated this man from the crowded plains of Friuli. “I really often had the sense of being in a unique position in the mountains,” he said, “of being where perhaps nobody had ever been before.” For him, these mountains that seemed to block the town from the rest of the world were not a barrier. Just like the Alps that had bordered his world view in Italy, the Coast Mountains were something for him to aspire to, to be among them and to climb to the tops of them.
EVEN FARTHER up the coast—eight hundred kilometres north of Vancouver as an airplane flies—fresh water meets salt in a mystical, rain-soaked valley where the Skeena River leaves its mountain-enclosed course and runs wide and shallow into the ocean around the city of Prince Rupert, which sits on Kaien Island within hailing distance of the Alaska panhandle.
From Prince Rupert eastward, the Canadian National Railway (CNR) and Yellowhead Highway dance with each other and the wide, wide river. But before the building of the railway by the CNR’s predecessor, the Grand Trunk Pacific, and before the road, the river was all there was, a highway for First Nations’ canoes and later for sternwheelers that fought their way upstream to supply HBC forts and return with furs and gold. When it came time to build a railway along the Skeena, the only place for the right-of-way was on the narrow shoreline, which had to be augmented in places with rock blasted from the encroaching mountains. Now the road shares this same narrow shoreline with the railway as they pass beside, over and under each other so close that it seems as if an approaching locomotive is demanding a lane of the highway for itself. The road and the railway cross stream after stream and their names—Agate, Kwinitsa, Snowbound, Slickenslide, Avalanche and many more—tell the railway construction story.
One hundred years ago, the terrain of the river valley was only one of a host of problems facing Foley, Welch and Stewart, the largest railway construction company in North America, as it geared up to build the section of the GTP railway that would run from Prince Rupert to Telkwa, the most difficult part of the railway that would stretch from the coast to Winnipeg. Such terrain required workmen in large numbers—just the place for hundreds of Italians.
Work on the section had begun in 1908, but within two years the GTP and Foley, Welch and Stewart were running short of money and labour. A decision to scrimp on camp amenities made it even more difficult to attract workers and hold on to those already there. Seven years before, on the strength of rumours that the GTP would need thousands of men, the labour agent Antonio Cordasco had recruited Italians in Montreal at a time when the company wanted only Britons and Scandinavians. By 1910, however, the GTP would take any nationality, but now it was competing for labour with two other railways, the Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR) and the Kettle River Valley Railway, soon to be owned by the CPR. Forbidden by British Columbia law to recruit in China, the powerful companies convinced the federal minister of the interior to allow increased southern European immigration, a move that resulted in free entry of “alien” navvies.
Soon every train coming west was full of foreign labourers. Vancouver became a huge holding pen for these men, some lured by this private employment agency’s description of the GTP camps:
Feeding is unstinted and the best obtainable and on a scale undreamed of, unlimited choice of fresh meat, fresh vegetables, groceries, butter, eggs, milk, bread, fruit; after work there are sing-songs, games, sports, fishing and shooting.
Hundreds of Austro-Hungarians and Italians, the gullible ones and the ones who didn’t understand English well enough to question the propaganda, climbed aboard Union Steamship Company ships in Vancouver and sailed up the coast. To get from the tents and shacks of Prince Rupert to the construction camps upriver, the men boarded one of the four shallow-draft paddlewheel steamers built especially by Foley, Welch and Stewart to transport labour and equipment up the Skeena. A fifth steamer carried and distributed all the food.
“Food unfit for a dog” was how one man described it. And there were more grievances: bunkhouses “so filthy a self-respecting pig would refuse to die in one of them” and an absence of medical care to treat the chronic diarrhea and typhoid fever that resulted from living in such conditions. The men had had to pay for their food, transport, shelter and work gear before they even reached the camps. This, the issuance of time cheques instead of cash and the fact that it was difficult to find transport back down the Skeena that didn’t belong to the company made it difficult for the men to leave.
The conditions in mills and in mining and railway construction camps gave new international unions ammunition in their fight to gain recognition from employers. The union movement in the form of small unaffiliated locals had been gathering strength in the coal mines of Vancouver Island for decades and had flexed its muscles in the Fernie mines in the dying years of the nineteenth century. These unaffiliated unions were not interested in recruiting foreigners—foreign labour was a threat. But as the twentieth century dawned, small unions had amalgamated to form larger and more powerful bargaining units. Now the majority of employees in the coal mines of the East Kootenays happened to be these very foreigners, whom the unions were now forced to cultivate despite the dismal reputation of eastern and southern Europeans, Italians in particular, as strikebreakers in both Canada and the United States.
Between 1900 and 1914, the majority of workers in the Kootenays were immigrants. The cacophony of languages heard on the streets and in the mines made Fernie, in the words of a modern-day labour historian, a “Tower of Babel.” It was for this reason that the “radical, Socialist, renegade” Western Federation of Miners (WFM) chose to organize in the Kootenays and had its ritual and constitution translated into Italian, Finnish and Russian. The union’s tenure, however, was very brief. In 1903, having battled the Crow’s Nest Pass Coal Company for several months, the WFM lost one thousand of its members to the less radical and better-organized United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).
The UMWA had come late to valuing foreign workers. Only two years before, in 1901, the president of the union had told an American industrial commission that Hungarians and Italians “have been undesirable as far as our organization is concerned.” But by 1903, foreign workers had become so necessary to the survival of the union that it began to publish the union newspaper, the District Ledger, in Italian, Finnish and Slav as well as English and French. The 1911 convention in Lethbridge of the newly founded District 18 UMWA, which included the Kootenays, voted to denounce insurance companies “for their cruel, heartless cheating of the poor widows and orphans, especially those of our foreign brother.”
West of Fernie, in the Slocan Valley at Sandon, where the WFM still held sway, the death of an Italian miner and the subsequent treatment of his widow and orphans in Italy showed how valuable the unions now considered foreign workers to be. WFM head office in Denver, Colorado, had been urging the secretary of its Sandon local to encourage all the Italians to register so that they could vote for a member of the union who was running for parliament. “It will assist him and the Sandon Miners’ Union to have you learn the Italian lingo,” head office wrote. “I hope you will go at it as carefully as you do a pony of rye whiskey.”
Then an Italian miner named Max Calgaro died in the Surprise Mine at Sandon. By the time the union secretary discovered that Calgaro was not a member, the Italian had already been buried in a rough, fifty-dollar coffin purchased from a local furniture store. The mine manager and Calgaro’s brother in Calgary both refused to pay for the coffin or the funeral, and now the furniture dealer was demanding the union’s help to collect the money owed for the coffin. So eager was the union to cultivate Italians that the secretary agreed to continue to advocate for the family.
He asked for help from the government administrator in Kaslo and included a statement of Calgaro’s earnings and the amount of money the miner had sent from time to time to his family in the village of Arsiero, Veneto. The secretary determined that only a commission in Italy could confirm these amounts of money. He acquired the Calgaros’ marriage certificate and other documents. He filed claims against the company for the full $1,500 allowed by the Workmen’s Compensation Act, and he duly sent the $56.20 that remained in Calgaro’s bank account plus his last paycheque to the man’s widow in Arsiero. All this for a man already dead and of no further use to the union except as proof that the union had Italians’ interests at heart.
WEST OF Arsiero, Calgaro’s home village, through the mountains of northern Italy, is the region of Lombardy, which had the distinction, in the years just after Italian unification, of having the highest rate of emigration and the most primitive farming methods of any region in Italy. At the northern edge of Lombardy, near the ragged Swiss border, is the U-shaped province of Sondrio, also known as the Valtellina. The Adda River flows westward past the city of Sondrio through the bottom of the valley, which is flat and fertile with rugged, almost perpendicular sides. At the western end of the Valtellina, the river empties into Lake Como, where smugglers once brought common necessities from Switzerland by boat in the dark of night to avoid the customs houses and taxes that were such a burden on ordinary people.
East of Sondrio is the village of Tovo di Sant’Agata, where a grey stuccoed tunnel of derelict buildings, their windows shuttered, their walls crumbling, contrasts with the brightly painted houses and tidy gardens of the modern section. At the fenced and gated cemetery, two men finish the gateposts with slate; two women, one young and straight-backed, the other elderly and hunched, wash the slab of marble that covers an entire grave. Plastic flowers add a durable but kitschy brightness. Rescued from an older graveyard, the headstones of villagers who were alive when their fellow citizens emigrated to Vancouver Island at the turn of the twentieth century line the walls that surround the new cemetery. Half of them commemorate people named Armanasco; another quarter, people named Senini.
It is no surprise then that the Vancouver Island Armanascos and Seninis are closely related. The first of them to emigrate worked in the Wellington coal mines for James Dunsmuir; when he shut Wellington down, they moved south of Nanaimo to Extension, which had become the new centre of the Dunsmuir coal empire. More relatives arrived from Tovo. When fifty-four Italian men founded the Felice Cavallotti Lodge in Extension in 1900, the second Italian lodge in all of British Columbia, two Seninis and three Armanascos were among them.
A random collection of soot-blackened shacks and cabins built rough for easy dismantling and moving, Extension was a typical mining camp. Several stores sold groceries; several hotels provided room and board, beer and gambling. The Tunnel Hotel had a bocce court in the backyard where the Italians played for drinks. The streets were “dust laid around boulders,” with the occasional stump in the middle to make travel more challenging. Various ethnic groups—Slavs, Italians, Scots, Chinese—lived separately in small ghettos. The number of Italians in the town was continued evidence of the affinity the Dunsmuir family had for Italians, but many of these men now had families and a stake in the community.
Men with family responsibilities weren’t nearly as malleable as single men had been. When James Dunsmuir arbitrarily decided that he wanted everyone living in Extension to move once again to his newly founded town of Ladysmith, men like Joseph Fontana and Louis Astori refused to leave Extension. And when a royal commission investigated unrest in the coal mines of Vancouver Island in 1903, Fontana and Astori had the courage to testify against their employer.
That was the year that Steve Arman left Tovo di Sant’Agata for Extension. His father, Dominic Armanasco, had died a decade before when an E&N train hit him while he was walking from Wellington to Nanaimo on the railway track, but Steve had lots of other relatives in Extension, including his brother Antonio. Having already anglicized his name, Steve was in a hurry to be a bona fide Canadian—he learned English and became a naturalized British subject as soon as he was eligible—but when it came to marrying, he wanted his bride to be Italian.
The Passerini family, who owned a store in Extension, showed him the photograph of a woman named Giuseppina Fognini who was from Tartano, a Valtellina village not far from Tovo. Steve wrote her a letter introducing himself and the two began to correspond. Steve was thirty-two and ready to settle down; Giuseppina was twenty-five and not getting any younger.
That she was interested in corresponding with a coal miner in Canada is probably a reflection of her marriage prospects in Italy. According to the stories she would tell her daughter, Lydia, over and over again in the years to come, Giuseppina’s father was a count, an aide to a general and the owner of a home that had a library. When Lydia was an old woman, she confessed that she used to tune her mother out when she started to talk about her past. She knew her mother worked for a doctor and his wife, but if Giuseppina had ever said what her position was—female companion, secretary, governess—her daughter hadn’t been listening. It was only when her mother died and Lydia found an old steamship ticket and a bill from a department store in Sondrio among the documents in her mother’s old purse that she wished she had listened more carefully.
Two years after they had begun to write to each other, Steve had proposed to Giuseppina and sent her a prepaid steerage ticket that would take her from Milan to New York via Le Havre on the French mail steamer Savoy, and from New York to Nanaimo by train and steamship. Before she left Italy, her employers took her shopping to buy twenty metres of quality fabric, in black and green, which she used to make clothing for her trousseau.
Giuseppina arrived in Nanaimo on January 11, 1912, and met her intended groom for the first time. Two and a half weeks later, a Methodist minister married the two Roman Catholics. Steve’s signature on the marriage licence is shaky and awkward; Giuseppina’s is flowing and self-assured. Her new home was a log cabin in Extension, where, it seemed to her, the men did nothing but drink and gamble when they weren’t digging coal. When she unpacked her new clothes, Steve said, “You don’t wear those here,” and ordered her to burn them. She obeyed him, but according to the story she told her daughter, she cried for two months afterwards.
Giuseppina had a friend, however, who lived across the street. Adele Foglioni had stood up with her at her wedding, and when Giuseppina’s first child died shortly after he was born, Adele placed the tiny body in the coffin and, in the Italian custom of the day, sprinkled rose petals around his head before she took a photograph of the open coffin for Giuseppina to keep.
The boy was born and died just after the beginning of what would come to be known as the Big Strike of 1912 to 1914. Miners in all the coal mining towns of Vancouver Island—Cumberland, Nanaimo, Extension, South Wellington and Ladysmith—had walked off the job in September 1912, and all the coal mining companies on the Island had responded with a lockout. The issue was union recognition and the UMWA was determined to win. There had been a UMWA-led strike in Fernie in 1911, but the situation there had been entirely different. The union had got its foot in the door in Fernie six years earlier when management agreed to voluntary check-off, which meant the company would deduct union dues from the paycheques of union members, but it did not require all miners to join the union. On Vancouver Island, however, management allowed no union activity whatsoever.
Mainly because of their numbers, Fernie’s Italians were in a position of strength not enjoyed by those on Vancouver Island. In 1911 there were twelve hundred Italians in Fernie, a much greater concentration than in any mining camp on Vancouver Island. It had been UMWA official policy to court ethnic groups, including Italians, for several years by this time, but given the reputation of Italians for strikebreaking, the union was unsure of their loyalty and accordingly sent a special Italian organizer named Joe Angelo to Vancouver Island to keep an eye on them.
One of the major companies on the Island was a new player. Just two years before the strike started, the Dunsmuirs had sold their mines to Canadian Collieries, a subsidiary of Mackenzie and Mann and Company Ltd. The new owners were railway entrepreneurs who were acquiring businesses to provide traffic for the CNoR, even then under construction in the interior of British Columbia and racing to beat the GTP to become Canada’s second transcontinental railway. The acquisition of coal mines also ensured a constant supply of indispensible fuel for the railway.
When Canadian Collieries in Cumberland threatened Chinese, Japanese and Italian miners with deportation if they continued to strike, the Chinese and Japanese went back to work, but most of the residents of the Italian ghetto at the foot of Union Camp left Cumberland for the strikers’ tents on Ruxton Beach and elsewhere.
Italians in Ladysmith and Extension were not unified in their response, however. From the beginning of the strike or sometime during the first year, some of the men with wives and families crossed the picket lines and returned to work. Unlike many Italian workers, they were insiders and had a stake in the community. They were men like Joseph Fontana, who had been in Extension on and off for at least ten years. He had married and started a family during that time. His wife owned one of the grocery stores. He was a good man, according to his son, Mark, “a good worker, a good slave.” He was one of the men who had refused to move to Ladysmith when James Dunsmuir ordered everyone to move out of Extension years before. He had had the guts to testify against Dunsmuir at the Royal Commission into Industrial Disputes in 1903, and he had rescued sixteen men after the 1909 explosion in the Extension mine that killed thirty-two.
But when the strike came along in 1912, Joseph Fontana continued to go to work. Mark was only seven years old, but he remembers how the school had to keep the strikers’ kids separate from the strikebreakers’ kids so that they couldn’t fight in the football field. And when riots tore Extension apart in August of 1913, the Fontana house was one of several Italian homes that were looted and burned in retribution because their owners were strikebreakers.
The riots shouldn’t have come as a surprise that summer. The weather was hot and tempers were short; outsiders in the form of special police recruited from the streets of Vancouver and Victoria were guarding the mine entrances, and strikebreakers were making it possible for the mines to produce again.
People in Extension had seen Joe Angelo, the UMWA’s Italian organizer, pointing out the houses of strikebreakers to two other men on the day before the riots and to a group of thirty or forty strikers early the next morning. As a very old man, Mark Fontana remembered how the strikers had taken axes to the furniture and smashed everything in sight, how they had broken both his father’s legs and given him a cut to the head that required twenty-three stitches and how the feathers from the torn mattresses had stuck to his mother’s jam, which had spilled from hundreds of broken jars. If the army hadn’t come the next morning, he figured his family might have been killed.
Not far away, in Ladysmith, where many Canadian Collieries miners lived, the strike presented another Italian family man with a dilemma of a different kind. Giovanni (John) Giovando had come from Piedmont in 1898 to mine coal, but in recent years he and his wife, Victoria Giachero, had been running a series of hotels. At the time of the strike, the couple owned the Pretoria Hotel and lived on the premises. When the rioting moved to Ladysmith, they had fifty guests staying in the hotel, many of them Italian refugees from the Extension riots. The Giovandos’ eldest son, Lorenzo, was eight years old when the rioters marched on Ladysmith.
And of course my father had nothing to do with the strike, but he . . . knew the [men staying in his hotel]. They came from the same area [in Italy as he did], so he let them stay. When the union men found them, they just beat them up. Blood was flying. It was terrible. It was really cruel and there was wives with them. They were thrown out and beaten up. Fights all the time. Rock throwing.
Lorenzo’s maternal grandmother owned the Europe Hotel. During the year when the militia occupied Ladysmith, Mrs. Giachero would sit in the front window dressed completely in black, as older Italian women did in those days, and fume while soldiers patrolled in front of her hotel. It made her so mad she complained to Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Currie, the officer in command of the militia in Ladysmith. Currie would go on to become a war hero in World War I and be knighted by King George V, but he would always remember Mrs. Giachero and her complaints.
THE MILITIA had set up camps in all the coal towns on Vancouver Island, and the rioters had all been arrested when Attorney General William Bowser signed a contract with the Pinkerton Detective Agency to send an undercover man into Nanaimo to pose as a striker under an assumed name and find out what the union was planning. At first, the state of emergency forbade the bars to sell alcohol to the townspeople, but the Pinkerton was always able to procure whisky. He bought rounds for all comers and took a bottle to every clandestine meeting he attended. He stood watch with the strikers in front of Nanaimo’s biggest mine; he helped them to count strikebreakers coming off work and follow them to their lodgings. And every morning he lounged around Post Office Square, listening and ingratiating himself with the strikers.
When the Pinkerton went to Ladysmith to observe the first trial of the arrested strikers, he found James Dunsmuir’s town to be full of foreigners, people who “displayed traits employed by the ignorant and the savage.” In the Pinkerton’s mind, foreigners were as bad as socialists and all the strikers were socialists. And it seemed as if he was watching especially for Italians: in his notes they appear frequently as strikers and strikebreakers.
On the union side, there were Italians in the crowd of strikers and their sympathizers who stood watch every day in front of Nanaimo’s Number One Mine; there were Italians who were policing other strikers and a “smart-talking” Italian whom the Pinkerton called Andrew the Socialist; and there was another detective who understood Italian and had infiltrated a group of Italian strikers, hoping to hear them betray themselves.
In particular, the union had Angelo Cormons and Giovanni (John) Cuffolo on the scene. The two men from Platischis had been in Nanaimo since 1906; by 1911 both had married women from Platischis too. These men had a stake in the community and the union and they were tough customers. Both were tall, but Angelo was wide, too, and had a legendary past as a smuggler along the Italian border with Austria; he had escaped police custody during a snowstorm. In 1913, the union sent the two men to Extension as enforcers. John did the talking and Angelo did the enforcing. Angelo’s grandson describes an encounter that has become part of family lore: “There was this little Italian fellow who was a yappy little guy and [Angelo] picked him up and pinned him against the wall and he says, ‘You want to stay there for the rest of your life? If you do, go to work tomorrow.’”
The “little fellow” was one of many Italian strikebreakers. The Pinkerton followed three of them to their Nicol Street boarding house after work. He reported on the trial of two who had been charged with stabbing a union man named Hatfield, who turned out to have started the trouble in the first place. He watched as more strikebreakers arrived by boat every day. He could see them on the streets and in the saloons and stores and, according to him, they were “generally of the Italian and Austrian or Bulgarian type and [spoke] little or no English.”
Italians appeared so often in the Pinkerton’s notes that it looked as if he was using the word Italian in the same way James Dunsmuir had used it in 1877: to mean all strikebreakers, no matter what nationality. And despite the presence of soldiers and special policemen, it was starting to get more dangerous for the strikebreakers. As a striker told the detective,
When it came to a case of white men being dispossessed of their jobs by a lot of Italians and Russians such as are now in Number One mine, it devolves upon the former to blow up a few of the latter to show them that they have taken the wrong jobs this time.
Whether or not threats such as this were believable, strikebreakers were beginning to leave Nanaimo as the calendar moved toward Christmas. Twenty Italians left for Vancouver after quitting their jobs in Number One. When a judge acquitted two Italians who had been arrested for speaking their own language and laughing at a joke, he advised them to get out of town and find railway work in Alberni.
On Christmas Eve, the courts released on bail all strikers who were still in jail awaiting trial except for two Italians who were described as not being residents of British Columbia. One of them was almost certainly Joe Angelo. When Angelo went on trial in New Westminster with the men from Extension, the Pinkerton wrote, “Because he is Italian and not a citizen of this country . . . authorities will give it to him good and plenty.” When the judge found Angelo guilty, one striker said he deserved what he got. No expressions of sympathy were heard on the streets from either side.
The Big Strike fizzled out in the summer of 1914 when the UMWA withdrew strike pay and World War I called the soldiers away. The mines blackballed the strikers, and the strikebreakers who were outsiders went back to Vancouver. The names of the men, Italian or not, who crossed picket lines manned by their neighbours would be remembered on Vancouver Island for generations to come.
IN THE years leading up to World War I, Vancouver had become the largest urban centre in British Columbia. It was a city that had known prosperity and poverty, a city where the growing number of Chinese, blacks and Italians threatened the Canadian, British and American majority.
In 1911, that majority, whether affluent or working-class, had represented 85 percent of the population of Vancouver, but the number of Italians had grown. One year earlier there had been only 1,500, mostly from Calabria and Veneto, out of a population of 100,000. But in 1911 there were five to six thousand, mostly men, including sojourners, some of them in transit—headed for a railway gang up the coast or in the interior of the province, or a coal mine on Vancouver Island—some of them looking for unskilled work in the city. They crammed the boarding houses and hotels in and around Little Italy, they stood on every street corner from False Creek to Coal Harbour, they crowded the sidewalks in front of places of business, and—even more than the Chinese, whom they outnumbered—they were deemed a threat to Vancouver’s “British character.”
And Italians were also a threat because they knew how to work hard. Worse still, unlike the Chinese who took jobs no white men wanted, Italians competed with Anglo-Saxon workers for unskilled jobs. They excelled “as shovellers on the top of the Earth” and “diggers and muckers” beneath it. Their ability to outwork Anglo-Saxons, their frugal ways and their lack of interest in becoming settled citizens did nothing to reconcile Vancouver’s citizens to them.
The hostility endured by Italians and other itinerant workers, the so-called “floating population,” became more fierce when the mayor of Vancouver took on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1912. Since 1905 the Wobblies, as they were called, had been organizing the unorganizable—the unskilled, the itinerant, the blanket stiffs and navvies, the “bohunks” and “wops”—into a great industrial union. Because of the kind of men the Wobblies represented and because they favoured direct action in the streets, governments at all levels were determined to crush them.
In the first weeks of 1912, the rain-soaked streets of the Downtown Eastside became a battleground. History has labelled it the Free Speech Strike, that time when out-of-work men marched along Carrall Street and gathered on the corners at Powell and Cordova to listen to IWW speakers. The time when the mayor and council banned outdoor meetings and sent soldiers in plainclothes and policemen on horseback and on foot to beat demonstrators and arrest them for vagrancy and for standing on the street in groups. The time when more Wobbly reinforcements snuck across the American border on mountain trails and marched into the city and when they hollered from the decks of boats at crowds gathered in Stanley Park. By spring the city bowed to the inevitable and rescinded the ban on outdoor meetings, and Wobblies were speaking on the streets of Vancouver without harassment.
By this time the IWW was leading a strike against the CNoR on its Fraser River grade, part of the new transcontinental railway Mackenzie and Mann was building to compete with the CPR. The CNoR was building parallel to the CPR through the Fraser Valley, up the Fraser Canyon and on to Kamloops, and it was on that section of the grade that the strikers brought work to a halt. Most of the seven thousand strikers were “foreigners”; most of the strikebreakers were Italian.
It was essential that the IWW run a peaceful and orderly strike, but a combination of factors—federal and provincial government opposition, angry editorials in newspapers, a large contingent of Pinkerton detectives working undercover within the union and also guarding the Italian strikebreakers, health inspectors intent on closing down the strikers’ camps and police raids that resulted in large-scale arrests—shut the IWW down on the CNoR grade.
But the Wobblies hadn’t finished with railways in British Columbia yet. That same summer of 1912 the union cast its eye northward to the Skeena River, where conditions in the GTP camps were terrible and navvies were trapped by the lack of non-company transportation back to Prince Rupert. Once again, the presence of Italians in the strikebound camps is noteworthy. When the GTP president toured the line in August of 1912, conducting his inspection from the rear platform of his private railway car, he praised those still on the job, “especially Italian labourers.” The official journal of the British Columbia Federation of Labour, the British Columbia Federationist, accused the GTP of resorting to the “American system of importing ‘dagos’ as next best to Asiatics.”
As it had for the CNoR strike, the Canadian government had once again ignored its own immigration regulations and allowed southern Europeans into the country, this time at the request of Foley, Welch and Stewart. They had come in response to ads in newspapers in New York, Omaha and St. Louis, their travel costs from Boston and Montreal paid by the GTP. The strikebreakers landed on the docks at Prince Rupert, where manherders insulated them from the strikers. Once again the IWW called off the strike. And the railways—the GTP in 1914 and the CNoR in 1915—were finally completed.
The Wobblies may have been courting Italians and the UMWA tolerating them, but the B.C. Federation of Labour was not. According to the Federationist, which lumped all the Italian transients together, “The rough ways of Italian labourers clashed dramatically with those of Vancouver’s respectable majority on weekends when, having pooled their savings, they purchased liquor by the barrelful.” Every Saturday night, city police had to respond to a “row among the Italians,” the article went on. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Italians refused to join the Civic Employees’ Union. Vancouver’s middle class “resented the Italians’ willingness to live poorly in order to accumulate cash savings, scoffed at their rough demeanour, and disliked their clannishness.”
AMONG THE Italians who were offending the sensibilities of middle-class Vancouverites were men from Friuli, a region that had exported over fifty thousand of its people worldwide in that one year of 1913. Asked how long they have been emigrating, Friulians will say they have always emigrated. This was especially true of the men who came from the isolated villages of the Carnic Alps that rise abruptly above the Friulian plain between the Dolomites in the west and the Julian Alps in the east. They have been leaving their families in the summer to find work in other parts of Europe since the sixteenth century. The boys of the Carnic Alps grew up with the certainty that as soon as they were strong enough to wield a pick and shovel, they would emigrate too. The people of that isolated area have been victims of geography and circumstance for far longer than people have in any other part of Italy including the Friulian plain.
There are only two passes through the Alps into Friuli: one at Tarvisio in the northeast corner and the other in the southeast corner between Friuli and Slovenia through the valley of the Natisone. Each time a foreign army burst through one of these passes, Friulians fled to where the wheels of the invaders could not go—the marshes on the Adriatic to the south or the mountains to the north. When the foreign armies retreated, as they always did sooner or later, Friulians returned to vacant pastures, empty granaries and a land that could not support them. Eventually, those who had fled to the mountains didn’t bother returning to the plain, choosing instead to look for ways to support themselves in villages that clung to the steep sides of the valleys accessible only along narrow paths through the mountains.
Mountain people could work their whole lives and still not make enough money to survive. They could climb the slopes to where the chestnut trees had grown for as long as humans could remember to gather the glossy brown nuts in the damp and mud of the fall rains. They could climb farther up the slopes to cut beech wood to make into charcoal or carve into kitchen utensils. They could grow hay on the newly cleared slopes. In summer, the women could carry the coke, the chestnuts, the utensils or the hay on their backs in willow baskets down the steep paths to sell to the people of the plains or to trade for cornmeal, but they never had enough money or food. The ritual of men leaving and people struggling continued for centuries. Gradually the men went farther and farther away and the women started to follow, leaving their houses and their elderly behind. When the old people died, the houses stayed empty for decades.
Then, one hundred years ago, a dam that was built on the Torrente Cellina to provide power for Venice produced a turquoise lake next to the town of Barcis. More recently, a four-kilometre-long tunnel made it possible for commuters who worked on the plains to drive from the old villages in twenty minutes. The commuters are reclaiming the houses. Scaffolding blocks the narrow streets and courtyards as workmen restore the ancient stone walls. Newly varnished doors and brightly planted flower boxes send life-enhancing splashes of colour through the formerly deserted villages.
Three centuries after the people of the mountains began to leave home to work elsewhere, the people of the plains became part of the exodus, one that “commence[d] modestly, acquire[d] momentum quickly, and proceed[ed] feverishly.” Among the men who left the Friulian plains before World War I was Tobia Castellarin.
There is a photograph of Castellarin that his descendants still have, but he is absent from the group photograph taken in 1914 that shows his wife’s parents, Pasquale and Cristina Tomasin, his wife, Antonia Tomasin, and their six children, who range from a baby to a young teenager. These are people unfamiliar with such expensive fripperies as formal photographs, which immigrant families sat for only to send to a family member who was far away. Pasquale looks resigned, but everyone else looks startled, testimony to their unfamiliarity with a camera and a flash of powder.
The family member for whom the photo was taken had left Italy the previous year, arriving in New York harbour on March 4, 1913, on the French ship La Rochambeau, out of Le Havre. It was not the first time the forty-one-year-old had sailed past the Statue of Liberty and approached the immigration centre on Ellis Island. The elaborate red brick building that resembled a Venetian palace with its four cupola-style towers and its arched first-floor windows was by now familiar to him. He had first landed there in the company of one of his brothers in 1907, the year over one million immigrants came through its doors. Between him and his three brothers, Osia, Isaia and Osvaldo, a member of the Castellarin family had embarked on Ellis Island seven times in the previous six years. Men like Castellarin and his brothers could read and write, but had little formal education. They spoke Friulian and a very crude form of Italian, but no English. Tobia’s grandson describes them as “conditioned to regard their landlords with the reverence given to those who appeared so immeasurably above them.” Their goal in emigrating was “to raise their miserable extended family back home a notch from its poverty.”
Unlike some other sojourners, Castellarin was a faithful letter writer, but he did not tell his family where he was and what he was doing. Instead, he filled his correspondence with his concerns for and advice to Antonia and his children. By October 1913 he was in Vancouver, which just the year before had been the scene of the Free Speech Strike and where the middle class and the B.C. Federation of Labour had expressed their distaste for Italians.
The letter he wrote to Antonia that month included a response to some concern she had about his brother, Osvaldo, to which he replied,
I know everything. Don’t worry about anything; let them say what they want; it doesn’t matter; don’t meddle in anything; hold your peace and quiet and don’t hold any hard feelings with anybody.
Then he went on to reassure her, “Look after the children and if you need anything, write me in time and I will not fail to help you and Mother too,” and closed by writing,
I have nothing more to add than to urge you to pray [to] the Lord and have the children pray for us so that He gives us a little bit of luck. I say goodbye to you with all my heart signing myself your brother husband, Tobia Castellarin.
Whatever the nature of his mistake, Osvaldo was not the first of Tobia’s brothers to have caused the family transatlantic concern. Osia had gone to Powell River in 1910 to work on the construction gang building the pulp and paper mill. When he lost his foot in an accident and was unable to work, he returned to Italy, but not before he agreed to Tobia’s request that he be his banker, receive the money he sent home, dole it out to Antonia and put some of it aside for the family to buy land when Tobia came home. That Tobia asked his brother to do this when Antonia had been looking after the family affairs in his absence, feeding and raising the children and providing for her parents, is a reflection of his lack of understanding of the role she and other women like her had assumed in Italy when their husbands were absent.
Osia had gone home, but despite the fact that the world was gearing up for a war in Europe, Tobia had stayed in British Columbia. By 1914, with war rumours mounting, Vancouver was flooded with laid-off workers, but because non-residents were not eligible for relief, many immigrants were returning to Europe, and as soon as Britain declared war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in August of that year, Italian military reservists went home too.
In that same month, as Italy gathered in its citizens from abroad, it closed the borders to her citizens at home. King Vittorio Emanuele III issued a decree on August 6, 1914, that stopped emigration of men of military age and any relatives wishing to join family outside the country by restricting the use of their passports.
In the complicated dance of pre-war European politics, Italy had been allied with the Central Powers, Germany and Austria, but the sympathies of most Italians were with the Allies, Britain, France and Russia. If the Allies won the war, Italy stood a better chance of regaining territories in the Trentino and in the Julian Alps extending as far south as Trieste and Istria. It already regarded these territories as Italian even though Longobards and other Germanic armies up to and including Austria’s had occupied them on several occasions over the centuries.
It took until May 1915 for Italy to decide that the Allies would be most likely to fulfill its territorial ambitions. During the ten months of Italian neutrality, however, Italian sojourners were even more unpopular in Canada, where troops were already on their way to Europe. The sojourners knew they risked being interned should Italy choose to join the Central Powers. The Canadian government, eager to fulfill its obligations as the senior colony of the British Empire, had passed amendments to the War Measures Act that labelled sojourners from countries at war with Britain as enemy aliens. Eighty-five hundred men, mostly Ukrainians, were already on their way to internment camps.
But there were advantages to waiting out the war in Vancouver. The number of available jobs increased manyfold as Canadians joined the army, enemy aliens were interned and other Europeans returned home to fight for their various countries. And though there were Italians who enlisted in the Canadian armed forces, there were others like Tobia Castellarin and his friend Osvaldo Fabris who decided to stay where they were. For them, there was now a choice of jobs.