When the hut was completed, father left us and went to work on the construction of the railroad at Sifton, Manitoba, 18 miles from home. He had to do so because we needed some money with which to start farming. We were the only settlers in the western part of the settlement. Later, however, other immigrants settled west of us, picking out the better areas. Because the immigrants had no forests in the Old Country and owned no more than five or six acres of land, they felt that it was a good farm if only because it contained plenty of bush. They believed that all they needed were ten or fifteen acres of good soil along the creek and it didn’t matter if the rest of the land was swampy or stoney.
Illustration: A man walking a trail toward a railroad.Archival photograph
Children at a Ukrainian homestead, Athabasca, Alberta, 1920, in front of a thatched house. Provincial Archives of Alberta, A10015. Archival photograph, not the Hryhorczuk family. No known copyright restrictions.
Source
Illustrated online edition. The memoir text follows the 2011 copy compiled by Rene Nicholas Bilodeau.
