Editorial

A life, by his dates

Only dates and events stated in the memoir, plus two notes marked as such: the birth year given in the brief for this edition, and the family relationship named there. Nothing here is part of the memoir text.

  1. Born in Galicia. Edition note The memoir does not give a birth date. It says he turned seventeen in December, and he was seventeen at the wedding on 22 February 1905, which puts that birthday in December 1887. This edition’s brief gives the year as about 1888.
  2. Easter departure from Euchachky, in the county of Kolomaya. He was nine. The party was his father John, his mother, himself, George (7), Mary (4), and Dora (1). They stopped in Hamburg, landed at Halifax after about ten days, and went on by train to Dauphin, where the railroad ended. A wagon, then two miles on foot, to a clearing by Drifting River. The first house was a log hut roofed with bark, without windows or doors.
  3. Father went to railroad work at Sifton, eighteen miles away, at $1.50 a day, and walked home.
  4. The second house: hewed logs, a sod roof, an open clay fireplace, two windows, and a door. He reckoned the cash cost at $1.95.
  5. Two bull calves, which grew into the oxen. The $10.00 they had on arrival had paid for the homestead. Mr. Childs broke two acres for $6.00.
  6. Drifting River school opened, five miles southeast, in an English-speaking community. Mr. Maksymetz bought a yoke of oxen and carried mail and supplies from Dauphin.
  7. The settlers looked for their own teacher. Charles Heath taught in Mr. Slyziuk’s house for $30.00 a month. That spring they finished the log Kolomaya School, roofed with split shingles.
  8. Wasyl Zaporzan, a Ukrainian teacher, at $35.00 a month, with a tiny store on the side. In the winter, aged fifteen, the hunting accident; the left arm was amputated below the elbow at the Dauphin hospital. He left school and went to work for an implement dealer in Gilbert Plains at $15.00 a month.
  9. Married Anastasia Dzaman at Gilbert Plains. The team cost $2.00. The orchestra — violin, dulcimer, and drum — cost $3.00. He had turned seventeen in December; she was fifteen.
  10. The youth club “Seech,” with yellow and blue ribbons. He glosses Seech as the equivalent of the Boy Scouts.
  11. A small church, still without a resident priest. The Presbyterian minister Reverend Berezowsky served the community and the Seech.
  12. His father gave him eighty acres. Six farmers bought a threshing outfit: portable steamer, wooden 22-inch separator, hand feed, straw carrier, low bagger. He ran it. A wet harvest; nine hundred bushels of wheat sold at seventeen cents, after seven cents for threshing.
  13. The Venlaw players took “Ubynyk” (which he glosses as Killer) to Ethelbert, twenty miles, and hung coloured blankets for walls. Admission twenty-five cents. In the spring the family moved to Ethelbert. Michael and William were already born. That summer, the Taras Shevchenko society, Alex Magis chairman, and a hall.
  14. On Portage Avenue in Winnipeg he bought a Ford for $275.00, cash, with no receipt. It was the first automobile in Ethelbert.
  15. Elected reeve of the Ethelbert municipality, during the First World War. He left the road work for International Harvester and sold the car to John Kowcun.
  16. A policeman of Polish descent was appointed for Ethelbert by the provincial government. The memoir tells of chickens taken for the right to water oxen in Ethelbert Creek, and of official school trustees in neighbouring municipalities.
  17. The constituency of Gilbert Plains was divided and the constituency of Ethelbert created.
  18. Elected MLA as an Independent Farmer: sixteen hundred votes, Mr. Markoff eight hundred and twenty, Mr. Gniazdowski of Sifton one hundred. He names a minority Morris government, and the Free Press line about “two Galicians.” Yakimschak was elected in Emerson.
  19. The government was defeated. The Independent Farmers formed the new government with John Bracken as Premier. Nicholas was re-elected by acclamation. Bachynsky joined the group.
  20. One term lost to a Social Credit candidate, in the depression. The memoir does not give the year of that election.
  21. MLA except for that one term. In the last term, Deputy Speaker and Chairman of the Transportation and Telephones Committee. He says the twenty years were under the leadership of John Bracken and Douglas Campbell.
  22. Introduction by his grandson, Rene Nicholas Bilodeau. Edition note Nicholas is Michael Wood’s great-grandfather.

Illustrated online edition. The memoir text follows the 2011 copy compiled by Rene Nicholas Bilodeau.