Oldal 109 [109]
OCR
“THE NEw MECCA OF IMMIGRANTS”... to recruit settlers both from Europe and the United States. To continue the arrival of a large number of settlers, improvements in conditions were needed, primarily in terms of travel opportunities. The above-mentioned railway brought about such improvement, and the railway companies continued to play a central role in the settlement of the western provinces with immigrants. Yet, despite such developments and the activities of the agents described below, no large-scale settlement took place, in part due to an economic crisis between 1873 and 1896 and the fact that Canada could not compete successfully with the United States.” This was also the context for the arrival of the first Hungarian settlers. Hungarian “migration to Canada began as an off-shoot of mass migration to the United States”, as previously noted, with the first settlers to the Canadian west arriving from Pennsylvania.” Paul Esterházy, employed by the Canadian government, played a key role in bringing the first settlers to the region (see his activities below). Ihe first colony, Huns Valley was established in Manitoba in 1885, however, it proved to be short lived. Eszterház, established in 1886, was more successful with its status consolidated by the turn of the century and was followed by several other Hungarian settlements (including Otthon and Bekevär). By this time, new settlers had come directly from the native country.”* In his study, Martin Louis Kovacs even refers to this area prior to 1914 as “little Hungary.”” By the time of World War I there were half a dozen Hungarian colonies in Western Canada, the majority of which were in Saskatchewan, and Hungarians had also settled in ethnically mixed areas." It is difficult to say (due to the lack of accurate census data) how many Hungarians lived in Canada when the Great War started and immigration stopped, but the 1920 census gives us an idea of the size of this group: according to the documents, there were 13,181 Hungarians in Canada, most of whom were rural inhabitants in the prairie provinces.”” More than twice this many people arrived in just 5 years in the 1920s. Between 1896 and 1914, 3 million people settled in Canada and between 1901 and 1911 the population increased by 43 percent. Such a transformation did not happen without conflicts and this affected Hungarians as well. With the increasing number of immigrants arriving in the country, voices emphasizing the need for stricter immigration control became stronger, Knowles, Strangers at Our Gates, 82. Patrias, Hungarians in Canada, 4-5. Nandor Dreisziger, Rose-Gardens on Ice-Floes: A Century of the Hungarian Diaspora in Canada, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2000), 239-258, 241. Dreisziger, Struggle and Hope, 61. Patrias, Hungarians in Canada, 6. 27 Ibid. 6. This paragraph is based on Knowles, Strangers at Our Gates, 107-124. * 107 +
