A Scandinavian Heritage. Joan Magee
at least fifty Emigrants had been placed in each car.
On Monday, 3 July nine of the Norwegians died and were buried immediately. Others became ill. For about 11 days the cholera continued to spread among the emigrants. The station master later estimated that of those who arrived on the train on 2 July at least 57 adults died as well as a number of children.
At the inquest the Reeve of Windsor, Samuel McDonell, gave evidence of the treatment of the sick immigrants by the villagers of Windsor. An excerpt from his evidence follows:
As chairman of the Board of Health, I had several communications with different officers of the Great Western Railway Company, on the subject of providing for the sick and the burial of the dead; and it was arranged between Mr. David D. Chapman, on behalf of the Company, and the Board of Health, that the Board of Health should be allowed to use a storehouse of the Company, at Moy, about a mile north of Windsor on the Detroit River, as a Cholera Hospital, until the 11th of August last, and the Company were to defray the expense of providing coffins for the burial of the emigrants who might die from cholera, and that all emigrants should be left at Moy, and transported across the river from that point to Detroit. These arrangements were adhered to by the Company until the 11th of August last, when they ceased, and the Company refused to bury the dead or to renew these arrangements at all. The expense occasioned to the Municipality of Windsor by the necessity imposed upon it of providing for those afflicted with cholera was £125, besides private subscriptions and gratuitous services rendered by the humane of the village.13
At the inquest the station master spoke of the difficulty he had in handling the situation, an overwhelming one for a village with only 750 inhabitants, one doctor, and no hospital facilities. He said:
I was among the cholera patients night and day during the continuance of the malady, and had frequently to superintend the burial of the dead; the men under me refusing to perform the service without my sharing in the danger. I received great assistance from Dr. Alfred K. Dewson, of Windsor, Doctor Hewitt, of Detroit, and several other medical men from Detroit, who volunteered their professional services. And Mr. Isaac Askew, of Windsor, was most indefatigable in his attention to the sick, being constantly with them night and day, and rendered them every assistance he possibly could — having been unable, from his unremitting attention, to take off his clothes from the Monday to the Thursday after the cholera first broke out — and he still continued his exertions until the cholera disappeared. Mr. John McEwen also aided us until he himself was taken ill with the cholera; Mrs. McEwen also paid great attention to the females who were attacked by the disease, and behaved in an exceedingly humane and courageous manner. J.W. Blackadder also rendered us very material assistance, and some few others aided us in a lesser degree but there was a general panic, and it was impossible to get nurses and nearly so to find persons to bury the dead.
In August the epidemic gradually came to a halt, but it was not soon forgotten. It was decided to hold an inquest to consider the role which the Great Western Railway had played in the deaths of so many emigrants. On 25-28 November 1854 the inquest was held in London, Ontario, with evidence on oath from the witnesses quoted above as well as that of several others. There was no doubt that Dr. Alfred Dewson believed that the Great Western was at fault. He said:
They might have landed from shipboard with the disease lurking about them, as Emigrant ships are often very dirty. The car in which the death took place was not the usual car for the accommodation of passengers, it was a freight car. The Emigrants were not physically so strong as the usual class of Emigrants; they were particularly dirty and filthy in their habits and persons. It would be imprudent to put such a class of people in great numbers in a car.
The new Chairman of the Board of Health of Windsor who had meantime replaced Samuel McDonell in this position, read a letter at the inquest in which he protested, on behalf of the people of Windsor:
. . . against the reckless conduct shewn by the employees, of the Company, at Hamilton, in cooping up within close freight cars at this hot season of the year emigrants lately landed from shipboard. From the verdict of the Jurors on the Coroner’s Inquest, held on the bodies of some of these poor unfortunates (with which we believe you have already been furnished), you will perceive that blame is attached to the Company through their employees for forwarding them to this point in such ill-ventilated cars, and we will venture to say scarcely adapted for the conveyance of cattle, much less of human beings.
In fact all the employees here did their duty on the trying occasion faithfully and well, but if these scenes are to be repeated as it is even now whispered that there are more emigrants on their way to the West, we don’t know how diseased they may be, we venture to say that their patience will be completely exhausted, as even now difficulty being found in procuring men to put the bodies of these victims of cholera into their coffins and graves.14
The final report of the inquest stated that:
The jury further add, that they are of opinion that though the deceased emigrants might have been affected with cholera before they arrived at Hamilton, yet their deaths were accelerated by the manner in which they were conveyed by the Great Western Railway Company, being placed in unventilated cars in too great numbers, and without sufficient comforts for this season of the year, and, also, from detention on the way from Hamilton to Windsor.15
Seemingly these deplorable conditions on the Canadian railroads were scarcely noted in the newspapers of the day. For example, the cholera deaths at Windsor were not reported in the Detroit, Chatham, or London newspapers nor seemingly in any other paper in Canada or Norway other than one Montreal newspaper which noted the incident briefly, copying the report from a Sarnia paper which is no longer extant.
In Windsor, where so many Norwegian immigrants died, their names unknown, the passage of time blurred the details of the tragedy. Soon it was remembered as the occasion on which certain “German cholera victims” were given relief by a number of heroic Windsor citizens who nursed them at great personal risk. One of them, Mrs. Margaret McEwen, was later awarded a gold watch by the Great Western Railway for her humanitarian work in nursing the sick “Germans,” and in adopting two children who were orphaned and left behind in Windsor. The burial of the Norwegians took place quickly without benefit of clergy, and their resting place is unknown. Presumably it was on railway property at Moy.
The “whisper” about more Norwegian emigrants being on the way was quite accurate for in 1854 some 5,663 arrived in Quebec, and many of these people travelled through to Detroit by way of Windsor. Cholera continued to rage for three months, the epidemic continuing until September 1854 and killing nearly 3,600 victims in Canada that year. No doubt there were other Norwegian victims who were not able to pass the strict medical examination by Detroit medical officers which preceded their entry into the United States. It may be seen that some of the travellers who left their villages along the Sognefjord in the 1850s, never to be heard from again, met a tragic fate in Canada, dying in transit of disease or by accident. It was indeed a perilous journey.
Sadie Sinclair looking at an old photograph of her parents and herself, then a baby, taken about 1905. Both her father, John Sinclair, and her mother, Margaret Ann Sinclair (née Sinclair), were born in the Shetland Island. They both belonged to a large branch of the family, the Sinclairs or St. Clairs of Houss, descended from Einar the Earl, brother of Rolf, and their warlike predecessors, the ancient Scandinavian Jarls of Orkney. The Orkney and Shetland Islands passed from Norway to Scotland in 1469, but the people of the islands continued to speak the Norse language for centuries. It was last spoken as a living language about the end of the eighteenth century, yet its influence remains in the speech of the islanders. Sadie Sinclair prizes her copy of the book Lowrie, Being a Humorous Account in the Dialect of Incidents in the Life of a Shetland Crofter, by Joseph Gray. John Sinclair emigrated to Canada in 1922. In 1923 Sadie Sinclair emigrated, living first in London, Ontario, then moving in 1928 to Windsor. In both cities she was employed in business, working for the London Life Insurance Company for over 40 years.
3
The Norwegians