From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Croats/Anthony W. Rasporich
The first group of Croats in Canada were made up mostly of male adventurers, who called themselves Kolumbusari, after Christopher Columbus. Much like the Italian peasants, or contadini, and the Chinese bachelors in search of their “mountain of gold,” most of these Croatian Amerikanci travelled in search of fortune, adventure, refuge from military service, and a better life. Whether explorers, loggers, fishermen, or miners, they were “men without women,” sojourners who intended to make their fortunes and return eventually home.
Early encounters with Canada were few and brief – most often along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Croatian sailors and explorers accompanied a few of the early expeditions, though perhaps identified as Venetians, Austrians, Germans, Hungarians, Slavs, Slavonians, or Dalmatians. Croats may have accompanied the late-fifteenth-century voyages of the Venetians John and Sebastian Cabot and the sixteenth-century expedition of the Florentine Verrazano. Nedo Pavešković identified two Dalmatian sailors, Malogrudici and Masalarda, among the crew of the third expedition of Cartier and Roberval in 1541–42 – a claim not verified to date. Samuel de Champlain’s diary of 1605–6 notes a “miner who was with us, named Master Jaques, a native of Slavonia, a man well versed in the search for minerals.” The man died the following winter of scurvy on St Croix Island, after making the first mineral assessment of the region.
For centuries sailors and fishermen plied their trade in the Adriatic Sea, then in the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and finally in the Pacific by the end of the eighteenth. Evidence has been offered of Croatian sailors participating in the exploration of Canada’s west coast in the 1790s and in the nascent salmon fisheries of the early nineteenth century. As the population of Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia expanded to about 25,000 in the wake of California’s gold rush of 1849, several Croats went to the gold diggings of the Cariboo rush but also became restaurateurs, innkeepers, fishermen, and general labourers. After the mining boom collapsed in the late 1860s, only a few fishermen, miners, and merchants remained.
It was a core of remaining fishermen that probably attracted other fishermen from Istria (Lošinj) on the northern Adriatic to Port Guichon, later renamed Ladner, in the Fraser estuary, which was established by families with such names as Bussanich, Cosulich, Vicevich, and Vidulich. Gradually wives and children were brought over in the 1890s, and the first permanent Croatian settlement in Canada began. Participation in the Anglo-Canadian parish church of the Sacred Heart began the process of assimilation, as did activities in the Fraser River Fishermen’s Union prior to 1914.
The Yukon rush of 1898 attracted its small share of Croatian miners, restaurateurs, and labourers, only a handful of whom remained after the boom died in 1902. More established settlement was beginning at Nanaimo and Wellington, which had been active in coal mining since the late 1860s and had employed a few residual miners from the Cariboo period.
In the boom period 1900–12 “bunkhouse men” of eastern European and Slavic origins – some 6,000 to 10,000 in number – risked life and limb in railway construction, mining, logging, and agricultural labour across western Canada, moving freely as well eastward or to the United States. While their days were filled with hazard, accidents, and strike actions, they were still far less vulnerable than they would have been as conscripts in the Austro-Hungarian army during the Balkan troubles after 1910.
Permanent rural settlements of Croats emerged along this complex of east-west and north-south axes. One, at Duck Lake in northern Saskatchewan, seems to have been formed from refugees of the Calumet copper region of northern Michigan. Agricultural settlement in the Kenaston-Hanley-Davidson axis south of Saskatoon involved an extended chain of familial connections linking Lovinac in Croatia with Kansas and Oklahoma and finally with Saskatchewan. Further east, settlements in the Niagara peninsula at Thorold, Welland, and Port Colborne were closely tied to Pennsylvania’s Croatian communities, as evidenced in the establishment of the Pittsburgh-based Croatian Fraternal Union in 1909.
The patchwork of thirty small communities spread from Ontario to British Columbia evolved in the 1920s into a more evenly distributed series of some two hundred, spread from Stellarton, Nova Scotia, to Ladysmith on Vancouver Island. During the 1920s some 15,000 Croats entered Canada, of the total 28,000 who came here from Yugoslavia. After 1924 restrictive U.S. immigration quotas forced Croats bound for the United States to Canada. A preponderantly masculine population of emigrants gave way to a mix, which included as many as 40 percent women.
The return rate for emigrants from Croatia was high – about 4 or 5 percent from the United States and 20 to 25 percent from Canada. Many of the sojourners sought still to earn money to send home. Croats in many countries provided about two-thirds of the total remittances to Yugoslavia between the wars – some $160 million.
For the majority of the 12,000 Croats who remained by 1931, Canada had become a permanent home. Male sojourners, some 4,000–5,000 strong, became increasingly radicalized by chronic unemployment in the 1930s. The others were settling into small communities across Canada’s resource frontier. Many in this interwar generation were literate and had at least a primary-school education. About one-third – or 5,000 of a community of 15,000 in 1941 – had been born in Canada. Day-labourers drifted about in work gangs in search of construction projects and seasonal work in the mines and lumber industry. Such a quest could take them from coast to coast. These itinerant workers were threatened by deportation, either because they were public charges or because they had come under the influence of the Communist Party. As a result, they proved largely immune to institutional life.
In 1939 the Croatian community was fragmented geographically, economically, and politically. There were bitter contests for control of cultural institutions, such as the one that closed the Croatian Home in Vancouver in 1940. Yet the war united this community against resurgent fascism in Europe and increasing repression in Yugoslavia.
Croatian immigration from 1945 to 1990 was different in both nature and degree from previous waves. The new immigrants were generally better educated and more urbanized and included displaced professionals from the post-war refugee camps in Austria and Italy, that is, people who supported the losing side in the conflict that ravaged wartime Yugoslavia. This group formed the basis of a small intelligentsia that fostered ethnic self-consciousness and institutional complexity. This trend paralleled similar drives among second- and third-generation Croatian Canadians towards higher education and among foreign- and native-born to migrate to larger urban centres.
By the 1960s the new wave had swamped earlier Croat immigrants and their descendants; the ratio was almost 3 to 1 in 1961. About 1,500 Yugoslavs entered Canada in 1944, and the annual rate of immigration remained at about that level until 1956. In 1956, 5,300 people entered from Yugoslavia, and in the first nine months of 1957, 10,000. Almost all of the immigrants of the 1941–51 period were refugees; of the 42,000 immigrants who arrived in 1951–61, approximately 8,000 were refugees.
In the years 1945–51 about 250,000 refugees left Croatia, and about 10,000 of them entered Canada. At the same time 2,000 returned to Croatia, many of them eager to participate in the socialist construction of Tito’s new Communist state. However, about a quarter to a third of these would return to Canada by the early 1950s, often bitterly disillusioned. Refugees from Croatia to Canada were labelled “displaced persons” and endured, even as professionals, harsh physical labour at low wages as bushworkers, miners, and railway gang labour, much in the tradition of their pre-war brethren. Needless to say, the political and social fragmentation accelerated in this small but vital community.
Many of the new immigrants acquired citizenship and purchased homes in the boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Their larger numbers, along with federal and provincial grants, allowed them to set up churches, literary and cultural societies, language schools, musical ensembles, sporting clubs, and political organizations. Croats established seventeen churches across the twenty-two major urban communities in Canada by 1978, and five more in the 1980s.
Croat communities range in size from Toronto’s 19,000, through second-tier urban centres (Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Montreal, Vancouver, and Windsor) with 5,000 to 10,000, to cities and towns on resource frontiers (Nanaimo, Rouyn-Noranda, Sault Ste Marie, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, and Timmins) with 700 to 2,000 members and generally declining, since their core group was the second wave of migration.
The Croatian communities in the Toronto area tended to be segregated residentially by income and region of origin in several concentrations: the downtown Bathurst, Bloor, and Spadina area; St Clair and Weston Road in High Park; and the suburbs of Etobicoke, Mississauga, Rexdale, and Oakville. In Hamilton, similar concentrations emerged near the steel mills, along the brow of Hamilton Mountain, plus a suburban dispersal towards Dundas and Stoney Creek. Dispersion is also visible in the older industrial cities of Sault Ste Marie, Sudbury, and Thunder Bay, where the Croats moved from the inner city, close to work, to the suburbs. Even where diffuse pockets of settlement had persisted in Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, and Winnipeg, the suburbs had a strong attraction.
Clubs, halls, associations, churches, and language schools proliferated with expansion of the population. Given a more literate and skilled population, particularly in southern Ontario, leadership was now more readily available.
