Jonas Gidlof is a particularly compelling character that arrived in Silverhill, solely due to his background in Sweden. Jonas Gidlof was an agitator in Sweden’s big strike in 1909. As a result of being an agitator, he was blacklisted from working in Sweden. He and some friends Siver Lowe and Henning Green took an old cattle boat called the Lake Manitoba to Halifax then railway to Vancouver. Silver’s wallet was stolen sometime while on the train, so he was kicked off somewhere in the Prairies. He found a farmhouse housing a French-speaking family. Despite the language barrier, he was able to use their telegraph machine to alert his friends in Vancouver what had happened. They sent him the funds to allow him to get two Vancouver. Jonas Gidlof and his friends chose Vancouver to die to the railroad work that was available here. Jonas and Henning did get a railway job; they had to walk from Nanaimo to Alberi to get it.
He made enough money to pay for his wife and children to come to Canada their journey also had some speedbumps along with country About 200 yards from crossing the Columbia river their train derailed! The car carrying Gidlof’s family was dangling off the tracks and over the river bank. They were picked up by another train and made it safely to Vancouver.
I bring up Jonas’s story because it is interesting to me that he was blacklisted in Sweden but able to work in Canada. Canada herself would not bar him from working, but one would think that being blacklisted in Sweden would make him unhirable in British Columbia. This is probably merely a case of poor file keeping, without computers details about someone can easily be lost. This also shows that anyone can come to Canada and succeed