Both John and Thomas were grimly aware that wrenching a desirable “estate” from the dense backwoods was a monumental task. Thomas’s spirits sagged as he stared out at his rotting stumps and realized how quickly his capital was disappearing. But he tried not to worry Catharine, who wrote home, “My husband is become more reconciled to the country, and I daily feel my attachment to it strengthening.” John was too much of an optimist to be anything other than sanguine about the future, and Susanna described this period as “the halcyon days of the bush.”
The demands on both men and women in the bush were endless: there were always crops to harvest, maple sap to boil for syrup and sugar, apples to dry, fruit to bottle, fences to build or mend, potatoes to plant, candles to make. But even in the busiest season, Catharine found time to pull a crudely made wooden chair up to the scrubbed pine kitchen table and write in her journal or begin a letter home. Her account of their “Robinson Crusoe sort of life” filled pages and pages of precious vellum paper with her neat, sloping script. She was a compulsive scribbler who wrote the way she talked—in a warm, happy gush. Nothing deterred her from her prolixity. “Brevity in epistolary correspondence is not one of my excellences,” she sheepishly admitted.
She wrote about the shortage of basic supplies such as tea and milk, and the dire state of the roads. She described how her clothes crackled with static electricity during a January cold snap, and how she had developed a taste for maple sugar in her tea. She enthused about Sam’s skill at spearing fish in the lake, and the elegance of Indian quillwork. In her eyes, snow always twinkled like diamonds; a flock of snow buntings sparkled like “stars of silver,” even the bonfires of brushwood were “a magnificent sight.” She wrote about “bright sunbeams and blue cloudless sky”; pretty ducks “skimming along the … pine-fringed shores”; honeysuckle, St.-John’s-wort and the magnificent water-lily, which “in all its virgin beauty expands its snowy bosom to the sun and genial air.” She asked her family to send her some seeds from the primroses and violets that grew around Reydon Hall, so that she might introduce them into the backwoods.
Catharine could make the best of anything. Even the ugly, immovable stumps, which marched over the Traills’ newly cleared property like an army of angry dwarves, acquired their own flattering metaphor. In her letter to England, Catharine described how in winter each stump sported its “turban of snow.”
At one level, Catharine’s enthusiasm was genuine. She had never been as fond of metropolitan life as her sisters Eliza, Agnes and Susanna and had always preferred to watch the seasons gently blend into each other in Suffolk. In Upper Canada, she now had the far more dramatic cycle of seasons, and a vast new array of plants, to record.
Similarly, she “never was a votary at the shrine of luxury or fashion,” unlike Agnes and Susanna. She had hated the necessity, when visiting London, of getting dressed up in a full chemise, linen drawers, petticoat-bodice, whalebone corset and six or seven petticoats under a wide-skirted gown. The whole outfit (including bonnet, laced boots, heavy wool shawl and gloves) would have weighed close to twenty pounds, and it made every outing an exhausting challenge. In the backwoods, Catharine simply pulled on enough garments for warmth and respectability before venturing outside. “We do what we like; we dress as we find most suitable and most convenient; we are totally without the fear of any Mr. or Mrs. Grundy; and having shaken off the trammels of Grundyism, we laugh at the absurdity of those who voluntarily forge afresh and hug their chains.”
But there was a bleak self-justification underlying Catharine’s upbeat tone. Catharine knew that her mother and elder sisters would find Upper Canada appallingly primitive, and that they would be disgusted at the lack of regard for social status. She acknowledged that it was “a hard country for the poor gentleman, whose habits have rendered him unfit for manual labour.” She admitted to her mother how women of any class who had left England for Canada were “discontented and unhappy. They miss the little domestic comforts they had been used to enjoy; they regret the friends and relations they left in the old country; and they cannot endure the loneliness of the backwoods.” When her mother implied by return of post that she shared Catharine’s regret at her “exile,” Catharine shot back: “Let the assurance that I am not less happy than when I left my native land console you for my absence.”
There was an additional reason for Catharine’s relentless good cheer. She knew that if she allowed herself to linger on the discomforts of their new life, she would be falling in with Thomas’s pessimism. Catharine was deluding herself when she wrote that her husband was reconciling himself to the new country after the arrival of her legacy. Her husband didn’t have anything like his wife’s get-up-and-go. Thomas’s physical and psychological health were both crumbling. After a couple of years in the colony, his back was bent and his sparse hair iron grey. Wherever he looked, all he could see were more trees to be cut down, more bush to be cleared. He longed to go home. If he had to stay in Upper Canada, he would have preferred to cultivate an orchard and rear sheep. But it would be years before his land was ready for anything less demanding than potatoes, wheat and pigs. He was in his early forties, and feeling his age—but he had nobody with whom to share the workload. So he started to borrow money, digging himself into debt, in order to hire Irish labourers to help clear his land. He worked alongside the men, chopping, clearing the underbrush, making brush heaps, logging, burning the fallow ground, sowing and harrowing his first crop.
Thomas had few psychological resources to protect him from the leaden depressions into which he sank with increasing regularity. He never learned to enjoy the Canadian landscape that his wife had grown so fond of. The quiet pleasures of canoeing, fishing or contemplation of a brilliant sunset had no appeal for him. There was no time for the only pursuit he really enjoyed: reading. Daylight had gone before he dragged himself back to the log house for his dinner each evening. He was far too weary to try reading by the light of a candle or whale oil lamp. Occasionally he managed to set pen to paper and write to the two sons he had left behind in the Orkneys, with his first wife’s father. He suggested, with customary diffidence, that they might join him in Upper Canada. In 1833, Walter Traill was eighteen and John was fourteen—young lads who could have taken much of the labour from his shoulders. But neither boy was in the least interested in becoming an unpaid labourer for his father. Walter had already decided to study medicine, and didn’t even bother to reply to his father’s letters.
A hundred and fifty years ago, nobody understood the bleak reality of chronic depression. Catharine was too compassionate a woman to fix to her husband’s condition one of the derogatory diagnoses of the day—moral frailty, unmanly weakness. But she recognized that if she herself admitted feelings of defeat or failure, Thomas’s spirits would utterly collapse. And she knew that Agnes, in England, would be unable to restrain herself from telling Catharine that she had only herself to blame, for rushing into a precipitate marriage with an impractical, middle-aged widower. So Catharine insisted to her family that she was going to be “cheerful and contented for the sake of my beloved partner.” She was not going to “sadden him by useless regrets.” Her lush descriptions of Upper Canada’s matchless scenery, flora and fauna allowed her to turn a blind eye to everything that was going wrong. She immersed herself in her love of nature, as she had learned to do at her father’s side when Thomas Strickland had walked his little daughter along the Suffolk paths.
Few of Catharine’s original letters home from this period have survived. But most of her observations were published in her own lifetime, thanks to her sister Agnes. Catharine had seen her elder sister’s letter to Susanna suggesting that the two Canadian sisters might collaborate on a magazine containing information “of a useful nature.” Either she or Agnes must have realized that Catharine’s letters home would make an attractive publication. Agnes certainly liked the idea, and she and her sister Jane edited Catharine’s correspondence into a publishable manuscript. This was no mean task at a
time when manuscripts were carefully copied out in longhand, especially as Catharine’s handwriting was not always easy to follow. Jane complained to Catharine about a later manuscript that “though the work is a very interesting one you had left it imperfect in construction and there was an immensity to do—Agnes who looked over it sometimes was as puzzled as myself.” The cleaned-up draft was then sent to Charles Knight, a London publisher. Knight agreed to bring the manuscript out in January 1836 as part of his “Library of Entertaining Knowledge.” It appeared under the title The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer, Illustrative of the Domestic Economy of British America.
The book was pitched to the “wives and daughters of emigrants of the higher class” who would become the “pioneers of civilization in the wilderness.” The Backwoods of Canada painted a light-hearted picture of an active, satisfying life for women who were prepared to discard anything “pertaining to the artificial refinement of fashionable life in England” and concentrate on domestic duties and botany. It reads well today, because it is as informative, lively and cheerful as its author must have been. Her sunny personality almost leaps off every page: she devoted only two paragraphs to her attack of cholera, but required forty pages of text to describe the fauna and flora she discovered during her first few months in the bush. Catharine altered several of the details of her emigration (the name of the boat on which the Traills crossed the Atlantic was changed from the Rowley to the Laurel ) and made the best of all the worst moments, such as the grim journey from Rice Lake to Peterborough. There are only fleeting references to her husband: his name is never mentioned.
All Catharine’s upbeat pretense, for Reydon consumption, about her less-than-perfect marriage and precipitate decision to emigrate now became the gloss over the hardships of pioneer life. When The Backwoods of Canada was first published in England, it sold so well that Catharine was asked to add some extra information for later editions. (She supplied a how-to chapter on pickling vegetables and making maple sugar, soap and candles, plus some statistics on immigration.)
For all their difficulties, in their first four years in Canada, the Moodies and Traills had scarcely tasted the real hardships of pioneer life. They still had a little capital to draw on, and they could still dream that they were gracefully helping to establish a New World squirearchy.
Chapter 8
“A Little Red-Haired Baboon”
“Canada is the land of hope,” Catharine assured her family back home, after she had been in the colony for three years. “Everything is going forward; it is scarcely possible for arts, sciences, agriculture, manufactures, to retrogade; they must keep advancing.”
There were reasons other than Catharine’s incurable optimism for this happy prognosis. The Canada-mania in the British Isles during the early 1830s had meant a rush of people across the Atlantic. With all these new settlers taming the bush, establishing communities, bringing crops to market and buying supplies for their farms, how could the colony’s economy not grow and thrive? As the frontier was rapidly pushed west, how could colonial governors and their masters in London not invest further in Canadian roads and canals? Any fool, argued the colonists, could see that this was the way to fortify British North America against its rapacious neighbour to the south.
British canal-building was one of the wonders of the early-nineteenthcentury world. A spider’s web of beautifully maintained waterways already covered the map of England. By the time the Moodies and the Traills crossed the Atlantic, the British were busy exporting their canal know-how to Canada to strengthen their territorial possessions there. In 1825, the first vessel passed through the Lachine Canal, avoiding the rapids south of the island of Montreal. Four years later, the new 27-mile Welland Canal allowed ships loaded with lumber and grain to bypass the Niagara Falls and the turbulent Gorge and enter Lake Ontario from Lake Erie. But the most impressive feat of canal engineering was opened in 1832. At enormous cost in both lives and money, the 125-mile Rideau Canal system, with forty-seven locks, was hacked out of granite to link Kingston (British military headquarters in North America) to the Ottawa River. The first two canals improved commerce within the northern half of the continent; the third strengthened Canada’s defences against the United States.
These successes sparked a rash of proposals for similar colony-building projects. Douro Township was a district ripe for rapid settlement and growth, and well situated for the development of a waterway. There was already talk in Toronto (formerly York), the seat of government for Upper Canada, of a canal system to link Lake Huron to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. Lake Katchewanooka, on which the Traill and Moodie properties perched, would be part of the route. Such a waterway would allow vessels from Lake Huron to make their way into Lake Simcoe, across the present-day Kawartha Lakes, down the Otonabee River, across Rice Lake, and from there down the Trent River to the Bay of Quinte, close to Belleville. The proposed canal system would give settlers easy access to supplies for their settlements and markets for their products. It would open up a vast area of back country for development and at the same time boost existing settlements on its banks. Various eager investors were already building mills, taverns and solid stone houses in Peterborough, in anticipation of a bonanza. The township had even agreed to plug the worst potholes in the corduroy roads (made with logs laid crosswise to the traffic) that linked the scattered settlements. “Sooner or later there is little doubt but that it will be carried into effect,” Catharine Parr Trail boasted.
Unfortunately, there was a great deal of doubt. For all its promise, the economy of Upper Canada remained primitive, weak and entirely dependent on logging and agriculture. Nothing could happen without the hard labour of new immigrants. As John Moodie noted in a long article he wrote for an English newspaper in 1836, Canada’s “present prosperity and progress in improvement must depend chiefly upon emigration and the expenditure of imported capital.” But the supply of willing labourers began to drop off in the mid-1830s. Cholera was devastating the populations of the Old World. Immigrant ships continued to unload human cargo at Grosse Ile, but immigrants eager to tame the bush did not materialize in the numbers expected. Far more of the newcomers, particularly those from the middle or upper classes, gravitated to established communities like Toronto, Kingston, London and Belleville.
Beneath the ebb and flow of immigration, however, was another, more corrosive cause for Canada’s slow rate of growth. The British government was losing interest in its colony. England was no longer the depressed country that the sisters had left behind; Britain was finally emerging from its post-Napoleonic doldrums. The puffing, clanking, booming age of the railways had begun, and the mother country was being transformed into the wealthiest nation on earth. Far-sighted capitalists preferred to invest in British coal mines, railways and factories instead of distant and doubtful engineering projects.
A new class had stepped onto the British stage: the industrialists, whose entrepreneurial skills and muscular ambitions made the cities of the Midlands and the north—cities like Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester—hum. These “masters of the new manufacturing machine,” in historian Donald Creighton’s phrase, were men who “sought world markets and the traffic of the Seven Seas.” They were free-traders, with all the contempt for victims of such policies that free traders always display. They had no time for underpopulated colonies—like Upper Canada, the Cape Colony or Australia—that needed British subsidies for defence or administration. They were impatient with Canadian colonists who wouldn’t cut the umbilical cord with the mother country, and who relied on shipping monopolies and tariff preferences to protect their transatlantic trade. These ambitious manufacturers were more interested in the giant market in the United States than in sparsely populated British North America.
At the same time that Britain was turning its back on its North American possessions, tensions were emerging within the colony itself. The interests of the governed were visibly diverging from
those of the governors.
The titular ruler of Upper Canada was the lieutenant-governor, a well-born Englishman (usually the possessor of a title, several military honours or at the very least a coat of arms for his carriage) sent by Westminister to Toronto to run the colony’s affairs. The actual governors were his local advisers—the clergymen, officers, officials and landowners of the Family Compact whose idea of government was entirely feudal. Members of this local oligarchy were linked by blood, marriage or at least allegiance to the Church of England. Comfortably ensconced in their impressive stone mansions in Toronto, members of the Family Compact dominated the judiciary, the Executive Council and the Legislative Council (neither of which was elected) and much of the House of Assembly (the elected lower house, which was virtually powerless). They dispensed favours to their friends and directed British policy to their own advantage.
The Traills and the Moodies would have loved to belong to this exclusive élite of families like the Boultons, Jarvises and Powells. They felt connected to them by virtue of their education and background, and they yearned to be recipients of their patronage. Either Thomas Traill or John Dunbar Moodie would have been ecstatic to get his hands on a government job like local land registrar, which gave its holder an income. Thomas Traill was overjoyed when he was appointed a justice of the peace. Even though remuneration was derisory—a small proportion of the fees charged for performing marriages or the fines levied for minor crimes—the office bestowed on its holder a dab of prestige.
However, neither the Moodies nor the Traills had the wherewithal to join the exalted ranks of bigwigs in the colonial capital. Both couples were stuck in the backwoods because that was where they could get free land. Like everybody else who was roughing it in the bush—from rude Yankees to Anglo-Irish gentlefolk, from Irish paupers to Scottish labour-ers—they were the governed. And like the rest of the backwoods settlers in the late 1830s, the sisters and their husbands faced mounting problems: crop failures, a shortage of money, a slow-down in immigration, struggles with inadequate transportation facilities.
Sisters in the Wilderness Page 13