Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  Susanna was mute as the sleigh slid through the incredible pall of the winter landscape. Tears ran silently down her face as she listened to the jangle of the horses’ bridles, the rhythmic chunk-chunk-chunk of their hooves, the slither of runners on hard-packed snow, the rustle of dried leaves still clinging to the trees. Cold air entered the travellers’ nostrils like knives; the horses’ heads were soon white with frost. The party spent that night in Peterborough, where Susanna was able to arrange for the return of little Aggie to her own family after close to a year with Mary Hague.

  In town, Susanna had a jarring insight into her children’s ignorance of any life beyond their hardscrabble solitude in a backwoods cabin. As the loaded wagon entered the main street, five-year-old Dunbar stared in amazement at buildings that nestled up against each other. “Are the houses come to see one another?” he asked. “How did they all meet here?”

  Chapter 10

  Belligerent Belleville

  By the admittedly modest standards of Upper Canada in 1840, Belleville was close to the acme of sophistication, with far more class and culture than Cobourg or Peterborough. It was large (the most important settlement between Kingston and Toronto) and well established (its Loyalist founders could trace their history in Upper Canada back three generations). It had been named after Lady Bella Gore, the beautiful young wife of Governor Francis Gore, in 1816, and its ladies prided themselves that their fashionable attire was less than a year behind London’s.

  In 1840, Belleville was one of the most important towns in Upper Canada, with a good harbour and a growing population.

  Belleville’s economy was thriving, thanks to two flour mills, two carding mills, four sawmills, three breweries, seven blacksmiths’ shops and two tanneries. At its wharves, sailboats bringing goods from northern New York State via the Bay of Quinte jostled with fishing boats and steamers carrying passengers along the lakefront. Its twenty-six shops and twelve grocery stores carried imported goods from the United States, the West Indies and Europe, as well as locally grown produce. The town had at least one bookstore and a circulating library, and on Sundays, its 1,700 citizens had four churches to choose from: Presbyterian, Methodist, Roman Catholic and Anglican. While Belleville’s finest families lived in solid limestone houses with large sash windows, the town still had no sidewalks, and pigs roamed freely along the muddy streets, gobbling up the garbage. But residents of Belleville were confident that they were in the vanguard of colonial progress: every seventh house had a streetlight in front of it, which was lit on moonless nights so that pedestrians could avoid the puddles and pigshit.

  Underneath this urbane surface, however, seethed all the most vicious emotions of the raw young colony. Every kind of prejudice flourished in the town: Tories versus Reformers, Methodists versus Anglicans, Irish versus Scots, Protestants versus Catholics. Belleville’s numerous Irish Protestants had established one of the most active Orange Lodges in the province, and they commemorated the defeat of the Catholics in the 1690 Battle of the Boyne with bloodthirsty glee. All over Upper Canada, Orange Lodges were well on their way to becoming the most important club in every small town—boisterous, populist and passionately pro-British. But the Belleville Orange Lodge was particularly forceful.

  Mrs. Margaret Simpson’s tavern, where the Montreal–Toronto coaches changed horses, buzzed with partisan gossip.

  By the time John Dunbar Moodie had secured a permanent job in Belleville, he was well aware that the town pulsed with bad blood. As he strode down Front Street in his military uniform, he endured the catcalls of those who had supported the rebels in ’37. In Mrs. Margaret Simpson’s smoky tavern on the waterfront, he heard the Scots immigrants sneer at the “Paddies” and watched the Irish immigrants come to blows with the “damn Yankees.” He was at the opening of Belleville’s most imposing new building—the county jail—which immediately filled up with drunks, debtors, cheats, violent criminals and thieves. The level of partisan sniping and name-calling was enough to discourage even an optimist like John. “I sometimes wish I could clear out from this unhappy distracted country where I see nothing but ultra selfish Toryism or Revolutionary Radicalism,” he wrote in 1839. “The people in this part of the country are split into some three or four factions—The Catholics harbouring dark designs under an hypocritical profession of loyalty and Orangemen goading them on to rebellion by claiming all the loyalty in the country to themselves—while the native Canadians [second- and third-generation immigrant families] are hugging the loaves and fishes as their own peculiar perquisite, agreeing with the others on hardly any one point but in hatred of the Scotch and their Church.”

  In the early days of 1840, however, John was too eager to see Susanna and their five children to dwell on Belleville’s shortcomings. He had a new job and a new house, and he was going to make a new start in the new decade! He strutted past the unpainted frame houses that sprawled untidily along Bridge Street and Front Street, the two main streets that intersected on the banks of the Moira River, carefully avoiding the potholes and happily greeting passers-by. He was good at remembering names, and he delighted in offering cheery hellos to every lawyer, merchant, housewife and child he bumped into. Short and plump, his vest straining across his belly and his ready smile almost obscured by his mutton-chop whiskers, he radiated geniality. At last, after two years of almost constant separation, he could dream about cosy evenings with his family grouped around the fireside in the pretty, neat little cottage he had rented and furnished. He could imagine Susanna’s relief that she no longer had to struggle out in the chill of a January morning to milk the cows; instead, she could purchase staples at a store. He could almost hear little Agnes and Katie singing nursery rhymes as he accompanied them on his flute. He smiled as he imagined his three sons chasing chickens in their yard. Most of all, John longed to show Susanna the china tea service he had recently purchased. There could be no more satisfactory symbol of Susanna’s release from the backwoods, he fervently believed, than the chance to return to the old Reydon Hall custom of taking tea at four o’clock each afternoon in bone china cups.

  On the third day of January, Susanna, Jenny and the children arrived in Belleville after a long and freezing journey from Peterborough through Cobourg. Thin-lipped with cold, Susanna was tearful and nauseated, and in no mood to be cheered up by bone china. Her first bit of news for John, as she pressed little Johnnie, now fifteen months, into her husband’s arms, was that she was once again expecting a baby. John had made a brief visit home the previous November—just long enough to conceive their sixth child.

  Although Susanna didn’t welcome another pregnancy, both she and John were proud of their rapidly expanding family. Had she wanted to, Susanna could undoubtedly have learned about natural abortificeants (her Indian friends might have told her about the effectiveness of oil of cedar, hellebore or ergot of rye). But birth control and terminations were rarely considered by Canadians of this period. A brood of eight or ten children provided a ready supply of much-needed cheap labour for the farm, even if it did put a huge strain on the mother’s health. Even in larger towns like Belleville, the birth rate remained high until the late nineteenth century, because children were still regarded as insurance for the future. One of the ditties popular in the colony suggested that:

  Of all the crops a man can raise

  Or stock that he employs,

  None yields such profit and such praise

  As a crop of Girls and Boys.

  The following day, Susanna set off to explore Belleville. She was deeply disappointed, and irritated by what she perceived as its pretensions. She had hoped for a thriving market town like Bungay or Southwold, with cobbled streets and charming stone cottages. Instead she found “an insignificant, dirty-looking place” in which the frame houses were “put up in the most unartistic and irregular fashion.” Large sections of Front Street remained unpaved, and the slabs of limestone on the paved sections were laid so carelessly that pedestrians were constantly tripping and falli
ng. Susanna harrumphed that the “paving committee had been composed of shoe-makers,” because so many shoes got destroyed in falls or stuck in the deep, mud-filled potholes. Her relief at the prospect of regular Sunday worship was diluted by her disgust at the brick-and-frame “eyesore” that was St. Thomas’s Anglican Church. St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, on the same block, was an even shabbier wooden building. John’s assurance that at least five households boasted pianos did not raise her spirits. Only the cedar-fringed banks and “rapid, sparkling” water of the Moira River, which thousands of logs floated down each spring, brought a smile to her face. The river reminded her of the Otonabee. Faced with the gossipy little community of Belleville, Susanna grew quite nostalgic for the privacy of her cabin on Lake Katchewanooka.

  Susanna considered St. Thomas’s Anglican Church “an eye-sore.”

  As sheriff of Victoria County, John was in a sensitive position. His job was to keep the peace among the various factions. This meant, in his view, staying aloof from the ethnic, sectarian and political schisms within the populace. He might have managed to stay away from ethnic and sectarian squabbles, but there was no hope of avoiding the political quarrels. A chasm separated the Tories, who swore undying loyalty to the British crown, and the Reformers, who felt that the colony should be given a greater degree of control over its own affairs. John tried to stay on the fence, by attending both the Anglican and the Presbyterian churches, and by appointing as his deputy sheriffs one Tory and one Reformer. But “however moderate your views might be,” Susanna discovered, “to belong to the one was to incur the dislike and ill-will of the other.”

  While John had to deal with Belleville’s frock-coated lawyers and merchants, who pursued their public vendettas through elections, legal cases and business practices, Susanna had to deal with their wives. Many were the kind of educated women for whose company she had hungered in the wilderness. But now she discovered that Belleville wives “entered deeply into this party hostility; and those who … might have become friends and agreeable companions, kept aloof, rarely taking notice of each other when accidentally thrown together.” Her hands still roughened by field work, she also found them snobbish and superficial: she deplored their love of finery and their sneering disregard for farmers and “mechanics.” In fact, she found herself in the unfamiliar position of scorning their hoity-toity pretensions, which were remarkably similar to those with which she had arrived in Canada.

  A chilly social reception was only the start of the Moodies’ problems. The knives were out for the new sheriff before he’d even set foot in the courthouse. There were a lot of civic offices attached to the new Victoria District, but the permanent, full-time office of sheriff was the plum. Although the sheriff ’s job had no salary attached, its holder could expect an income of at least $200 a year from fees received for serving writs and subpoenas. This was a very modest income for a professional man: John had earned 325 pounds a year as paymaster to the militia, and a successful lawyer in Upper Canada might bring in $1,000 a year. However, the real money for John came from the sheriff ’s right to keep any proceeds from the sale of impounded property and any court-imposed fines he collected. Income from these sources could amount to five or six times the total of fees received. The prospect of an annual income of more than $1000 meant that various Belleville worthies had been competing for the office long before the district was formally established. The strongest candidate was Thomas Parker, a Tory bully who was the former deputy sheriff of the Midland District (which then included what would later become the Victoria District) and the Belleville agent of the Commercial Bank in Toronto.

  Parker was desperate to be sheriff because he was close to bankruptcy. He thought he had the job in the bag. When he heard that some arriviste half-pay Scot, who knew little about Belleville and nothing about municipal politics, had upstaged him, he was mad as hell. And so were all his friends. Anglican Tories to a man, they decided that the newcomer must be a Reformer and a Presbyterian, and that it was their civic duty to prove he was an incompetent sheriff. Knowing that the Moodies were chronically hard up, Parker played a vicious cat-and-mouse game with John. He and his Tory pals delayed payments to the sheriff on trumped-up grounds and brought nuisance lawsuits against him, which never came to anything but cost John money. John was soon begging the Toronto authorities for an additional appointment: “At present I am hardly able to support my family with the most rigid economy.”

  On top of all this unpleasantness, John had a messy start to the new job. Because he would be handling public funds, he had to produce two letters from people who would act as guarantors for him. But they had to be men known to the Toronto authorities—which was a challenge for John, who had rarely met any of the colony’s prominent lawyers, merchants and landowners while he was stuck in the backwoods. He first nominated his two brothers-in-law, Thomas Traill and Sam Strickland, but after several weeks he heard that they didn’t meet the exacting standards of the Toronto bureaucrats. As time ticked on, he grew anxious that his appointment wouldn’t be confirmed before the first Quarter Sessions were due to be held in Belleville’s new courthouse. He produced a second pair of guarantors, and then a third. The second pair of guarantors was finally accepted, and, at the last moment, John was sworn in and documented as sheriff. But his cheery self-confidence was punctured. He was sure that Thomas Parker was already denigrating him to the government. In a letter to Sir George Arthur in February 1840, ostensibly thanking the Governor for the job, John rushed to defend himself from any base accusations that might have reached Toronto ears. The Governor assured him that “Mr. Parker has not made any communication of the kind, directly or indirectly.”

  Initially, Susanna kept her distance from the tiresome infighting of Belleville citizens and concentrated on her children and her writing. Now that she was out of the woods, she wanted to reestablish herself as a professional writer so that she could supplement the family income. She had more time: she no longer had to care for livestock (though, like most town-dwellers, she still kept chickens and had a vegetable garden), and much of the arduous work of childcare, cleaning, laundry, cooking and baking had been delegated to the series of young Irish maids who had taken Jenny’s place. And Susanna finally had in the New World an editor who valued her work—John Lovell, the most famous printer-publisher in nineteenth-century Canada, who had first approached her two years earlier to contribute to his Literary Garland.

  Lovell’s support was just the encouragement she needed. He paid according to the quantity of pages (five pounds per sheet) rather than offering a set fee for each contribution, and he printed anything she sent him. The poems, serialized novels and short stories that Susanna produced were written for an English (or at least a British-educated) audience. She assumed that her readers—for the most part, the merchant élites of Montreal and Toronto—would prefer European settings and fastidious heroes. She also sent works that she had written twenty years earlier, in Suffolk. And she began to play with the idea of shaping some of her experiences of the past eight years—her first impressions of Canada, the early months in Hamilton Township, the ups and downs of life in Douro—into sketches for publication.

  Alongside her literary compositions, Susanna wrote personal letters to Lovell with all her family news (“I have been busy preparing my boys’ winter clothing”). Once or twice she and John even managed a trip to Montreal to see her editor and visit with his wife, Sara, and their family in their elegant townhouse on St. Catharine Street. “She was a pleasant companion,” Sara would recall. She admired Susanna’s skill with water colours, and was amazed to hear that this English lady often had little Johnnie on her knee as she composed articles. Nostalgia for London tugged at Susanna as she glimpsed the cultured life of Montreal in the 1840s, with its concerts, theatres and soirées.

  Susanna entrusted Lovell with the realization of one of her greatest dreams—the purchase of an inexpensive piano. In the backwoods, a piano had become the symbol of the lost state of genti
lity. Nothing had underlined their cultural and spiritual poverty so much as her inability to accompany herself on the piano when she taught her children the nursery rhymes and hymns of her youth. When Lovell secured one in Montreal and had it crated and shipped up the St. Lawrence to Belleville, Susanna was overjoyed. It almost made up for the ostentatious disregard that her Belleville neighbours continued to show for her literary achievements. At one point, one of her sons arrived home from school looking downcast; he said that another boy had jeered at him that “Mrs. Moodie invents lies, and gets paid for them.”

  In spite of their fresh start, sadness and misfortune continued to dog the Moodies. In July 1840, Susanna gave birth to a sickly little boy. Christened George Arthur, after their benefactor the Governor, he clung to life for only three weeks. It was an ill omen. Next, in December, the Moodies’ rented cottage caught fire, and they lost their furniture, clothing and winter stores. They almost lost two-year-old Johnnie, too: he had hidden in the kitchen of the burning building and was rescued only seconds before the roof collapsed. The fire traumatized Susanna, who had suffered one house fire already in the Moodies’ backwoods log cabin, and who was still mourning the death of her infant four months earlier: “The agony I endured for about half an hour [before Johnnie was found] I shall never forget.” Had the calamity occurred in Douro Township, she would have rushed to her sister Catharine for solace. Instead, she poured out her terrors in a letter to her mother and sisters in England. Astringent Agnes replied, “We were all much grieved to hear of your sad loss by fire and the distress it must have been to you and your lovely little flock, but if it had occurred before Moodie got the appointment it would have been of far more serious consequence.”