Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  Years later, after Agnes’s death in 1874, Susanna’s and Catharine’s sister Sarah—the only non-author among the six Strickland sisters—wrote to Susanna’s daughter Katie Vickers to explain the lengthy gap in correspondence during the 1850s between Susanna and her English sisters. “The publication of that disgusting book Roughing It in the Bush made the very name of Canada hateful to us all,” she recalled. “We had always striven hard to keep up the respectability of the family in spite of loss of property, and it was very mortifying to have a book like that going the round of some vulgar upstarts….You cannot imagine how vexed and mortified my dear sister Agnes was, and at the time when she was at the very height of her fame to have passages from that book commented upon and ill-natured remarks made by people who were envious of her great fame. This will in a slight degree give you some idea of the state of things, and explain the backwardness of much correspondence.”

  Chapter 14

  Good Advice

  Catharine hated finding herself caught in the middle of the row between two angry, sharp-tongued sisters. By nature a peacemaker, she herself would do anything to avoid confrontation. She felt especially threatened by this particular family rift because she depended so much on both Agnes and Susanna.

  John and Susanna Moodie were Catharine’s closest relatives in Canada—her only relatives while her brother Sam was wife-hunting in Suffolk. The two sisters wrote to each other on their birthdays, and they traded children’s clothes, suggestions for herbal cures and items that arrived in the care packages from England. Her link with Susanna was a crucial psychological prop to Catharine. Of course, Catharine had other friends, particularly Frances Stewart and her daughter Ellen Dunlop, in Peterborough. They provided the day-to-day conversational intimacy that a talkative and outgoing woman like Catharine appreciated. They wrote to Catharine frequently, and Frances often sent a few dollars when Catharine was desperate. Mindful of the destruction Susanna’s pen had wrought, Catharine confided to Ellen in a letter her relief that, “I have written nothing which my children need regret to have my name attached to, or the dear friends who have ever taken so kindly an interest in my career read with pain.”

  But Susanna was the person that Catharine turned to in a crisis. In 1852, the bailiffs once again knocked at the Traills’ door, looking for payment of outstanding debts. Thomas was by now far too enmeshed in despair to cope, and since he had never talked about business affairs with his wife, Catharine felt equally helpless. She had no idea what the court was allowed to claim. Could the bailiffs seize the flour and pork in her larder? Could they carry off the crops that were still in the ground but had already been sold to the neighbour? Did the Traills have any say in the value of the items that would go into a bankruptcy sale—Thomas’s gold watch, the kitchen stove, the gun that Thomas had carried in ’37, his books? She wrote a frantic letter to her sister describing her predicament. “I have been vainly waiting and hopelessly hoping to go down to Belleville,” she told Susanna. “I have many questions to put to Moodie which would possibly save me some embarrassment and blunders … so very desiring [am] I of being with you even for two days [that] I would let no obstacle stand in the [way] of it as I think it might be of great service to us in many ways beside the great comfort to me of seeing you.”

  This particular crisis was averted, but by mid-century, clearly the tables were turned between the two sisters. Twenty years earlier in the colony’s backwoods, Catharine had been the strong, sunny-tempered elder sister who reassured and comforted her sibling. Now it was Susanna, living in a comfortable stone house in a prosperous town, who could offer a hand to her sister trapped (in Susanna’s words) in a “cold comfortless house on the plains.” Catharine’s visits to Susanna were her only respite from worry. Being stuck at Oaklands throughout the long winter eroded her ability to sail through life with hope, resolution and perseverance. “During the cold weather I feel unable to write or stir myself. I appear to stagnate to become wrapped up in self, only thinking of the present ill and how to keep myself warm….My dear husband is sadly depressed again. This is the season of the year when one’s creditors are sure to remember us if no one else does.”

  During the early years of the 1850s, travelling in winter meant that Catharine had to wait until packed snow made country roads passable, then cadge a ride to Belleville on the horse-drawn sleigh of one of the Rice Lake merchants. In the summer, she endured bumpy, dusty rides in the stagecoaches that travelled from Rice Lake south to Cobourg, then east to Belleville. Thomas would be left in the care of Katie and Annie, his oldest daughters. But soon travel got a whole lot easier. In 1854,a perky little railroad called the C&P—the Cobourg and Peterborough Railway—made its inaugural run. It was one of a tangle of small railroads, badly financed but enthusiastically welcomed, that suddenly sprouted throughout the more settled regions of British North America. From then on, if Catharine wanted to visit Susanna, she could take the train south from Harwood, on the south shore of Rice Lake, to Cobourg, and then travel on to Belleville by either the Grand Trunk Line or by stagecoach. This cut down her travelling time by at least a day. To visit Frances Stewart and her daughter Ellen Dunlop in Peterborough, she had the excitement of crossing the C&P’s ambitious causeway and trestle bridge over the three-mile width of Rice Lake to the Indian reserve of Hiawatha on the north shore. When the bridge was opened in December 1854, one thousand Cobourg citizens enjoyed a free fifteen-mile-an-hour trip over the thirty miles of track to Peterborough. Unfortunately, its builders had underestimated the impact of winter weather on the flimsy structure: by 1860, the trestle would become too rickety for use.

  The three-mile trestle bridge over Rice Lake, an over-ambitious project of the Cobourg and Peterborough Railway, opened in 1854.

  The railroads made a huge difference to everybody’s lives. Travel became relatively comfortable. The coaches—with their padded seats, stoves and kerosene lamps—were a vast improvement over stagecoaches jolting over muddy roads, or steamers tossed about by lake storms. The poignant wail of the train’s whistle and the clickety-click of steel wheels on rails knitted together the scattered settlements and isolated farms of Upper Canada. Catharine knew the C&P would benefit the backwoods townships and was glad to reach Belleville more easily. However, she resented the clamour, dirt and destruction of the wilderness that they created. “As a lover of the picturesque,” she admitted, “I must confess that I have a great dislike of railroads.”

  Susanna had none of Catharine’s reservations; she embraced progress. Canada’s first railway artery was the Grand Trunk, reaching from Montreal to Sarnia. When it opened its loop line through Belleville in 1856, connecting the wharves with the main Toronto line, she was thrilled. “I never saw a Locomotive engine at work before,” she reported to Richard Bentley. “The sight filled me with awe.” From Belleville, Susanna could now reach either Toronto or Montreal within a few hours. One of the greatest excitements in her life was the train trip she took with John to Portland, Maine, the following year. “My first visit to the sea, after an absence of five and twenty years,” she recorded. “The dear, old familiar sea, by whose side I had been bred and born, with whose every tone and phase I was familiar in my English days. How my heart sprang to meet it.” The “iron horse,” as she called the GTR locomotive, had enabled her to unlace her shabby black leather boots and dip her toes in the ocean that lay between her and “home.”

  Before the arrival of the railroad, Belleville’s wharves were a centre of thriving commerce. Three-masted schooners criss-crossed Lake Ontario.

  Catharine’s visits to Belleville during this period allowed her to forget the stress of life in Oaklands and enjoy diversions she could only dream of when she was stuck there. In winter, she could walk down Front Street, peering into hardware stores, boot stores and dry goods stores. She might finger the new novels from London and New York in Harrison’s Bookstore, admire the latest design of stoves at the shop of Thomas Linklater the ironmonger or buy patent medicines and
flower seeds at Chandler’s drugstore. She and Susanna would go for sleigh rides over the frozen surface of the Bay of Quinte, and Catharine would remind herself that winter was extraordinarily beautiful as well as savage. “The Bay is a solid plain just now,” Susanna wrote to her publisher one February, “traversed in all directions by sleighs and pedestrians. It is so safe after these iron frosts, that you quite forget the waters imprisoned beneath the coat of snow that covers them…. Nature [is] dressed in a rich tissue of white and silver, and every twig enwreathed with pearls and diamonds … the frost King works such miracles, and the sun lights up his doings with such a glory of dazzling brightness.”

  In the spring, Catharine could wander down to the new stone wharves, and watch steamers and double-masted schooners jostle for a mooring. If she felt so inclined, she could even join her brother-in-law and sister at one of the evening parties that had lately become so fashionable. As Belleville’s population doubled and its wealth grew, the local bourgeoisie moved beyond the humdrum six o’clock supper of meat and potatoes that had been the custom when the Moodies first arrived there in 1840. By 1852, manners and habits aspired to the standards set in the drawing rooms of Edinburgh or London. “Evening parties [today] always include dancing and music, while cards are provided for those gentlemen who prefer whist to the society of ladies,” Susanna had explained in Life in the Clearings. “The evening generally closes with a splendid supper….The ladies are always served first, the gentlemen waiting upon them at supper; and they never sit down to the table, when the company is large, until after the ladies have returned to the drawing-room.”

  What Catharine most enjoyed, however, were the times during summer visits when she and Susanna, and as many friends and relatives as possible, set off for a picnic. Along the Bay of Quinte there were several pretty spots, only an hour’s carriage ride from Belleville, where a convivial crowd could settle on the grass and admire the magnificent scenery. As the high blue sky of a Canadian summer’s day arched above the picnickers, they could watch sailboats skim across the sparkling bay and look out at Prince Edward County, across the water. The hampers of food must have taken poor Catharine’s breath away: “hams, fowls, meat pies, cold joints of meat, and abundance of tarts and cakes, while the luxury of ice is conveyed in a blanket at the bottom of one of the boats,” according to Susanna. The women would stroll about, picking flowers and fruits, while the gentlemen fished. Children would play tag along the shoreline; young men would set up the stumps for an informal game of cricket. Susanna and Catharine would sit together, as comfortable with each other as they had been twenty years earlier as pioneers in the bush.

  Belleville’s Victoria Park was a favourite picnic spot, from which families could watch sailing races or take the ferry to Prince Edward County.

  The two stout matrons, both in their fifties, must have made an intriguing pair. They were unmistakably sisters: the broad Strickland brow and deep-set eyes were emphasized by the way each woman had scraped her hair back under a lace bonnet. Their accents were as crisply English as the day they’d left Suffolk, although their speech was peppered with the Scottish expressions and pronunciations picked up from their husbands. Their dress must often have occasioned comment, since each still had a few of Agnes’s cast-off collars, shawls, sashes and parasols to liven up her outfit. Both were as alert to all the life around them as ever: Catharine rhapsodized about the blossoms of the “dear little Linnae Borealis” at the edge of the wood, while Susanna kept an amused eye on which of the young people were “sparking” or flirting.

  A topic of conversation to which the sisters regularly returned was their children. As young mothers they had lived so close that they continued to regard each other’s family as an extension of their own, and they shared each other’s maternal delights and concerns. The Traill offspring remained a tight-knit group who adored their mother, although the open contempt that James and Harry, now tall young men, showed for their father upset Catharine. Resentful of the endless farm tasks they were expected to do, they were often surly and rude. Catharine appealed to Susanna to tell the boys to curb their “want of respectfulness and deference of manner.” Catharine’s two older daughters, Katie and Annie, had far more compassion for the old man. The Traill household expanded in 1855 when a nineteen-year-old emigrant, Clinton Atwood from Gloucestershire, arrived to board and learn farming. This meant more work for the women: “My dear girls are kept busy from morning till night and I can hardly keep the clothing in order for the four boys and Mr. Traill and now Clinton is added to wash iron and mend for as well,” Catharine complained. But he and Annie were soon “walking out” together. A compulsive matchmaker, Catharine was torn between delight in the romance and apprehension that she might soon lose Annie, a mainstay of the household, who kept an eye on the two youngest boys, William and Walter. Catharine’s youngest daughter, Mary, frequently stayed with her Aunt Moodie for long spells. Catharine fretted that when Mary came home, she would “feel the change from a house of great plenty and every comfort to ours which is not so…. How good my sister has been to my little one.”

  Susanna’s house was undoubtedly more comfortable than Catharine’s, but her family was less harmonious. There didn’t seem to be any emotional glue to keep her five children close to home. Susanna’s eldest son, Dunbar, disappeared west to join the California gold rush. Her second son, Donald, a charmer with his father’s joie de vivre whom Susanna adored, was costing his parents one hundred pounds a year (several thousand dollars in today’s currency) because he had persuaded them to send him to the new medical school at McGill University. Rumours were already reaching Belleville that Donald was spending more time in the bars than the lecture halls. He lacked, in Susanna’s eyes, “that energy which alone ensures success.” And Susanna’s dire predictions about Agnes Fitzgibbon’s marriage had been fulfilled: by the time she was twenty-one, Agnes had three children, was expecting her fourth, and was constantly appealing to her parents for help. In 1856, Susanna thanked her publisher Richard Bentley profusely for his latest remittance: “It enabled me to help one very dear to me, in sickness and in sorrow, when I had no other means of doing so.” Her relief was short-lived: Agnes’s fourth baby died (probably of scarlet fever or meningitis) when it was four months old. “We bask for a few days in the warm sunshine of domestic happiness,” reflected Susanna, “and awake one morning to find the shadow of death resting upon our own threshold.” Ill health drove Agnes back to her parents’ roof: she and her three children spent several weeks in Belleville so her mother could nurse her through sickness and depression.

  There was further disruption in the Moodie household in 1855 when the Moodies’ eldest daughter, Catherine, married a young businessman who had just moved from Belleville to Toronto. John Joseph Vickers ran his own delivery firm and was soon so successful that he could afford a well-built stone mansion, with separate servants’ quarters, on Adelaide Street. A stolid, reliable man, Vickers was a support to his in-laws from the moment he entered the family. But like Agnes, Catherine Vickers was plagued by health problems: the doctor diagnosed chronic bronchitis. Such a condition, Susanna knew, was often confused with tuberculosis. The diagnosis “made me too anxious to think of any thing else,” she wrote. And with Catherine’s departure from Belleville, Susanna had lost the mainstay of her household. Only Robert remained at home.

  There was another topic of conversation that was of equally compelling interest to the sisters: outlets for their writing. New magazines, dishonest publishers, literary trends, money-making subjects—Susanna and Catharine each knew that her sister was more helpful on these topics than anyone else in the colony. No other women they knew combined motherhood and authorship; none of their neighbours carved out time from family responsibilities to write articles and stories for publication. Each sister encouraged the other’s ideas and commiserated with her disappointments. And Susanna kept Catharine up-to-date on some of the new English authors. Anybody overhearing Susanna’s critical judgmen
ts would have found them irresistibly crisp. She declared Tennyson’s poem Maud “a ridiculous rhapsody of affectation” and Longfellow’s Hiawatha “the most readable absurdity.”

  But the sisterly and literary companionship between Catharine and Susanna faltered after the family row over Roughing It in the Bush. Catharine’s enthusiasm for visits to the Moodies was tempered by the knowledge that Susanna would try to recruit her as an ally against Agnes. Since the publication of Roughing It, Agnes no longer deigned to write to “My dear Susan” and “Dearest Brother Moodie” as she had once addressed them. So as soon as Catharine arrived in Belleville, Susanna would pump her for news from Reydon Hall. The conflict of loyalties unsettled Catharine, who continued to rely heavily on the money and annual boxes of fabric, boots, clothing and books that Agnes sent. In 1854, Agnes had given her a muslin dress with blue-edged flounces, a cashmere jacket trimmed with military braid and a woollen petticoat. Catharine never dared tell her English sister how wildly inappropriate were some of the items that lay on the top of Reydon parcels—the long white gloves, the fichus of Honiton lace, the cravats for Agnes’s Canadian nephews.

  Catharine felt uncomfortable when Susanna criticized Agnes, because she herself was so eager for Agnes’s help in London publishing circles. It was Agnes, after all, who had found her a publisher for Canadian Crusoes, and on whom she depended for news of reviews and sales of further magazine pieces. But Agnes’s anger at Susanna had seeped into her relationship with Catharine, and there was a note of snippy irritation in some of her letters these days. When Catharine sent Agnes a manuscript of a children’s story that she had written several years earlier, which took the form of a conversation between its subjects, Agnes’s response was curt: “No-one attends to books in dialogue.”