Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  Scratch, scratch, scratch … the pen moved faster and faster as memories flocked back. Catharine recalled how Elizabeth had excelled at quick sketches of village characters, including John Fenn the rat-catcher, old Catchpole the mole-catcher and “some old women reputed to be witches but really very harmless creatures.” She wrote of Jane’s cloud of curls and Sarah’s sense of style: “When dressed in her riding habit and Spanish hat and feathers she certainly made a striking appearance.” But the sister she recalled with the deepest and most familiar affection was the one to whom she had always been closest.

  It was more than five years since Susanna had died, and Catharine missed her. These days Catharine remembered her sister not as the cantankerous widow or the demented old woman on her deathbed, but as the lively, headstrong girl with “an inherent love of freedom of thought and action.” She wrote about her with a love and longing she had never expressed about Thomas Traill after his death. “We two lived in childlike confidence and harmony, as we grew up side by side as loving friends, our lives remaining in parallel grooves, and this continued even after we married and left the old home at Reydon to share the untried fortunes of the new world in our forest homes in what is now Ontario.” In particular, she remembered her youngest sister’s intensity. “Susie was an infant genius…. Her facility for rhyme was great and her imagination vivid and romantic, tinged with gloom and grandeur….As is often found in persons of genius, she was often elated and often depressed, easily excited by passing events, unable to control emotions caused by either pain or pleasure. …I was not of so imaginative a disposition.”

  Whatever wistful thoughts of Susanna she harboured, Catharine undoubtedly comforted herself with the pleasure she continued to take in her own huge family. Five of her seven children were still alive in 1890, and she had twenty-one grandchildren. Kate Traill continued to look after her mother, and Annie Atwood and Mary Muchall, Catharine’s two married daughters, lived close by. But both her sons, like so many young men in the late nineteenth century, had been forced to travel west in order to find work. William and Walter were now both settled in western Canada and had started families thousands of miles away from Lakefield. Catharine ached to see them and her “little Nor’wester grandchildren.” Even when her right hand was swollen with rheumatism, or her eyes cloudy with cataracts, she managed to write them lengthy letters. “See dear how I have blotted the sheet well you must not mind the blot but take from the hand of the aged mother,” she wrote to William Traill, now a chief trader dealing in furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company in the remote northwest of the Dominion. William wrote affectionate letters home, filled with vivid descriptions of native uprisings, natural disasters and adventurous canoe trips. He sent his mother dried ferns and grasses from the Peace River region. But Walter’s letters arrived infrequently these days, and were often gloomy. Catharine confided to William her concerns about Walter’s mental health. “I fear for that morbid temperament so like his dear father’s.”

  Catharine’s son William Traill (seated, right), who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company before becoming a farmer in Saskatchewan, with his wife Harriette and nine of their ten children.

  In sheer volume alone, Catharine’s correspondence is extraordinary. Judging by what has survived, during the last few years of her life she sat down to write a lengthy epistle to a relative or a friend, or a formal letter to a publisher or fellow writer, at least once or twice a week. Moreover, letter-writing was light afternoon entertainment for the elderly author. Most mornings, while Kate Traill did the housework, Catharine worked away at her writing projects. Often her eyes ached after she had been writing or reading too long; then she would open the windows and step outside. “I long for air,” she explained to her daughter Annie, “and pottering about the garden.” Kate looked after beds of flowering perennials, while Catharine was still in charge of the vegetable patch. Since the two women could rarely afford meat in their diet, they depended on Catharine’s harvest of peas, beans, root vegetables, raspberries and strawberries. Despite her white hair, arthritic knees and aching back, the octogenarian would dig, plant, weed and pick just as she had done throughout her life in Canada.

  Besides the family memoir, Catharine had two other writing projects on the go: an account of her first seven years in Canada, and a book of essays on natural history for young readers. Catharine’s determination to get into print never flagged, despite endless rebuffs from publishers. “Canada is a poor market for literature,” she complained to her niece Katie Vickers. Household bills gnawed away at Catharine, but there was also a secondary motive: “I wished to leave something myself for my grandchildren as I have neither gold nor silver nor any personal property to leave … ” Often, publishers didn’t even bother to return Catharine’s carefully hand-copied manuscripts to her. Those that did offered only vague indications of interest. By now, Catharine knew that her sister Agnes’s description of publishers’ “cold-blooded villainy” was deadly accurate. “He is a real hum-bug,” she wrote of one unctuous editor. “I have no faith in his promises and his flattery as that does not pay.”

  Catharine’s struggles to find a publisher were particularly exasperating since she was now clearly a bone fide Canadian celebrity herself, rather than simply the sister of either Agnes Strickland or Susanna Moodie. Successive governors-general paid obeisance to her. Six years after being lionized in Ottawa by the Lansdownes, Catharine was invited to preside over the hospitality offered to Lansdowne’s successor, Baron Stanley of Preston, and his wife Lady Stanley when they made a two-hour visit to Lakefield in September 1890. The village residents threw themselves into the viceregal reception. They built arches over the main street, decorated the village hall in flowers and wreaths, draped clean white linen cloths over the rugged trestle tables and appointed twelve girls to wait upon the tables at tea. Catharine was not impressed. Her discomfort with snobbery and formality erupted. “I had a bad headache and felt unequal to the fatigue,” she wrote to her son William. She smiled graciously throughout the Governor-General’s generous compliments to her—“a lady whose name is known … in England as well as here”—although her advanced deafness and the clatter of teaspoons meant she couldn’t hear a word. However, a lifetime of authorship meant that Catharine knew how to take advantage of such a situation: she was more than happy to present Lady Stanley with a copy of Studies of Plant Life in Canada. For all the excitement, as soon as the Stanleys had been escorted off to a night train “amid huzzahs and a torchlight procession and God Save the Queen by a Lindsay band,” Catharine was relieved to get back to Westove.

  Once again, it was not the important men with fancy titles amongst Catharine’s acquaintance who came to her rescue on the publishing front but her own family. Soon after the Stanleys’ visit to Lakefield, Maime Fitzgibbon came to live there. “I shall be busy writing,” Catharine told William, “as she wants us to bring out a volume together.” Maime had become friendly with Edward Caswell, the eager young literary editor at the Toronto-based Methodist Book and Publishing House. Caswell was working with Maime on her second book, a biography of her maternal grandfather entitled A Veteran of 1812: The Life of James FitzGibbon, which was eventually published in 1894. Both Maime and Edward were caught up in the craze for “wheeling,” or bicycling, that swept Toronto in the 1890s. Maime was just the kind of woman to embrace the liberation that the bicycle offered. Still single at forty and an intrepid traveller who had gone west by train and crossed the Atlantic by steamer, she loved to swathe her head in a veil, her legs in bloomers, and go for a good wheel. Mr. Caswell pedalled as fast as he could to keep up with her as she sped around the streets of Toronto, or along the Don Valley ravine. One August, she persuaded him to put his bicycle on the train to Peterborough, and to cycle from there to Lakefield to visit Catharine Parr Traill at Westove.

  Edward was captivated by the genial, white-haired author, now in her nineties, who sat on the verandah and seemed to recognize each individual bird that flew through her g
arden. Maime soon had him interested in her great-aunt’s manuscripts. The editor particularly liked the short essays that she had written for children about different aspects of nature—the smell, sounds and sight of the Canadian woods in spring, for example, or the behaviour of such Canadian birds as pine grosbeaks and the increasingly rare scarlet tanagers. Edward asked Maime to write a biographical sketch of Catharine as an introduction to a volume that he decided to call Pearls and Pebbles, or Notes of an Old Naturalist. To Catharine’s excitement, when the book was published in mid-December 1894, it did well. Within three months, 750 copies, at one dollar a copy, were sold, and it received favourable notices in both Canada and England. Sandford Fleming, an enthusiastic fan and reliable friend, dashed off a quick note from Ottawa to the author. “Receive dear Mrs. Traill an order for seven copies. I long to see the latest production of yours. You are indeed a wonderful woman.”

  The review that must have given Catharine the most pleasure was by the redoubtable Professor Goldwin Smith, the former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University who now lived in splendour in Toronto with his wealthy wife, the former Mrs. Henry Boulton of The Grange. Smith, who delighted in the title “the Sage of the Grange,” was a roaring snob who knew little about the countryside and usually sneered at anything too sentimental. But in his review in the London Illustrated News, which was reproduced in the Peterborough Daily Evening News, he pronounced Pearls and Pebbles “a sort of Canadian counterpart to White’s ‘Selbourne.’”

  Caswell was sufficiently encouraged by the success of Pearls and Pebbles to publish a further volume of Catharine’s essays the following year, Cot and Cradle Stories. Maime helped her great-aunt organize the manuscript for, as the ninety-three-year-old author confessed to her niece: “I get dreadfully bewildered now with MS papers, lose time through want of memory. A thousand things flit through my brain—like dreams—good for a few minutes—then gone.” But Cot and Cradle Stories did not do well.

  Catharine had never had two cents to rub together—she derived no royalties from the books that had been published in England, and the two little volumes published by the Methodist Book and Publishing House brought slim proceeds. She had always depended on the generosity of relatives like her brother Sam, her sister Sarah and her son William. But now she was the only member of her generation left. Her sister Sarah Gwillym had died in 1890, two years after Jane. “I stand alone,” wrote a saddened Catharine, “the last and only one living of the sisters.”

  Both Catharine’s English sisters left her modest legacies, which she invested (along with Agnes’s legacy of $2,500) in a Peterborough enterprise run by a Mr. John Burnham. Mr. Burnham, however, went bankrupt in late 1897, and Catharine, at ninety-five, was left virtually penniless.

  Catharine received the dire financial news with her usual “The Lord will provide” stoicism. She had borne many hardships before, and she prepared to weather this latest storm. Several younger members of the Strickland clan, however, thought she deserved better. Mary Strickland, wife of Sam’s grandson Arthur, decided Catharine needed official assistance. Without Catharine’s knowledge, an urgent plea was sent to the British Prime Minister, at 10 Downing Street, for help for the “oldest living author in the British Empire.”

  A secretary to Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, sent a stuffy reply, indicating that her service to the Empire did not make Mrs. Traill eligible for a civil list pension. However, he added, she might receive a donation from the Royal Bounty Fund of 150 pounds “if the people of Canada generally, or her friends and admirers in particular, are willing to show their appreciation of her literary merits and character by raising a Testimonial Fund for the purpose of making some permanent provision for the future.” Such a grant, it was made clear, was made on account not of Catharine Parr Traill’s own achievements, but simply because she was the sister of Agnes Strickland. And the Royal Bounty Fund put stingy limits on its largesse. If Mrs. Traill should die before the grant was awarded, the money could not be redirected to her daughter Kate Traill, who was equally needy, because she was too distant a relative of Agnes to qualify.

  By the summer of 1898, Catharine had outlived two of her four sons and one of her three daughters (Mary Muchall died in 1892) and, in her own words, “all the great men and women of the past. Soldiers, sailors, statesmen, three sovereigns, the poets, the novelists, artists, historians.” At ninety-six, she was a Canadian icon—one of the few souls alive who could remember the celebrations after the Battle of Waterloo, and who knew the Dominion of Canada when it was still a wilderness. She appeared to be immortal. The journalist Faith Fenton made a pilgrimage to Lakefield to profile Catharine for her new magazine, the Canadian Home Journal. She was captivated by the welcome she received. “What a picture she makes as she sits in her rocking chair: blue eyes, bright as a child’s; silky white hair, parted over the high forehead and tucked away beneath the pretty cap, whose pink ribbons are not more delicately coloured than the wrinkled cheeks; a smile full of kindliness, and lips curving humourously.” As their grandmother chatted away to the smart lady journalist from Toronto, Katie Traill (Harry’s daughter) and a couple of Annie Atwood’s daughters exchanged significant looks. They had seen so many visitors fall under their grandmother’s charm. When Faith Fenton finally rose to leave, Katie Traill said, “Don’t call her a ‘wonderful old lady.’ Everybody does, and we get so tired of it.” Fenton couldn’t resist using the label: “There is no other phrase so true.”

  Catharine on the porch at Westove in 1898, with two of her granddaughters: undeniably, “a wonderful old lady.”

  But Catharine’s ready smile could not hide the fact that she suffered all the handicaps of her advanced age. Her eyes were cloudy, her ears deaf, her hands shook, and she was too frail to scramble over the rocks of the Stony Lake islands, searching for lichen, moss and ferns. “The fund should be started at once,” Mary Strickland insisted, “and only kept open for a few weeks, fearing that anything should happen to Mrs. Traill which is only too likely at her great age.” The family knew exactly who to approach to raise a Testimonial Fund for Catharine: her good friend Sandford Fleming, who had recently been knighted in Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee honours of 1897, alongside Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier.

  In June 1898, Sir Sandford threw himself into the campaign to raise funds for his old friend. He arm-twisted colleagues, sent out a circular to everyone he had ever worked with and persuaded the Governor-General and his wife to head the list of donors with a generous contribution of fifty dollars. “Those of the present generation…may not be familiar with the life and work of Mrs. Traill…read the note he sent round. “She has rendered service of no ordinary kind in making known the advantages offered by Canada as a field for settlement, and by her very widely read writings she has been instrumental in inducing very many emigrants from the United Kingdom to find homes in the Dominion.”

  The list of signatories to the testimonial was a Who’s Who of the intellectual establishment of 1890s Canada. It included George Grant (principal of Queen’s College, Kingston), John Bourinot (chief clerk of the House of Commons) and all the senior staff of Ottawa’s Experimental Farm. It included Toronto lawyers and Quebec City businessmen. It included the librarian of the British Columbia legislature, the president of the Winnipeg Board of Trade and the wife of Sir William Van Horne, president of the CPR. By December, when Sir Sandford wrote and told Catharine about it, the fund stood at over $1,000.

  Catharine finally had more financial security than she had known for years. “Dear valued friend,” replied Catharine, in a script as firm as it had been twenty years earlier, “You can hardly think how welcome [your letter] proved….How can I thank all the kindness of the generous givers of this large sum of money awarded to the aged authoress. It does seem too great for such small services…. And in what words dearest Friend shall I thank you, and all my known and unknown friends in England and Ontario. I can only adopt the hearty simple phrase used by the Indian women of H
iawatha village—‘I bless you in my heart.’”

  The formal presentation came early in 1899. The tribute acknowledged Catharine’s major literary works, and concluded: “We cannot forget the courage with which you endured the privations and trials of the backwoods in the early settlement of Ontario, and we rejoice to know that your useful life has been prolonged in health and vigour until you are now the oldest living author in Her Majesty’s dominion. Nearing the close of the century we desire to pay tribute to your personal worth, and we ask your acceptance of this testimonial as a slight token of the esteem and regard in which you are universally held.”

  A few months later, Kate Traill took her ninety-seven-year-old mother to Minnewawa, her cottage on Stony Lake. Catharine sat on the shady verandah, scattering crumbs for her beloved birds and watching canoes skim across the azure water. She loved “the wild and picturesque rocks, trees, hill and valley, wild-flowers, ferns, shrubs and moss and the pure, sweet scent of pines over all, breathing health and strength. If I were a doctor,” she had once written, “I would send my patients to live in a shanty under the pines.” In the summer of 1899, she would occasionally ignore Kate’s protests and, cherrywood staff in hand, totter off to the woods behind the cottage to look for berries and flowers. Very occasionally, she would pick up a pen to write to distant relatives.