Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush

by Susanna Moodie

  Oh! ye sons of labour, seek to attain this true dignity inherent in your nature, and cease to envy the possessors of those ephemeral honours that perish with the perishing things of this world. The time is coming – is now even at the doors – when education shall give you a truer standing in society, and good men throughout the whole world shall recognise each other as brothers.

  “An’ o’er the earth gude sense an’ worth

  Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that.”

  Carried away from my subject by an impetuous current of thought, I must step back to the show from which I derived a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure. The space in which it was exhibited contained, I am told, about sixteen acres. The rear of this, where the animals were shown, was a large grove covered with tall spreading trees, beneath the shade of which, reposing or standing in the most picturesque attitudes, were to be seen the finest breeds of cattle, horses, and sheep, in the province. This inclosure was surrounded by a high boarded fence, against which pens were erected for the accommodation of plethoric-looking pigs, fat sleepy lambs, and wild mischievous goats; while noble horses were led to and fro by their owners or their servants, snorting and curveting in all the conscious pride of strength and beauty. These handsome, proud-looking creatures, might be considered the aristocracy of the animal department; yet, in spite of their prancing hoofs, arched necks, and glances of fire, they had to labour in their vocation as well as the poorest pig that grunted and panted in its close pen. There was a donkey there – a solitary ass – the first of his kind I ever beheld in the province. Unused to such a stir and bustle, he lifted up his voice, and made the grove ring with his discordant notes. The horses bounded and reared, and glanced down upon him in such mad disdain, that they could scarcely be controlled by their keepers. I can imagine the astonishment they must have felt on hearing the first bray of an ass; they could not have appeared more startled at a lion’s roar. Whoever exhibited Mr. Braham was a brave man. A gentleman, who settled in the neighbourhood of Peterboro’ twenty years ago, brought out a donkey with him to Canada, and until the day of his death he went by no other name than the undignified one of Donkey.

  I cannot help thinking, that the donkey would be a very useful creature in the colony. Though rather an untractable democrat, insisting on having things his own way, he is a hardy, patient fellow, and easily kept; and though very obstinate, is by no means insensible of kind treatment, or incapable of attachment; and then, as an exterminator of Canadian thistles, he would prove an invaluable reformer by removing these agricultural pests out of the way. Often have I gazed upon the Canadian thistle – that prolific, sturdy democrat of the soil, that rudely jostles aside its more delicate and valued neighbours, elbowing them from their places with its wide-spreading and armed foliage – and asked myself for what purpose it grew and flourished so abundantly? Surely, it must have some useful qualities; some good must lie hidden under its hardy structure and coat of mail, independently of its exercising those valuable qualities in man – patience and industry – which must be called into active operation in order to root it out, and hinder it from destroying the fruits of his labour. The time, perhaps, may arrive when its thick milky juices and oily roots may be found to yield nutricious food, or afford a soothing narcotic to alleviate the restless tossings of pain. I firmly believe that nothing has been made in vain; that every animate and inanimate substance has its use, although we may be ignorant of it; that the most perfect and beautiful harmony reigns over the visible world; that although we may foolishly despise those animals, plants, and insects, that we consider noxious, because their real utility has never been tested by experience, they are absolutely necessary as links in the great chain of Providence, and appointed to fulfil a special purpose and end.

  “What shall we do for firewood when all the forests are burned?” was a very natural question asked us the other day by a young friend, who, with very scanty means, contemplated with a sort of horror the increased demand for fuel, and its increasing price.

  Tupper has an admirable answer for all such queries: –

  “Yet man, heedless of a God, counteth up vain reckonings,

  Fearing to be jostled and starved out by the too prolific increase of his kind,

  And asketh, in unbelieving dread, for how few years to come

  Will the black cellars of the world yield unto him fuel for his winter.

  Might not the wide waste sea be bent into narrower bounds?

  Might not the arm of diligence make the tangled wilderness a garden?

  And for aught thou can’st tell, there may be a thousand methods

  Of comforting thy limbs in warmth, though thou kindle not a spark.

  Fear not, son of man, for thyself, nor thy seed – with a multitude is plenty:

  God’s blessing giveth increase, and with it larger than enough.”

  Surely it is folly for anyone to despair of the future, while the providence of God superintends the affairs of the universe. Is it not sinful to doubt the power of that Being, who fed a vast multitude from a few loaves and small fishes? Is His arm shortened, that he can no longer produce those articles that are indispensable and necessary for the health and comfort of the creatures dependent upon his bounty? What millions have been fed by the introduction of the potato plant – that wild, half-poisonous native of the Chilian mountains! When first exhibited as a curiousity by Sir Walter Raleigh, who could have imagined the astonishing results, – not only in feeding the multitudes that for several ages in Ireland it has fed, but that the very blight upon it, by stopping an easy mode of obtaining food, should be the instrument in the hands of the great Father to induce these impoverished, starving children of an unhappy country, to remove to lands where honest toil would be amply remunerated, and produce greater blessings for them than the precarious support afforded by an esculent root? We have faith, unbounded faith, in the benevolent care of the Universal Father, – faith in the fertility of the earth, and her capabilities of supporting to the end of time her numerous offspring.

  The over-population of old settled countries may appear to a casual thinker a dreadful calamity; and yet it is but the natural means employed by Providence to force the poorer classes, by the strong law of necessity, to emigrate and spread themselves over the earth, in order to bring into cultivation and usefulness its waste places. When the world can no longer maintain its inhabitants, it will be struck out of being by the fiat of Him who called it into existence.

  Nothing has contributed more to the rapid advance of the province than the institution of the Agricultural Society, and from it we are already reaping the most beneficial results. It has stirred up a spirit of emulation in a large class of people, who were very supine in their method of cultivating their lands; who, instead of improving them, and making them produce not only the largest quantity of grain, but that of the best quality, were quite contented if they reaped enough from their slovenly farming to supply the wants of their family, of a very inferior sort.

  Now, we behold a laudable struggle among the tillers of the soil, as to which shall send the best specimens of good husbandry to contend for the prizes at the provincial shows, where very large sums of money are expended in providing handsome premiums for the victors. All the leading men in the province are members of this truly honourable institution; and many of them send horses, and the growth of their gardens, to add to the general bustle and excitement of the scene. The summer before last my husband took the second prize for wheat at the provincial show, and I must frankly own that I felt as proud of it as if it had been the same sum bestowed upon a prize poem.

  There was an immense display of farm produce on the present occasion at Toronto, all excellent in their kind. The Agricultural Hall, a large, temporary building of boards, was completely filled with the fruits of the earth and the products of the dairy –

  “A glorious sight, if glory dwells below,

  Where heaven’s munificence makes all the show.”

  The most deli
cious butter and tempting cheese, quite equal, perhaps, to the renowned British in every thing but the name, were displayed in the greatest abundance.

  A Mr. Hiram Ranney, from the Brock district, contributed a monster cheese, weighing 7 cwt., not made of “double skimmed sky-blue,” but of milk of the richest quality, which, from its size and appearance, might have feasted all the rats and mice in the province for the next twelve months. It was large enough to have made the good old deity of heathen times – her godship of the earth – an agricultural throne; while from the floral hall, close at hand, a crown could have been woven, on the shortest notice, of the choicest buds from her own inexhaustible treasury.

  A great quantity of fine flax and hemp particularly attracted my attention. Both grow admirably in this country, and at no very distant period will form staple articles for home manufacture and foreign export.

  The vast improvement in home-manufactured cloth, blankets, flannels, shawls, carpeting, and counterpanes, was very apparent over the same articles in former years. In a short time Canada need not be beholden to any foreign country for articles of comfort and convenience. In these things her real wealth and strength are shown; and we may well augur from what she has already achieved in this line, how much more she can do – and do well with credit and profit to herself.

  The sheep in Canada are not subject to the diseases which carry off so many yearly in Britain; and though these animals have to be housed during the winter, they are a very profitable stock. The Canadian grass-fed mutton is not so large as it is in England, and in flavour and texture more nearly resembles the Scotch. It has more of a young flavour, and, to my thinking, affords a more wholesome, profitable article of consumption. Beef is very inferior to the British; but since the attention of the people has been more intently directed to their agricultural interests, there is a decided improvement in this respect, and the condition of all the meat sent to market now-a-days is ten per cent better than the lean, hard animals, we used to purchase for winter provisions, when we first came to the province.

  At that time they had a race of pigs, tall and gaunt, with fierce, bristling manes, that wandered about the roads and woods, seeking what they could devour, like famished wolves. You might have pronounced them, without any great stretch of imagination, descended from the same stock into which the attendant fiends that possessed the poor maniacs of Galilee had been cast so many ages ago. I knew a gentleman who was attacked in the bush by a sow of this ferocious breed, who fairly tried him in the woods of Douro, and kept him on his uncomfortable perch during several hours, until his swinish enemy’s patience was exhausted, and she had to give up her supper of human flesh for the more natural products of the forest, acorns and beech-mast.

  Talking of pigs and sheep recals to my mind an amusing anecdote, told to me by a resident of one of our back townships, which illustrates, even in a cruel act of retaliation, the dry humour which so strongly characterizes the lower class of emigrants from the emerald isle. I will give it in my young friend’s own words: –

  “In one of our back townships there lived an old Dutchman, who was of such a vindictive temper that none of his neighbours could remain at peace with him. He made the owners of the next farm so miserable that they were obliged to sell out, and leave the place. The farm passed through many hands, and at last became vacant, for no one could stay on it more than a few months; they were so worried and annoyed by this spiteful old man, who, upon the slightest occasion, threw down their fences and injured their cattle. In short, the poor people began to suspect that he was the devil himself, sent among them as a punishment for their sins.

  “At last an Irish emigrant lately out was offered the place very cheap, and, to the astonishment of all, bought it, in spite of the bad karacter, for the future residence of himself and family.

  “He had not been long on the new place when one of his sheep, which had got through a hole in the Dutchman’s fence, came hobbling home with one of its legs stuck through the other. Now, you must know that this man, who was so active in punishing the trespasses of his neighbours’ cattle and stock, was not at all particular in keeping his own at home. There happened to be an old sow of his, who was very fond of Pat’s potaties, and a constant throuble to him, just then in the field when the sheep came home. Pat took the old sow (not very tenderly, I’m afraid) by the ear, and drawing out his jack-knife, very deliberately slit her mouth on either side as far as he could. By and by, the old Dutchman came puffing and blowing along; and seeing Pat sitting upon his door-step, enjoying the evening air, and comfortably smoking his pipe, he asked him if he had seen anything of his sow?

  “‘Well, neighbour,’ said Pat, putting on one of his gravest faces, ‘one of the strangest things happened a short while ago that I ever saw. A sheep of mine came home with its leg slit and the other put through it, and your old sow was so amused with the odd sight that she split her jaws with laughing.’”

  This turned the tables upon the spiteful old man, and completely cured him of all his ill-natured tricks. He is now one of the best neighbours in the township.

  This was but a poor reparation to the poor sheep and the old sow. Their sufferings appear to have been regarded by both parties as a very minor consideration.

  The hall set apart for the display of fancy work and the fine arts appeared to be the great centre of attraction, for it was almost impossible to force your way through the dense crowd, or catch a glimpse of the pictures exhibited by native artists. The show of these was highly creditable indeed. Eight pictures, illustrative of Indian scenery, character, and customs, by Mr. Paul Kane, would have done honour to any exhibition. For correctness of design, beauty of colouring, and a faithful representation of the peculiar scenery of this continent, they could scarcely be surpassed.

  I stood for a long time intently examining these interesting pictures, when a tall fellow, in the grey homespun of the country, who, I suppose, thought that I had my share of enjoyment in that department, very coolly took me by the shoulders, pulled me back into the crowd, and possessed himself of my vacant place. This man should have formed a class with the two large tame bears exhibited on the ground appropriated to the poultry; but I rather think that Bruin and his brother would have been ashamed of having him added to their fraternity; seeing that their conduct was quite unexceptionable, and they could have a set a good example to numbers of the human bipeds, who pushed and elbowed from side to side anything that obstructed their path, while a little common courtesy would have secured to themselves and others a far better opportunity of examining everything carefully. The greatest nuisance in this respect was a multitude of small children, who were completely hidden in the press, and whose feet, hands, and head, dealt blows, against which it was impossible to protect yourself, as you felt severely without being able to ward off their home-thrusts. It is plain that they could not see at all, but were determined that everyone should sensibly feel their disappointment. It was impossible to stop for a moment to examine this most interesting portion of the Exhibition; and one was really glad to force a passage out of the press into the free air.

  Large placards were pasted about in the most conspicuous places, warning visitors to the grounds to look out for pickpockets! Everyone was on the alert to discover these gentry – expecting them, I suppose, to be classed like the animal and vegetable productions of the soil; and the vicinity of a knowing-looking, long-bearded pedlar, who was selling Yankee notions at the top of his voice, and always surrounded by a great mob, was considered the most likely locality for these invisible personages, who, I firmly believe, existed alone in the fancy of the authors of the aforesaid placards.

  There was a very fine display of the improved and foreign breeds of poultry; and a set of idle Irish loungers, of the lower class, were amusing themselves by inserting the bowls of their pipes into the pens that contained these noble fowls, and giving them the benefit of a good smoking. The intoxicating effects of the fumes of the tobacco upon the poor creatures appeared to
afford their tormentors the greatest entertainment. The stately Cochin-China cocks shook their plumed heads, and turned up their beaks with unmistakeable signs of annoyance and disgust; and two fine fowls that were lying dead outside the pens, were probably killed by this novel sport.

  I was greatly struck by the appearance of Okah Tubee, the celebrated Indian doctor, who was certainly the most conspicuous-looking person in the show, and on a less public occasion would have drawn a large number of spectators on his own hook.

  Okah Tubee is a broad, stout, powerfully built man, with a large fat face, set off to the least possible advantage by round rings of braided hair, tied with blue ribbons, and with large gold ear-rings in his ears. Now, it certainly is true that a man has a perfect right to dress his hair in this fashion, or in any fashion he pleases; but a more absurd appearance than the blue ribbons gave to his broad, brown, beardless face, it is impossible to imagine. The solemn dignity, too, with which he carried off this tom-foolery was not the least laughable part of it. I wonder which of his wives – for I was told he had several – braided all these small rings of hair, and confined them with the blue love knots; but it is more than probable that the grave Indian performed his own toilet. His blue surtout beaver hat accorded ill with his Indian leggings and moccassins. I must think that the big man’s dress was in shocking bad taste, and decided failure. I missed the sight of him carrying a flag in the procession, and mounted on horseback; if his riding-dress matched his walking costume, it must have been rich.