Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  Cobourg in 1838: this sketch, completed by the artist William Bartlett six years after the sisters passed through the little town, includes the newly-opened Victoria College (centre).

  As the Traills had arrived in Lower Canada two weeks before the Moodies, the two families travelled separately up the St. Lawrence River. Thomas and Catharine arrived in Cobourg—their jumping-off point for the backwoods—a week before John and Susanna.

  The couples had agreed that they would eventually rendezvous at Sam Strickland’s home in the township of Douro, two days’ journey north of Cobourg. Communications were so bad in the colony that not only was there no way that each couple could track the other’s moves, but Sam Strickland didn’t even know his two sisters were about to arrive on his doorstep.

  Cobourg gave Catharine and Susanna their first real taste of Upper Canada. During his East Anglian lecture tour, Cattermole had described the town as a “handsome and thriving place [with] stores in abundance… hatters, shoemakers, and every other convenience which a wealthy, grain-purchasing, money-making generation could desire.” And it certainly had pretensions. It had shrugged off its early nickname, “Hardscrabble,” and with flag-waving pride renamed itself Cobourg, in a misspelled tribute to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who had married Princess Charlotte, only child of the future King George IV, in 1816. Princess Charlotte was heir to the British throne; had she not died a year after her marriage, Upper Canada’s Cobourg might have revelled in royal patronage. Unfortunately, when another German prince entered the British royal family, he paid no attention to the little colonial namesake. Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, husband of Queen Victoria, had little interest in Britain’s overseas possessions.

  Most of the original population of Cobourg was composed of Loyalists, who had lived in North America for several generations but had fled north during the 1790s after the American War of Independence. Next to arrive, during the 1820s, was a wave of half-pay British officers interested in free land and a new start. By 1832, Cobourg had a population of around one thousand and aspirations to a cultural life. There was a printing office and a book society. James McCarroll, a talented Irishman who had recently immigrated with his father, had just opened a music school promising “the sublime studies of such spirits as Carolin, Weber, Mozart, Haydn, Handel, &c.” There were regular tea parties for which the wives of Cobourg’s leading citizens dressed up in their best flounces and furs to discuss the same topics that would have galvanized similar gatherings in England—new brides, new babies and the servant problem. There was a Methodist Academy. A sandy beach gently curved around the bay, cradling the high-masted lake schooners as they bobbed about on the water. Cobourg’s weekly newspaper, the Cobourg Star (“a friend and welcome guest at every fireside”), was edited by R.D. Chatterton, an English journalist familiar with both Susanna’s poetry and the London literati that Susanna and Catharine had left behind. The Reverend Mr. McAulay gave his sermons in St. Peter’s Anglican Church in such a fruity English accent that he might have been standing in the pulpit of the church in Reydon. Catharine insisted that Cobourg lived up to expectations. She wrote home happily about its “very pretty church and select society,” and commented that “many families of respectability [had] fixed their residences in or near the town.”

  This was raw Upper Canada, however, not pastoral England. Beyond the cleared fields surrounding the little lakeshore town was the gloomy, impenetrable bush. Black bears often strolled through backyards. No newcomer could ignore the town’s gimcrack appearance: most of its one hundred and fifty houses were little more than wooden shanties. And to anyone familiar with Suffolk’s ecclesiastical gems, St. Peter’s looked more like a cowshed than an Anglican church. The only two buildings of any substance were the new stone courthouse on the town’s outskirts and a splendid brick mansion recently erected by the lawyer George Boulton. There was such a shortage of coins in the colony that half the money in circulation in the Cobourg stores consisted of brass buttons torn off discarded uniforms. And there always seemed to be at least one dishevelled pioneer making an exhibition of himself in the middle of town, half-sozzled at eleven o’clock in the morning. Cobourg boasted three taverns and several distilleries, but only two churches.

  Susanna was far less generous—and more incisive—than her sister in her assessment of Cobourg. It didn’t take her long to realize that Cobourg’s culture was skin-deep. Her heart sank as she heard how the book society read Walter Scott’s novels or Lord Byron’s poetry over and over again, because it took at least two years for the latest London best-seller to arrive. Her nose crinkled as she took in the shabby state, including perspiration stains, of many of the ladies’ gowns. Her eyes widened as she glanced through the pages of the Cobourg Star. She was horrified by “the freedom of the press [which is] enjoyed to an extent in this province unknown in more civilized communities.” Upper Canadian periodicals were notorious for the abuse and invective they heaped upon their targets. “It is the commonest thing in the world,” Susanna noted with alarm, “to hear one editor abusing, like a pickpocket, an opposition brother; calling him a reptile, a crawling thing, a calumniator, a hired vendor of lies, and his paper a smut-machine.” Even William Lyon Mackenzie, in The Colonial Advocate, deplored the fact that the hundreds of newspapers circulating in Upper Canada had become the “dernier resort of the venal, the profligate and the unprincipled in society.” For Susanna, this kind of invective was a far cry from La Belle Assemblée and The Court Journal.

  The Traills spent only the night of August 31, 1832, in Cobourg. An autumnal chill had crept into the evening air, and the pressure to keep moving was strong. More urgently, Catharine had realized that Thomas was not an ideal pioneer. Thomas was a sweet, gentle man, but easily defeated by circumstance. All his erudition was useless in a crisis, as her cholera episode in Montreal had demonstrated. He was hopelessly impractical: if he tried to nail a trunk closed, he always hit his finger with the hammer. On the journey up the St. Lawrence, Thomas had sunk into an increasingly gloomy silence as his wife enthused about the scenery. Catharine began to understand that the success and happiness of her marriage would depend on her own initiative and energy. She knew that she could not manage alone. So she insisted that she and Thomas should embark on the last leg of their journey—the thirty-eight miles north to Peterborough—as soon as possible. From Peterborough, they would get in touch with Samuel, who was living eleven miles further north, on the Otonobee River.

  The back country north of Cobourg was a landscape of swamps, forests, bush and rivers.

  Sam, his wife Mary and their two small children had settled north of Peterborough only a year earlier, some months after Sam had terminated his employment with the Canada Company. Samuel Strickland was just the kind of person that any new immigrant, with no experience of the colony, would value as a close neighbour. Within months of acquiring land, Sam had cleared twenty-five acres and built a decent house. He had huge advantages over either of his brothers-in-law. Several years younger than both Thomas and John, he was a strong, resourceful man who had now lived in Upper Canada for seven years and had acquired all the necessary practical skills. He could use and care for oxen, make ox-yokes and axe handles, cut and stack hay, build zigzag fences and split logs. Like his sister Agnes in England, he was a take-charge kind of person. His forte was organizing “bees”—the community working sessions at which neighbours would pool their labour for the benefit of one of their members. What’s more, Sam revelled in the pioneer life. A barrel of a man, he loved hunting and practical jokes. (He once buried a porcupine in a barrel of nails, then invited anybody who came along to take a free handful.) Catharine hoped that capable Sam might teach scholarly Tom how to work with his hands.

  Douro Township had a further attraction for the Traills: it had a reputation as a little island of gentility amidst the uncouth stumps. The name itself caused a flutter in the breast of every British military man: Douro was named after the Battle of the Douro River in
the Peninsular War. The township, which covered about fifty square miles, stretched from the banks of the Otonobee River in the west to the edge of Dummer Township in the east. It had good water communications, thanks to the river, and in its southwestern corner there was the rapidly growing settlement of Peterborough, with a population of over seven hundred people. Two Anglo-Irish gentlemen—Sam’s fatherin-law, Robert Reid, and Reid’s brother-in-law, Thomas Alexander Stewart—were amongst the founders of Peterborough and lived with their large families on its northern edge. Sam Strickland had bought land close to the Reids immediately after he left the Canada Company. He had then sold that land and, with the proceeds, bought more uncleared acres farther north, where the Otonabee River widened out and became a long skinny lake called Lake Katchawanooka, or “Lake of the Waterfalls.” (The lake was also referred to as “Katchewanook” and “Katchiwano” in this period, before its name was regularized on provincial maps.) The Strickland farm on Lake Katchewanooka was the first dwelling in the community originally known as North Douro, and eventually renamed Lakefield.

  Thirty-five miles to the north, on Sturgeon Lake, there was a second covey of gentlefolk. Of the six settlers there, four were university-educated, one had attended an English military college and the last had “half a dozen silver spoons and a wife who plays the guitar,” according to one of the group, John Langton from Lancashire. Patrick Shirreff, a Scottish farmer who travelled throughout North America in the early 1830s, recorded that the society of the Peterborough region was reputed to be “the most polished and aristocratic in Canada.” What Shirreff implied was that there were far fewer loudmouthed Loyalists here than on the Front. The British class system had been partly transplanted to the Peterborough region—which meant that Catharine and Thomas would feel comfortably at home in its upper ranks. Thomas might find a kindred spirit amongst the bookish Sturgeon Lake crowd.

  Catharine’s creeping anxiety about what lay ahead was evident in her account of the journey from the Front into the back country that she sent home to her mother. Girlish enthusiasm faded from her descriptions of a countryside that looked increasingly foreign. Although the gentle hills north of Cobourg reminded her of Gloucestershire, she deplored the “zigzag fences of split timber [which were] very offensive to my eye. I look in vain for the rich hedgerows of my native country.” As the afternoon wore on, and the woods each side of the road thickened, she began to wonder how any settler could clear the ground and build a log house within a single day, as Mr. Cattermole had airily promised.

  Today, we can barely conceive how barbaric Catharine must have found the British North American frontier of 170 years ago. There are no sepia photographs to kindle our imaginations; only a few amateurish sketches capture the immensity of the wilderness. Ancient stands of white pine, many over one hundred feet tall and with trunks five or six feet across, dwarfed the puny efforts of early settlers to tame the dense undergrowth of cedar and birch. Soon these giants would be felled by greedy lumber crews, eager to feed the appetite of Britain’s Royal Navy for squared timbers and masts. But in 1832, the mighty trees towered like malevolent sentinels over a landscape broken up only by swamps, rivers, rocky outcrops, lakes and clearings created by forest fires. Often the only sound in the dead of a bitter winter night was the howling of wolves; often the nearest habitation was several miles away, through almost impenetrable bush.

  Catharine huddled closer to Thomas as the horse-drawn wagon rumbled on. When they arrived at Rice Lake, her curiosity was whetted by the sight of an Indian village inhabited by Chippewa people (known today as Ojibwe, or in their own language, Anishanabeg). But her appetite for tourism was quenched when she got thoroughly chilled by driving rain as they crossed the lake on a grubby little steamer. Then the steamer, which continued up the Otonabee River, ran aground four miles below Peterborough. The men on the rowboat that eventually arrived to rescue them had consumed a whole keg of whisky and were “sullen and gloomy.” After an ugly row with the passengers, the men took off into the night, leaving Catharine and Thomas stranded in the woods. “We were nearly three miles below Peterborough, and how I was to walk this distance, weakened as I was by recent illness and fatigue of our long travelling, I knew not.”

  Luckily, one of their fellow passengers knew where he was going. In response to Catharine’s entreaties, he guided them through the dense forest to safety. It was an ordeal. At one point, Catharine lost her footing in the dark as she crossed a stream and fell into knee-deep water. And when they finally reached Peterborough, they found the principal inn there completely full. Thomas stood helplessly by as his shivering, wretched wife tearfully explained their predicament to the landlady. Catharine’s gentle nature (plus the promise of a handsome reward from the Traills’ savings) made instant friends: “we received every kindness and attention that we required from mine host and hostess,” she reported in her weekly letter back to Reydon Hall. The innkeeper and his wife “relinquished their own bed for our accommodation, contenting themselves with a shakedown before the kitchen fire.”

  Travel in the New World was a rude shock for English gentry. Henry James Warre (1819–1898) contrasted his elegant Montreal sleigh (bottom sketch) with the bone-shaking experience of winter travel on country roads.

  The following morning, a message was sent to Sam Strickland that his sister had arrived in Peterborough with her new husband. It took the boy who delivered the message all day to make his laborious way through the forests, along the roughly marked eleven-mile trail. Two days after Catharine and Thomas had reached Peterborough, a breathless and excited Sam arrived by canoe from his farm, after shooting the rapids of the Otonabee River, for a noisy reunion at the inn. He soon got Thomas organized. Thanks to Sam, Thomas had already secured a land grant of some waterfront acres on Lake Katchewanooka. Now his brother-in-law persuaded Thomas to spend some of his meagre capital on more acres that adjoined Sam’s land, so their two farms would be contiguous.

  Within three months of leaving the British Isles, the Traills had begun backwoods life with a wonderful advantage: they didn’t have to start from scratch. They had a neighbour who knew what he was doing, and who could lend them the agricultural implements (axes, ploughs, scythes) with which they were completely unfamiliar. Moreover, unlike most early settlers, they were able to spend their first year in the bush not in a leaky, cramped shanty but first as guests of various friends in Peterborough, and then in a sturdy log cabin near the Stricklands that had been abandoned by another family.

  Irish-born Frances Stewart became a close friend to Catharine as soon as the Traills arrived in Douro Township

  The Stricklands’ hospitality sweetened the Traills’ first taste of pioneer life. The Reids and Stewarts formed a little clique into which Catharine—generous, kind and always willing to lend a hand with jam-making and bread-baking—was soon absorbed. During the early weeks in Peter-borough, Catharine quickly became close friends with Dublin-born Frances Stewart, who was eight years older than she was and already the mother of eight children (she would have eleven children altogether, all of whom would survive childhood). Frances shared all Catharine’s religious, literary and botanical interests. A relative by marriage of the novelist Maria Edge-worth, Frances and her husband Thomas had moved to the unbroken bush of Douro Township ten years earlier, when Peterborough scarcely existed. Frances knew all too well how wretched a woman like Catharine would feel as she faced the rigours of life in the backwoods. In 1823, Frances herself had written home: “This place is so lonely that in spite of all my efforts to keep them off, clouds of dismal thoughts fly and lower over me. I have not seen a woman except those in our party for over five months, and only three times anyone in the shape of a companion.”

  Frances, a spry little woman with a ready smile, quickly became Catharine’s confidante, ready to comfort her when she unburdened herself about her homesickness for East Anglia, her impatience that letters from home took more than two months to reach her, her unhappiness that there was no church
at which she could attend services. However bad Catharine found the bush, she had to acknowledge that her new friend had found Upper Canada in a far more raw state. Frances had drawn on her deep faith in a protective God to sustain her, and on her extensive knowledge of natural science (she had studied chemistry, botany and geology as a child) to catalogue the plants around her.

  During the 1820s, the Stewarts had watched the local population swell and had built themselves a comfortable log house on the Otonabee River, a home they named Auburn. By the time the Traills arrived in Peterborough, Auburn’s every shelf and wall was lined with collections of dried flowers and grasses, Indian bows and arrows, dried skins of small furry animals, bear claws, eagle wings, antlers, fossils, rock and crystal specimens and Indian pottery. All winter a huge fire blazed in the hearth, while children played on the floor and an infant slept in an Indian cradle.