Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  As Susanna sat in her chilly wooden cabin, far from anything her English sisters would consider “civilization,” she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Agnes obviously had no idea of her sisters’ circumstances. As if Susanna and Katie, living two days’ journey from each other, could find enough material “of a useful nature” for a magazine, or even a single honest bookseller who could help them! Susanna couldn’t even imagine which of her fellow Upper Canadians would buy it. Moreover, Susanna had no interest in producing a how-to book for settlers. She wanted to write the kinds of religious poems and romantic stories that Agnes was so successfully getting into print. Susanna would much rather be writing about “a noble deer” pursued by a pack of wolves “like so many black devils” than transcribe the recipe for venison pie.

  As the Moodies’ second year in the colony began, their prospects grew bleaker. Susanna had found some outlets for her creativity but hadn’t secured any income. And, despite her temporary triumphs, she was still subject to intense bouts of homesickness. She felt trapped by her babies and her circumstances, unable even to visit her sister near Peterborough because travelling was so difficult for most of the year. On the occasions when Agnes’s letters arrived, her tears would flow for hours. Thanks to John’s mismanagement, they were running out of money, and the farm was nowhere near providing them with a livelihood. John was digging himself deeper and deeper into debt with the Cobourg moneylenders in order to buy equipment and hire men. He worried con-stantly that soon they would be unable to afford to feed themselves. And he felt helpless as Susanna raged that her feelings for Canada were the same as those “the condemned criminal entertains for his cell—his only hope of escape being through the portals of the grave.”

  A drawing of a goldfinch and thistle by Susanna. Although she didn’t share her sister’s interest in natural history, flower painting was a relief from the hard work of pioneering.

  Desperate to make Susanna happy, and convinced that they needed a new start, John made a snap decision. They must move. Had he spent the next few years getting the Hamilton farm working well, his investment would have paid off handsomely. Despite the short-term problems, the farm was a prosperous one in a desirable location. John could have participated in the growing export of wheat to England, and he would have watched land values climb. But John didn’t give it a chance. Once he had decided something wasn’t working, he was always impatient to move on. After barely a year in Hamilton Township, he elected to sell the property.

  Leaving Susanna and the two little girls at Melsetter, John made the difficult journey to visit Sam and Catharine and their families on Lake Katchewanooka. He still had not taken advantage of his right to a free land grant, so now, impetuous as ever, he got his brother-in-law Sam Strickland to secure sixty-six uncleared acres on the banks of the lake, close to the Traills. On his return, he set about to convince Susanna that they should uproot themselves from Hamilton Township. Title to military land grants, he argued persuasively, expired unless the land was settled within two years of purchase. They had better get moving. Besides, if they left the Front, they could say goodbye to their unpleasant American neighbours who had jeered at their manners. Around Peterborough, Moodie insisted, the state of society was “more congenial to our European tastes and habits.”

  In an unexpected volte-face, Susanna suddenly had second thoughts about packing up all their possessions. By now she had “nested” at Melsetter: “It was a beautiful, picturesque spot and … I had learned to love it; it was much against my wish that it was sold.” Unlike her husband, she probably had a better business sense for Melsetter’s potential. But she was never able to resist her husband’s enthusiasms. “To the Woods! To the Woods!” sang out John, seizing Susanna in his arms and waltzing her round the kitchen. In late 1833, each of the six Strickland sisters had received a much-anticipated seven-hundred-pound legacy from an uncle in England. This was a fortune for Susanna and Catharine in Upper Canada, where labourers earned sixty pounds a year and two hundred pounds was considered a comfortable annual income. It allowed John to pay off most of his debts to Yankees, grasping land speculators and unforgiving merchants in Cobourg, and begin to daydream about his new “estate” amongst the gentry of Douro Township.

  In the early weeks of 1834, John and Susanna waited impatiently for the snow on the road north to be packed sufficiently hard for them to travel. John booked the local carrier to transport them in two wagons, mounted on runners. One morning, in the chilly pre-dawn darkness of early February, John, Susanna, the carrier and his son loaded the two little girls, the maidservant, kitchen table and chairs, farming implements, chickens, clothes, the big iron bake kettle, pots and pans—and Susanna’s precious Coalport tea service—into the two wagons and headed north. A long, cold day of being jostled and thrown about, as the wagons rolled across the frozen ruts, stretched ahead of the Moodies.

  The journey was a nightmare. The Moodies travelled nearly fifty miles that day, from Cobourg on Lake Ontario, via Port Hope, over the marshy, thickly wooded area then known as the Cavan swamp. They had hoped to stop for the night on the far side of the swamp, in Peterborough, then a sprawl of wooden houses and a few stone buildings including an inn. But the two brothers hired to drive them were eager to keep going and accomplish the whole distance within a day. So from Peterborough, as a blood-red sun dropped below the white horizon, they followed the roaring, surging Otonabee River eleven miles north towards the new settlement on the banks of Lake Katchewanooka.

  On and on the sleighs rattled and bumped, over the frozen ridges of the icy track, between high snowbanks. Sometimes the two sleighs slid smoothly over the ground; other times, the Moodies were thrown violently forward as the sleigh runners hit a rock or tree stump protruding through the packed snow. The full moon, which had allowed Susanna to see the road ahead, clouded over. The cold grew more intense. The wind rose.

  As the night wore on, Susanna gripped the side of the sleigh and concentrated with grim determination on a single point in the future: their arrival at Lake Katchewanooka. The Moodies were expecting to stay there with Sam. Susanna could remember her brother only as an ebullient, curly-haired teenager, who had left England to make his fortune in the New World in 1826, though she knew from her husband John’s visits to Sam the previous fall that he was now married and comfortably settled. All she could think about was the first sight of his cheerful face, and the moment when she would step out of the cumbersome, hateful sleigh and be embraced by her own flesh and blood. She knew her beloved sister Catharine was in the same area, but she wasn’t sure when she would see her. She was too cold and exhausted by travel to think of anything beyond the prospect of Sam’s hearth. When the sleigh finally drew up outside a solid log house, with lighted windows, she could barely wait to uncurl her cramped, stiff body.

  Before she had time to clamber down from the sleigh, however, Sam emerged from his log house. He yelled a hearty greeting but immediately told the driver they were not stopping yet. Blithely oblivious to his sister’s exhaustion, and careless of the misery in her face, he told her that she was expected at her sister’s, a further ten minutes down the road. All Susanna heard was that the journey was not yet over. She buried her face in the fur of her dog and wept.

  A further upset lay ahead. When the first heavily laden sleigh was in sight of their destination, the driver pulled the horses up to a slithery, unexpected stop. The road ahead was completely blocked by the massive trunk of a fallen pine tree. The second sleigh nearly cannoned into the back of the first. The first driver urged his horses to jump the obstruction: the sleigh with its human cargo teetered for a minute on the top of the trunk, then slid safely across. When the second sleigh reached the top of the log, however, it hung poised there for a second and then, in ghastly slow motion, tipped gradually onto its side and finally fell to the ground with a dreadful crash. The sleigh landed heavily on the wooden crates it had carried. The frozen darkness was filled with the sounds of wood splitting, glass breaking a
nd china smashing. Iron cooking pots that had been tied to the top of the pile of crates rolled across the road. Fragments of wood, pottery and bone china spilled out into the snow. Not one piece of the precious Coalport tea service survived the calamity.

  Susanna Moodie had loved her elegant teapot, with its pattern of gold leaves and blue ribbons and flowers. During the first months in their Hamilton Township cabin, when her spirits were low, she would take this symbol of gentility down from a high shelf and cradle it in her arms. She would remember the way that her mother, back home at Reydon Hall, took tea at four o’clock every afternoon. Mrs. Strickland herself had given the Moodies the Coalport tea service as a wedding present. Susanna had carefully transported the teapot, plus the matching milk jug, slop bowl, sugar bowl with its own dainty lid, and six cups and deep saucers, across the ocean and over hundred of miles of mud roads and forest tracks. And now one of the few remaining links with her vanished way of life—the life of an English gentlewoman, who held translucent china cups in smooth white hands—was smashed beyond repair. There was no hope of replacing it in the wilderness.

  Chapter 7

  “Halcyon Days in the Bush”

  The sisters’ reunion was intensely emotional. Susanna’s arrival after such a long cold journey was like a dream: Catharine’s familiar, loving voice; the smoky warmth of the Traills’ log house; the wonderful sense of being amongst family again. After the hugs and tears, there was a chance to admire each other’s offspring. It was February 1834, and Catharine had not seen Susanna’s daughter Katie, now two, since they’d parted in Suffolk, and she was eager to fuss over eight-month-old Agnes, while Susanna immediately took to little James Traill, a plump nine-month-old who watched the new arrivals with silent curiosity.

  Best of all was the joy of being with a kindred spirit—someone who shared the same values, memories, sense of humour and history. Their reunion promised a return to the companionship of their childhood. Isolated from each other, the two sisters had coped with a society foreign to everything they had known. Catharine had forged ahead, buoyed up by her motto: “Hope! Resolution! and Perseverance!”—a slogan given added force, as her husband pointed out, “because you not only recommend the maxim but practise it also.” But Susanna, who lacked her sister’s flexibility, still struggled to adapt to the manners and customs of the New World.

  Now, however, each sister had a sympathetic audience. Safe in their family solidarity, and their shared assumption of a social hierarchy, they could hardly wait to compare notes on all their new experiences. They didn’t have to explain things to each other—why they found Yankees cold or Irish immigrants feckless. Peals of laughter rang out as the sisters tried to top each other’s catalogue of disasters.

  Catharine giggled at the way that the Americans she had met talked: their “nasal twang,” and their habit of using the word “fix” not in the precise English sense of “mend” but as a catch-all term for doing any kind of work. Susanna regaled Catharine with tales of her neighbours and servants in Hamilton Township. Susanna was a much better raconteur than her sister; her stories always had a rhythm and a punchline. “I wish nature had not given me such a quick perception of the ridiculous,” she once admitted, “such a perverse inclination to laugh in the wrong place.” Her ear for regional and class accents made her a brilliant mimic. She replayed an argument between Bell, a Scottish maidservant who used to work for the Moodies, and John Monaghan, an Irish lad who had arrived on their doorstep. First she imitated the indignant Bell, insisting in an exaggerated Scottish accent, “I winna be fashed aboot him,” because she regarded the boy as a Papist robber. Next, Susanna switched into an Irish lilt as she imitated the pathetic John, claiming he was beaten by his former master: “Shure the marks are on my showlthers yet.”

  Catharine’s gentle anecdotes reflected her inability to “read” the people in Upper Canada, as anyone in England could unconsciously “read” their fellow countrymen by their body-language, accents and attitudes. Catharine always saw the best in people and was rarely censorious. She had been warned about the “odious manners” of native-born Americans, but once she had got to know a few Yankees, she was agreeably surprised to find them “for the most part, polite, well-behaved people.” Susanna, in contrast, was unsettled both by her failure to understand the strangers she met and by her inability to position them in relation to herself. So her vivid descriptions of dishonest land-dealers, thieving neighbours and disappearing servants were designed to shore up her flagging sense of superiority to all these uncouth strangers, as well as to entertain her audience. She called Uncle Joe, the bankrupt farmer from whom John had bought the Hamilton Township property, a “weasel-faced Yankee.” She described the neighbour whose family constantly borrowed articles from the Moodies and never returned them as a “bony, red-headed ruffianly American squatter.”

  Susanna was impressed with the Traills’ newly completed log house, which they had named Westove, after the Traill family property in the Orkneys. In a humid summer it benefitted from the breeze off the lake because it was set on a little peninsula, referred to by Catharine as “the Point.” On the ground floor there was a kitchen, a large parlour with a bedroom off it, a pantry and a storage closet. Thomas had hung maps and prints on the parlour walls; Catharine sewed curtains of green cambric and white muslin for the windows. An open staircase led to an upper floor that would later be divided into three bedrooms. Below the kitchen was a cellar in which potatoes, turnips, carrots and onions could be stored through the winter. The rooms were dark; windows were small, to ensure a warm interior during Canadian winters. But through a small pane of glass in the parlour door there was a view of Lake Katchawanooka.

  Susanna was less delighted, however, with her first sight of the real “bush,” as opposed to the cleared land close to the Front. The clearing around the Traills’ house “was very small,” she noted, “and only just reclaimed from the wilderness, and the greater part of it was covered with piles of brushwood to be burnt the first dry days of spring. The charred and blackened stumps on the few acres that had been cleared during the preceding year were everything but picturesque; and I concluded, as I turned away, disgusted, from the prospect before me, that there was very little beauty to be found in the backwoods.”

  A bush farm in the 1830s: the sight of corduroy roads and acres of stumps discouraged many settlers. ( Bush Farms near Chatham: watercolour by Philip J. Bainbrigge.)

  The two sisters spent the first weeks of 1834 sitting together in front of the Traills’ Franklin stove, nursing their babies and reestablishing their old intimacy. The snow melted slowly that spring in the Peterborough district. John Dunbar Moodie supervised work on his own cedar log cabin, about one mile north along the shoreline from the Traills’ residence. Then he turned to the question of how to clear his land. He had extended his sixty-six-acre holding on Lake Katchewanooka by spending more of Susanna’s legacy on a further three hundred acres (paying, he admitted to Tom and Sam, an outrageous price for some of this uncleared land). He spent yet more of the legacy on the tools and labourers to help clear the property. Each labourer was paid on a piecework basis: eleven to twelve dollars for chopping, logging and fencing an acre of hardwood land, and fourteen dollars if pine, spruce and hemlock predominated. His spending didn’t concern his wife; Susanna trusted his judgment. Besides, it was easy for her to shrug off any worries in Catharine’s company. Catharine enthused about how beautiful the summers were and laughingly dismissed Susanna’s fears of wild beasts bounding out of the woods.

  Soon the two women were strolling down the newly trodden path through the forest to inspect progress on the Moodie log house. It was larger than the Traills’, and the ground floor was already partitioned into a parlour, kitchen and two small bedrooms. A fire was lit in the stove, and there was a plume of smoke from the chimney. Despite its dirt floors and the chinks in its walls, it was “a palace when compared to the miserable hut we had wintered in during the severe winter of 1833,” observed Su
sanna. “I regarded it with complacency as my future home.”

  As the days lengthened, and the ice on Lake Katchewanooka turned grey and rotten, Catharine wrote home to tell their mother that, “My dear sister and her husband are comfortably settled in their new abode … we often see them.” The two women spent a lot of time reminiscing about Suffolk. They liked to chat about “sweet, never-to-beforgotten home, and cheat ourselves into the fond belief that, at no very distant time we may again retrace its fertile fields and flowery dales.”

  By the first week in May, the maples, oaks and birches around the Moodies’ and Traills’ cabins were in leaf. Soon there was a carpet of trilliums and lady’s-slippers on the forest floor. At the lake’s edge, the pale spikes of wild rice waved gently in the breeze. John Moodie bought a canoe, to which (ever the Orkney lad) he attached a keel and sail. Whenever possible, he and Susanna would skim across the lake’s surface. Susanna’s letters home were now almost as chirpy as Catharine’s, as she began to see the landscape through her sister’s eyes. There was no more talk of “gloomy woods.” Susanna rhapsodized about “the august grandeur of the vast forest” which cast “a magic spell upon our spirits.” Her poetry reflected her happiness:

  Come, launch the light canoe;

  The breeze is fresh and strong;

  The summer skies are blue,

  And ’tis joy to float along.”

  One of the most memorable expeditions the Moodies ever made was up Lake Katchewanooka into Clear Lake and from there to Stony Lake (or Stoney Lake, as it is still sometimes spelled). John, Susanna and their two little girls set off at dawn and arrived after a couple of hours at Young’s Point Falls, where the jovial Irish miller, Mr. Young, invited them to dine with his family. To Susanna’s amazement, his two daughters produced a lavish feast of “bush dainties,” including “an indescribable variety of roast and boiled, of fish, flesh and fowl,” plus “pumpkin, raspberry, cherry and currant pies, with fresh butter and green cheese (as the new cream-cheese is called), molasses, preserves and pickled cucumber.” The Moodies left their daughters with the Young family and paddled on through Clear Lake, an “unrivalled brightness of water [which] spread out its azure mirror before us.” At length, the Moodies reached Stony Lake—a dramatic piece of water lodged in a geological fold, where the stark granite of the Canadian Shield meets the soft sandstone of the St. Lawrence Valley. “Oh, what a magnificent scene of wild and lonely grandeur burst upon us as we swept round the little peninsula, and the whole majesty of Stony Lake broke upon us at once,” Susanna wrote later in Roughing It in the Bush. “Imagine a large sheet of water some fifteen miles in breadth and twenty-five in length, taken up by islands of every size and shape, from the lofty naked rock of red granite to the rounded hill, covered with oak-trees to its summit: while others were level with the waters, and of a rich emerald green, only fringed with a growth of aquatic shrubs and flowers. Never did my eyes rest on a more lovely or beautiful scene. Not a vestige of man, or of his works, was there.”