Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  Susanna was right: Stony Lake was almost pristine wilderness. Its shores were still untouched by loggers, and only a handful of settlers had ever paddled across its surface, threading their way through its picturesque isles. The local Chippewa treasured the lake as a source of birchbark, wampum grass, wild onions and game. They venerated its tranquillity and tried to keep Europeans away by telling them stories about rattlesnakes and wild beasts. Now Susanna stared around her at the landscape, “savage and grand in its primeval beauty.” She admitted to herself that, “filled with the love of Nature, my heart forgot for the time the love of home.”

  Susanna was already expecting her third child when she arrived at Lake Katchewanooka. Encouraged by the good reports of immigrant life that reached England from both of her sisters, Agnes Strickland composed some cheerful verses in doggerel for her brother-in-law, John:

  It affords me much pleasure,

  To hear how your treasure,

  Increases in land and in money.

  And I give you great joy

  On your hopes of a boy

  To feed on your butter and honey.

  And in the meanwhile,

  Baby Aggie’s sweet smile,

  And Katie’s gay prattle must be

  A fund of sweet mirth

  As you sit by your hearth,

  With Susie at breakfast or tea.

  John’s hopes for a boy were answered: in August 1834, John Alexander Dunbar (always known as Dunbar) was born.

  Both Susanna and Catharine had come to childbearing relatively late, but now they too were caught up in the exhausting cycle of frequent pregnancies and births. Susanna would have seven babies within eleven years, her first when she was twenty-nine and her last when she was forty. Most of her pregnancies were difficult and her labours were long; she often thought she was going to die. Catharine spaced out her nine pregnancies a little more: she was thirty-one when James was born and forty-six when the last of her children arrived, in 1848. No letters survive describing the backwoods births, when doctors were always miles away and women had to rely on friends like Frances Stewart (and later Catharine herself) to be midwives. Neither woman would have written such letters: in the nineteenth century, the messy business of childbirth was never mentioned in polite society or literature. In Britain during this period, an allusion to a woman being “with child” or “lying in” was considered the height of indelicacy. (During the early 1830s came the first whimsical mentions of babies being found under gooseberry bushes.) The modern imagination recoils from the idea of giving birth in a log house, with the wind howling outside, flickering candles providing the only light and raw whisky the sole source of pain relief. The bush abounded with stories of women who died either during childbirth, or because puerperal fever set in afterwards, or because the strain of too many pregnancies caused heart disease.

  Motherhood came as naturally to Catharine as breathing. It was the most meaningful activity in her life. She was always prepared to give more love than she took, and she saw no conflict between her family and her impulse to write. Since her first child didn’t arrive until after she had reached Peterborough, and while she was staying with friends, she had been able to enjoy her first few weeks with him. She always hugged and kissed all her babies and treated her offspring as children long after they had grown up. Thomas was a distant parent, but Catharine made up for him. She taught her toddlers little prayers, and she read to them as they got older. She made her daughters rag dolls out of scraps of fabric. She led her brood on long, exciting walks through the forest, showing them where the deer gathered at the water’s edge and how to collect frog spawn. Soon the window sills and shelves were as loaded with treasures as the window ledge of Catharine’s Reydon Hall bedroom had been. The Traill children responded to their mother with deep affection, mixed (as they got older) with exasperation provoked by her suffocating love. The Traill cabin exuded warmth, with its constant smell of baking, its patchwork quilts (Catharine was an expert quilter, who loved quilting bees) and a fire that blazed brightly in its hearth. Catharine’s homemaking gifts even succeeded in cheering up Thomas, for whom life in the backwoods was proving a ghastly disappointment.

  The dynamics in the Moodie cabin, a mile down the lakeshore, were quite different. John was an indulgent, loving father who could always be persuaded to play a tune on his flute or get down on hands and knees and pretend to be a bear. But Susanna was never entirely at ease as a mother. Tense and emotionally needy, she could never embrace her maternal role whole-heartedly. The writing impulse gnawed at her; she did not put her children’s needs first in the same unthinking way that Catharine did. She was not a natural hugger like Catharine, and although she loved her babies, she resented their demands. It had been hard enough to make the journey from Reydon Hall to Cobourg with a baby in her arms—now she had to organize her new log house with two little girls underfoot, plus a newborn infant. She taught her family to read, but she didn’t have Catharine’s patience with their temper tantrums or squabbles. Dolls irritated her: as a child she had preferred frogs, and she thought rag dolls were a silly waste of time. She and her daughter Agnes often clashed, since little Aggie was just as willful as her mother. It didn’t take Aggie long to discover that Aunt Traill’s cabin was more convivial, and that Aunt Traill always seemed to have more time for her than her own mother did. The Moodie children scampered along the forest path to the Traill cabin whenever the opportunity arose.

  There was plenty of love in the Moodie household, but most of it was the passion that still flamed between John and Susanna. As John kept reminding her, they had come to the colony for the sake of their children—to give them a future they could not afford in England. Susanna had been much too wrapped up in her love for John to question his decision to emigrate. Instead, consciously or unconsciously, all her life she resented her children for her exile—and even as small children, they knew it.

  During the first few years in the backwoods, the Traill and Moodie households usually had a hired man and a maidservant apiece to help with the domestic and yard work. Nevertheless, both women had to do far more than their mother ever did at Reydon Hall. In the mornings there were stoves to stoke, chickens to feed, eggs to collect, babies to feed and dress, porridge to make (John Moodie always relished his “pouritch,” particularly if there was a little cream to pour on it). Then there was all the baking to be done—the bread, pies and cakes required to feed not just growing families but also the hired help in the fields. Kitchen gardens—with carefully tended rows of potatoes, peas, carrots, squash and onions—needed weeding and watering from late April onwards. Once a week, each woman heated iron cauldrons of water in which to do laundry; in summer, it could be rinsed in the lake. Once all the sheets and garments were washed, with caustic lye soap that took the skin off hands, they had to be hung to dry. The weather had to be very bad indeed before a pioneer wife decided to keep the wet laundry inside and drape it over cabin partitions, fogging the place with clammy humidity. Far better to hang it outside where it froze as it dried, then bring in the shirts, aprons, gowns, sheets and underwear (all stiff as boards) and fold them on the kitchen table.

  Afternoons were the times to socialize. Susanna’s prickly distrust of strangers had subsided now that she was securely entrenched amongst like-minded British gentlefolk. There were two other families besides the Stricklands, Traills and Moodies who lived close to Lake Katchewanooka: Lieutenant Alexander Shairp and his wife Emilia, and Lieutenant-Colonel John Caddy and his wife Hannah. The women often gathered for tea in the afternoon. Their heads were always bent over their needlework, as they had to clothe their whole families. Boys and men wore grey flannel shirts and homespun trousers; girls and women wore long, full-skirted dresses (wool in winter, calico in summer), covered with gaily patterned cotton aprons. Since there were no paper patterns, the women would unstitch an old garment and cut the new cloth according to these pieces. As they sewed and mended, they compared notes on how to make butter and cheese
from the scrawny cows most families kept, how to make candles from mutton fat, which berries made the best jam or how to bake good bread with gritty flour. They kept each other informed about who was travelling to Peterborough or across Rice Lake to Cobourg or Port Hope and might pick up supplies of tea, rice or dried fruit. They eagerly peppered visitors and newcomers with questions. Was the colonial government going to improve the roads? Had cholera struck again in Lower Canada? Were conditions in the Old Country just as bad as when they left? Was King William iv still alive?

  On other days, Susanna and Catharine would take their children on expeditions to collect flowers and catch butterflies. Frances Stewart had lent Catharine two guides with which to educate herself about North American plants. One, published in London in 1814, was a scientific tome entitled Flora Americae Septentrionalis (North American Flora) by Frederick Pursh; the other was an Essay on Comparative Agriculture; or A Brief Examination into the State of Agriculture As It Now Exists in Great Britain and Canada, by J.E. Burton, published in Montreal in 1828. Both books fell far short of Catharine’s needs as she struggled to identify new species of plants. Like Frances Stewart, she started to keep careful notes concerning her specimens and observations. When each family got back to their cabins, the women would lay out their finds. Catharine would carefully pack up the moths and insects she had caught, or plant seeds she had dried, to send to sisters Jane and Sarah in England. She deeply regretted that she had not paid more attention to her elder sister Elizabeth’s instruction in painting before she left home. Now she enviously watched Susanna as her youngest sister got out her pens and paints to execute exquisitely precise sketches of flowers she had collected or birds she had seen.

  Pioneer families ate early, so it was soon time to pack up such erudite pursuits and prepare dinner. The basic diet in winter was monotonous: pea soup and pork, potatoes and bread, and perhaps some preserved fruit while supplies lasted through the long winter. Anything that had to be purchased in Peterborough was an expensive luxury. The trick to survival, physical and financial, was to be self-sufficient. In summer the children were sent off to pick wild strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, red and black currants, huckleberries, grapes and blueberries, which their mothers would then stew. (“A dish of raspberries and milk, with sugar, or a pie, gives many an emigrant family a supper,” Catharine suggested.) And there were often special delicacies. During a pause in farm routines, the men might take time to shoot deer or game birds, or catch fish in the lake. If an Indian woman arrived at the door, there was also the possibility of duck or venison.

  Members of the local Indian band started calling on the settlers within a few days of each woman’s arrival north of Peterborough. Frances Stewart had told Catharine that when the first Europeans settled in the area, they regarded the Indians as “strange, wild, foreign savages … rolled in blankets, red leggings and mocassins covering their feet and legs; long black hair hanging loose and matted over their faces and shoulders, restless black eyes peering everywhere.” The “Chippewa Indians,” as the sisters called them, had been established in the area for nearly 150 years. They supported themselves by trapping, hunting, fishing and gathering edible plants. Once the settlers began to clear the land, the Indians were happy to start trading goods with them. In exchange for baskets, mats, ducks or venison, they took such European treats as pork, flour, potatoes or clothing. Susanna’s quilted petticoat was particularly coveted by her visitors. Sometimes they asked to borrow household items. “Once a squaw came to borrow a washing-tub, but not understanding her language, I could not for some time discover the object of her solicitude,” Catharine wrote home. “At last she took up a corner of her blanket, and pointing to some soap, began rubbing it between her two hands, initiated the action of washing, then laughed, and pointed to the tub; she then held up two fingers, to intimate it was for two days she needed the loan.” The tub was returned punctually.

  The Strickland sisters had arrived in Upper Canada with a romanticized image of the colony’s native people. The eighteenth-century travel literature in their father’s library at Reydon Hall was liberally sprinkled with references to “the Noble Savage”: travellers wrote about native peoples in North America in the same tone as they used for ruins in Europe, as though they were charming and exotic remnants of a disappearing culture. Philosophers and poets, from Rousseau to Wordsworth, had extolled native people’s freedom and self-reliance as a dignified alternative to the grasping cruelty of “civilization.” Many of the authors had never actually met a native, but they imparted to emigrants like the Stricklands a fuzzy belief in their innate goodness. So Susanna and Catharine approached their Chippewa neighbours with rosy expectations, and they weren’t disappointed. They made regular calls on the band’s camp along the lakeshore. They enjoyed hearing their new friends singing hymns on Sundays (the band had been converted to Christianity by a Methodist missionary a few years earlier). They got to know several members of the band quite well: Peter, the chief, his wife, Mrs. Peter, and various hunters, young men and children. Both sisters conversed easily with the women in the camp who, like themselves, were pregnant, nursing babies and teaching older children how to behave. These shared female experiences forged a bond between English and Indian women much stronger than any rapport established between an Indian hunter and a newly arrived Englishman.

  Each sister was intrigued by different aspects of the native way of life. Catharine was fascinated by the Chippewa habit of carrying children in specially woven baskets fastened to their mothers’ shoulders with deerskin straps, and infants in flat cradles strapped to their backs. “I have seen the picture of the Virgin and Child in some of the old illuminated missals,” remarked Catharine, “not unlike the figure of a papouse in its swaddling-clothes.” Catharine embraced these neighbours with unqualified friendship and adopted many of their customs: she wore deerskin moccasins in the snow, and she dosed her children with arum alropurpureum when they had diarrhea. She was also impressed with the exquisite native craftsmanship. It wasn’t long before letter cases and flower stands decorated with quillwork, and knife trays and work baskets made of birchbark, were scattered all over her parlour, and a miniature birchbark canoe was soon on its way to Sarah Strickland, in England.

  Susanna found her Chippewa neighbours honest and grateful for any kindness shown to them. She deplored the way that most white settlers treated the natives. Indians met with more approval than Susanna accorded many settlers. She allowed any Indian visitor to sit at the table with her, although she still wouldn’t permit her Irish servants the same privilege. “An Indian is Nature’s gentleman—never familiar, coarse or vulgar,” proclaimed “Moodie’s squaw,” as the Indians called her. She delighted in the nicknames in their own language that the Indians had given some settlers: muckakee, meaning bullfrog, for an odious braggart, and segoskee, or rising sun, for a young man with a red face.

  But Susanna was incapable of the simple warmth that her sister found so easy and the lack of prejudice that real friendship with these “dark strangers” would require. European to her marrow, Susanna found the Chippewa men ugly: “with very coarse and repulsive features. The forehead is low and retreating, the observing faculties large, the intellectual ones scarcely developed; the ears large, and standing off from the face, the eyes looking towards the temples, keen, snake-like, and far apart … the jaw-bone projecting, massy and brutal.” She decided that their tents were dirty and that the native women who slept with white men were immoral. And close encounters with the Chippewa convinced her that the talents and good qualities of Indians “have been somewhat overrated, and invested with a poetical interest which they scarcely deserve,” by many of their armchair admirers in the Old Country.

  On Catharine’s receipt of the legacy from the sisters’ English uncle, Thomas Traill, like John Moodie, had immediately embarked on ambitious plans. An energetic settler working by himself could clear only four acres a year, so Thomas hired men to clear the bush on his acreage, despit
e the high cost of labour. He contracted additional men to build a granary, stable, dairy, chicken house and a verandah in front of his house, to improve the interior and to prepare beds for flowers and vegetables. Throughout the mid-1830s, Thomas Traill and John Moodie continued to chop, fell and clear the trees from their acres. Then they prepared the ground for crops by dragging a heavy iron plough over the rocky ground (carefully avoiding any boulders or stumps that would break its teeth). If they planted the seed too early, it might get caught in the late frost. If they left it too late, the growing season might be too short and the crop destroyed by rain. The only crops that proved reliable were the root vegetables, particularly potatoes, that every settler’s wife planted close to her cabin.