Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  For Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie, however, the news was appalling. Dutiful feelings of loyalty to British interests were swept aside by dismay at the prospect of their husbands’ prolonged absence. They had infants to nurse and children to feed, and now they would also have to do the men’s work in the dead of winter—keeping fires lit, woodpiles filled, animals fed and paths cleared. The snowstorm had continued all night; weeks of freezing temperatures and snowdrifts lay ahead. “God preserve us from the fearful consequences of a civil warfare,” Catharine confided to her journal. “O, my God, the Father of all mercies, grant that he may return in safety to those dear babes and their anxious mother.” The backwoods reverberated with rumours: Toronto was beseiged by sixty thousand men; four hundred Indians had attacked the city and slaughtered all the inhabitants; American soldiers were crossing the border in support of Mackenzie. The two women were terrified that armed rebels might burst out of the forest at any moment, intent on rape, pillage and murder. “Became so restless and impatient I felt in a perfect fever,” Catharine wrote in her journal. Susanna and her children moved into the Traills’ cabin.

  In fact, the rebellion fizzled out almost before it began. There were scarcely any casualties, and William Lyon Mackenzie was forced to flee across the border. Bond Head offered a reward of one thousand pounds for his capture. When news reached the little settlement north of Peterborough that the men would soon be home, Catharine escorted Susanna home in the horse-drawn sleigh. With the children swathed in buffalo rugs, the two women wrapped themselves up in a blanket together and started laughing hysterically in the cold night air. Suffused with relief that their husbands were safe, they were overcome with the humour, as Catharine noted in her journal, of finding themselves “not a whit less happy than if we had been rolling along in a carriage with a splendid pair of bays instead of slowly creeping along at a funereal pace in the rudest of all vehicles with the most ungraceful and uncouth of all steeds.” Thomas and John were back on their farms only days after they had left.

  Despite its comic-opera aspect, the rebellion had stirred everybody up. Susanna wrote an anthem calling on the “Freemen of Canada” to fight the “base insurgents.” Fifty years before Rudyard Kipling, she tapped into the British appetite for triumphant patriotism. It was soon on the lips of every soldier in Bond Head’s ragged defence force. The second of its five verses made it plain that the loyalty of true Canadians, wherever they were born, must lie with the motherland:

  What though your bones may never lie

  Beneath dear Albion’s hallow’d sod,

  Spurn the base wretch who dare defy,

  In arms, his country and his God!

  Whose callous bosom cannot feel

  That he who acts a traitor’s part,

  Remorselessly uplifts the steel

  To plunge it in a parent’s heart.

  The rousing words were accompanied by banging pot lids and waving fists as Susanna’s children marched around the kitchen reciting the anthem, while their father accompanied them on his flute.

  The triumphant suppression of the ’37 Uprising infused the Christmas celebrations two weeks later with additional jubilation. Catharine decorated her cabin with even more ingenuity than usual, threading dried cranberries onto pine boughs to simulate the red holly berries she had gathered as a girl in Suffolk. Her daughter Katie made a hemlock wreath and twisted her precious coral beads (which her mother had refused to sell) around the boughs. Catharine scrounged supplies from her brother Sam to ensure a feast, and by the time the Moodie family arrived in their sleigh, the Traills’ table was laden with the weight of roast duck, potatoes, vegetables carefully preserved four months earlier, pies, preserves and breads. While Thomas and John toasted the new Queen in treacle beer (made from treacle, hops, bran and water), Catharine distributed maple sugar sweets to the children.

  After dinner, the two families went outside to play in the newly fallen snow. Both men were now limping, since awkward Thomas had fallen off his mount and sprained his ankle at a meeting of the militia in Peterborough a few days earlier. Though the men were unable to pull the children on their homemade sleds along the snowy paths through the woods, the two Strickland sisters, as usual, compensated for their husbands’ handicaps.

  It was only when night fell, and the women sat beside the Franklin stove nursing their infants and reminiscing about Reydon Christmases, that a sadder note crept in. They recalled jubilant wassailing parties while their father was still alive, when the Hall was thronged with merrymaking neighbours and attentive servants. They thought of their four older sisters in England. They remembered how, after their father’s death, Agnes always took charge of celebrations, while gentle Sarah quietly produced a delicious dinner despite their straitened circumstances. “Our Christmas meetings at best are but a melancholy imitation of those social hours,” sighed Catharine. “Their chief charm arises here from the retrospect of the past and from the long train of affectionate remembrances that crowd thick and fast upon each other.”

  The taste of military life had given new energy to both John and Thomas. Both hated farming and knew they were failures as frontier pioneers. Now they had tasted again a life based on professional, rather than manual, skills. Their brother-in-law Sam Strickland, who had never served in the regular army, was happy to return to pioneering, but neither John nor Thomas could bear the thought of slogging through another miserable year in the bush. John Moodie was forty-one, and Thomas Traill forty-five: too old for heavy labour. The short-lived uprising of 1837 had opened a new chapter for both the Moodies and the Traills.

  John Moodie was the first to find an escape route. He was under pressure from creditors in both Peterborough and Cobourg; if he could acquire a salary, he could finally pay off some debts. So when the government in Toronto announced the creation of several new regiments to defend the colony, Moodie immediately volunteered. His energetic cheeriness charmed the military authorities and wangled him a captain’s commission in the Queen’s Own Regiment. By late January 1838, he was back in Toronto, three days’ journey from Peterborough, sitting in the New British Coffee House on York Street, or strolling along King Street admiring the Georgian terraces and brick market buildings that had sprung up in the previous decade. It was a welcome change of circumstances, especially since, according to the Sturgeon Lake settler John Langton, military officers were “as thick as blackberries” on the streets of Toronto. A mood of carnival buoyancy prevailed; there was no end to the old friends to be discovered and toasts to be drunk.

  A month later, Moodie was posted to the Niagara Region, even farther from his family. His regiment was positioned to repel incursions from rebels now based across the border. Mackenzie had assembled a small army in Buffalo of American sympathizers anxious to join Mac’s crusade to “free” Canada. The border raids of these wild-eyed Yankees were costing far more in casualties and damage than the original uprising had done.

  With at least one hundred miles between them, John and Susanna had to rely on the mail service to maintain their intimacy, as they had in the months before their marriage. In the densely written lines of their letters, we can glimpse the strength of their love for each other, and their mutual dependence. “I have been so bothered and hurried about with parades, drills, and other duties,” John wrote to his “dearest Susie” from Toronto, “that I have not till this moment been able to settle myself sufficiently to write to you and our sweet babes. God bless you all. How I long to clasp you to my heart, my own good old wife, and to kiss my dear honest hearted Katie my light hearted Aggy, and sly Dunnie and my gentle generous Donald.” As the weeks of separation dragged on, even the delights of a regular income palled: “Do write me soon, my dearest Susie and tell me all about my dear children. I could not live long without seeing you all … I am tolerably sick of Militia Soldiering and shall be right glad to get back to my old woman and our dear brats again.” In every letter, John sent his wife as much money as he could afford. “Now my dear Sus
ie do not stint yourself of comforts for I cannot bear to be pampered up while you are suffering any privation.”

  Susanna was equally lonely: “I have shed more tears since you have been away than during the whole period of our marriage,” she wrote to her “dearest Moodie.” “I wish you were here.” A few months later, she confessed to John, “I long to be with you—to see, to speak to you, to hold you to my heart once more…. There are times when I almost wish I could love you less. This weary longing after you makes my life pass away like a dream.” She missed both John’s physical presence and his ability to lighten her mood: “I dreamt you returned last night and I was so glad, but you pushed me away, and said you had taken a vow of celibacy and meant to live alone, and I burst into such fits of laughing that I awoke.”

  The passion of their marriage was undimmed, despite the hardships of the past seven years and the arrival of four children. John was still, as Susanna wrote years later in Roughing It in the Bush, “my light of life.” Their letters pulsate with buoyancy and desire, but unslaked libido is only half the story. John and Susanna were more than man and wife. They were united in a friendship that was unusual by nineteenth-century standards, and is refreshing to a twentieth-century reader. They took each other seriously as writers: whenever possible, Susanna showed John her work before she sent it to the publishers. John was terribly proud of his clever wife and always encouraged her literary ambitions. While he was in Toronto, he managed to sell several of Susanna’s patriotic ballads, as well as some of his own poems, to The Palladium, a Toronto newspaper published by a Rice Lake acquaintance of the Moodies, Charles Fothergill.

  Soon after John disappeared to Toronto, Susanna realized she was expecting a fifth child. A woman of Susanna’s age and class in England during this period would have been treated as an invalid; her “delicate state” would have required her to avoid exercise or excitement. But by 1838, Susanna had left such feeble behaviour far behind. She and her youngsters were alone in the bush with only Jenny, an illiterate Irish servant, to help her. This pregnancy appears to have given her a rush of energy. As soon as the sap started flowing, she organized Jenny to make maple sugar. Once the snow had melted, Susanna sowed the spring crops and planted her garden with a wide assortment of vegetables, including melon and cucumber. Thomas Traill could only envy his neighbour’s achievements. “She is farther advanced than her brother or me, or indeed any of the neighbours,” he wrote to John Moodie. “I am happy to say that all your children look fat, fair and flourishing as do mine, and you will find on your return which I hope will be soon that everything has been managed admirably in your absence and every difficulty met with energy, constancy and courage. I am proud to do justice to the worth and value of your most excellent wife. She is indeed a treasure of which you may be proud.” Thomas found himself asking if he could borrow Jenny to help him plant potatoes.

  Thanks to John’s military pay, the Moodies were nibbling away at their debts to Peterborough merchants and to various labourers. But Susanna worried constantly about the hundreds of dollars they still owed. Even after a hard day of field work, she busied herself at night with anything that might bring in some cash. She painted birds and butterflies onto the hard bracket fungus fans that grew on trees, then gave the finished works to her brother Sam to sell to his Peterborough cronies. Invited to contribute to a new Montreal publication, the Literary Garland, she wrote late into the night, by the uncertain light of old rags dipped in pork lard and stuffed into the mouth of a bottle. The Literary Garland, published by John Lovell, was the first successful literary magazine in British North America, and it was also the first to pay its contributors. Susanna shed tears of pride and relief when her first payment arrived, in the form of a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. And she took her courage in her hands and composed a letter to the new Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, Sir George Arthur, in which she described her family’s circumstances and requested that John should be allowed to continue in the regiment, “which, by enabling him to pay our debts, would rescue us from our present misery.”

  In August, John Moodie’s regiment was disbanded and John returned from the front. Soon after the Moodies’ joyful reunion, a third son, John Strickland, was born safely. Susanna’s hard work resulted in the most abundant crops the Moodies had ever reaped. “The harvest was the happiest we ever spent in the bush. We had enough of the common necessaries of life,” Susanna noted. In the evenings, she and John resumed their old habit of taking gentle sails across the lake. But John was now out of a job, and the dark cloud of debt hovered over the family. Susanna didn’t tell her husband about the petition on his behalf that she had sent to Sir George Arthur. Although the Moodie marriage was much more intimate than that of the Traills, Susanna, like Catharine, recognized the frailty of the male ego. She shrank from any suggestion that she might appear the more decisive or resilient partner. “Proud and sensitive as he was,” she wrote affectionately of her husband, “and averse to asking the least favour of the great, I was dreadfully afraid that the act I had just done would be displeasing to him.”

  The Lieutenant-Governor never directly acknowledged Susanna’s letter. As the days shortened and the temperature dropped, Susanna’s spirits fell. But in late October, good news arrived: John Moodie received a letter from Toronto appointing him temporary paymaster to the militia regiments stationed along Lake Ontario and in the Bay of Quinte. The salary of 325 pounds a year was more than Susanna had dared hope for. By December, John was living in Belleville, a well-established lakefront community between Kingston and Cobourg, a journey of ninety-five miles from his family. Susanna was facing her second winter alone in the bush.

  Susanna did not relish another separation from John, but they had agreed that she should stay in the backwoods because it was uncertain how long the paymaster job would last. Both assumed Susanna would manage fine: the children were healthy, the Traills were nearby, and Susanna had proved the previous winter that she could handle the farm by herself. Susanna and her children spent Christmas with the Traills, and Catharine produced a delicious roast goose, fattened on wild rice, and plum pudding. The children spent the afternoon sliding down a snowbank. “It was a Christmas treat to watch those joyous faces, buoyant with mirth, and brightened by the keen air, through the frosty panes,” Catharine would recall sixteen years later. As they had done the previous Christmas, the two sisters indulged in a few tears as they recalled memories of “home, country and friends from whom we were for ever parted,” but Catharine reassured Susanna that their sisters in England would be thinking of them and “some kind voice would murmur, ‘Ah would they were here.’” At the end of the celebration, Catharine helped Susanna pile her five youngsters into the horsedrawn sleigh for the journey home; the children immediately fell asleep “and we were left in silence to enjoy the peculiar beauties of that snow clad scene by the dreamy light that stole down upon our narrow road through the snow laden branches above our heads.”

  Susanna was still nursing little Johnnie. Her left breast had begun to ache on Christmas Day: within forty-eight hours it was inflamed and throbbing. “I was in great agony, and did little else but cry and groan until the following Sunday,” Susanna later wrote to John. “Kind Traill went himself after dark and brought up the Dr. at three o’clock in the bitter cold morning. He put the lancet immediately into my breast, and I was able to turn and move my left arm for the first time for ten days, for I lay like a crushed snake on my back unable to move or even to be raised forward without the most piteous cries. You may imagine what I suffered when I tell you that more than half a pint of matter must have followed the cut of the lancet, and the wound has continued to discharge ever since. I was often quite out of my senses, and only recovered to weep over the probability that I might never see my beloved husband again.” Dr. Hutchison, a gruff Scottish practitioner from Peterborough, was shocked to see a wellborn Englishwoman sick and alone except for her small children and an illiterate Irish servant. He looked round the forlorn, c
old, dirty room, feebly lighted by the wretched lamp, and said to Susanna: “In the name of God! Mrs. Moodie get out of this.”

  As Dr. Hutchison had pointed out, the log cabin that Susanna had once regarded as “a palace” was showing its age. Wood smoke had blackened the interior and left a sooty residue on every surface. The log walls had shrunk and shifted as they’d dried and aged, leaving big chinks to be plugged with rags and old paper. The stovepipes were so brittle that Susanna never dared light a blazing fire. The cups were chipped; the blankets on the bed were worn; mice had nibbled away the covers of the small library of books; there was scarcely any firewood left, and the supply of candles was almost exhausted. It was all Susanna could do to survive from day to day, as winter gales roared around her clearing in the woods. She had barely recovered from her grotesquely infected breast abscess when two-year-old Donald fell onto the corner of the iron stove and gashed his head open. “Jenny called out that he was killed, and for a moment when I saw his ghastly face, the blood pouring in a torrent from the frightful wound, I thought so too…. After some time I succeeded in staunching the blood with very warm water, and then I examined his head and I felt convinced his skull was not fractured though I saw the bone plainly.”

  Donald’s head had not yet had time to heal properly when a third disaster struck the Moodie household: scarlet fever. First Donald was taken with “sudden inflammation on the lungs, attended with violent fever and every symptom of croup.” Within twenty-four hours, the baby was similarly afflicted. Johnnie “was to all appearance dead,” Susanna later wrote to her husband. “All sense appeared to have fled. His jaws were relaxed, the foam was running from his mouth and my lovely dear’s beautiful limbs fell over my arms a dead weight. I burst into an agony of tears.” Dr. Hutchison refused to come this time: the roads were almost impassable, and besides, there was little he could do—the fever was killing children throughout the district. Helped by Jenny, Susanna nursed her two children with warm baths, castor oil and hot mustard poultices on their chests. Then, as soon as she was sure they were out of danger, she collapsed with influenza herself.