Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  By the end of the 1850s, the Moodies had largely abandoned their spiritualist activities. John continued to keep up his album for a few months, but he didn’t have the energy for frequent submissions to the Spiritual Telegraph, or the money for more trips to see sweet Kate Fox in New York. And his children, particularly his eldest daughter, ridiculed him for indulging in sorcery. Katie Vickers, now a member of Toronto’s social establishment, disapproved of her elderly father’s tactile healing activities. Several years later, she destroyed over fifty pages of John’s Spiritual Album, including those (she explained) that dealt with her father’s “homeopathic medical prescriptions … all of which my dear Father lived to see the fallacy of.”

  South of the border, spiritualism was rapidly falling out of fashion and its practice had become decidedly tacky. Some spirits turned out to be rather opinionated, radical folk. There were mediums who claimed that the spirits believed in free love; others who insisted that they endorsed votes for women; still others through whom the spirits lobbied for the abolition of slavery. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the mania for spiritualism disappeared. In Britain, Professor Michael Faraday subjected the movement to a barrage of withering contempt in the columns of the Times. The eminent scientist wrote that he was “aghast at the hold which the table-turning mania had gained on all classes of society, and at the loose thinking and presumptuous ignorance which the popular explanations revealed.” He described experiments that showed that the movements of tables and the “rappings” could be produced by unconscious muscular pressures exerted by the sitters. The novelist Charles Dickens was equally caustic: “I have not the least belief in the awful unseen being available for evening parties at so much per night.”

  And in October 1888, before a sold-out audience at the New York Academy of Music, Maggie Fox publicly confessed that spiritualism, as far as she was concerned, had been nothing but a fraud from the start. She demonstrated that the mysterious “Rochester rappings” had been produced by an abnormality of her big toe, which she had developed through assiduous practice. Kate Fox, who was sitting in a box overlooking the stage, confirmed her sister’s statements. Susanna Moodie had been right all those years earlier when she had divined the source of Kate Fox’s rappings as the cracking of toe and ankle joints.

  Chapter 16

  Tottering Slowly On

  A couple of hours after midnight on August 25, 1857, Catharine woke up and smelled smoke. Her stomach twisted with fear, and she pulled herself into a sitting position as she gathered her thoughts. Perhaps she was dreaming. Perhaps it was just the whiff of a bush fire a few miles away. But a second later, she heard an ominous crackle. She shook her husband, slumbering next to her. Her voice rising with panic, she told him to get up and wake their children, who were asleep on the floor above. Hurriedly, she swung her feet to the floor, groped for a shawl and felt for her moccasins with her feet. Oaklands was on fire. Catharine knew that an old log house with a shingle roof would burn like a tinderbox.

  “I had barely time to awake the sleepers upstairs, and we got out a part of our bedding, wearing apparel, a few books, 3 chairs and 3 tables before the whole house was in a blaze,” recorded Thomas in a journal he kept intermittently. “I am so thankful that all our lives were saved, particularly our dear Walter, whose room was full of smoke when he was called, that I hardly regret what is lost. Thanks to God for all his mercies.”

  The Traills watched the blaze from beyond the snake fence round the property, where they were out of reach of the searing heat. But as the flames finally subsided, the family made a pathetic sight. They stood amidst the stubble as the sun rose and illuminated the smouldering wreck of their home with the cool light of dawn. Relief that they had all survived evaporated when they realized what they had lost. Thomas’s maps and prints, and all save a handful of his books, were gone; the first-edition novels of Sir Walter Scott that he had so carefully transported from home to home were now just a pile of ash. All the beds, chests and stools were charred fragments, and the cooking pots and pans were bent and blackened. Catharine had lost everything she had carefully preserved for winter: dried apples, herbs, bottled vegetables and fruit, maple sugar and syrup, wild rice, bags of flour. Most of their clothing was gone, as were their candlesticks, plates, cutlery, rag rugs and Catharine’s carefully worked quilts. The Traills had lost all records of their family history: letters from England and Scotland, drafts of Catharine’s published books, all the treasures—antlers, pressed flowers, fossils, squirrel skins, awkward drawings—that recorded the children’s upbringing in the bush. The only batch of papers that Catharine had manage to rescue were her botanical notes on ferns, flowers, trees and shrubs.

  The Traills were left worse off than when they had first arrived in the colony twenty-five years earlier: they were now both homeless and penniless. Friends and relatives came to their aid. Sam Strickland gave them ten pounds to replace household goods, and a cheque for twenty pounds arrived from Agnes for “My poor unlucky Catharine.” For a few weeks, the whole family stayed at Thorndale, a nearby farmhouse in which Clinton Atwood, the young man from Gloucestershire, was now living. Catharine looked around for a new house. “I am very desirous to procure a home before the cold sets in as I cannot feel settled here,” she told Ellen Dunlop. But Catharine had no money with which to rent a decent property, and the Traills were forced to scatter around the region, dependent on the kindness of others. Thomas and Catharine went to stay with Sam Strickland at Lakefield. Kate, now twenty-one, and nineteen-year-old Annie, the two eldest daughters, were taken in by friends at Gore’s Landing. Mary Traill, a sixteen-year-old with fragile health, was invited to stay with Ellen Dunlop. Catharine’s eldest son, James, was now married: he and his wife Amelia took in thirteen-year-old William and nine-year-old Walter. Twenty-year-old Harry stayed on with Clinton Atwood.

  For Catharine, the fire was simply another crisis that God would help them overcome. “We trusted in Him and were helped.” She began to plan how they might restart their lives. “If we let our farm [land],” she wrote to Ellen, “we can live at a small expence and earn something in a quiet way by needle-work and knitting, pressing flowers and other matters.” She discussed with her sister Susanna the idea of taking in a couple of boarders. But for Thomas Traill, the fire was the last straw. He tried to play his part in getting the family ship afloat again, appealing for help from his first wife’s brother, in the Orkneys: “We were poor enough before but the fire has made us of course still poorer.” As the winter of 1857–58 dragged on, however, he emerged less and less frequently from his bedroom. By now, both the sons he had left behind in Scotland had died. Thomas’s health deteriorated; his cough became more and more pronounced. The following summer, Catharine moved her ailing husband to a cottage in the grounds of Frances Stewart’s house, Auburn, on the outskirts of Peterborough. She nursed him devotedly, but Thomas had lost the will to live. He died on June 21, 1859.

  Catharine had always loved her sweet, bewildered husband. She believed that it was her duty “as a wife, and now as a widow,” as she wrote in her journal, “[to] bear testimony to my husband’s worth. With some foreign eccentricities of manner, and some faults of nervous irritability of constitution, he was a true hearted loyal gentleman, faithful in deed and word—a kind & benevolent disposition, a loving father, husband and friend—a scholar and a true gentleman, whose virtues will be remembered long after his faults have been forgotten.” Susanna too had always had a soft spot for her brother-in-law, who was so painfully unsuited for roughing it in the bush. But as we consider his career today, we can’t help wondering: could Thomas Traill ever have made a happy immigrant? If he had been able to settle in Toronto in 1832, where he might have taught at the newly founded Upper Canada College, might he have found his niche in the colony? Perhaps. But during most of the last century, immigrants who relied solely on their learning and social position in Britain rarely did well in the New World. Those who thrived in British North America were me
n far more ruthless, ambitious and brave than “a scholar and true gentleman” like Thomas Traill.

  During the anguished months between the Oaklands fire and Thomas’s death, Susanna Moodie reached out to Catharine as much as she could. Catharine spent several weeks with the Moodies in early 1858. (Catharine’s son James had now moved to Belleville, and he and his wife Amelia had a son—Catharine’s first grandchild—in January). Susanna fussed over her elder sister in a quite uncharacteristic way, dosing her with wild cherry balsam because she had a cough and trying to keep her in bed when she had bronchitis. It was during this visit that John “healed” Catharine’s rheumatism by laying his hand on her shoulder. Catharine did not mention her adventures in spiritual healing in her letter to her own daughter Mary, but she did write, “Your Aunt … is much concerned at my illness.”

  Susanna was probably glad to have her sister close, so she could confide her own concerns. John Moodie’s long-running, corrosive and expensive battle with his Tory critics in Belleville was reaching a climax, and it did not augur well for the Moodie family.

  For more than twenty years, Belleville’s Tories (most of whom were active Orangemen) had made life difficult for John Dunbar Moodie, sheriff of Hastings County. In nineteenth-century Canada, the sheriff was responsible for collecting court-ordered debts on behalf of creditors. If for any reason the debtor did not pay, the unsatisfied creditor could sue the sheriff on the grounds that it was the sheriff ’s fault that the court action had failed. John’s Tory critics, led by Thomas Parker (who still resented Moodie’s appointment to the job he himself had wanted), had indulged in protracted “sheriff-baiting,” suing John for non-collection of debts, but protecting themselves from his counter-suits with legal tactics. John’s income was eroded by all his legal bills, incurred as he tried to defend himself from his enemies. The sheriff ’s prime source of income was drawn from the fines levied by the court, but John’s income from this source had steadily fallen, because Parker and his friends made sure that most cases were settled in the lower courts, where John had no access to any fines levied. Susanna railed against the weasel tactics of lawyers: “They are a set of finished rascals, and swarm everywhere.”

  The struggle to do his job despite Thomas Parker and his ilk had aged John. By the time his brother-in-law Thomas Traill died, sixty-one-year-old John was a white-haired, limping old man. He had lost the military swagger of his youth; thanks to the accident with the pioneer harrow just before the 1837 uprising, and a knee injury he had sustained in a fall in 1845, he dragged his left leg as he walked. Although he still loved to laugh, an expression of permanent anxiety had settled on his ruddy face. Life was getting harder, not easier.

  Hastings County covered a large area, and John found himself travelling farther and farther, in the bitter cold of winter and the furious heat of summer, in order to supervise the administration of justice and collect what little income he could. It all got too much for him in the mid-1850s. So he agreed with the former district court bailiff, Dunham Ockerman, that if Ockerman, as deputy sheriff, took on the “outdoor work” in outlying parts of the county, John would allow him half the fees he collected. John took Ockerman off to a lawyer to have the legality of the arrangement checked and a formal agreement signed.

  John’s enemies smelled blood. Although the appointment of a deputy sheriff was legal, the “farming of offices” was against the law. Judge Allan Ramsey Dougall, an Orangeman and another old adversary of John’s, watched Ockerman’s conduct with eagle-eyed attention. As soon as he had enough evidence to prove Ockerman was acting with far too much independence to be described as a mere “deputy,” Dougall pounced. In October 1859, four months after Thomas Traill’s death, Dougall brought a formal court action against John for “the purpose of bringing before the Court of Queen’s Bench the legality or otherwise of the proceedings of Mr. Sheriff Moodie in reference to his office.” John was summoned to appear before the assizes in Belleville in December to answer the charges.

  Susanna was convinced that the charges against her beloved husband would be dismissed, but she was wrong. The presiding magistrate at the Belleville Assizes ruled against John. In the spring of 1860, the case went to the Court of Queen’s Bench in Toronto, which ruled that Moodie was technically guilty of infringing the statute regarding the farming of offices. But the whole issue of John’s future as sheriff was left in a dreadful limbo. On the one hand, the Reformers who dominated the United Provinces government were reluctant to terminate John’s appointment as sheriff. He had been a loyal, hard-working, honest sheriff, and Belleville’s Orangemen were notorious for their vicious partisanship. On the other hand, the government was not prepared to come to his aid: they didn’t want to offend Belleville’s cabal of Tory lawyers. So the case was left hanging in a crossfire of appeals and petitions.

  Susanna was stunned by this turn of events. She insisted to Catharine that John had the “sympathy of the whole county” against the “malignity of the men who have done this….So do not grieve for me, my sister, my dear tried friend.” She also realized that the case could drag on for months: “I wish it were over…. Uncertainty is always worse to bear than the pressures of sorrows known. When we know what we have to expect, the mind rises to meet the emergencies of the case, and we can mature plans for the future.” The behaviour of their Belleville neighbours both enraged and scared her. Anger made her insist that she and John would turn their backs on Belleville as fast as possible if they lost the case: “I have no ties to bind me to Belleville, beyond the dear home that has sheltered us for so many years, and the trees I have with my own hands planted, and last, not least the graves of my dear boys.” But this anger was a defence mechanism against a much more deep-seated emotion: fear. Susanna was worried about John: “The blow fell very severely, and I never saw him look so pale and worn.” Susanna had just watched her strong, stalwart sister Catharine accommodate herself to widowhood, and she was terrified of facing the same prospect. By now, she knew that Catharine had an emotional stamina that she lacked.

  John Moodie was not the only person to fall victim to the obstinate determination of members of the Orange Order in British North America. At the Order’s annual parade on July 12, there were always Orange-Green brawls between Protestants and Catholics on Belleville’s Front Street. “It appears a useless aggravation of an old national grievance to perpetuate the memory of the battle of the Boyne,” Susanna had written indignantly in Life in the Clearings. Orangemen had also been central in the election rioting in Toronto in 1841 that left one man dead. Small wonder that Susanna insisted that the activities of the Orange Order “pollute with their moral leprosy the free institutions of the country.” But in 1860, a few weeks after the Court of Queen’s Bench in Toronto ruled against the sheriff of Hastings County, the Orangemen outdid themselves in a display of muscle. This time, the victim was none other than Edward, Prince of Wales, the nineteen-year-old heir to the British throne.

  Prince Edward, eldest son of Queen Victoria, had arrived in the colony for the first ever royal overseas tour. One of his first public appearances was in Montreal, where he was to lay the last stone of one of the most splendid structures in the British Empire: the Victoria Bridge, which spanned the two-mile width of the St. Lawrence River and was named in honour of his mother. The bridge, designed by the great British engineer George Stephenson with an innovative construction of tubular girders, had taken almost five and a half years to complete and was the longest bridge in the world. On August 25, the slim young prince clambered onto a train pulled by a huge Grand Trunk Railway locomotive and was taken to the centre of the bridge to hammer into place the final rivet. He and his entourage then clambered back into the train and returned to the immense locomotive shed at Pointe St. Charles, where the City of Montreal had laid on a luncheon for one thousand guests. “‘God save the Queen’ was played as His Royal Highness entered, and when he was seated the whole company sat down and fell to,” reported The Daily Globe. With the opening of thi
s engineering masterpiece, the Prince of Wales had inaugurated Canada’s magnificent Railroad Era.

  One of the first steam engines (with a cow-catcher at the front) of the Grand Trunk Railway. Canada’s Railroad Era had arrived.

  The Victoria Bridge was more than just an engineering triumph. Its glorious opening ceremonies allowed the young, sprawling colony, with its rapidly swelling population and fractious politics, to show itself off to its future sovereign. For the first time in most of their careers, cabinet ministers donned the British civil uniform designed for colonial officials. It was a flattering costume that included a sword and navy jacket with lashings of gold braid and facings. The Globe carped that John A. Macdonald, joint premier (along with George-Etienne Cartier) of the United Provinces, had no idea how to walk with a sword sheathed at his side, and with his “devil-may-care air, managed to get his cocked hat stuck on one side … in a most ridiculous fashion.” But none of those present at Montreal could be oblivious to a shared pride in the dignity and autonomy of their own government.

  Ottawa’s splendid Gothic Parliament Buildings in the 1860s, during construction.

  From Montreal the Prince of Wales proceeded to Ottawa, to lay the cornerstone of the new Parliament Buildings. Susanna was one of the few people in British North America to laud Queen Victoria’s choice of the swampy lumber town as the new capital, instead of either Toronto or Montreal. “A very few years will make Ottawa worthy of the royal favour. In natural beauty it far surpasses all its more wealthy rivals…. The Queen showed much taste in picking it.” The young Prince must have been overwhelmed by his welcome, and by the peculiar Canadian tradition of building triumphal arches of leafy boughs along the official route. “Here is the universal programme,” declared one newspaper reporter. “Spruce arches, cannon, procession, levee, lunch, ball, departure; cheers, crowds, men, women, enthusiasm, militia, Sunday school children, illuminations, fire works, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum.”