Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  It soon became evident, however, that the wild enthusiasm for the Prince was getting out of hand. John A., in particular, was perturbed by a nasty undercurrent in the outpouring of loyalty to the British Crown, thanks to the machinations of the Orangemen. In the United Kingdom, the parades and banners of the Orange Order were illegal, so the Prince of Wales’s advisers had told Canadian authorities that the Order could make no public demonstrations during the royal visit, because Edward could not acknowledge an illegal organization. Most Canadian Orangemen reluctantly accepted the veto. However, the fiercest among them bristled at this insult to their independence. Since Orange Order parades were perfectly legal in Canada, why should Canadians follow English rules? The Orangemen in Kingston, John A. Macdonald’s own riding, built a particularly glorious arch of evergreens, put on their orange-and-blue uniforms, tuned up their fife-and-drum band and clamoured to be allowed to join the parade when the Prince disembarked at Kingston’s docks.

  Wherever the Prince went, he passed under massive temporary arches of spruce branches: this one welcomed him to Sparks Street, Ottawa.

  The result was a stand-off. The Prince refused to disembark from the steamer on which he was travelling down the St. Lawrence River; the Orangemen refused to back down. So the royal steamer weighed anchor and set off towards the Bay of Quinte and the next stop on the royal itinerary: Belleville. But the infuriated Kingston Orangemen got there first, by train. They persuaded their zealous colleagues in Belleville to insist that the loyal Order of Orangemen be allowed to make their demonstration there.

  As sheriff of Victoria County, John Dunbar Moodie was part of Belleville’s welcoming committee, and Susanna, now one of the best-known writers in the colony, was at his side amongst the other civic dignitaries. Early that bright September morning, the Moodies had walked from their house down to the wharf, admiring as they went all the decorations in the centre of town. Belleville had gone overboard with preparations: the streets were lined with sheaves of wheat, cornstalks, bunting, Chinese lanterns and glowing bunches of orange day-lilies. Ten triumphal arches were positioned along the Prince’s scheduled route. Farmers from the surrounding countryside had loaded their wives and families onto their wagons and converged on the town to see the show. A bevy of fifty young ladies on horseback were scheduled to meet the Prince when he set foot on firm ground.

  But once again, the Prince of Wales never stepped ashore. In the face of yet more Orange intransigence, the steamer bearing the royal party simply chuffed away. It wasn’t until Edward reached Cobourg that he and his retinue were finally able to enjoy one of the balls organized in his honour—and that was largely because the train in which Kingston’s Orange troublemakers were pursuing him had broken down ten miles from the town. Back in Belleville, the townspeople “chaffed with suppressed rage,” according to The Daily Globe’s correspondent: “Though the gilded crowns, many coloured flowers and flags give an air of gaiety to the place, yet such a quantity of sullen, discontented faces I have never before witnessed.”

  The Moodies were outraged by the discourtesy to the royal party. But it would have been foolish for John to have tried to stop the Orange Order’s demonstration—too many of the most prominent townsfolk, and all his political enemies, were involved. George Benjamin, publisher of the Belleville Intelligencer (whom Susanna had caricatured so viciously in her writings), was one of those who organized the pugnacious defence of Orange Order rights in Belleville. Benjamin’s role came as no surprise to John and Susanna, since John’s old adversary was still pursuing the sheriff with equal zeal: Benjamin told Premier John A. Macdonald that John Dunbar Moodie’s dismissal from office was “the most important” of all the issues in his riding.

  The uncertainty of the court case, the belligerence of the Orange-men, the hostility of George Benjamin—the sheriff was under a lot of stress. In July 1861, John Moodie suffered a stroke that paralysed his left side. A hysterical Susanna quickly called in Dr. Lister, the well-known Belleville physician, and watched aghast as he applied the favourite all-purpose remedy of the nineteenth-century: cutting open a vein to bleed the patient.

  Twelve days after his stroke, John wrote a cheerful letter to his favourite daughter, Katie Vickers, in Toronto. He told her that his left arm was gradually regaining its strength: “I can now open and shut my hand, put it on the top of my head and take hold feebly of my right elbow and other gymnastic feats of the same kind….I believe some of my friends? here expected I was used up. However I laugh at them and tell them I am going to join the Cricket Club in a few days.” But John’s impaired health unnerved his wife. She couldn’t sleep at night. She suffered a chronic, settled pain and uneasiness in the pit of her stomach. For the first time in her life, when she sat down to write, “Ideas will no longer come….My mind is neither so lively nor so elastic as formerly.”

  For the next few weeks, John pretended to go back to work. But an invalid sheriff was an even greater embarrassment for the government than one facing charges of corruption, and eventually John’s old friend Lewis Wallbridge, the Speaker of the Assembly, persuaded him to resign his position before his appeal was heard. Early in 1862, John Dunbar Moodie resigned as the sheriff of the County of Hastings after twenty-three years of service. At sixty-four, he was old, sick and broke. The Moodies’ only assets were their cottage and fifteen acres of land, heavily mortgaged, and the various debts still owed to John as sheriff. He continued to hope for another job, and received a vague indication that something might be found for him, but his wife was the greater realist. “I build very little upon these promises,” Susanna wrote sadly to her sister. “I wish the dear husband would cease to hope, and resign himself to the probability of disappointment. The anxiety and uncertainty of his position is killing him by inches.”

  Susanna was scared about the future, but, as usual, she was resourceful in a crisis. The only way she knew how to earn money was through writing, so she picked up her pen again. She sent two sketches to a new Toronto periodical, the British-American Magazine. She encouraged John to prepare a collection of all his past writings and publish them with a biographical introduction. Despite his trembling hand and failing eyesight, John managed to produce Scenes and Adventures as a Soldier and Settler during Half a Century, which would appear in 1866. Susanna explained their predicament to Richard Bentley and requested his help in getting a story that she wrote years earlier published, to keep “the gaunt wolf poverty from the door.”

  Her loyal old friend could not have responded more sympathetically. “Your letter just received gave me very sincere grief,” Bentley replied in April 1865. “It is indeed very hard that after the faithful discharge of arduous duties for many years, and in the decline of life as your good husband is, when personal comforts may be acceptable and frequently required, a public officer should lose his means of support without any pension.” Tears came to Susanna’s eyes as she read his letter, and when she reached the second page she ran out onto the verandah to show John the kind words before sitting down to express her fervent gratitude. “God bless you for your goodness,” she scrawled, and went on to thank God “for raising me up a true friend.” Bentley was confident that he could secure for Susanna a grant from the Royal Literary Fund in London. In due course, a bank draft for sixty pounds arrived from Octavian Blewett, the Fund’s secretary.

  This was the only formal recognition, in England or Canada, that Susanna Moodie ever received for her work during her lifetime. The meagre grant was soon consumed by the Moodies’ living expenses and legal bills, but in Susanna’s mind, it compensated for the meanness of both her Canadian critics and John’s political friends. “I hold, perhaps, the first place among the female authors residing within the Colony,” she told Bentley, “and my contributions to their periodical literature [have] always enjoyed great popularity. But this has not made them more ready to give my dear husband a small place under the government, to keep us from the Author’s fate—a dry crust and the garret.”

  John k
new his memory was failing and his strength draining away, but his native ebullience was unquenched: he continued to read the Globe each day, to write to the editors of various publications and to visit his daughters in Toronto. Even when fatigue struck and his leg ached, he tried to be cheerful, not least because he knew how much Susanna feared widowhood. Susanna refused to acknowledge her husband’s steady deterioration. As one of her daughters later admitted, “whatever her husband did or said was right in her eyes … not even her own children dare hint to the contrary.”

  There was one trip John was determined to make before he died. Since the Moodies had left the backwoods for Belleville after the 1837 Rebellion, John had never returned to Lake Katchewanooka and the community now known as Lakefield. However, he and Susanna had heard a great deal about its development during the intervening years from Catharine, who had settled there after Thomas died. Her brother Sam, who lived in a grand brick house and was acknowledged as Lakefield’s founding father, had helped his widowed sister build a small cottage close by. So in July 1865, John and Susanna Moodie scraped together the money to pay a two-week visit.

  Susanna and John travelled by train as far as Peterborough. The journey tired the elderly couple, who clung to each other’s arms and hung on to bags filled with their clothes, writing pads and gifts of baked goods and jam for their relatives. A stagecoach collected them from the Peterborough railroad station and took them into Lakefield. They were overwhelmed. “How rapidly the face of this country changes!” wrote Susanna. “I left the woods of North Douro, 26 years ago. Only three houses all composed of logs and of the smallest dimensions were to be found within three miles of us.” Now, the Otonabee River no longer raced and foamed through the dense forest, overwhelming a handful of settlers with the raw power of the landscape. Instead, the water rippled in the calm millponds next to the huge waterwheels of two prosperous sawmills. Clapboard houses, with gardens full of hollyhocks, delphiniums and roses, lined the main street. There were four taverns, a frame schoolhouse where Catharine’s daughter Mary taught, a post office, three stores, a doctor’s office and a bakery. All the scars of a pioneer settlement—the mud holes in the road, the stumps and bare earth around every dwelling, the vegetable peelings outside the kitchen doors—had disappeared. There was even a brand-new plank sidewalk down the main street. It was only eleven years earlier that Sam Strickland had organized the building of the village’s first church—Christchurch, a little stone building that looked as though it had arrived ready-made from an English village—but its congregation had already outgrown it and was in the process of building a larger Anglican church, St. John’s. In addition, the Baptists and the Presbyterians had each built brick churches and the Wesleyan Methodists had built a frame church.

  Lakefield would never rival Susanna’s memories of Southwold—there were none of the village trades she remembered from her English youth, such as the wheelwright, barrel-maker and potter. But Lakefield had fulfilled the promise that both Catharine and Susanna had described in their letters home before the 1837 Rebellion: it was a community in which a gentleman could live in comfort. The canal system first promoted in the 1830s, linking Lake Ontario with Lake Huron, would not be completed for another fifty-five years. But Lakefield had flourished because immigration was booming again. A half-century of backbreaking work had pushed the “frontier” dividing cultivated land and wilderness hundreds of miles beyond the town to the north and the west. British North America still lacked men with capital, but the railroads were stimulating the economy and the five colonies were moving towards political union. Among English-speaking Canadians, there was a slowly emerging national identity that combined loyalty to the British Crown with the levelling instinct (what Trollope called “the corduroy braggadocio”) of their American neighbours.

  The visit raised the Moodies’ spirits. Old friends stopped John and Susanna in the street and recalled the youthful adventures they had all shared (Susanna mistook many of the grey-whiskered men for their fathers). “I do not remember that I ever spent a happier or more enjoyable fortnight in my whole life,” Susanna told Richard Bentley. “My dear old husband forgot for a few days his cares, and enjoyed himself as much as I did.” There were family reunions in The Homestead, Sam’s mansion. “My brother,” Susanna told Bentley, “has a handsome and commodious house and a beautiful garden which would amply satisfy the taste of any gentleman of moderate fortune.” Sam himself was in poor health; his muscular body was aging rapidly, and his eyes were clouded due to diabetes. His pretensions soon began to grate on Susanna, who preferred cosy evenings in Catharine’s pretty little cottage, on the banks of the Otonabee. Their sister Agnes’s successive triumphs in literature and society were a recurrent topic of conversation. In a recent letter to Catharine, Agnes had described a visit to the fifth Earl Spencer, at Althorp, “where I found the finest library in England.” It is easy to imagine Susanna’s expression as she read her sister’s smug account of “three weeks in these classic shades having much homage paid to me.”

  John and Susanna made one more pilgrimage, a poignant one, to the property, a mile outside Lakefield’s centre, that had been their home from 1832 to 1839. “I did not know the place,” Susanna noted. In Lakefield, nature might have been tamed and shaped to suit colonists’ tastes, but out there, it was back in control. Their lakeside log cabin had disappeared, and most of the acres had reverted to cedar swamp. The only evidence of the Moodies’ sojourn were the stones of their well—mute testimony to the blood, sweat and tears they had expended on survival.

  Susanna stood at the edge of Lake Katchewanooka, watching the yellow water-lilies rocking up and down on the lake and the iridescent blue dragonflies hovering over them. Memories of her younger self flooded back. She thought about how hard they had worked to clear the land, and the miseries of hunger, disease, cold and disappointment they had endured. But she also remembered the twilight sails that she and John had taken on the lake, and the cheerful laughter of Peter Nogan and Mrs. Tom, their Chippewa friends. She had been a slim, active woman in those days who, for all her grumbles, firmly believed that her backwoods trials were the dark hours before the dawn. Now she was a tired, grey-haired sixty-two-year-old, convinced that she had never been “among fortune’s favourites.” What had she achieved with all those struggles? The Moodies had left England in order to give their children more opportunities in the New World. So far, their children’s lives were no easier than Susanna’s and John’s. Had it all been worth it?

  On their return to Belleville, Moodie fortunes went from bad to worse. Dunbar created the first problem. When John gave up the sheriff ’s job, he’d given the Bridge Street house to Dunbar, in the expectation that his oldest son would look after his parents in their old age. But Dunbar had quickly sold the house so that he and his new wife, Eliza, could travel to Delaware and buy a farm there. Eliza and her sister, Julia Russell, had first entered the Moodie household as boarders, from Jamaica, a few years earlier. In those days, Susanna had found them “a great comfort.” She told Catharine that “dear Lizzie … is a daughter to me in my trouble and dear little Julia does her best with her angelic voice to drive away care.” But once Eliza had married Dunbar, Susanna began to blame her for Dunbar’s shortcomings and constant requests for money. All of Susanna’s broad-minded liberalism deserted her when she came to blows with a daughter-in-law who had negro blood. She described Eliza as a “a selfish, cold-hearted arrogant Quadroon, a woman of little intellect and who despises it in others.”

  John and Susanna with thier daughter-in-law Eliza: “a selfish, cold-hearted, arrogant Quadroon.”

  John’s decision to give Dunbar the Bridge Street cottage, and Dunbar’s decision to sell it, provoked endless family rows and recriminations. Katie Vickers and her husband, who thought little of Dunbar and his wife, were so exasperated that they stopped talking to the Moodies. This meant that John and Susanna had lost the support of their only child who was comfortably settled. Next, Susanna decided that s
he and John could not go to Delaware with Dunbar, as they had originally planned; she could not bear to leave Belleville. However, they now had neither a roof over their heads nor any equity. And in the midst of all this confusion, news reached them from Toronto that the feckless Charles Fitzgibbon had died suddenly, leaving Agnes a penniless widow with six young children. Susanna ached to help her poor daughter, but she had no money. Nor could she help Donald Moodie, her second son, who was also in a fix. “His heedless extravagance has been a sore burthen and trial to us,” Susanna complained in a letter to Bentley (although she refrained from admitting that Donald was well on his way to becoming an alcoholic). Only Robert, the sturdy youngest son, continued to express concern for his parents. But since he too was now married, with a delicate wife and young family but no job, he could offer only sympathy. Family turmoil made Susanna sick with anxiety for the future. In her weakened state, she contracted typhoid fever—rampant in every small town due to the primitive wooden drains, but in Susanna’s view, due in her own case to “mental anxiety.”

  Thanks to her sturdy Strickland constitution, Susanna recovered from the fever. Bowing to the inevitable, she gave up any thought of living with one of their children. Instead, she and John rented a modest wood-frame cottage a mile outside Belleville and found an elderly servant to look after them. From her front windows overlooking the Bay of Quinte, Susanna could watch schooners unload cargoes of coal on the wharves, then return to Oswego, on the American shore of Lake Ontario, loaded with lumber. Various grandchildren came to stay. Friends brought baskets of apples, onions, beans and carrots, and took Susanna out for a spin in their carriages. Susanna eked out a living by selling paintings of flowers. But her letters are steeped in the anguish of infirmity and fear. Often, her only diversion was to watch the antics of Quiz, her Skye terrier, and Grim, a steel-grey cat. She wrote to her faithful patron, Richard Bentley: “My dear husband is not very well, low-spirited and anxious….My heart has been nearly broken. I often wonder that I am alive.” Neither she nor John enjoyed old age. “Old age is selfish,” she exclaimed to her niece Mary Traill, now married and living in Belleville. “It covets companionship, which the young too much immersed in the pleasures and hopes of their happy prime, have no time or inclination to give, and when your own nestlings are all flown, the lonely hours hang heavily on your hands and the shadows lengthen in the dark valley as you totter slowly and sadly on.”