Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  Frontispiece for “a most valuable addition to the literature of Canada,” to which citizens of the newly-minted Dominion eagerly subscribed.

  Agnes Moodie Fitzgibbon’s lithograph of a trillium: she and her daughters hand-coloured 5,000 illustrations.

  Catharine chose her tone deliberately. She wanted the large-format, literary volume to “foster a love for the native plants of Canada” and persuade readers to pay attention to the “floral beauty that is destined sooner or later to be swept away, as the onward march of civilization clears away the primeval forest, reclaims the swamps and bogs, and turns the waste places into a fruitful field.” Her preface acknowledged that “the scientific reader may possibly expect a more learned description of the plants, and may notice many defects and omissions,” but Catharine was writing for people like herself, not for lofty scientists.

  Once Agnes had finished her lithographs, Canadian Wild Flowers took most of 1867 to put together. “I got the proof sheet and Agnes’s design of the specimen sheet for the book of Canadian Flowers,” Catharine wrote to her daughter Kate in February that year. “I re-wrote one article and corrected and sent it by post to Lovell.” Although she acknowledged that it was mostly her niece’s work, she was soon getting as irritated with Lovell and Agnes as she had been with the Hamilton Horticultural Society. “I have been writing at my flower book but have not heard from Lovell …how very uncourteous these publishers are.” She resented the way that Agnes failed to consult her on every detail. She complained to Susanna that “I do not even know who is correcting the press for Agnes writes hasty letters and seldom comes to the point on business matters.” She knew Susanna would sympathize with her exasperation—Susanna knew Agnes’s haughty manner all too well.

  Exasperation apart, Catharine did her bit to sell subscriptions. She and Kate did the rounds of likely readers in the Peterborough area. Loyal friends like Frances Stewart bought several. “Your approval dear friend of the book,” Catharine wrote to her, “cheered me not a little for I was much disappointed with my share of the work.” But other potential buyers looked askance at the high-priced, large format volume. Catharine described to her daughter Annie how “[a] hard-fisted, hard-headed hardware merchant … looked … as if he would have liked nothing better than throwing one of his hammers or hoes at [Kate’s] head when he paid down hard cash for his book. One man kept us a long time in suspense, and at last declined on the plea that his children always tore all the books in his wife’s drawing room to pieces, calling on a lean, ill-favoured vinegar bottle of a wife to endorse the fact which she did saying, ‘I guess they do.’ I merely hinted that it was rather a bad plan to let them destroy things. ‘Wal I guess it is but they will do it so it’s no use buying things to be tore up,’ she said—so there was an end to the matter.”

  The proposed volume received a better reception amongst the English relatives. By now, Agnes Strickland had resumed a regular, if frosty correspondence with Susanna, who had described to her English sisters her own and Catharine’s various writing projects. Agnes was in a forgiving mood, because she had discovered yet another rich run of royals for Elizabeth Strickland and herself to write about: the Tudor princesses. She loyally promised to support Canadian Wild Flowers. “I hope that [the work that] your interesting daughter Agnes … and dear Kate are preparing will answer,” she wrote to Susanna in 1868. “I have not heard the price, but I will subscribe for a copy.”

  The first edition of Canadian Wild Flowers appeared at the end of 1868, and it was an instant triumph. It was the first botanical book for the general reader; it had been put together by two indomitable women; and it was a proudly Canadian production at a most propitious moment. The previous year, to the accompaniment of brass bands, blazing fireworks and sonorous speeches, the United Provinces (present-day Ontario and Quebec) and two of the British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard (New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) had come together to form the Dominion of Canada. Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, knighted at Confederation, was determined to expand and promote the newly minted nation. There was a popular hunger for the symbols of nationhood: in England, the Staffordshire potter Thomas Furnival replaced the pictures of Niagara Falls on ironstone dinner services destined for Canada with pictures of beavers and maple leaves. A book celebrating the Dominion’s flora had instant appeal.

  The Montreal Daily News wrote: “This beautiful work must be regarded as a most valuable addition to the literature of Canada. It is a joint production of two ladies, Mrs. Agnes Fitzgibbon of Toronto and her aunt, Mrs. Traill of North Douro, a lady well-known to the literary world, sister of Miss Agnes Strickland, the celebrated authoress of the Lives of the Queens of England … Between them these ladies have produced a work of great merit; and we rise from its perusal full of hope for the future literary reputation of the Dominion.” The periodical New Century referred to the book as “[o]ne of the most remarkable works ever attempted by a woman.” Agnes Fitzgibbon, who had stayed in Montreal to oversee the first printing, easily found subscribers amongst that cosmopolitan city’s literary set for a second and then a third edition within a few months.

  Spurred by success, Catharine and Agnes planned English and American editions, and further botanical collaborations. Catharine must have hoped that this triumph would stimulate interest amongst publishers for her longer manuscript about plants. But all these hopes and plans were quickly overtaken by events. A more attractive proposition than literary sweat and toil came along for pretty, clever Agnes Fitzgibbon: a new suitor. While selling subscriptions for Canadian Wild Flowers in Ottawa, she had been introduced to Colonel Brown Chamberlin. Chamberlin, a lawyer who owned the Montreal Gazette, was active in the militia and was the Conservative member of Parliament for the Eastern Townships riding of Missisquoi. Moreover, the dashing Colonel Chamberlin had served Sir John A. Macdonald, his political boss, so well that a patronage plum came his way: in early 1870, he was appointed Queen’s Printer, which gave him a very comfortable annual salary of $2,000. Within a year of first meeting, Agnes and her suitor were married. Agnes had achieved what every young widow of the era prayed for: a second chance. Moreover, unlike Charles Fitzgibbon, Brown Chamberlin offered the three Rs—he was rich, respectable and reliable. In 1871, thirty-eight-year-old Agnes Chamberlin gave birth to her fourth daughter and (counting the four earlier deaths) ninth child. She no longer had the time or inclination to scrape a living in the book world.

  In July 1870, tragedy struck Catharine Parr Traill’s family. Her son Harry had recently got a job as a guard at Kingston Penitentiary. One day, while he was supervising a limekiln within the prison grounds, two convicts attacked and killed him in the course of a planned escape. It was a brutal crime: Harry’s head was split open by a crowbar wielded from behind him. The newspapers covered the trial and conviction of the murderers the following November with ghoulish interest—it was the first time a prison guard had been murdered in the line of duty in Canada.

  The loss of her second son devastated Catharine. She told Frances Stewart how she desperately tried to forget “the terrible details of this most disastrous event, and to think only that he is gone from amongst us.” Susanna’s sympathy for her sister was unstinting—although clothed, as usual, with snatches of her own enduring grief. “Oh dear, dear Katie, you have my fullest, deepest sympathy….The poor wife will feel it most, for in the course of Nature, you and I will soon join our dear ones again, but she poor thing has a long sad life of widowhood before her.”

  Catharine worried about Harry’s widow, Lily, and three children. She prayed that “God who is the father of the orphan, and the protector of the widow will not leave them comfortless … to His gracious care we must commend poor desolate-hearted Lily and her children.” More practically, she invited Harry’s only daughter and her own namesake, three-year-old Katharine Parr, to stay with her and her daughter. There were now three Catharine Traills (with variations in the spelling) living at Westove: the writer Catharine, sixty-eight; “Aunt Kate,�
�� as Catharine’s thirty-four-year-old daughter was now called; and “Little Katie.” The two older women found Little Katie “a source of great interest yet of anxious care.” Most of the child-rearing fell on the shoulders of Aunt Kate, but Catharine took on herself the responsibility of teaching Little Katie the letters of the alphabet and names of wildflowers. She had less time to pursue botanical research and a publisher for her plant life manuscript.

  It was not simply Catharine’s preoccupation with family affairs that kept her long manuscript on plant life unpublished during the 1870s. The more fundamental problem was that Catharine was a nineteenth-century woman writing in an eighteenth-century idiom. Botany was changing; natural history was giving way to scientific technique; laboratory work was replacing nature study. Charles Darwin had rocked the intellectual establishment of the English-speaking world when he published The Origin of Species. Professional botanists now sought evidence of evolutionary change rather than divine intervention when they studied the propagation of plants. Catharine’s writing style—the attractive mix of scientific nomenclature and literary elegance that she had learned from Gilbert White—was increasingly out-of-date. Interest faded in books that reflected sheer love of nature’s bounty and admiration of God’s handiwork. There was no room for female gifted amateurs amongst the academically qualified male scientists in professional associations. In 1897, when D.P. Penhallow, professor of botany at McGill University, published a review of Canadian botany from 1800 to 1895, there was not a single woman mentioned in his list of over one hundred people who had contributed to the subject.

  But Catharine, who was as little interested in intellectual fashions as she was in clothing fashions, remained determined to get her manuscript in print. “Nothing is done, my dear,” she remarked to her daughter Katie, “without trying, and if one thing fails I must try another.” Her dog-eared manuscript on plant life would see the light of day during her own lifetime because of her persistence and because, for all its faults, it had its charms.

  Chapter 18

  A Trip to Stony Lake

  Susanna leaned heavily on the arm of her nephew, Percy Strickland, as she hobbled along the dusty road. It was a sultry June morn-ing—the hottest day so far of 1872—and the distance from Westove, Catharine’s cottage, to the Lakefield steamer dock seemed longer than she recalled. She regretted that she had agreed to walk with Percy when she could have been riding with her sister in his horse-drawn buggy. But Percy had put her on her mettle with a careless remark, as he looked at his two stout aunts, that the buggy would “scarcely hold two fairies” like them. Determined not to let her seventy-year-old sister show her up, sixty-eight-year-old Susanna had insisted on walking the mile to the dock situated just behind the little Anglican Church built by her late brother Sam, who had died five years earlier. Now her lace-up black leather boots were pinching her corns. She would have loved to stop and mop the “glow” from her brow.

  Once the landing dock was in sight, however, her good humour returned. It had been a pleasant surprise when Percy had arrived at Catharine’s front door that morning to invite his aunts to join a family excursion on the steamer to Stony Lake. Susanna had not seen Stony Lake for years. She vividly recalled the expedition that she and John had made in 1835 by canoe from their log home on Lake Katchewanooka. They had been in Canada less than three years and were still enjoying their “halcyon days” in the bush. The trip been an epiphany for her—a moment when the sheer grandeur of the Canadian landscape had blotted out the endless gnaw of homesickness. The opportunity to revisit such an achingly beautiful landscape was irresistible.

  When Percy and Susanna stepped onto the dock, a small crowd was already waiting to board the steamer Chippewa. There was Catharine’s friend, the Reverend Vincent Clementi, and his wife and niece; Catharine and her daughter Kate; Percy’s brothers George, Robert and Roland Strickland, and Roland’s wife and Robert’s two daughters; plus a handful of other Lakefield residents. There was also a pile of luggage. The gentlemen all had fishing rods and baskets; the ladies had straw hats, parasols and reticules filled with remedies for seasickness and sunburn; Catharine had the basket she always carried for rock, fern and flower specimens; Mrs. Vincent Clementi and Mrs. Roland Strickland had the makings of a picnic.

  Catharine and Susanna settled themselves on the wooden seats in the cabin of the little vessel, while the men stood on the deck overhead, by the engine room. Acquaintances often confused the two sisters, with their sharp blue eyes, white hair and lacy widows’ bonnets. But differences were more apparent than similarities when they were together. “I am dark and much older looking,” Susanna insisted, “and she is a pretty old lady with a soft smiling face and nice pink cheeks.” The Chippewa, which had been plying the Lakefield to Stony Lake route since the previous year, was emitting an urgent hiss: it had got up enough steam in its boiler to cast off. Its red-painted funnel gave a resounding whistle as the boat headed upstream through Lake Katchewanooka towards Clear Lake.

  With every passing year, more of the forest disappeared and the log booms from Clear Lake down the Otonabee River grew larger.

  Susanna’s two nephews, Roland and George, had a particular interest in showing off the delights of Stony Lake. They co-owned the eighty-foot Chippewa with its nineteen-horsepower engine. Roland Strickland, one of the most important timber merchants in the area, used the steamer in the spring to tow his log booms from Stony Lake to Lakefield, and he was eager to drum up passenger traffic for the vessel during the summer months. Aunt Moodie, the well-known author, might be very useful in his campaign to promote the attractions of the waterways above Lakefield. She still received invitations from Montreal magazine editors to contribute to their publications: perhaps she might turn her descriptive talents to the Strickland enterprise?

  As the Chippewa churned through the water, Catharine chatted away to anyone who settled near her, but Susanna was silent as she eagerly searched the scenery for familiar landmarks. As she gazed out the cabin window at the east shore of Lake Katchewanooka, she could scarcely make out the property on which she and John had worked so hard in the 1830s. She knew from her visit in 1865 that their old house had collapsed, but only now, as she took in the entire setting, did she appreciate the change in the landscape that ruthless logging had wrought. “The woods about it are all gone, and a new growth of small cedars fringes the shore in front,” she wrote later to her son-in-law, John Vickers. “There is a tolerable looking modern cottage on the spot that the old log house once occupied, and the old barn survives on the same spot on which it was built, more than 30 years ago, but the woods that framed it are all down, and it has a bare, desolate look.”

  To Susanna’s eyes, the land looked plucked and shaved with its stubble of stumps. The giant pines, oaks and maples that had topped the skyline were felled, and wispy second-growth birch and cedar were only starting to replace them. Huge quantities of lumber had been taken out of the area. The limestone falls down which water had once roared and foamed from Clear Lake had been blasted out in 1871 to make a lock, so that logs could be floated into Lake Katchewanooka more easily. Banks that were once covered in brilliant red cardinal flowers and orange tiger-lilies had been flooded to make a millpond. The magnificent emptiness of sparkling Clear Lake was interrupted by scattered habitation along its west shore. Susanna, who did not share her sister’s concerns about vanishing species, was happy to see these signs of life. She decided that “a pretty Catholic church, and burying ground, and a small picturesque group of cottages, gives an air of civilization to the once romantic place.”

  In 1835, the Moodies had pulled their canoe up at the mill by Young’s Point Falls and been served a feast of “bush dainties” by the Young family. Susanna had been particularly startled to be offered coffee that had been boiled in the frying pan—“for the first and last time in my life,” she would remember thirty-seven years later. Now, Susanna was delighted to discover that the recently appointed master at the new lock between Lake Ka
tchewanooka and Clear Lake was none other than Pat Young, son of the old miller: “He greeted me with intense Irish glee, and asked after the two pretty little girls he carried down in his arms asleep to put in Moodie’s canoe at night,” she told John Vickers, Katie’s husband. “And sure, was he not delighted to hear that they both had married Irish husbands and that little Katie was the mother of nine children. ‘Sure, she was always the clever stirring little thing.’”

  The steamer continued through Clear Lake, and the temperature rose in the Chippewa’s cabin as the hot yellow sun climbed in the sky. Susanna fanned herself with the latest issue of the Canadian Monthly and National Review, and Catharine undid the button at the throat of her black gown. Finally, when the sun was directly overhead, the Chippewa nosed its way into Stony Lake. Although thirty years of logging had wiped out the mighty oaks and white pines from its shoreline, the lake itself was as dramatic as Susanna recalled. She stared about her at the great red-granite rocks along the north shore, heaved steeply up “like the bare bones of some ancient world.” She looked at the reflections of dark woods “frowning down from their lofty granite ridges” into the cold, blue water. She heard Percy insisting that there were over 1,200 islands, and she wondered how long it would be before this marvellous, vast, lonely place became as popular amongst sightseers as the English Lake District.

  Thanks to the efforts of the Strickland family, it didn’t take long for Stony Lake to be discovered. The first tourists started arriving to disrupt the “wild and lonely grandeur” as soon as there was a regular steamer service each summer through Lake Katchewanooka and Clear Lake. And three years after Susanna and Catharine took their trip, a new train service from Peterborough to the Lakefield wharf doubled the steamers’ business. Soon the fighting qualities of Stony Lake muskellunge, the delicate pink flesh of its salmon trout, the profusion of private islands, the azure clarity of its waters and the abundance of deer, partridge and ruffed grouse in the surrounding woods were famous amongst fishermen and hunters as far south as Ohio and New York. Local entrepreneurs built shoreline hotels with well-stocked bars and acted as guides for sportsmen. The Canadian Illustrated News named Stony Lake “possibly the prettiest locality in Canada.” In 1893, Catharine’s daughter Kate bought a three-acre island, Minnewawa, where Catharine spent happy summers. She slept in the rustic cabin and delighted in the island’s “most beautiful oaks and pines,” as she told her son William, “and the wild picturesque outline of the rocky mounts and deep valleys.” Within twenty years of Susanna’s and Catharine’s summer trip in 1872, the whole area had acquired a new name, the Kawartha Lakes (a corruption of the Ojibwa word kawatha, meaning “bright waters and happy land”), and become an established part of the summer cottaging ritual for many Canadian families.