Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  You careless fellow!—What, lost your mitts?

  Aren’t you afraid I’ll give you fits?

  Punch your head, or slap your face,

  Or send to a corner in dire disgrace?

  Were I a lady young and fair,

  You would certainly take the greatest care,

  Of the smallest thing her love could proffer,

  So what excuse my lad can you offer?

  By 1876, Susanna’s eyesight was no longer sharp enough to knit, but her wit was quite sharp enough for verse.

  When I take up the pins in your behalf

  I give you leave my boy to laugh—

  At old Knitty Knotty, who loves you well,

  And hopes to see you a learned swell.

  When Catharine and Susanna were apart, they thought fondly of each other—even though they knew that, together, they got on each other’s nerves. They exchanged frequent letters, never forgetting to mark each other’s birthdays. Susanna wrote to “my beloved sister of old” whose face “seems looking at me through the dim mist of years in its youthful bloom.” She assured friends that “My dear sister Catharine is as amiable and loveable as ever….We still love with the old love through weal or woe.” The sisters were now in their seventies, and with each passing year, more ailments filled their letters. Catharine’s lumbago made writing uncomfortable; Susanna had an “odious hernia” which prevented her from walking very far. Both women complained of failing memories (although each could reel off the name of every single family member on each side of the Atlantic). More poignantly, Susanna began to suffer spells of dementia. “I had no idea,” she wrote sadly in 1882, “that age was such a ruthless destroyer of the senses and so perfectly obliterates the past, by mingling it up with the present.”

  In 1883, Catharine received a summons from Robert Moodie: Susanna was sick. As Catharine boarded the 2:30 pm train to Toronto at Lakefield Station on a gloomy November afternoon, she wondered whether she would ever see any of her sisters again in this world. “There are only four of all the old Stricklands left,” Catharine had written sadly to Ellen Dunlop that morning. “Two in England—Mrs. Gwillym 85—Jane Margaret 83—myself 81—and dear Mrs. Moodie in her eightieth year—an aged sisterhood.” After a seven-hour journey, she stepped onto the platform at the yet-unfinished Union Station and was immediately bewildered by the throng of people, the whistles and clangs of huge locomotives, the white brightness of the huge station’s new electric lights. But Robert Moodie, reliable as always, was there to greet her, carry her shabby cloth bag and find a cab to take them to his house on Wilton Crescent, between Jarvis and Sherbourne streets.

  Catharine slowly clambered up the narrow staircase of the brick duplex to the bedroom overlooking the back garden, where Susanna had spent most of the previous two years. She was shocked when she saw Susanna: “She looked aged and feeble and I found the fine intellect much weakened … more than I could have supposed. Only at times she would brighten up, and seem more like her old self; but it was like flashes of light on dull cloudy days.” Catharine’s ten-day visit proved a tonic for both these sturdy women. Susanna insisted on struggling down the narrow stairs to Robert’s parlour, where her old piano now stood. Then Catharine would sit down and pick out the hymns they had learned in their Suffolk childhood. Susanna insisted that Charles Wesley was “the king of hymn writers,” and the sisters’ quavery sopranos would join together in the words of “Jesu, lover of my soul” or “Forth in thy Name, O Lord, I go.” Many of the poignant verses must have recalled for the sisters their hard times in the backwoods, when they and their young families had assembled on Sundays in Catharine’s parlour to sing the same verses:

  Other refuge have I none,

  Hangs my helpless soul on thee;

  Leave, ah! leave me not alone,

  Still support and comfort me.

  Catharine’s visit gave Susanna a new lease on life. For a few months, the shadows of dementia retreated from her mind, and she recovered her appetite for visitors. When a dapper, middle-aged Englishman, with shiny black boots and a jaunty self-assurance, turned up at Robert’s house, she was eager to talk to him. The visitor was James Ewing Ritchie, a well-known English travel writer. Ritchie had been commissioned by the London periodical the Christian World to cross the Atlantic in order to prepare a series of articles on the pros and cons of emigration to Canada. But Susanna knew Ritchie as the son of Andrew Ritchie, once the pastor of Wrentham Congregational Church, three miles north of Reydon. It was Pastor Ritchie who had converted the young and spiritually restless Susanna to Congregationalism in 1830.

  James Ritchie had inquired into the whereabouts of Agnes Strickland’s sisters as soon as he arrived in Canada. He knew that their stories, and their link to the famous royal biographer, would make great copy. Before he had even tracked them down, he’d drafted a few dramatic paragraphs about two “delicately nurtured ladies” who had been “familiar with the best of London literary society” and had then arrived in the “waste, howling wilderness” of Canada and slaved as “no servant girl slaves in England.” Now he had finally located Susanna in Toronto, and he reported that she possessed “a mental vigour and active memory rare in one so aged.” They talked for hours about her memories of her Suffolk childhood and of Regency London.

  After talking to Susanna, Ritchie knew that both sisters had incredible stories to tell. So he made a special side trip in order to visit Lakefield and knocked on the door of Westove. Catharine, who had fussed over James when he was a little boy, was even more delighted to see him than Susanna had been—it is easy to imagine a smart London journalist flinching from the garrulous flow of reminiscences he had sparked. Ritchie told his readers that he was bowled over by Mrs. Traill’s “queenlike” manners and enthusiasm for nature: “In spite of all the hardships she has had to undergo as wife and mother in the wilderness, her face still retains something of the freshness and fairness of her youth. She is a wonderful old lady.” Ritchie lavished praise on the literary output of both women, and on their role as “pioneers of Canadian literature.” Much of Ritchie’s interview with Susanna was reprinted in the Globe, and his whole collection of articles was published in London in 1885 under the title To Canada with Emigrants.

  Even after all these years, the English sisters winced when they saw references in the London press to their Canadian sisters’ humble circumstances. All that Roughing It in the Bush mortification flamed again in Jane Strickland, who wrote a tetchy letter to Susanna. Jane dismissed James Ritchie as “Sir Snob” and deplored his patronizing style: “While praising [Catharine’s] elegant arrangements he takes care to inform his readers ‘it is only a wooden house.’…We all thought him a disgusting child. He must have written in pure spite.”

  Susanna’s interview with James Ritchie was amongst the last encounters she had with anyone outside her family circle. Strange fantasies began to flood her mind—fantasies that she had been robbed and was now penniless. The fantasies intensified over the next few months as Susanna’s sanity slowly slipped away. She could no longer read; she could not walk without assistance; she confused her children with her grandchildren. By the end of 1884, she required constant nursing, and Robert Moodie and his sister Katie Vickers decided to move their mother to Katie’s mansion at 52 Adelaide Street.

  Susanna’s daughter Katie and her husband John Vickers, with seven of their ten children, in the parlour of their opulent mansion on Toronto’s Adelaide Street.

  Yet it was not until March 1885 that the old lady seemed ready to relinquish her hold on life. Catharine arrived to sit with her and listen to her inchoate ramblings. Susanna was a wreck of her former independent, private self. Catharine wrote to Ellen Dunlop: “I cannot leave her as she frets if I go away and when she comes in to me she keeps talking and rambles so that I lose all thought of anything and every one else…. My sister who used to rail against dolls to play with and call them hideous idols and find fault with mothers for giving little children dolls to play with
has a great wax doll dressed like a baby and this she nurses and caresses—and believes it is her own living babe and cannot bear it out of her sight….This is to me the saddest sight for it shews the entire change that has come over her fine intellect. She is a child again in very truth.”

  It was a wretched, anguished death. On Easter Sunday, the new bell of St. Andrew’s Church on King Street began to clang. Susanna grew dreadfully agitated. She got it into her head that the bell tolled for a murderer who had cut off her head, and she struggled out of bed to kneel on the floor and pray for his soul. For the next thirty-six hours, the poor old woman was repeatedly startled awake by fearsome delusions and nightmares. Finally, as her nurse, daughter and sister slumped exhausted by her bedside, she fell into a coma. Catharine listened to her laboured breaths. “The total loss of your dear aunt’s faculties,” Catharine told her daughter Annie Atwood, “had indeed reconciled us to the final close of her life on earth … the restful peace of God seemed to have taken the place of all the sad harassed pained expression that was for so long sad to witness on that beloved face.” Staring at her sister’s face, Catharine was transported to the bedroom of Reydon Hall, where she had last seen her own mother “calmly sleeping” fifty-two years earlier. As she watched and prayed, Susanna drew her last breath.

  Robert Moodie arranged for his mother’s remains to travel to Belleville by train. Susanna Moodie was buried in the newly laid-out graveyard to the west of the city, overlooking the Bay of Quinte. The bodies of her husband John and her two sons were taken from the old graveyard, in the centre of town, and buried next to her. John Vickers paid for a splendid white marble angel, wearing a Moodie-like expression of fierce pride and holding a star aloft, to be erected at the grave. The Globe published a long obituary, applauding Susanna’s determination to help create a Canadian literature: “Many a struggling Canadian author has reason to thank her for encouragement and advice kindly given.” The obituary writer described Roughing It in the Bush as the best-read book ever written in Canada and made the prescient comment: “Its pictures of patient suffering and endurance will last long after the landmarks with which they are associated will have disappeared.”

  Chapter 19

  Apotheosis in Ottawa

  In 1884, when she was eighty-two, Catharine went to stay in the Dominion capital and found that she was a celebrity. “I am paid more attention to here in Ottawa,” she wrote with delight to her sister Sarah Gwillym, “than I ever have been [elsewhere].” She was fussed over by “the heads of the society of the place …for my literary talents, which of course few care for at Lakefield.”

  A prophet is always without honour in her own country: Catharine’s Lakefield neighbours knew her not as a famous author, but as Sam Strickland’s sister who was a walking encyclopedia of flowers. Catharine recognized that her newfound status as a celebrity said a lot about Canada, too. “Education has made vast strides since even our flower book appeared,” she explained to Sarah. “There is not now the struggle for mere bread that there was—the cultivation of the mind is extending far and wide even to the remotest parts of the country. You cannot think the progress that a few years have made among all ranks of the people.”

  The progress of the new nation in the late nineteenth century was phenomenal. The population of British North America, only 800,000 when the sisters arrived in 1832, now numbered 4.5 million. The Canadian landscape had been transformed from bush farms and mud roads to open countryside, railways and industrial towns. There were seven provinces now, stretching from the red earth of tiny Prince Edward Island in the east to the unexplored vastness of British Columbia in the west. Sir John A. Macdonald, first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada, was well on his way to achieving his dream of a railway that reached to the Pacific Ocean. The economy had begun to flag, but most families continued to have large numbers of children, and settlers surged into the prairies and beyond. Thanks to the efforts of education pioneer Egerton Ryerson, a strong-willed Methodist minister and provincial politician, Ontario now had a first-rate system of primary and secondary schools. No child at the end of the century had to forego instruction in mathematics, literature and history the way that Catharine’s and Susanna’s children had. Every small community in southern Ontario aspired to a small brick schoolhouse and some kind of lending library (although most banned works of fiction). Specialized journals flourished, particularly those that covered religious or agricultural issues or promoted the benefits of temperance.

  Nowhere was the speed with which Canada had been civilized more evident than in the capital. When the Traills and Moodies had crossed the Atlantic to the New World half a century earlier, there had been only a muddy, rowdy lumber town on the banks of the Ottawa River, just below the roaring Chaudiere Falls. Now Ottawa boasted a viceregal court at Rideau Hall, the residence of the Governor-General of the Dominion, and the town was graced with a magnificent set of copper-roofed Parliament Buildings that constituted, according to the novelist Anthony Trollope, “the noblest architecture in North America.”

  For all the pomp and ceremony, however, Ottawa was still a lumber town. James Ewing Ritchie called in there before he carried on to Toronto and Lakefield to visit the Strickland sisters. The author of To Canada with Emigrants described it to his English readers as “a curious compound—almost Irish in that respect—of splendour and meanness. There are magnificent shops—and then you come to the wooden shanties, which in such a city ought long ere this to have been improved off the face of this earth.” Like so many visitors from the rarefied literary air of London, Ewing was astonished by the medley of characters who congregated in the Canadian capital: “I met there statesmen, adventurers, wild men of the woods or prairie, deputies from Manitoba, lawyers from Quebec, sharpers and honest men, all staying at one hotel; and it seemed strange to sit at dinner and see great rough fellows, with the manners of ploughmen, quaffing their costly champagne, and fancying themselves patterns of gentility and taste.” Nonetheless, Ewing reflected that the horrors faced by Susanna, Catharine and other early pioneers “are now amongst the pleasant reminiscences of the past.”

  Agnes Moodie Fitzgibbon Chamberlin, a respected figure in Ottawa during the 1880s, had her mother’s spirit and intelligence.

  This was the Ottawa to which Catharine, a cheerful octogenarian with lively blue eyes, came to visit her favourite niece and co-author, Agnes Fitzgibbon Chamberlin, in January 1884. She boarded the smoky carriage of the Grand Trunk Railway at Brockville, where she had been staying with friends, then changed at Prescott onto the Ottawa & Prescott Railway line. During her three hours of jolting train travel, a familiar dread of station crowds at the other end began to suffuse her. She worried that she would never manage to clamber down unaided from the train with all her baggage. She stared anxiously out the window, noting snowbanks so high that the farmhouses and Dutch barns were almost buried. But thirty miles from the capital, a cheery voice called out, “Oh Auntie! I am so glad you are here!” It was Agnes’s eldest daughter, thirty-three-year-old Maime Fitzgibbon, who years earlier had helped colour the lithographs for The Wild Flowers of Canada, and had now joined the train to ensure her greataunt’s comfort. “All the weary feeling and the anxious thoughts fled like melted snow away,” Catharine wrote to Ellen Dunlop.

  Maime, or Mary Agnes as she had been christened, was a particular favourite of Catharine’s because she herself was now an author. In 1880, she had published a lively account of a trip she took by rail, steamer and road to Manitoba, where she spent some months as governess to the children of a CPR engineer. Maime was no fool: she had capitalized on her famous grandmother, Susanna Moodie, by calling her book A Trip to Manitoba, or Roughing it on the Line, and in an attempt to snare a valuable patron she had dedicated it to Lady Dufferin. Maime chatted away to her great-aunt as the train chuffed north. “You will I am sure like your great niece Miss Fitzgibbon,” Catharine wrote to Sarah Gwyllim, who had invited Maime to spend some time in England with her, “She is clever,
practical and very agreeable—not pretty, but nice and lady-like and possesses much general knowledge and taste and the talent for writing which still belongs as a source of heirloom to the Strickland race.”

  When the train drew into Ottawa’s fussy little station, cab drivers looking for fares and boys eager to earn a few cents carrying baggage swarmed onto the platform. “I should have been perfectly bewildered by the jostling crowd of men and horses and boys pulling at one’s sleeve,” Catharine recorded. But capable Maime elbowed a path through the throng, helped Catharine into a cab, bundled her up against the piercing east wind that cut through the town and told the surly Irish cab driver to take them to New Edinburgh, a small village about a mile east of the Parliament Buildings. The cab bumped along the unploughed road and over the two rickety wooden bridges that spanned the frozen Rideau River. Soon Catharine was settled in front of a warm fire at 52 Alexander Street, the Chamberlins’ pleasant brick house, barely two hundred yards from the Governor-General’s gates at Rideau Hall.

  Within a few days of Catharine’s arrival, she was swept up into the social life of the capital by “the good kind [Colonel] and my dear Agnes C.” Agnes introduced her aunt to a social ritual that had not reached Lakefield: weekly “At Homes,” at which ladies received friends and acquaintances. “On Monday Mrs. C took me to call with her on Mrs. Macpherson,” Catharine wrote to Ellen Dunlop, “and it was her day … ” Catharine, who had never had much time for social rituals, was both impressed and uncomfortable. “I saw several strangers …but they were all rather grand.” Next, Agnes hired a cab to take her aunt through Rideau Hall’s wrought-iron gates and up to the viceregal front door so Catharine could write her name in the visitors’ book. This would alert the Marquess of Lansdowne, recently arrived to serve as the Dominion’s fifth Governor-General, to the presence in town of a distinguished visitor. “Oh Ellen! How I enjoyed the drive through the beautiful grounds and the dear snow laden evergreens of the woods—it was a treat and took me back to old times but the deep, deep snow!… and the cold— last night was 26˚ below Zero.”