Sisters in the Wilderness (12 page)

But even sunny-tempered Catharine could not ignore the rough-andready manners of some of her new acquaintances. After a lifetime of hat-doffing deference from social inferiors in Britain, she was shocked by the attitude of the Loyalist innkeeper in Cornwall: “Our host seemed perfectly indifferent as to the comfort of his guests, leaving them to wait on themselves or go without what they wanted.” She admitted that she had been warned about the “odious manner ascribed, though doubtless too generally, to the American.” She was equally upset when a large, rude man jammed himself into the stagecoach on the Cornwall to Prescott leg of the journey, squashing up the other nine passengers so uncomfortably that she herself was “literally bruised black and blue.” The Loyalists, who made up the majority of residents of the Front in the early 1830s, were full-fledged North Americans: they had been on the continent for several generations, members of a society that valued achievement over education or wealth. They had no time for genteel immigrants who assumed that a British colony would respect the British class system. Their pioneer individualism jarred on class-conscious English nerves. But Catharine made the best of these circumstances, and praised the tavern-keepers at the Prescott inn to the skies: “the female servants were all English, and seemed to vie with each other in attention to us.”

Susanna didn't have Catharine's ability to overlook the disturbing evidence that Upper Canada was not a northern Eden. Although never as sensitive to landscape as her sister, she shared Catharine's pleasure in the scenery on the journey west (
anything
was better than the “watery waste”
of the long sea voyage she had endured). But Susanna's primary focus was always people, and she was appalled by many of her fellow passengers on the steamer, especially the Irish drunk who lay outside the ladies' cabin all night, singing and ranting about “the political state of the Emerald Isle.” She was unnerved by the way that servants sat at table with their employers, and common labourers took pleasure in lippy talk with the gentry to whom, in England, they would have tugged their forelocks. And she was horrified when she and John met Tom Wales, the Suffolk friend with whom John had gone to hear Cattermole's lectures, who had arrived in the colony two months earlier. Like many of the new European arrivals, Wales was shivering with “the ague”—a malarial fever spread by mosquitoes which left its victims feverish and weak. Like the disappointed Englishman whom Catharine had met in Montreal, Tom Wales was hellbent on getting back to England as fast as he could. He gave Susanna an earful about the bush—hideous roads, swarms of black-flies, swamp fever, thieving land agents and a disgusting diet of potatoes and pork fat.

Cobourg in 1838: this sketch, completed by the artist William Bartlett six years after the sisters passed through the little town, includes the newly-opened Victoria College (centre).

As the Traills had arrived in Lower Canada two weeks before the Moodies, the two families travelled separately up the St. Lawrence River. Thomas and Catharine arrived in Cobourg—their jumping-off point for the backwoods—a week before John and Susanna.

The couples had agreed that they would eventually rendezvous at Sam Strickland's home in the township of Douro, two days' journey north of Cobourg. Communications were so bad in the colony that not only was there no way that each couple could track the other's moves, but Sam Strickland didn't even know his two sisters were about to arrive on his doorstep.

Cobourg gave Catharine and Susanna their first real taste of Upper Canada. During his East Anglian lecture tour, Cattermole had described the town as a “handsome and thriving place [with] stores in abundance… hatters, shoemakers, and every other convenience which a wealthy, grain-purchasing, money-making generation could desire.” And it certainly had pretensions. It had shrugged off its early nickname, “Hardscrabble,” and with flag-waving pride renamed itself Cobourg, in a misspelled tribute to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who had married Princess Charlotte, only child of the future King George IV, in 1816. Princess Charlotte was heir to the British throne; had she not died a year after her marriage, Upper Canada's Cobourg might have revelled in royal patronage. Unfortunately, when another German prince entered the British royal family, he paid no attention to the little colonial namesake. Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, husband of Queen Victoria, had little interest in Britain's overseas possessions.

Most of the original population of Cobourg was composed of Loyalists, who had lived in North America for several generations but had fled north during the 1790s after the American War of Independence. Next to arrive, during the 1820s, was a wave of half-pay British officers interested in free land and a new start. By 1832, Cobourg had a population of around one thousand and aspirations to a
cultural life. There was a printing office and a book society. James McCarroll, a talented Irishman who had recently immigrated with his father, had just opened a music school promising “the sublime studies of such spirits as Carolin, Weber, Mozart, Haydn, Handel, &c.” There were regular tea parties for which the wives of Cobourg's leading citizens dressed up in their best flounces and furs to discuss the same topics that would have galvanized similar gatherings in England—new brides, new babies and the servant problem. There was a Methodist Academy. A sandy beach gently curved around the bay, cradling the high-masted lake schooners as they bobbed about on the water. Cobourg's weekly newspaper, the
Cobourg Star
(“a friend and welcome guest at every fireside”), was edited by R.D. Chatterton, an English journalist familiar with both Susanna's poetry and the London literati that Susanna and Catharine had left behind. The Reverend Mr. McAulay gave his sermons in St. Peter's Anglican Church in such a fruity English accent that he might have been standing in the pulpit of the church in Reydon. Catharine insisted that Cobourg lived up to expectations. She wrote home happily about its “very pretty church and select society,” and commented that “many families of respectability [had] fixed their residences in or near the town.”

This was raw Upper Canada, however, not pastoral England. Beyond the cleared fields surrounding the little lakeshore town was the gloomy, impenetrable bush. Black bears often strolled through backyards. No newcomer could ignore the town's gimcrack appearance: most of its one hundred and fifty houses were little more than wooden shanties. And to anyone familiar with Suffolk's ecclesiastical gems, St. Peter's looked more like a cowshed than an Anglican church. The only two buildings of any substance were the new stone courthouse on the town's outskirts and a splendid brick mansion recently erected by the lawyer George Boulton. There was such a shortage of coins in the colony that half the money in circulation in the Cobourg stores consisted of brass buttons torn off discarded uniforms. And there always seemed to be at least one dishevelled pioneer making an exhibition of himself in the middle of town,
half-sozzled at eleven o'clock in the morning. Cobourg boasted three taverns and several distilleries, but only two churches.

Susanna was far less generous—and more incisive—than her sister in her assessment of Cobourg. It didn't take her long to realize that Cobourg's culture was skin-deep. Her heart sank as she heard how the book society read Walter Scott's novels or Lord Byron's poetry over and over again, because it took at least two years for the latest London best-seller to arrive. Her nose crinkled as she took in the shabby state, including perspiration stains, of many of the ladies' gowns. Her eyes widened as she glanced through the pages of the
Cobourg Star
. She was horrified by “the freedom of the press [which is] enjoyed to an extent in this province unknown in more civilized communities.” Upper Canadian periodicals were notorious for the abuse and invective they heaped upon their targets. “It is the commonest thing in the world,” Susanna noted with alarm, “to hear one editor abusing, like a pickpocket, an opposition brother; calling him a reptile, a crawling thing, a calumniator, a hired vendor of lies, and his paper a smut-machine.” Even William Lyon Mackenzie, in
The Colonial Advocate,
deplored the fact that the hundreds of newspapers circulating in Upper Canada had become the “dernier resort of the venal, the profligate and the unprincipled in society.” For Susanna, this kind of invective was a far cry from
La Belle Assemblée
and
The Court Journal.

The Traills spent only the night of August 31, 1832, in Cobourg. An autumnal chill had crept into the evening air, and the pressure to keep moving was strong. More urgently, Catharine had realized that Thomas was not an ideal pioneer. Thomas was a sweet, gentle man, but easily defeated by circumstance. All his erudition was useless in a crisis, as her cholera episode in Montreal had demonstrated. He was hopelessly impractical: if he tried to nail a trunk closed, he always hit his finger with the hammer. On the journey up the St. Lawrence, Thomas had sunk into an increasingly gloomy silence as his wife enthused about the scenery. Catharine began to understand that the success and happiness of her marriage would depend on her own initiative and energy. She knew
that she could not manage alone. So she insisted that she and Thomas should embark on the last leg of their journey—the thirty-eight miles north to Peterborough—as soon as possible. From Peterborough, they would get in touch with Samuel, who was living eleven miles further north, on the Otonobee River.

The back country north of Cobourg was a landscape of swamps, forests, bush and rivers.

Sam, his wife Mary and their two small children had settled north of Peterborough only a year earlier, some months after Sam had terminated his employment with the Canada Company. Samuel Strickland was just the kind of person that any new immigrant, with no experience of the
colony, would value as a close neighbour. Within months of acquiring land, Sam had cleared twenty-five acres and built a decent house. He had huge advantages over either of his brothers-in-law. Several years younger than both Thomas and John, he was a strong, resourceful man who had now lived in Upper Canada for seven years and had acquired all the necessary practical skills. He could use and care for oxen, make ox-yokes and axe handles, cut and stack hay, build zigzag fences and split logs. Like his sister Agnes in England, he was a take-charge kind of person. His forte was organizing “bees”—the community working sessions at which neighbours would pool their labour for the benefit of one of their members. What's more, Sam revelled in the pioneer life. A barrel of a man, he loved hunting and practical jokes. (He once buried a porcupine in a barrel of nails, then invited anybody who came along to take a free handful.) Catharine hoped that capable Sam might teach scholarly Tom how to work with his hands.

Douro Township had a further attraction for the Traills: it had a reputation as a little island of gentility amidst the uncouth stumps. The name itself caused a flutter in the breast of every British military man: Douro was named after the Battle of the Douro River in the Peninsular War. The township, which covered about fifty square miles, stretched from the banks of the Otonobee River in the west to the edge of Dummer Township in the east. It had good water communications, thanks to the river, and in its southwestern corner there was the rapidly growing settlement of Peterborough, with a population of over seven hundred people. Two Anglo-Irish gentlemen—Sam's fatherin-law, Robert Reid, and Reid's brother-in-law, Thomas Alexander Stewart—were amongst the founders of Peterborough and lived with their large families on its northern edge. Sam Strickland had bought land close to the Reids immediately after he left the Canada Company. He had then sold that land and, with the proceeds, bought more uncleared acres farther north, where the Otonabee River widened out and became a long skinny lake called Lake Katchawanooka, or “Lake of the Waterfalls.” (The lake was also referred to as “Katchewanook”
and “Katchiwano” in this period, before its name was regularized on provincial maps.) The Strickland farm on Lake Katchewanooka was the first dwelling in the community originally known as North Douro, and eventually renamed Lakefield.