Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [103]
Susanna’s stated intention in Roughing It in the Bush was to describe the experience of emigration without the misrepresentations that hucksters like Cattermole had spread in the early 1830s. “Oh, ye dealers in wild lands—ye speculators in the folly and credulity of your fellow men—what a mass of misery …have ye not to answer for!” Susanna wrote in her introduction. She accused the land speculators of persuading the gullible that “sheep and oxen … ran about the streets [of the New World] ready roasted, and with knives and forks upon their backs.” She was committed to the truth, as she made plain in her opening epigraph:
I sketch from Nature, and the picture’s true;
Whate’er the subject, whether grave or gay,
Painful experience in a distant land
Made it mine own.
Susanna was at pains to show the dark underbelly of experiences that her own sister Catharine had written about with gentle joy. In The Backwoods of Canada, for example, Catharine had described the “bee” during which the Traills’ neighbours had helped the newcomers raise the walls of their first log cabin. Catharine had made the communal feast of whisky, salt pork and rice pudding sound like a dainty tea party: “In spite of the difference of rank among those that assisted at the bee, the greatest possible harmony prevailed, and the party separated well pleased with the day’s work and entertainment.” In Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna told a very different story. Bees presented “the most disgusting picture of a bush life. They are noisy, riotous, drunken meetings, often terminating in violent quarrels, sometimes even in bloodshed.”
There was a vivid immediacy to Susanna’s descriptions. In a passage describing the Moodies’ arrival at their first home in Hamilton Township, she wrote, “I was perfectly bewildered—I could only stare at the place, with my eyes swimming in tears; but as the horses plunged down into the broken hollow, my attention was drawn from my new residence to the peril which endangered life and limb at every step. The driver, however, was well used to such roads, and, steering us dexterously between the black stumps, at length drove up, not to the door, for which there was none to the house, but to the open space from which that absent but very necessary appendage had been removed. Three young steers and two heifers, which the driver proceeded to drive out, were quietly reposing on the floor….I begged the man to stay until [my husband] arrived, as I felt terrified at being alone in this wild, strange-looking place. He laughed, as well he might, at our fears, and said that he had a long way to go, and must be off; then, cracking his whip … he went his way, and Hannah and myself were left standing in the middle of the dirty floor.”
Susanna also included anecdotes that capture the community humour of life in the bush. For all her disgust at the behaviour of some of her neighbours at logging bees, her prose dances with her love of regional accents and earthy humour when she writes about one that took place on the Moodies’ property. One of the Irish settlers who helped at the bee was “Old Wittals … with his low forehead and long nose [who] ate his food like a famished wolf.” A fellow logger was “funning Old Wittals for having eaten seven large cabbages at Mr. Traill’s bee, a few days previous. His son, Sol, thought himself as in duty bound to take up the cudgel for his father. ‘Now, I guess that’s a lie, anyhow. Father was sick that day, and I tell you he only ate five.’… Malachi Chroak had discovered an old pair of cracked bellows in a corner, which he placed under his arm, and applying his mouth to the pipe,