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By Root 1270 0

a widow,” as she wrote in her journal, “[to] bear testimony to my husband’s worth. With some foreign eccentricities of manner, and some faults of nervous irritability of constitution, he was a true hearted loyal gentleman, faithful in deed and word—a kind & benevolent disposition, a loving father, husband and friend—a scholar and a true gentleman, whose virtues will be remembered long after his faults have been forgotten.” Susanna too had always had a soft spot for her brother-in-law, who was so painfully unsuited for roughing it in the bush. But as we consider his career today, we can’t help wondering: could Thomas Traill ever have made a happy immigrant? If he had been able to settle in Toronto in 1832, where he might have taught at the newly founded Upper Canada College, might he have found his niche in the colony? Perhaps. But during most of the last century, immigrants who relied solely on their learning and social position in Britain rarely did well in the New World. Those who thrived in British North America were men far more ruthless, ambitious and brave than “a scholar and true gentleman” like Thomas Traill.

During the anguished months between the Oaklands fire and Thomas’s death, Susanna Moodie reached out to Catharine as much as she could. Catharine spent several weeks with the Moodies in early 1858. (Catharine’s son James had now moved to Belleville, and he and his wife Amelia had a son—Catharine’s first grandchild—in January). Susanna fussed over her elder sister in a quite uncharacteristic way, dosing her with wild cherry balsam because she had a cough and trying to keep her in bed when she had bronchitis. It was during this visit that John “healed” Catharine’s rheumatism by laying his hand on her shoulder. Catharine did not mention her adventures in spiritual healing in her letter to her own daughter Mary, but she did write, “Your Aunt … is much concerned at my illness.”

Susanna was probably glad to have her sister close, so she could confide her own concerns. John Moodie’s long-running, corrosive and expensive battle with his Tory critics in Belleville was reaching a climax, and it did not augur well for the Moodie family.

For more than twenty years, Belleville’s Tories (most of whom were active Orangemen) had made life difficult for John Dunbar Moodie, sheriff of Hastings County. In nineteenth-century Canada, the sheriff was responsible for collecting court-ordered debts on behalf of creditors. If for any reason the debtor did not pay, the unsatisfied creditor could sue the sheriff on the grounds that it was the sheriff ’s fault that the court action had failed. John’s Tory critics, led by Thomas Parker (who still resented Moodie’s appointment to the job he himself had wanted), had indulged in protracted “sheriff-baiting,” suing John for non-collection of debts, but protecting themselves from his counter-suits with legal tactics. John’s income was eroded by all his legal bills, incurred as he tried to defend himself from his enemies. The sheriff ’s prime source of income was drawn from the fines levied by the court, but John’s income from this source had steadily fallen, because Parker and his friends made sure that most cases were settled in the lower courts, where John had no access to any fines levied. Susanna railed against the weasel tactics of lawyers: “They are a set of finished rascals, and swarm everywhere.”

The struggle to do his job despite Thomas Parker and his ilk had aged John. By the time his brother-in-law Thomas Traill died, sixty-one-year-old John was a white-haired, limping old man. He had lost the military swagger of his youth; thanks to the accident with the pioneer harrow just before the 1837 uprising, and a knee injury he had sustained in a fall in 1845, he dragged his left leg as he walked. Although he still loved to laugh, an expression of permanent anxiety had settled on his ruddy face. Life was getting harder, not easier.

Hastings County covered a large area, and John found himself travelling farther and farther, in the bitter cold of winter and the furious heat of summer,