Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [150]
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 Katchewanooka 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.
In 1872, however, the two sisters were still looking at an empty expanse of glistening water and an unbroken shoreline. As the Chippewa