Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [158]
Chapter 19
Apotheosis in Ottawa
I n 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,