Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [168]
By the summer of 1898, Catharine had outlived two of her four sons and one of her three daughters (Mary Muchall died in 1892) and, in her own words, “all the great men and women of the past. Soldiers, sailors, statesmen, three sovereigns, the poets, the novelists, artists, historians.” At ninety-six, she was a Canadian icon—one of the few souls alive who could remember the celebrations after the Battle of Waterloo, and who knew the Dominion of Canada when it was still a wilderness. She appeared to be immortal. The journalist Faith Fenton made a pilgrimage to Lakefield to profile Catharine for her new magazine, the Canadian Home Journal. She was captivated by the welcome she received. “What a picture she makes as she sits in her rocking chair: blue eyes, bright as a child’s; silky white hair, parted over the high forehead and tucked away beneath the pretty cap, whose pink ribbons are not more delicately coloured than the wrinkled cheeks; a smile full of kindliness, and lips curving humourously.” As their grandmother chatted away to the smart lady journalist from Toronto, Katie Traill (Harry’s daughter) and a couple of Annie Atwood’s daughters exchanged significant looks. They had seen so many visitors fall under their grandmother’s charm. When Faith Fenton finally rose to leave, Katie Traill said, “Don’t call her a ‘wonderful old lady.’ Everybody does, and we get so tired of it.” Fenton couldn’t resist using the label: “There is no other phrase so true.”
Catharine on the porch at Westove in 1898, with two of her granddaughters: undeniably, “a wonderful old lady.”
But Catharine’s ready smile could not hide the fact that she suffered all the handicaps of her advanced age. Her eyes were cloudy, her ears deaf, her hands shook, and she was too frail to scramble over the rocks of the Stony Lake islands, searching for lichen, moss and ferns. “The fund should be started at once,” Mary Strickland insisted, “and only kept open for a few weeks, fearing that anything should happen to Mrs. Traill which is only too likely at her great age.” The family knew exactly who to approach to raise a Testimonial Fund for Catharine: her good friend Sandford Fleming, who had recently been knighted in Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee honours of 1897, alongside Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier.
In June 1898, Sir Sandford threw himself into the campaign to raise funds for his old friend. He arm-twisted colleagues, sent out a circular to everyone he had ever worked with and persuaded the Governor-General and his wife to head the list of donors with a generous contribution of fifty dollars. “Those of the present generation…may not be familiar with the life and work of Mrs. Traill…read the note he sent round. “She has rendered service of no ordinary kind in making known the advantages offered by Canada as a field for settlement, and by her very widely read writings she has been instrumental in inducing very many emigrants from the United Kingdom to find homes in the Dominion.”
The list of signatories to the testimonial was a Who’s Who of the intellectual establishment of 1890s Canada. It included George Grant (principal of Queen’s College, Kingston), John Bourinot (chief clerk of the House of Commons) and all the senior staff of Ottawa’s Experimental Farm. It included Toronto lawyers and Quebec City businessmen. It included the librarian of the British Columbia legislature, the president of the Winnipeg Board of Trade and the wife of Sir William Van Horne, president of the CPR. By December, when Sir Sandford wrote and told Catharine about it, the fund stood at over $1,000.
Catharine finally had more financial security than she had known for years. “Dear valued friend,” replied Catharine, in a script as firm as it had been twenty years earlier,