Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [170]
Yet today, one hundred years after Catharine’s death, she and Susanna would find modern Canada unrecognizable. Only two of their various dwellings survive: the Moodies’ pleasant stone cottage on Belleville’s Bridge Street and Catharine’s beloved Westove in Lakefield. These homes are now jostled by brick and clapboard neighbours of much more recent date, with car ports, swing sets and gas barbecues in their yards. The rest of the log cabins and cramped cottages in which the sisters scraped and scribbled in Ontario are long gone. We have moved far beyond sagas of wilderness survival and tales of rural life.
Hamilton Township, where the Moodies spent their miserable early months, is now dotted with gentrified farmhouses to which Torontonians drive, along a six-lane highway, for country weekends. Trailer parks and campgrounds crowd onto the south shore of Rice Lake, which Catharine described so lovingly in Canadian Crusoes. You can find historical plaques here and there, commemorating Susanna’s log cabin on Lake Katchewanooka, or the sites of Wolf Tower and Oaklands, the Traill homes on the Rice Lake Plains. But on the plaque that is planted firmly in the middle of Lakefield to mark Susanna’s connections with the village, Catharine’s name is misspelled. The most handsome mansion in Lakefield remains The Homestead: a yellow brick reminder that the only Strickland who was a successful pioneer was Sam.
The marble angel that marks the Moodie grave in Belleville cemetery.
Yet the legacy of Susanna and Catharine is as sturdy as Sam’s mansion or the Moodie angel in the Belleville cemetery. Their most important books are still in print. More than a century has passed since the sisters’ deaths, but plenty of contemporary Canadians have shared the feelings they captured on paper about emigration, and their ambivalent relationship with a landscape both majestic and savage. Every new Canadian who thinks longingly of “home” and every brave adventurer who sets off into the bush, brushing off black-flies and marvelling at nature, is following in the sisters’ footsteps.
Family Trees
Acknowledgments
I would not have had the material, the time or the nerve to write this book had it not been for Professor Michael Peterman of Trent University. Thanks to Michael and his two colleagues, Professor Carl Ballstadt of McMaster University and Professor Elizabeth Hopkins of York University, I was able to draw on three volumes of Traill and Moodie correspondence as sources. The three academic authors collected, edited and published all the extant letters by John and Susanna Moodie, and 136 of the approximately 500 letters written by Catharine Parr Traill. The three volumes saved me from months of labour in the National Archives of Canada, squinting over copperplate handwriting and cross-written letters. In addition, throughout the gestation and birth of this book, Michael has provided information, access to his research, suggestions for further reading and feedback. He showed me around Lakefield and Peterborough, and he and his wife Cara welcomed me to their home. After our first meeting, Michael said, “Well, I think the ladies will be safe with you.” I hope I have justified his confidence.
Both Beth Hopkins and Carl Ballstadt were also generous with their support. The insights into the sisters that I gained from Beth, as she drove me across southern Ontario one fall evening, gave valuable shape to my own impressions. I have drawn extensively on journal articles by all three authors.
I am also indebted to two rigorous and enthusiastic readers. My good friend Sandra Gwyn rescued a first draft of the book with imaginative and clear-headed suggestions. Dr. Sandy Campbell, who teaches in the English Department of the University of Ottawa, helped place the two sisters in their literary context and drew