Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [36]
For all its British laws and traditions, however, Upper Canada still consisted of fewer than a quarter of a million immigrants spread over a vast territory that only its native people really understood. Its immense emptiness was scarcely scratched by the influx of Loyalists and British immigrants. As Susanna and Catharine travelled west from Montreal, they had seen what settlers called “the Front”: the busy little towns that clung to the north shore of the St. Lawrence and consisted, for the most part, of a grist mill, a sawmill, a church, one or two stores and an inn. Only a handful, such as Brockville and Kingston, also boasted a smithy, a newspaper and a couple of lawyers. York, the administrative centre of Upper Canada that would be renamed Toronto, was still a squalid waterfront settlement of fewer than nine thousand residents—tiny compared to Quebec City and Montreal. To the north of the Front lay the “Back Townships,” the surveyed tracts of impenetrable swamps and forests of pine, oak and maple. Scattered through the thousands of acres of silent forest were bush farms consisting of log huts, barns, laboriously ploughed fields, newly planted orchards and stumps—endless acres of stumps. Once a settler had chopped down the trees on the land he had acquired, he had to wait at least seven years before the huge, ugly stumps were sufficiently rotten to pull out of the earth. Roads connecting these bush farms were either virtually impassable or nonexistent. Even those who acquired their land free had to use their own capital to buy the implements they needed to clear it, and ploughs and hoes were costly. Because labour was in short supply in the under-populated colony, if a gentleman immigrant chose to employ others to prepare his land and plant his crops, he could expect to pay at least twice the wage he would have paid in Britain. Luxury goods were unattainable; only flour, whisky and salt pork were cheap and available. Survival was a back-breaking, soul-destroying struggle.
Before Catharine had even left Montreal, a disappointed settler, on his way back to England, had warned her that most of Mr. Cattermole’s promises of an easy life for settlers were utter make-believe. “I found I had been vilely deceived,” the angry Englishman moaned. “Such land, such a country—I would not live in it for all I could see!” It took newcomers, he insisted, at least five years of back-breaking toil to clear their land and build a decent home before they could begin to think of planting flower gardens. But Catharine decided that the young man simply hadn’t tried hard enough, and she paid no attention. The next day, as she jolted her way westward in the stagecoach, she was reassured by what she saw. Land along the Front had been farmed for several years, so that attractive white frame houses had replaced log cabins, and well-established orchards were heavy with apples, plums and crab apples. “I am delighted with the neatness, cleanliness and comfort of the cottages and farms,” she bubbled. She noted with pleasure familiar flowers—goldenrod, and purple-spiked valerian “as plentiful as the bugloss is in our light sandy fields in England.” She talked to the landlady at a tavern about the hanks of home-dyed wool that hung on fences to dry, and the clay ovens that stood close to many dwellings: “At first I could not make out what these funny little round buildings, perched upon four posts, could be; and I took them for bee-hives till I spied a good woman drawing some nice hot loaves out of one.”
But even sunny-tempered Catharine could not ignore the rough-andready manners of some of her new acquaintances. After a lifetime of hat-doffing deference from social inferiors in Britain, she was shocked by