Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [39]
The Traills spent only the night of August 31, 1832, in Cobourg. An autumnal chill had crept into the evening air, and the pressure to keep moving was strong. More urgently, Catharine had realized that Thomas was not an ideal pioneer. Thomas was a sweet, gentle man, but easily defeated by circumstance. All his erudition was useless in a crisis, as her cholera episode in Montreal had demonstrated. He was hopelessly impractical: if he tried to nail a trunk closed, he always hit his finger with the hammer. On the journey up the St. Lawrence, Thomas had sunk into an increasingly gloomy silence as his wife enthused about the scenery. Catharine began to understand that the success and happiness of her marriage would depend on her own initiative and energy. She knew that she could not manage alone. So she insisted that she and Thomas should embark on the last leg of their journey—the thirty-eight miles north to Peterborough—as soon as possible. From Peterborough, they would get in touch with Samuel, who was living eleven miles further north, on the Otonobee River.
The back country north of Cobourg was a landscape of swamps, forests, bush and rivers.
Sam, his wife Mary and their two small children had settled north of Peterborough only a year earlier, some months after Sam had terminated his employment with the Canada Company. Samuel Strickland was just the kind of person that any new immigrant, with no experience of the colony, would value as a close neighbour. Within months of acquiring land, Sam had cleared twenty-five acres and built a decent house. He had huge advantages over either of his brothers-in-law. Several years younger than both Thomas and John, he was a strong, resourceful man who had now lived in Upper Canada for seven years and had acquired all the necessary practical skills. He could use and care for oxen, make ox-yokes and axe handles, cut and stack hay, build zigzag fences and split logs. Like his sister Agnes in England, he was a take-charge kind of person. His forte was organizing “bees”—the community working sessions at which neighbours would pool their labour for the benefit of one of their members. What’s more, Sam revelled in the pioneer life. A barrel of a man, he loved hunting and practical jokes. (He once buried a porcupine in a barrel of nails, then invited anybody who came along to take a free handful.) Catharine hoped that capable Sam might teach scholarly Tom how to work with his hands.
Douro Township had a further attraction for the Traills: it had a reputation as a little island of gentility amidst the uncouth stumps. The name itself caused a flutter in the breast of every British military man: Douro was named after the Battle of the Douro River in the Peninsular War. The township, which covered about fifty square miles, stretched from the banks of the Otonobee River in the west to the edge of Dummer Township in the east. It had good water communications, thanks to the river, and in its southwestern corner there was the rapidly growing settlement of Peterborough, with a population of over seven hundred people. Two Anglo-Irish gentlemen—Sam’s fatherin-law, Robert Reid, and Reid’s brother-in-law, Thomas Alexander Stewart—were amongst the founders of Peterborough and lived with their large families on its northern edge. Sam Strickland had bought land close to the Reids immediately after he left the Canada Company. He had then sold that land and, with the proceeds, bought more uncleared acres farther north, where the Otonabee River widened out and became a long skinny lake called Lake Katchawanooka, or “Lake of the Waterfalls.” (The lake was also referred to as “Katchewanook” and “Katchiwano” in this period,