Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [40]
Thirty-five miles to the north, on Sturgeon Lake, there was a second covey of gentlefolk. Of the six settlers there, four were university-educated, one had attended an English military college and the last had “half a dozen silver spoons and a wife who plays the guitar,” according to one of the group, John Langton from Lancashire. Patrick Shirreff, a Scottish farmer who travelled throughout North America in the early 1830s, recorded that the society of the Peterborough region was reputed to be “the most polished and aristocratic in Canada.” What Shirreff implied was that there were far fewer loudmouthed Loyalists here than on the Front. The British class system had been partly transplanted to the Peterborough region—which meant that Catharine and Thomas would feel comfortably at home in its upper ranks. Thomas might find a kindred spirit amongst the bookish Sturgeon Lake crowd.
Catharine’s creeping anxiety about what lay ahead was evident in her account of the journey from the Front into the back country that she sent home to her mother. Girlish enthusiasm faded from her descriptions of a countryside that looked increasingly foreign. Although the gentle hills north of Cobourg reminded her of Gloucestershire, she deplored the “zigzag fences of split timber [which were] very offensive to my eye. I look in vain for the rich hedgerows of my native country.” As the afternoon wore on, and the woods each side of the road thickened, she began to wonder how any settler could clear the ground and build a log house within a single day, as Mr. Cattermole had airily promised.
Today, we can barely conceive how barbaric Catharine must have found the British North American frontier of 170 years ago. There are no sepia photographs to kindle our imaginations; only a few amateurish sketches capture the immensity of the wilderness. Ancient stands of white pine, many over one hundred feet tall and with trunks five or six feet across, dwarfed the puny efforts of early settlers to tame the dense undergrowth of cedar and birch. Soon these giants would be felled by greedy lumber crews, eager to feed the appetite of Britain’s Royal Navy for squared timbers and masts. But in 1832, the mighty trees towered like malevolent sentinels over a landscape broken up only by swamps, rivers, rocky outcrops, lakes and clearings created by forest fires. Often the only sound in the dead of a bitter winter night was the howling of wolves; often the nearest habitation was several miles away, through almost impenetrable bush.
Catharine huddled closer to Thomas as the horse-drawn wagon rumbled on. When they arrived at Rice Lake, her curiosity was whetted by the sight of an Indian village inhabited by Chippewa people (known today as Ojibwe, or in their own language, Anishanabeg). But her appetite for tourism was quenched when she got thoroughly chilled by driving rain as they crossed the lake on a grubby little steamer. Then the steamer, which continued up the Otonabee River, ran aground four miles below Peterborough. The men on the rowboat that eventually arrived to rescue them had consumed a whole keg of whisky and were “sullen and gloomy.” After an ugly row with the passengers, the men took off into the night, leaving Catharine and Thomas stranded in the woods. “We were nearly three miles below Peterborough, and how I was to walk this distance, weakened as I was by recent illness and fatigue of our long travelling, I knew not.”
Luckily, one of their fellow passengers knew where he was going. In response to Catharine’s entreaties, he guided them through the dense forest to safety. It was an ordeal. At one point, Catharine lost her footing in the dark as she crossed a stream and fell into knee-deep water. And when they finally reached Peterborough, they found the principal inn there completely full. Thomas stood helplessly by as his shivering, wretched wife tearfully