Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [41]
Travel in the New World was a rude shock for English gentry. Henry James Warre (1819–1898) contrasted his elegant Montreal sleigh (bottom sketch) with the bone-shaking experience of winter travel on country roads.
The following morning, a message was sent to Sam Strickland that his sister had arrived in Peterborough with her new husband. It took the boy who delivered the message all day to make his laborious way through the forests, along the roughly marked eleven-mile trail. Two days after Catharine and Thomas had reached Peterborough, a breathless and excited Sam arrived by canoe from his farm, after shooting the rapids of the Otonabee River, for a noisy reunion at the inn. He soon got Thomas organized. Thanks to Sam, Thomas had already secured a land grant of some waterfront acres on Lake Katchewanooka. Now his brother-in-law persuaded Thomas to spend some of his meagre capital on more acres that adjoined Sam’s land, so their two farms would be contiguous.
Within three months of leaving the British Isles, the Traills had begun backwoods life with a wonderful advantage: they didn’t have to start from scratch. They had a neighbour who knew what he was doing, and who could lend them the agricultural implements (axes, ploughs, scythes) with which they were completely unfamiliar. Moreover, unlike most early settlers, they were able to spend their first year in the bush not in a leaky, cramped shanty but first as guests of various friends in Peterborough, and then in a sturdy log cabin near the Stricklands that had been abandoned by another family.
Irish-born Frances Stewart became a close friend to Catharine as soon as the Traills arrived in Douro Township
The Stricklands’ hospitality sweetened the Traills’ first taste of pioneer life. The Reids and Stewarts formed a little clique into which Catharine—generous, kind and always willing to lend a hand with jam-making and bread-baking—was soon absorbed. During the early weeks in Peter-borough, Catharine quickly became close friends with Dublin-born Frances Stewart, who was eight years older than she was and already the mother of eight children (she would have eleven children altogether, all of whom would survive childhood). Frances shared all Catharine’s religious, literary and botanical interests. A relative by marriage of the novelist Maria Edge-worth, Frances and her husband Thomas had moved to the unbroken bush of Douro Township ten years earlier, when Peterborough scarcely existed. Frances knew all too well how wretched a woman like Catharine would feel as she faced the rigours of life in the backwoods. In 1823, Frances herself had written home: “This place is so lonely that in spite of all my efforts to keep them off, clouds of dismal thoughts fly and lower over me. I have not seen a woman except those in our party for over five months, and only three times anyone in the shape of a companion.”
Frances, a spry little woman with a ready smile, quickly became Catharine’s confidante, ready to comfort her when she unburdened herself about her homesickness for East Anglia, her impatience that letters from home took more than two months to reach her, her unhappiness that there was no church at which she could attend services. However bad Catharine found the bush, she had to acknowledge that her new friend had found Upper Canada in a far more raw state. Frances had drawn on her deep faith in a protective God to sustain her, and on her extensive knowledge of natural science (she had studied chemistry, botany and geology as a child) to catalogue the plants around her.
During the 1820s, the Stewarts had watched the local population