Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [42]
Frances provided Catharine with the support Thomas could never offer and Catharine knew she could never ask of him. Auburn became Catharine’s haven, and an example of what she wanted to create in the backwoods. At Auburn, she could play Frances’s piano (the only one for miles around) and compare specimens of flora and fauna with her friend. Soon it became a game for the Stewart children to present her with bits of moss, curious leaves or petrified shells. “Ooh, Mrs. Traill,” they would say, mimicking her enthusiasm, “Here’s a wee mite.” Catharine learned from Frances “how much could be done by practical usefulness to make a home in the lonely woods the abode of peace and comfort even by delicately-nurtured women, and energetic, refined and educated men.”
After the Traills moved the eleven miles north, to Lake Katchewanooka, Catharine saw much less of Frances. The long walk along a roughly blazed trail was not an inviting prospect, particularly in the short winter days. It was too easy to get lost. Catharine was soon absorbed into another circle of pioneers: the Stricklands, Shairpes and Caddys, who were hacking a living out of the untamed bush. The presence of another woman was a huge boost to the women in this pioneer settlement, all of whom were locked in an exhausting and endlessly fertile cycle of annual childbirth. Catharine’s sister-in-law Mary Reid Strickland already had three children and was pregnant with her fourth (eventually she would have fourteen babies, three of whom would die as infants). And in June 1833, Catharine’s own first baby was born. Newborn James was “the joy of my heart and the delight of my eyes,” as Catharine described him to the Birds, in Suffolk.
By the time the new cabin on the Traills’ own property was finally ready for occupancy in December 1833, Catharine had recovered her optimistic belief that she and Thomas could conquer the wilderness. Scarcely a day went by without her sitting down to write lengthy descriptions of life in Upper Canada to her mother and sisters in England. The letters brim over with the same cheerful enthusiasm that, by now, Catharine had decided it was her marital duty to provide for her husband.
Chapter 6
“Yankee Savages”
T he mere thought of the wilderness appalled Susanna. The Moodies arrived at Cobourg on September 9, a week after the Traills had left. During her first few days there, she was so depressed by gruesome tales of the back country from Tom Wales and others that she decided even the skin-deep “civilization” of a small town was preferable to the bush. After all, unlike Catharine, she already had a small baby to care for. And Cobourg, with its newspaper and library, offered more hope of a literary career than some backwoods settlement could ever promise.
It didn’t take long to persuade John that they should stay put for a while. Her husband was easily convinced that he would do better to try land speculation rather than backwoods farming. Gregarious and chatty, he felt he had more hope of succeeding as an enthusiastic salesman than as an ignorant farmer. So he shelved his original intention of immediately applying for the free land to which he was entitled, especially since all the available plots close to the Front had been taken up years earlier. Instead of following the Traills into the back country, the Moodies looked around for a property they could afford where the land had already been cleared and buildings erected.
John and Susanna settled into Cobourg’s Steamboat Hotel. The talk in the saloon was all of lots and concessions,