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By Root 1264 0

polite, well-behaved people.” Susanna, in contrast, was unsettled both by her failure to understand the strangers she met and by her inability to position them in relation to herself. So her vivid descriptions of dishonest land-dealers, thieving neighbours and disappearing servants were designed to shore up her flagging sense of superiority to all these uncouth strangers, as well as to entertain her audience. She called Uncle Joe, the bankrupt farmer from whom John had bought the Hamilton Township property, a “weasel-faced Yankee.” She described the neighbour whose family constantly borrowed articles from the Moodies and never returned them as a “bony, red-headed ruffianly American squatter.”

Susanna was impressed with the Traills’ newly completed log house, which they had named Westove, after the Traill family property in the Orkneys. In a humid summer it benefitted from the breeze off the lake because it was set on a little peninsula, referred to by Catharine as “the Point.” On the ground floor there was a kitchen, a large parlour with a bedroom off it, a pantry and a storage closet. Thomas had hung maps and prints on the parlour walls; Catharine sewed curtains of green cambric and white muslin for the windows. An open staircase led to an upper floor that would later be divided into three bedrooms. Below the kitchen was a cellar in which potatoes, turnips, carrots and onions could be stored through the winter. The rooms were dark; windows were small, to ensure a warm interior during Canadian winters. But through a small pane of glass in the parlour door there was a view of Lake Katchawanooka.

Susanna was less delighted, however, with her first sight of the real “bush,” as opposed to the cleared land close to the Front. The clearing around the Traills’ house “was very small,” she noted, “and only just reclaimed from the wilderness, and the greater part of it was covered with piles of brushwood to be burnt the first dry days of spring. The charred and blackened stumps on the few acres that had been cleared during the preceding year were everything but picturesque; and I concluded, as I turned away, disgusted, from the prospect before me, that there was very little beauty to be found in the backwoods.”

A bush farm in the 1830s: the sight of corduroy roads and acres of stumps discouraged many settlers. ( Bush Farms near Chatham: watercolour by Philip J. Bainbrigge.)

The two sisters spent the first weeks of 1834 sitting together in front of the Traills’ Franklin stove, nursing their babies and reestablishing their old intimacy. The snow melted slowly that spring in the Peterborough district. John Dunbar Moodie supervised work on his own cedar log cabin, about one mile north along the shoreline from the Traills’ residence. Then he turned to the question of how to clear his land. He had extended his sixty-six-acre holding on Lake Katchewanooka by spending more of Susanna’s legacy on a further three hundred acres (paying, he admitted to Tom and Sam, an outrageous price for some of this uncleared land). He spent yet more of the legacy on the tools and labourers to help clear the property. Each labourer was paid on a piecework basis: eleven to twelve dollars for chopping, logging and fencing an acre of hardwood land, and fourteen dollars if pine, spruce and hemlock predominated. His spending didn’t concern his wife; Susanna trusted his judgment. Besides, it was easy for her to shrug off any worries in Catharine’s company. Catharine enthused about how beautiful the summers were and laughingly dismissed Susanna’s fears of wild beasts bounding out of the woods.

Soon the two women were strolling down the newly trodden path through the forest to inspect progress on the Moodie log house. It was larger than the Traills’, and the ground floor was already partitioned into a parlour, kitchen and two small bedrooms. A fire was lit in the stove, and there was a plume of smoke from the chimney. Despite its dirt floors and the chinks in its walls, it was “a palace when compared to the miserable hut we had wintered in during the severe