Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [54]
On other days, Susanna and Catharine would take their children on expeditions to collect flowers and catch butterflies. Frances Stewart had lent Catharine two guides with which to educate herself about North American plants. One, published in London in 1814, was a scientific tome entitled Flora Americae Septentrionalis (North American Flora) by Frederick Pursh; the other was an Essay on Comparative Agriculture; or A Brief Examination into the State of Agriculture As It Now Exists in Great Britain and Canada, by J.E. Burton, published in Montreal in 1828. Both books fell far short of Catharine’s needs as she struggled to identify new species of plants. Like Frances Stewart, she started to keep careful notes concerning her specimens and observations. When each family got back to their cabins, the women would lay out their finds. Catharine would carefully pack up the moths and insects she had caught, or plant seeds she had dried, to send to sisters Jane and Sarah in England. She deeply regretted that she had not paid more attention to her elder sister Elizabeth’s instruction in painting before she left home. Now she enviously watched Susanna as her youngest sister got out her pens and paints to execute exquisitely precise sketches of flowers she had collected or birds she had seen.
Pioneer families ate early, so it was soon time to pack up such erudite pursuits and prepare dinner. The basic diet in winter was monotonous: pea soup and pork, potatoes and bread, and perhaps some preserved fruit while supplies lasted through the long winter. Anything that had to be purchased in Peterborough was an expensive luxury. The trick to survival, physical and financial, was to be self-sufficient. In summer the children were sent off to pick wild strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, red and black currants, huckleberries, grapes and blueberries, which their mothers would then stew. (“A dish of raspberries and milk, with sugar, or a pie, gives many an emigrant family a supper,” Catharine suggested.) And there were often special delicacies. During a pause in farm routines, the men might take time to shoot deer or game birds, or catch fish in the lake. If an Indian woman arrived at the door, there was also the possibility of duck or venison.
Members of the local Indian band started calling on the settlers within a few days of each woman’s arrival north of Peterborough. Frances Stewart had told Catharine that when the first Europeans settled in the area, they regarded the Indians as “strange, wild, foreign savages … rolled in blankets, red leggings and mocassins covering their feet and legs; long black hair hanging loose and matted over their faces and shoulders, restless black eyes peering everywhere.” The “Chippewa Indians,” as the sisters called them, had been established in the area for nearly 150 years. They supported themselves by trapping, hunting, fishing and gathering edible plants. Once the settlers began to clear the land, the Indians were happy to start trading goods with them. In exchange for baskets, mats, ducks or venison, they took such European treats as pork, flour, potatoes or clothing. Susanna’s quilted petticoat was particularly coveted by her visitors. Sometimes they asked to borrow household items. “Once a squaw came to borrow a washing-tub, but not understanding her language, I could not for some time discover the object of her solicitude,” Catharine wrote home. “At last she took up a corner of her blanket, and pointing to some soap, began rubbing it between her two hands, initiated the action of washing, then laughed, and pointed to the tub; she then held up two fingers, to intimate it was for two days she needed the loan.” The tub was returned punctually.
The Strickland sisters had arrived in Upper Canada with a romanticized image of the colony’s native people. The eighteenth-century travel literature in their father’s library at Reydon Hall was liberally sprinkled with references to “the Noble Savage”: travellers wrote about native peoples