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would utterly collapse. And she knew that Agnes, in England, would be unable to restrain herself from telling Catharine that she had only herself to blame, for rushing into a precipitate marriage with an impractical, middle-aged widower. So Catharine insisted to her family that she was going to be “cheerful and contented for the sake of my beloved partner.” She was not going to “sadden him by useless regrets.” Her lush descriptions of Upper Canada’s matchless scenery, flora and fauna allowed her to turn a blind eye to everything that was going wrong. She immersed herself in her love of nature, as she had learned to do at her father’s side when Thomas Strickland had walked his little daughter along the Suffolk paths.

Few of Catharine’s original letters home from this period have survived. But most of her observations were published in her own lifetime, thanks to her sister Agnes. Catharine had seen her elder sister’s letter to Susanna suggesting that the two Canadian sisters might collaborate on a magazine containing information “of a useful nature.” Either she or Agnes must have realized that Catharine’s letters home would make an attractive publication. Agnes certainly liked the idea, and she and her sister Jane edited Catharine’s correspondence into a publishable manuscript. This was no mean task at a time when manuscripts were carefully copied out in longhand, especially as Catharine’s handwriting was not always easy to follow. Jane complained to Catharine about a later manuscript that “though the work is a very interesting one you had left it imperfect in construction and there was an immensity to do—Agnes who looked over it sometimes was as puzzled as myself.” The cleaned-up draft was then sent to Charles Knight, a London publisher. Knight agreed to bring the manuscript out in January 1836 as part of his “Library of Entertaining Knowledge.” It appeared under the title The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer, Illustrative of the Domestic Economy of British America.

The book was pitched to the “wives and daughters of emigrants of the higher class” who would become the “pioneers of civilization in the wilderness.” The Backwoods of Canada painted a light-hearted picture of an active, satisfying life for women who were prepared to discard anything “pertaining to the artificial refinement of fashionable life in England” and concentrate on domestic duties and botany. It reads well today, because it is as informative, lively and cheerful as its author must have been. Her sunny personality almost leaps off every page: she devoted only two paragraphs to her attack of cholera, but required forty pages of text to describe the fauna and flora she discovered during her first few months in the bush. Catharine altered several of the details of her emigration (the name of the boat on which the Traills crossed the Atlantic was changed from the Rowley to the Laurel ) and made the best of all the worst moments, such as the grim journey from Rice Lake to Peterborough. There are only fleeting references to her husband: his name is never mentioned.

All Catharine’s upbeat pretense, for Reydon consumption, about her less-than-perfect marriage and precipitate decision to emigrate now became the gloss over the hardships of pioneer life. When The Backwoods of Canada was first published in England, it sold so well that Catharine was asked to add some extra information for later editions. (She supplied a how-to chapter on pickling vegetables and making maple sugar, soap and candles, plus some statistics on immigration.)

For all their difficulties, in their first four years in Canada, the Moodies and Traills had scarcely tasted the real hardships of pioneer life. They still had a little capital to draw on, and they could still dream that they were gracefully helping to establish a New World squirearchy.

Chapter 8

“A Little Red-Haired Baboon”

“C anada is the land of hope,” Catharine assured her family back home, after she had been in the colony for three years. “Everything is going forward; it