Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [59]
There were reasons other than Catharine’s incurable optimism for this happy prognosis. The Canada-mania in the British Isles during the early 1830s had meant a rush of people across the Atlantic. With all these new settlers taming the bush, establishing communities, bringing crops to market and buying supplies for their farms, how could the colony’s economy not grow and thrive? As the frontier was rapidly pushed west, how could colonial governors and their masters in London not invest further in Canadian roads and canals? Any fool, argued the colonists, could see that this was the way to fortify British North America against its rapacious neighbour to the south.
British canal-building was one of the wonders of the early-nineteenthcentury world. A spider’s web of beautifully maintained waterways already covered the map of England. By the time the Moodies and the Traills crossed the Atlantic, the British were busy exporting their canal know-how to Canada to strengthen their territorial possessions there. In 1825, the first vessel passed through the Lachine Canal, avoiding the rapids south of the island of Montreal. Four years later, the new 27-mile Welland Canal allowed ships loaded with lumber and grain to bypass the Niagara Falls and the turbulent Gorge and enter Lake Ontario from Lake Erie. But the most impressive feat of canal engineering was opened in 1832. At enormous cost in both lives and money, the 125-mile Rideau Canal system, with forty-seven locks, was hacked out of granite to link Kingston (British military headquarters in North America) to the Ottawa River. The first two canals improved commerce within the northern half of the continent; the third strengthened Canada’s defences against the United States.
These successes sparked a rash of proposals for similar colony-building projects. Douro Township was a district ripe for rapid settlement and growth, and well situated for the development of a waterway. There was already talk in Toronto (formerly York), the seat of government for Upper Canada, of a canal system to link Lake Huron to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. Lake Katchewanooka, on which the Traill and Moodie properties perched, would be part of the route. Such a waterway would allow vessels from Lake Huron to make their way into Lake Simcoe, across the present-day Kawartha Lakes, down the Otonabee River, across Rice Lake, and from there down the Trent River to the Bay of Quinte, close to Belleville. The proposed canal system would give settlers easy access to supplies for their settlements and markets for their products. It would open up a vast area of back country for development and at the same time boost existing settlements on its banks. Various eager investors were already building mills, taverns and solid stone houses in Peterborough, in anticipation of a bonanza. The township had even agreed to plug the worst potholes in the corduroy roads (made with logs laid crosswise to the traffic) that linked the scattered settlements. “Sooner or later there is little doubt but that it will be carried into effect,” Catharine Parr Trail boasted.
Unfortunately, there was a great deal of doubt. For all its promise, the economy of Upper Canada remained primitive, weak and entirely dependent on logging and agriculture. Nothing could happen without the hard labour of new immigrants. As John Moodie noted in a long article he wrote for an English newspaper in 1836, Canada’s “present prosperity and progress in improvement must depend chiefly upon emigration and the expenditure of imported capital.” But the supply of willing labourers began to drop off in the mid-1830s. Cholera was devastating the populations of the Old World. Immigrant ships continued to unload human cargo at Grosse Ile, but immigrants eager to tame the bush did not materialize in the numbers expected. Far more of the newcomers, particularly those from the middle or upper classes, gravitated to established communities like Toronto,