Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [61]
By now, the diminutive and hot-tempered Scottish-born journalist William Lyon Mackenzie had emerged as the backwoodsman’s champion. Part hustler, part prophet, “Little Mac” had been galvanizing opposition to the Family Compact since the early 1820s, first as the outspoken editor of The Colonial Advocate and then as an elected member of the legislature of Upper Canada. In more recent Canadian history, only Newfoundland’s Joey Smallwood can match Mackenzie for populist wizardry—demonic fluency, fierce energy, fearlessness against the odds and an ability to fill the air with honey and gall. By the time the Traills and Moodies were settled in Douro Township, Mackenzie was busy inflaming the ragged (and often illiterate) backwoodsmen with his passionate Tory-bashing and his stinging criticism of the Toronto nabobs. Speaking from schoolhouse steps or the back of farm carts, he ranted about dishonest officials, corrupt clergy and lace-cuffed place-seekers. He pointed out that Upper Canada was a stagnant backwater compared to the United States, where newcomers had a say in their country’s future and easy access to land. On the main streets of every small town in Toronto’s hinterland, he accused the Family Compact of ruling Upper Canada “according to its own pleasure” and committing “acts of tyranny and oppression.” His voice shrill with indignation, and his red wig repeatedly sliding off his bald head, he made personal attacks on his political enemies. He insisted that people like Henry Boulton, the Attorney-General of Upper Canada, and John Beverley Robinson, Chief Justice, “surround the Lieutenant-Governor, and mould him like wax to their will.”
The Traills and Moodies had plenty of reasons to agree with the substance of Little Mac’s tirades. They had firsthand experience of the sluggish development of the backwoods. But they were so blinded by their social prejudices and eagerness to cling to “establishment” values that they failed to see that Little Mac was talking about their own plight. They couldn’t see that the colonial administration was impervious to problems faced by families like theirs. They didn’t understand that their own community would never thrive, or their own land rise in value, unless the colonial government stepped in to encourage settlement and invest in better transportation systems—measures the Family Compact had no desire to initiate.
To people like Traill and Moodie, William Lyon Mackenzie was a dangerous radical and a troublemaker who challenged all their most dearly held principles of social order. Another gentleman farmer in the Peterborough region, John Langton, spoke for his ilk when he dismissed Mackenzie as a “little factious wretch…. He is a little red-haired man about five foot nothing, and extremely like a baboon.” Mackenzie’s followers, in the considered opinion of John Moodie, were “under the influence of the most odious selfishness.” Moodie was too busy detecting a strain of republicanism in the Radicals’ demand for representative government to appreciate Mackenzie’s diagnosis of the colony’s problems. Little Mac’s followers were, in Susanna’s words, “a set of monsters,” traitors to the British flag and “enemies of my beloved country.” And the agitation of the Radicals meant a further drop in immigration to Upper Canada from the mid-1830s, with jarring consequences for life around Peterborough.
The legacies to Susanna and Catharine had been substantial, yet the money ran like sand through the fingers of John Moodie and Thomas Traill. The tranquillity of the “halcyon days of the bush,” as Susanna had described her first months on Lake Katchewanooka, began to evaporate as the two men exhausted their capital and ran out of cash. Part of the problem was that neither the Moodie nor the Traill property yielded enough wheat or lumber to sell at market. Their crops were so scanty that there was barely enough wheat to last them until Christmas, let alone to leave a bag