Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [65]
This was shocking news. Douro Township’s gentlemen immigrants were too distant from Toronto to know that Bond Head was an arrogant fool who had misjudged the strength of popular feeling and had helped provoke the uprising by treating Mackenzie as nothing more than a raving madman. At the various harvest festivals and Strickland family celebrations along Lake Katchewanooka that fall, Little Mac had been regarded as a bit of a joke. “Mackenzie’s treason,” in Catharine’s words, “had been like the annoying buzz of a mosquito ever in the public ears.”
Now Mackenzie had co-ordinated his offensive with an uprising of the Patriotes in Lower Canada, led by Louis-Joseph Papineau, who were also demanding more control over the colonial government. Taking advantage of Bond Head’s ill-advised decision to send his troops to Montreal, to quell the Patriotes there, Little Mac had launched an attack on a defenceless Toronto.
Within hours, eager to support the Crown, Sam Strickland had said goodbye to his family and set off through the December night to Peterborough, to join the Peterborough Volunteers. By the following morning, Thomas Traill was marching alongside Sam down the rutted cart-track towards Port Hope. A day later, John Moodie had shouldered his knapsack and limped on his crutches the eleven miles to Peter-borough, where he borrowed a horse and rode on to Port Hope at the head of two hundred more loyal volunteers. For Thomas and John, the call to arms was thrilling. Soldiering was their business. Soldiering meant the jangle of harness, the bark of orders, the acknowledgment of their officer status—as well as regular meals and jovial male companionship. It meant an escape, albeit temporary, from the backwoods and suffocating poverty. Both men dearly loved their wives, but the opportunity to defend the interests of the motherland was irresistible. It had an extra piquancy in 1837, because Britain had a new monarch, Victoria. For the first time in their lives, the rallying cry for these soldiers was “God save the Queen!”
For Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie, however, the news was appalling. Dutiful feelings of loyalty to British interests were swept aside by dismay at the prospect of their husbands’ prolonged absence. They had infants to nurse and children to feed, and now they would also have to do the men’s work in the dead of winter—keeping fires lit, woodpiles filled, animals fed and paths cleared. The snowstorm had continued all night; weeks of freezing temperatures and snowdrifts lay ahead. “God preserve us from the fearful consequences of a civil warfare,” Catharine confided to her journal. “O, my God, the Father of all mercies, grant that he may return in safety to those dear babes and their anxious mother.” The backwoods reverberated with rumours: Toronto was beseiged by sixty thousand men; four hundred Indians had attacked the city and slaughtered all the inhabitants; American soldiers were crossing the border in support of Mackenzie. The two women were terrified that armed rebels might burst out of the forest at any moment, intent on rape, pillage and murder. “Became so restless and impatient I felt in a perfect fever,” Catharine wrote in her journal. Susanna and her children moved into the Traills’ cabin.
In fact, the rebellion fizzled