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By Root 1211 0

out almost before it began. There were scarcely any casualties, and William Lyon Mackenzie was forced to flee across the border. Bond Head offered a reward of one thousand pounds for his capture. When news reached the little settlement north of Peterborough that the men would soon be home, Catharine escorted Susanna home in the horse-drawn sleigh. With the children swathed in buffalo rugs, the two women wrapped themselves up in a blanket together and started laughing hysterically in the cold night air. Suffused with relief that their husbands were safe, they were overcome with the humour, as Catharine noted in her journal, of finding themselves “not a whit less happy than if we had been rolling along in a carriage with a splendid pair of bays instead of slowly creeping along at a funereal pace in the rudest of all vehicles with the most ungraceful and uncouth of all steeds.” Thomas and John were back on their farms only days after they had left.

Despite its comic-opera aspect, the rebellion had stirred everybody up. Susanna wrote an anthem calling on the “Freemen of Canada” to fight the “base insurgents.” Fifty years before Rudyard Kipling, she tapped into the British appetite for triumphant patriotism. It was soon on the lips of every soldier in Bond Head’s ragged defence force. The second of its five verses made it plain that the loyalty of true Canadians, wherever they were born, must lie with the motherland:

What though your bones may never lie

Beneath dear Albion’s hallow’d sod,

Spurn the base wretch who dare defy,

In arms, his country and his God!

Whose callous bosom cannot feel

That he who acts a traitor’s part,

Remorselessly uplifts the steel

To plunge it in a parent’s heart.

The rousing words were accompanied by banging pot lids and waving fists as Susanna’s children marched around the kitchen reciting the anthem, while their father accompanied them on his flute.

The triumphant suppression of the ’37 Uprising infused the Christmas celebrations two weeks later with additional jubilation. Catharine decorated her cabin with even more ingenuity than usual, threading dried cranberries onto pine boughs to simulate the red holly berries she had gathered as a girl in Suffolk. Her daughter Katie made a hemlock wreath and twisted her precious coral beads (which her mother had refused to sell) around the boughs. Catharine scrounged supplies from her brother Sam to ensure a feast, and by the time the Moodie family arrived in their sleigh, the Traills’ table was laden with the weight of roast duck, potatoes, vegetables carefully preserved four months earlier, pies, preserves and breads. While Thomas and John toasted the new Queen in treacle beer (made from treacle, hops, bran and water), Catharine distributed maple sugar sweets to the children.

After dinner, the two families went outside to play in the newly fallen snow. Both men were now limping, since awkward Thomas had fallen off his mount and sprained his ankle at a meeting of the militia in Peterborough a few days earlier. Though the men were unable to pull the children on their homemade sleds along the snowy paths through the woods, the two Strickland sisters, as usual, compensated for their husbands’ handicaps.

It was only when night fell, and the women sat beside the Franklin stove nursing their infants and reminiscing about Reydon Christmases, that a sadder note crept in. They recalled jubilant wassailing parties while their father was still alive, when the Hall was thronged with merrymaking neighbours and attentive servants. They thought of their four older sisters in England. They remembered how, after their father’s death, Agnes always took charge of celebrations, while gentle Sarah quietly produced a delicious dinner despite their straitened circumstances. “Our Christmas meetings at best are but a melancholy imitation of those social hours,” sighed Catharine. “Their chief charm arises here from the retrospect of the past and from the long train of affectionate remembrances that crowd thick and fast upon each other.”

The taste of military life had