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By Root 1224 0

to be Canadian Crusoes, A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains as a story for her own children. During picnics at the Big Stone, or at bedtime in Wolf Tower, her brood would sit wide-eyed as their mother spun a tale about the world they lived in. The landscape she described was the landscape the Traill children knew—the Big Stone, the wild rice beds of Rice Lake, the local hills and ravines. In the evenings, Catharine would sit at her writing desk and put the story on paper. Writing was both therapy and catharsis for her, as it was for Susanna: an escape from day-to-day anxieties. In March 1850, Catharine reported to Ellen Dunlop, Frances Stewart’s daughter, that “I have been writing a little now every night at my Canadian Crusoes, and hope if I keep tolerably well to have the volume ready by the middle of May….I am in good hope of winning fifty pounds when it is ready and that cheers me up to persevere in my work.” By September she was able to write to Ellen, “I have yesterday finished my arduous and fatigueing task of copying the MS of the Canadian Crusoes—354 pages besides some notes.” Two weeks later, Catharine sent off her manuscript to Agnes, so she and Jane could edit the text and place it with a publisher.

Canadian Crusoes has the kind of conventional happy-ending adventure plot that children’s authors such as E. Nesbit and Enid Blyton have relied on. Set in the late eighteenth century, it involves three plucky youngsters—half-Scottish, half-French siblings called Hector and Catharine Maxwell, and their French-Canadian cousin Louis—who get lost in the bush. Together the trio rescue Indiana, a young Mohawk woman, from death, and (largely thanks to Indiana’s skills at canoeing, hunting and fishing) they survive for two years in the bush. When the children are finally rescued, they discover that they have been no more than eight miles from home. At the end of the story, Louis marries Catharine and Indiana marries Hector, the happy foursome representing a blending of Canada’s British, French and native heritages.

Canadian Crusoes is really a barely disguised survival manual, a kind of Backwoods of Canada for British children. In fiction as in conversation, Catharine burned with the impulse to pass on useful tips. When one of the girls makes tea from a wild fern, for instance, the reader not only learns what the fern looks like and where to find it (“a graceful woody fern, with a fine aromatic scent like nutmegs; this plant is highly esteemed among the Canadians as a beverage, and also as a remedy against the ague; it grows in great abundance on dry sandy lands and wastes, by waysides”), but there is even a footnote giving its Latin name (“comptonia asplenifolio”). Every chapter of Canadian Crusoes is packed with information about flora and fauna native to Upper Canada, Mohawk and Ojibwa history and culture, and hunting practices. And Catharine endowed the two British children with all the missionary zeal so popular amongst Victorians as they set out to convert Indiana: “Simply and earnestly they entered into the task as a labour of love, and though for a long time Indiana seemed to pay little attention to what they said, by slow degrees the good seed took root and brought forth fruit worthy of Him whose Spirit poured the beams of spiritual light into her heart.”

To Catharine’s dismay, it took Agnes nearly two years to find a publisher. Part of the reason was that Agnes spent some time on the manuscript adding a preface and once again rewriting illegible sections. But Agnes was also preoccupied with another issue. In 1850, the Pope had appointed Cardinal Wiseman, an extremely aggressive cleric, as Archbishop of Westminster—head of the Roman Catholic Church in Britain—and a large new body of distinguished converts, including the Reverand Henry Edward Manning of the Church of England, went over to Rome. The whole of London was in an uproar over the perceived threat to the established Church of England. This was just the kind of furor that Agnes, now the acknowledged expert on Victoria, loved: her opinion on the Queen’s role