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ROMANTIC CANADA
[Illustration: THE SHRINE.]
ROMANTIC CANADA
BY
VICTORIA HAYWARD
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
EDITH S. WATSON
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
EDWARD J. O’BRIEN
TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
OF CANADA, LTD. AT ST. MARTIN’S HOUSE
1922
Copyright, Canada, 1922, by
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED
Toronto
CONTENTS
PAGE
List of Illustrations vii
Publisher’s Foreword xi
Introduction xiii
CHAPTER PAGE
I Nova Scotia 1
II Barrels 9
III ’Longshoremen 15
IV Sea-Coast Homes of the Maritime Provinces 21
V Low Tide in the Bay of Fundy 29
VI Cape Breton 35
VII Newfoundland 41
VIII Labrador 49
IX Saint Pierre et Miquelon 57
X Quebec 65
XI Les Iles De Madeleine “The Necklace” 75
XII Percé 85
XIII Wayside Crosses and Garden Shrines 93
XIV Saint Anne L’Eglise 101
XV M. Jobin 109
XVI Romance of the Two-Wheeled Cart 121
XVII Bubble, Bubble, Bubble 131
XVIII Woodcarving 137
XIX Indian Lorette 145
XX The Abenaki Basket-Makers 153
XXI “To Market, To Market” 163
XXII Ontario 169
XXIII Ontario Continued 175
XXIV The Prairie 183
XXV Romance Clings to the Skirts of Winnipeg 189
XXVI Mine Host--The Mennonite 199
XXVII The Pas: Gateway of the Great Northland 207
XXVIII British Columbia 215
XXIX The Doukhobors: a Community Race in Canada 223
XXX Doukhobors: a Community Race--Continued 231
XXXI Steveston 237
XXXII The Indians of Alert Bay 243
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Shrine _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Her Daily Portion 4
“How’s Fish?” 5
Interior of an Apple-Barrel Cooperage in the Valley of the Gaspereau 12
In the Orchard 13
Tarring the Boat 18
A Nonogenarian Grandfather Placidly Catching up the Meshes of
an Old Net 19
Within Sight of Home, Sambro, Nova Scotia 24
Door-way of the Lighthouse-keeper’s Home at Cape Sharp, Nova Scotia 25
In the Raquette, Digby, Nova Scotia 32
The Bay of Fundy is the Greatest Natural Drydock in the World 33
On the “Gallery” 38
Boyhood Dreams of the Day when “their Turn Will Come” 39
Fit Subject for a Millet 40
Dusk, South Bay, Ingonish 41
Belleoram 44
Path End 45
The Water-Carrier 48
Knitting 49
Hearty at Eighty 52
An Eskimo Grandmother 53
Nearing the End 60
An Island-woman of Saint Pierre et Miquelon 61
The Rag Mat 68
Spinning 69
Tadousac has Lost None of its Scenic Beauty 72
An Old Trading-Post at Baie St. Paul 73
The Wool for the Homemade Looms is Grown on the Sheep Grazing
on the Slopes of Les Demoiselles 76
Seumas O’Brien, Author and Sculptor 77
The Sampler 80
The Lassie with Breton Cap 81
At Percé on the Gaspé Coast 88
A Little Angler 89
La Croix, the Age-old Milestone of the Quebec Highway 96
La Calvaire 97
In a Convent Garden 104
Saint Anne de Beaupré! Saint Anne L’Eglise! The Capital of the
Faith--the Place of the Miracle 105
M. Louis Jobin in his Work Shop 112
Many of the Seats in these Tiny Carts are built up so that the Driver
Sits above his “Horse” 124
Bad Roads, or no Roads at all never Betray the Ox into the Ditch 125
A Wayside Pot 134
Call of the Sea 140
The Figure on the Bow 141
Family Graves 148
The Snowshoe 149
The Twickenham of Canada 156
“Pour Madame’s Boudoir” 157
Stepping Stones 164
The Flower of St. Roch’s 165
An Old Ontario Homestead 172
Ontario, a Land of Campers and Camp-Fires 173
View from His Britannic Majesty, George III’s Chapel to the
Mohawks, near Brantford 176
Fort Mississauga, Niagara-on-the-Lake 177
Home of Alexander Graham Bell 180
On the Canal 181
Canada, “the Bread-Mother” of the World 184
Steady, There! 185
“The Stooker,” as the Prairie Calls Him 188
At the Window 192
“... And There in the Cucumber Field is Old Kitty” 193
A “Knight of the Field” Defending the Wheat 196
Foot Bridge to Trappist Monastery, Saint Norbert 197
Curing a Pelt, which, Sooner or Later, Graces the Shoulders
of Some Lady of the Land 200
On the Girls’ Side 201
Kaslo After Rain 208
Mountain Goats, Snowflakes Against the Blue Sky 209
A Madonna of the Kootenays 216
Drawing Water from the Columbia 217
In a Community Door Yard 224
Doukhobor Women Winnowing 225
Domesticity 228
Pulling Flax 230
Washing Flax in the Columbia 231
Close of the Season 236
Chrysanthemums a-bloom by a Steveston Doorway 237
The Family Tree of the Pacific Coast Indians 248
Spirit of the Untamed 249
PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD
We are proud to announce what we think will come to be regarded as a
really outstanding book of travel. We think it fitting that the first
important book in this category which we have published should treat of
our own country.
“Romantic Canada” aims to give, and from the hands of two women
singularly fitted to give it, the story of Canada in the romance of its
simple industries simply accomplished. It gives the story, in word and
in picture, of all sorts and conditions of folk, as they are to be found
in the faraway and little-visited territories of the Dominion. Author
and artist have left the beaten track, for it is in the highways and
by-ways that this particular Canada, which is passing as we grow in
population, and as steel links territory to territory the more easily
and the more quickly, is to be found. The photographs and discussion of
this hinterland of Canada are quite unique in the history of Canadian
literature and photographic art.
The author and artist have gone from Canadian coast to Canadian coast.
They have thought it not unwise also to include matter descriptive of
their travels in Labrador and Newfoundland.
The author and artist and ourselves desire to say “Thank you” to all
those who have helped to make this book what it is. Specifically we are
indebted to “Asia, the Magazine of the Asiatic Society”, for permission
to reproduce the photographs bearing the captions “Domesticity” and
“Pulling Flax”; to the “Century Magazine” in the same regard as to
“Hearty at Eighty”, “Island Woman of St. Pierre et Miquelon”, and “The
Figure on the Bow”; to “Town and Country”, as to “Fort Mississauga”, and
“View from His Britannic Majesty George III’s Chapel to the Mohawks,
near Brantford”; to the “Canadian Home Journal” as to “Early Home of
Alexander Graham Bell”, and “Drawing Water from the Columbia”; and to
the Toronto “Saturday Night” as to “An Old Ontario Homestead”.
We are also vastly indebted to the editor and proprietors of “The
Canadian Magazine”.
INTRODUCTION.
By Edward J. O’Brien.
It is a happy comradeship which has made this interesting volume
possible. Those who know and love the by-ways of Canada have frequently
encountered Miss Watson and Miss Hayward in the pursuit of a
self-imposed task. Hardly a task we should call it, but a delight, to
record with the camera and the pen those unique and beautiful racial
traditions which have survived in Canada and flourished, while the
passion for conformity to a provincial process of standardization has
crushed them in the United States. In Canada, the Scottish Highlander,
the Acadian, and the Doukhobor, for example, have not been compelled to
abandon their memories. The life of their forefathers has flourished
when transplanted to a new soil. That wise tolerance and appreciative
catholicity which is not always found in a new land has preserved old
loveliness here, and the magic of Miss Watson’s camera has arrested this
beauty at many significant moments.
I have more than once had occasion to allude to the invaluable labours
of Mr. C. M. Barbeau in harvesting the folksongs and tales of Quebec and
Ontario. Although the general public may not realize it, he is
conferring a new literature upon Canada and adding rich chapters to her
imaginative history. Well, these pictures with their fine sense of
composition and warm human values provide this literature with its just
setting, and the social record they afford is of permanent significance.
The quality of life changes even in a generation, and those who may turn
over the leaves of this book a century from now will know, as they could
not otherwise have known, what beautiful life has flourished in hidden
places.
The Magdalen Islands, for example, are an unknown land to Canadian city
dwellers. The service of Miss Watson and Miss Hayward in introducing
them alone to those who have never visited them is one for which any
happy traveller should be very grateful.
Cambridge, England.
ROMANTIC CANADA
CHAPTER I.
NOVA SCOTIA.
_No call sounded...._
No call sounded by the pipes of this New Era is more insistent than that
of the Canadian Sea-coast. One sometimes wonders if Canadians as a whole
even yet realize the important gift bestowed, when Heaven gave to Canada
so magnificent a coastline as that which the constant sword-play
of land and sea traces from Saint John, New Brunswick, to the
Newfoundland-Labrador Boundary? The map of Eastern Canada is “a study in
charts” worthy of closest attention. For it is here the Dominion rings
up the outside world.
But to get the real “lay of the land”, the true spirit of its people,
one must not be a stay-at-home, a mere map-student only, but a follower
of the Piper leading by the ’longshore road through New Brunswick, Nova
Scotia, Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island. Canadians must be able to
say, “these are our Maritime Provinces”, and say it with a pleasurable,
personal, as well as deep, national sense. And visitors from other lands
must be able to become personally possessive if they are to enjoy the
life etched quaintly enough of Grand Pré, of the Valley of the
Gaspereau, of the bonnie Hielands o’ Cape Breton. One hardly sets foot
in any part of this long stretch, without being at once conscious that
the sea invades all the life of Bluenose-land, that the marine spirit is
here in a beautiful, intimate sense, like the figurehead on a ship, both
soul and mascot of the “half-island”.
Sailing-vessels in themselves, are _genre_ crowding the Nova Scotia
stage. Her earliest discoverer came hither, over the sea, in the
picturesque craft of a Norse Dragon-ship. And the immediate chapters of
her history, after these half-shadowy voyages of the Norsemen, were
written by Basque and Breton fishboats a-sail, drawn across the Atlantic
Ocean in the wake of Cod.
Cod is still, more than ever, King in Bluenoseland and beyond. Over all
the vast stretch of the Canadian “Maritime” his huge fleet holds sway.
And what is so romantic as a fleet-winged schooner speeding away under
full sail on her voyage to the Banks? Unless it be the one coming in,
her decks almost awash, with the full load? Oars and sails, and the
tripping bows of the Dragon-ships and Breton bateaux founded this long
line of “Bankers” and Dories--laid the foundation of Nova Scotia’s
talent for ship-building. The “gift” which turned out the big
square-riggers from the Hantsport and Parrsboro “ways” was a natural
sequence of the maritime beginning of this land, where thought turns so
naturally to the sea, and to sea-power. It was those wooden
wind-jammers, wind-jammers with mere boat-beginnings, which paved the
way to the ocean-greyhounds which now home true to Halifax and Saint
John. Oh, the “Maritime” is the life-blood of Nova Scotian and
Newfoundlander.
Halifax is the heart of the Marine circulatory system. And serving
Halifax with fish for re-shipment, are innumerable little Havens and
Outports, all up and down Saint Margaret’s Bay, Spry Bay, the Gut of
Canso, and along the vast stretch reaching to Souris, P.E.I., and Havre
Aubert in Les Madeleines. And in each of these little Outports there is,
of course, a family behind every little “dory”. The morning greeting
among all these people is not, “Good Day!” but, “How’s Fish?” To these
coastal families, Halifax is not a mere cold city of business, but a
“mother” to whom they can turn with the catch, be it great or small, and
ask bread.
And so, in a morning spent on the Halifax waterfront, the lifting fog
reveals schooner after schooner snugly riding against the old wet piers
that artists love, or idly floating into dock amid harbour reflections,
weathered spars and mildewed sails a-drip. Sometimes there is a clump of
these schooners hitched together, all discharging at the same time. So
in a single morning at a fish-receiving wharf here, we have chatted with
skipper from Newfoundland, skipper from the Madeleine Islands in the
Gulf, and skipper from Prince Edward Island, and not moved from the one
dock.
Codfish overflows the roofs in the final stages of the drying, and lies
upturned to the sun almost under the shadow of city cathedrals. And here
on the wharves is an army of men and boys, the coopers and brine-mixers,
moving about from barrel to barrel of mackerel, mending leaks and
otherwise putting them in shape for trans-shipment; and over there,
overflowing the basement of some old warehouse, the half and whole
drums, called-for by the cod a-drying on the roof. Old scales are
trundled back and forth to this schooner and that, as the flying cod
hurtles through the air, hurled by some unseen hand at work in the hold
of the “Nancy Ann”, “The Village Leaf”, or the schooner, “Passport.”
[Illustration:
HER DAILY PORTION]
[Illustration:
“HOW’S FISH?”]
In sharp contrast to the fish-schooners is the brig, brigantine, or
barque, painted white, with water-casks the last thing in paint and
fancy designs on deck. She is discharging hogsheads of molasses brought
from Barbadoes or other of the British West Indies. Molasses has played
its part and commandeered the sailing vessel of the Bluenose fleet from
the earliest times. For in the rationing of the sea-craft up and down
the coast molasses was the “sweetening”; and old-timers to this day
prefer it to sugar.
* * * * *
In addition to her fishing industry and tale of ships, Nova Scotia
enjoys a pastoral side no less rich in _genre_. Farms are here. In
following the highways and little by-paths rambling among apple orchards
and gardens, potato fields and hay meadows--paths etched in Spring by
the pink flush of apple-blossoms, or in autumn by boughs curving to
earth under weight of rosy Baldwins or creamy Bellefleurs--one follows
everywhere hard on the heels of romance. It is her hand that beckons
into every little cottage snugly tucked away in valley and glen; where
every grandmother sitting carding, spinning, hooking rugs, knitting or
reading her daily portion of Scripture, can keep you entertained with
tales and the recounting of interesting happenings and not go outside
the range of the half-dozen houses which have been her little world for
more than half a century.
Along these roads and about these inland homes, friendly old willows
mingle atmospherically with tall and stately Lombardy poplars. It is on
these uplands of Nova Scotia one follows the old Post-roads--roads that
recall the dashing coach of other days and still cross rivers by old
covered-bridges, and preserve the quaint, rambling old houses that
served as Inns where passengers of old sought refreshment, or spent the
night, while waiting to make connections with the coach to this or that
objective.
Sitting down by the roadside to rest, some old-timer driving a span of
oxen and urging them along with an apple-bough goad, is sure to come
along and enter into conversation in that happy way which is half the
charm of adventuring by Nova Scotia highways. This old farmer-carter
well remembers Harry Killcup, the Robin Hood-Jehu of the Post-road from
Annapolis Royal to Halifax. He relates how Harry was talking to a girl
and didn’t pay attention to his horses, and drove them too near the edge
of the bridge and they fell over, dragging the coach with them. “The
river was in flood, too, but Harry managed to get the girl clear of the
wreckage, and saved her, but the young man, with whom she travelled, was
drowned.” It sounds like a movie stunt in the cold light of to-day,
whereas, in fact, it was Victorian realism and a typical incident of the
dashing times of the chaise in which Sam Slick engaged a permanent seat
in that other “chaise of Canadian literature” by which Judge Haliburton
eventually established his name in Canada’s Hall of Fame. The events
live very graphically before you as recited by this old eye-witness;
who, with many a “gee” and “whoa there”, again starts his oxen on the
way.
To the period of the Post Road belongs that old landmark of time and the
road, Grand Pré Church, outstanding figure of the countryside in which
dwelt Evangeline and her people. In order to catch its romantic spirit,
the time to see Grand Pré church is in the evening, when there is just a
wee flare of daylight and a soft mist arises from the waters of Minas,
shedding itself like a diaphanous veil over the land, as one strolls up
the country-road that comes through the village from the North, under
willows and poplars, to the door of the old church and then rambles off
to the South between clover fields and stacks of hay; the hay resembling
Hottentot villages outlined against the ashes-of-roses sky. It is at
dusk, that the rather austere lines of window, tower and roof lose their
sharp, almost Quaker-like severity. It is at that hour that the old
stones of the graveyard become time-softened, ivory-tinted pages of
history assembled under the stately poplars. Inside the church, in the
strong, simple lines of its painted box-pews and high pulpit; in the old
gallery; and in the square windows with little panes, there is the
quaint atmosphere which clings especially to old churches of the early
Colonial Period. Sitting in these old pews during service is to be
carried away on the wings of history to a pivotal point, whence to
behold a Cyclorama of all Canada. To the left, on this great
canvas--Glooscap and Micmac; succeeded by crude Breton and Portuguese
fishermen in their strange _bateaux_; followed by stirring panels of
Annapolis Royal and Louisburg, contrasted against panels of tenacious
pioneer Scotch and English settlers; in the next, _the clash_ between
France and England for supremacy, not alone in this sweet countryside of
Grand Pré, but in every other contained in the word Canada. These are
followed by a panel of United Empire Loyalists--very realistic this,
because, in the village, you have just been looking at an old
oil-painting of Colonel Crane and fingering his fine old sword, that
never wavered in its allegiance.
The other half of the Cycle, begins the New Order. First, a symbolic
figure of the stream of emigration flowing through the Maritime Gate to
the great Canadian West, followed by prairie scenes and mountain peaks,
mining scenes, cattle scenes, tawny grain, and Trans-Canada trains,
sisters of “Glooscap”, and “The Flying Bluenose”. That, is Grand Pré
Church--a link between the Past and the Present.