ONTARIO.
_Ontario is so modern...._
Ontario is so modern, and, to use a popular term, “up-to-date”, that
some years ago we were told by Torontonian after Torontonian that if we
were on the quest of the romantic we would not find it in Ontario.
We did not know what to make of it at the time, having in mind a number
of quaint old field-stone houses which we had seen along the road from
the car window in coming through from Montreal.
About these houses there was that certain unmistakable “something” which
for lack of a better word is called “atmosphere”. “Atmosphere and story”
just seemed to radiate from all their old windows.
I see yet, the picture made by their old, yellow-brown stone sides and
their steep roofs; all, in a clump of Lombardy poplars and smooth,
rolling fields, with here an apple orchard, and here a sprinkling of
sheep grazing on the rounded knolls, and cows standing with feet in the
brook.
Then I tried to make my Toronto friends see those old stone-houses.
“U-u-mph,” they said, “but they’re damp.”
Not long after that we came in contact with that other type of
early-Ontario house. The one with the low sides made of wood thinly
stuccoed with white plaster on the outside--the “Roughcast” houses of
Ontario. They of course carry in their now “peeling” plaster an appeal
to remember the Old Pioneers and days--the days when the hardships of
the wilderness rose up as a wall to deter all but the hardiest spirits
from blazing a trail here; here, where the true West had its portal.
Usually a clump of lilac bushes stands by these old doors, the boughs
gnarled and thick with age and the increasing struggle for
existence--the old lilac that strikes the human interest note and tells
plainer than words, of the domesticity that once was the pride of the
little family domiciled here so far away from “Home,” in the Old
Country. And over against these two old types of Provincial houses are
set the really palatial dwellings that represent the newer Ontario. And
yet to prove that no hard line separates Old and New, there is a fine,
old home down Saint Catharine’s way that claims to be one of the
earliest houses in the Province which, under the skilful renovation of
a modern architect, still holds itself proudly with “the best”.
If one had time to go into all the old houses of the Province, the real
old-timers--I am sure one would still find, as in Quebec, many fruits of
the loom. The old, woven carpet and bedspread, the old loom, and here
and there, perhaps, a grandmother to weave and many sitting and sewing
at squares for “pieced-pattern” bed-quilts.
In Empire Loyalist homes, of the country, there is, of course, still to
be found many a handsome and valuable piece of old furniture. Some of
the oldest and daintiest chairs we have ever come across, and one of the
dearest collections of little, old books, we once encountered in British
Columbia, out of Ontario.
Ontario is a sweeping Province of magnificent lakes and waterways. Her
coastline is almost as extensive as that of any Province. If it were not
that certain Atlantic Provinces have almost a monopoly of the word, she
might even be called “Maritime”.
Toronto is even now entering upon an era of a new waterfront with
docking accommodations of the best. For the Lake trade? Yes. And
presently for the Ocean’s.
So, in Ontario the trail of Romance, we soon discovered, led almost as
surely “By the ’longshore road” as down Nova Scotia way.
Ontario being a land of lakes, is, in consequence, a land of campers and
camp-fires; a land of the canoe; a land of fishing and hunting. And in
the North a land of logging, with the picturesque figures of the
lumbermen on snow-shoes.
Out there in the Georgian Bay is the romance of thirty thousand islands.
There are the picturesque figures of the Ojibways in canoes, still
taking the same old fishing and “trade” routes as in the days before the
coming of Champlain. Still there is Manitoulin.
The craft in greatest favour everywhere on lake, river and bay of
Ontario, is the canoe. I do not think anyone can know what an extensive
cult is the “canoe” till they see it in Ontario. In season it creeps on
the bosom of the lake like a leaf dropped silently from the tree. And
Romance rides in more or less every canoe, so that, if anything, the
Romantic may be said to be more difficult to keep up with in Ontario
than any of the Provinces. The trail of the Romantic invariably leads to
a tent somewhere by a stream. And
[Illustration:
AN OLD ONTARIO HOMESTEAD.]
[Illustration:
ONTARIO, A LAND OF CAMPERS AND
CAMP-FIRES.]
a camper may be just as romantic a figure as one who mows the hay, or
lists to the Angelus out of the Percé fishboat. What can be more
Romantic than a group around a campfire? Here seems to be situated the
very source and fountain-head of “pipe-dreams”, stories of the forest,
legends of the Indians--all interwoven and crossed with traditions of
pioneer explorers.
And these old tales are always having new chapters added, every time an
angler catches a fish; everytime a hunter takes a gun under arm.
Go out anywhere with an Ojibway of the Georgian Bay region, and you will
happen upon a black pot a-sling over a log upheld by two other logs, and
a roaring fire under the pot. Across the log may be several bits of
branches with a forked branch cut to give “beard” to the hook from which
swing a number of smoky tea-kettles and lard-pails, all hard a-boil with
tea, potatoes, or fish, or maybe just pork, suspended in the flame and
the smoke, or above the live coals, toward which a frying-pan is tilted
to bake the dough it holds into a cake of bread.
Do not these pots and kettles call to the cauldrons of Quebec, the
Madeleines and far Newfoundland, as to sisters? Ethnology of people!
Sometimes, it would seem, there is an ethnology of inanimate things.
Here in Ontario, among the Indians, one finds skilful workers of
sweetgrass, though apparently there is nowhere such a concentration into
a trade as in Pierreville.
But the Ontario squaw shows much delicacy in the use of porcupine
quills. These she dyes, or uses _au naturel_, in combination often with
birch-bark, to make a basket that is of Ontario, and one which would
hold its own everytime with the Quebec basket “pour Madame’s boudoir.”
The Ojibway woman shows an innate taste in design. The “patterns”, as
well as the colours employed in her basket, are frequently exquisite in
their harmony.
Somewhere on the beach or under trees, clinging to life, yet half
decadent, as a thing whose usefulness has been “outclassed”, one happens
here and there on the tribal or community-canoes, long, sinuous lines of
boathood half bizarre by reason of design, simplicity of material and
traditions of the builders; but more than half “bizarre” by reason of
things that cannot be classified yet nevertheless are positive in
suggestion. Was it in such canoes the Iroquois pursued the Hurons
fleeing toward the wilderness and out of it, to the shelter of the
French at Quebec? Was it in such canoes that the old explorers,
Champlain, Frontenac, the old Jesuit Missionaries, Breboeuf, Carron,
pushed along these lakes and water-highways? Was it in such, the
coureurs du bois, the trapper, the pioneer, the soldier, all those
characters of old--romantic characters of Old France, Old England, Old
Scotia--was it in such they took the paddle in hand, metamorphosing it
at a stroke into a “quill” wherewith to write “France” and “England”
across the page of a continent?
Here, too, among the Ojibways is still in use the hollowed stone with
its companion, nicely smooth and rounded for grinding corn. Old squaws
of the Ojibways can, and _do_ still, “turn the trick” easily enough.
Then there is another form of mortar, with a wooden pestle four or five
feet in length, bulky at each end and slender in the middle, so that two
hands may grasp it quite easily.
Thus, by these two instruments, comes the grain to the dough of the
frying-pan loaf.