THE WESTERN SETTLEMENTS
Sir Frederick Haldimand offered the Loyalists a wide choice of places
in which to settle. He was willing to make land grants on Chaleur Bay,
at Gaspé, on the north shore of the St Lawrence above Montreal, on the
Bay of Quinté, at Niagara, or along the Detroit river; and if none of
these places was suitable, he offered to transport to Nova Scotia or Cape
Breton those who wished to go thither. At all these places settlements
of Loyalists sprang up. That at Niagara grew to considerable importance,
and became after the division of the province in 1791 the capital of
Upper Canada. But by far the largest settlement was that which Haldimand
planned along the north shore of the St Lawrence and Lake Ontario between
the western boundary of the government of Quebec and Cataraqui (now
Kingston), east of the Bay of Quinté. Here the great majority of the
Loyalists in Canada were concentrated.
As soon as Haldimand received instructions from England with regard
to the granting of the lands he gave orders to Major Samuel Holland,
surveyor-general of the king’s territories in North America, to proceed
with the work of making the necessary surveys. Major Holland, taking with
him as assistants Lieutenants Kotté and Sutherland and deputy-surveyors
John Collins and Patrick McNish, set out in the early autumn of 1783, and
before the winter closed in he had completed the survey of five townships
bordering on the Bay of Quinté. The next spring his men returned, and
surveyed eight townships along the north bank of the St Lawrence, between
the Bay of Quinté and the provincial boundary. These townships are now
distinguished by names, but in 1783-84 they were designated merely
by numbers; thus for many years the old inhabitants referred to the
townships of Osnaburg, Williamsburg, and Matilda, for instance, as the
‘third town,’ the ‘fourth town,’ and the ‘fifth town.’ The surveys were
made in great haste, and, it is to be feared, not with great care; for
some tedious lawsuits arose out of the discrepancies contained in them,
and a generation later Robert Gourlay wrote that ‘one of the present
surveyors informed me that in running new lines over a great extent of
the province, he found spare room for a whole township in the midst of
those laid out at an early period.’ Each township was subdivided into
lots of two hundred acres each, and a town-site was selected in each case
which was subdivided into town lots.
[Illustration: SIR FREDERICK HALDIMAND
After a contemporary painting]
The task of transporting the settlers from their camping-places at Sorel,
Machiche, and St Johns to their new homes up the St Lawrence was one
of some magnitude. General Haldimand was not able himself to oversee
the work; but he appointed Sir John Johnson as superintendent, and the
work of settlement went on under Johnson’s care. On a given day the
Loyalists were ordered to strike camp, and proceed in a body to the new
settlements. Any who remained behind without sufficient excuse had their
rations stopped. Bateaux took the settlers up the St Lawrence, and the
various detachments were disembarked at their respective destinations. It
had been decided that the settlers should be placed on the land as far as
possible according to the corps in which they had served during the war,
and that care should be taken to have the Protestant and Roman Catholic
members of a corps settled separately. It was this arrangement which
brought about the grouping of Protestant and Roman Catholic Scottish
Highlanders in Glengarry. The first battalion of the King’s Royal
Regiment of New York was settled on the first five townships west of the
provincial boundary. This was Sir John Johnson’s regiment, and most of
its members were his Scottish dependants from the Mohawk valley. The next
three townships were settled by part of Jessup’s Corps, an offshoot of
Sir John Johnson’s regiment. Of the Cataraqui townships the first was
settled by a band of New York Loyalists, many of them of Dutch or German
extraction, commanded by Captain Michael Grass. On the second were part
of Jessup’s Corps; on the third and fourth were a detachment of the
second battalion of the King’s Royal Regiment of New York, which had been
stationed at Oswego across the lake at the close of the war, a detachment
of Rogers’s Rangers, and a party of New York Loyalists under Major Van
Alstine. The parties commanded by Grass and Van Alstine had come by ship
from New York to Quebec after the evacuation of New York in 1783. On the
fifth township were various detachments of disbanded regular troops, and
even a handful of disbanded German mercenaries.
As soon as the settlers had been placed on the townships to which they
had been assigned, they received their allotments of land. The surveyor
was the land agent, and the allotments were apportioned by each applicant
drawing a lot out of a hat. This democratic method of allotting lands
roused the indignation of some of the officers who had settled with their
men. They felt that they should have been given the front lots, unmindful
of the fact that their grants as officers were from five to ten times as
large as the grants which their men received. Their protests, contained
in a letter of Captain Grass to the governor, roused Haldimand to a
display of warmth to which he was as a rule a stranger. Captain Grass and
his associates, he wrote, were to get no special privileges, ‘the most
of them who came into the province with him being, in fact, mechanics,
only removed from one situation to practise their trade in another. Mr
Grass should, therefore, think himself very well off to draw lots in
common with the Loyalists.’ A good deal of difficulty arose also from the
fact that many allotments were inferior to the rest from an agricultural
point of view; but difficulties of this sort were adjusted by Johnson and
Holland on the spot.
By 1784 nearly all the settlers were destitute and completely dependent
on the generosity of the British government. They had no effects; they
had no money; and in many cases they were sorely in need of clothes. The
way in which Sir Frederick Haldimand came to their relief is deserving
of high praise. If he had adhered to the letter of his instructions from
England, the position of the Loyalists would have been a most unenviable
one. Repeatedly, however, Haldimand took on his own shoulders the
responsibility of ignoring or disobeying the instructions from England,
and trusted to chance that his protests would prevent the government from
repudiating his actions. When the home government, for instance, ordered
a reduction of the rations, Haldimand undertook to continue them in full;
and fortunately for him the home government, on receipt of his protest,
rescinded the order.
The settlers on the Upper St Lawrence and the Bay of Quinté did not
perhaps fare as well as those in Nova Scotia, or even the Mohawk Indians
who settled on the Grand river. They did not receive lumber for building
purposes, and ‘bricks for the inside of their chimneys, and a little
assistance of nails,’ as did the former; nor did they receive ploughs
and church-bells, as did the latter. For building lumber they had to
wait until saw-mills were constructed; instead of ploughs they had at
first to use hoes and spades, and there were not quite enough hoes and
spades to go round. Still, they did not fare badly. When the difficulty
of transporting things up the St Lawrence is remembered, it is remarkable
that they obtained as much as they did. In the first place they were
supplied with clothes for three years, or until they were able to provide
clothes for themselves. These consisted of coarse cloth for trousers
and Indian blankets for coats. Boots they made out of skins or heavy
cloth. Tools for building were given them: to each family were given
an ax and a hand-saw, though unfortunately the axes were short-handled
ship’s axes, ill-adapted to cutting in the forest; to each group of two
families were allotted a whip-saw and a cross-cut saw; and to each group
of five families was supplied a set of tools, containing chisels, augers,
draw-knives, etc. To each group of five families was also allotted ‘one
firelock ... intended for the messes, the pigeon and wildfowl season’;
but later on a firelock was supplied to every head of a family.
Haldimand went to great trouble in obtaining seed-wheat for the settlers,
sending agents down even into Vermont and the Mohawk valley to obtain
all that was to be had; he declined, however, to supply stock for the
farms, and although eventually he obtained some cattle, there were not
nearly enough cows to go round. In many cases the soldiers were allowed
the loan of the military tents; and everything was done to have saw-mills
and grist-mills erected in the most convenient places with the greatest
possible dispatch. In the meantime small portable grist-mills, worked by
hand, were distributed among the settlers.
Among the papers relating to the Loyalists in the Canadian Archives there
is an abstract of the numbers of the settlers in the five townships
at Cataraqui and the eight townships on the St Lawrence. There were
altogether 1568 men, 626 women, 1492 children, and 90 servants, making a
total of 3776 persons. These were, of course, only the original settlers.
As time went on others were added. Many of the soldiers had left their
families in the States behind them, and these families now hastened
to cross the border. A proclamation had been issued by the British
government inviting those Loyalists who still remained in the States to
assemble at certain places along the frontier, namely, at Isle aux Noix,
at Sackett’s Harbour, at Oswego, and at Niagara. The favourite route was
the old trail from the Mohawk valley to Oswego, where was stationed a
detachment of the 34th regiment. From Oswego these refugees crossed to
Cataraqui. ‘Loyalists,’ wrote an officer at Cataraqui in the summer of
1784, ‘are coming in daily across the lake.’ To accommodate these new
settlers three more townships had to be mapped out at the west end of the
Bay of Quinté.
For the first few years the Cataraqui settlers had a severe struggle
for existence. Most of them arrived in 1784, too late to attempt to sow
fall wheat; and it was several seasons before their crops became nearly
adequate for food. The difficulties of transportation up the St Lawrence
rendered the arrival of supplies irregular and uncertain. Cut off as they
were from civilization by the St Lawrence rapids, they were in a much
less advantageous position than the great majority of the Nova Scotia
and New Brunswick settlers, who were situated near the sea-coast. They
had no money, and as the government refused to send them specie, they
were compelled to fall back on barter as a means of trade, with the
result that all trade was local and trivial. In the autumn of 1787 the
crops failed, and in 1788 famine stalked through the land. There are many
legends about what was known as ‘the hungry year.’ If we are to believe
local tradition, some of the settlers actually died of starvation. In the
family papers of one family is to be found a story about an old couple
who were saved from starvation only by the pigeons which they were able
to knock over. A member of another family testifies: ‘We had the luxury
of a cow which the family brought with them, and had it not been for this
domestic boon, all would have perished in the year of scarcity.’ Two
hundred acre lots were sold for a few pounds of flour. A valuable cow, in
one case, was sold for eight bushels of potatoes; a three-year-old horse
was exchanged for half a hundredweight of flour. Bran was used for making
cakes; and leeks, buds of trees, and even leaves, were ground into food.
The summer of 1789, however, brought relief to the settlers, and though,
for many years, comforts and even necessaries were scarce, yet after
1791, the year in which the new settlements were erected into the
province of Upper Canada, it may be said that most of the settlers
had been placed on their feet. The soil was fruitful; communication
and transportation improved; and metallic currency gradually found
its way into the settlements. When Mrs Simcoe, the wife of the
lieutenant-governor, passed through the country in 1792, she was struck
by the neatness of the farms of the Dutch and German settlers from the
Mohawk valley, and by the high quality of the wheat. ‘I observed on my
way thither,’ she says in her diary, ‘that the wheat appeared finer than
any I have seen in England, and totally free from weeds.’ And a few
months later an anonymous English traveller, passing the same way, wrote:
‘In so infant a settlement, it would have been irrational to expect that
abundance which bursts the granaries, and lows in the stalls of more
cultivated countries. There was, however, that kind of appearance which
indicated that with economy and industry, there would be enough.’
Next in size to the settlements at Cataraqui and on the Upper St Lawrence
was the settlement at Niagara. During the war Niagara had been a haven
of refuge for the Loyalists of Pennsylvania and the frontier districts,
just as Oswego and St Johns had been havens of refuge for the Loyalists
of northern and western New York. As early as 1776 there arrived at
Fort George, Niagara, in a starving condition, five women and thirty-six
children, bearing names which are still to be found in the Niagara
peninsula. From that date until the end of the war refugees continued
to come in. Many of these refugees were the families of the men and
officers of the Loyalist troops stationed at Niagara. On September 27,
1783, for instance, the officer commanding at Niagara reports the arrival
from Schenectady of the wives of two officers of Butler’s Rangers,
with a number of children. Some of these people went down the lake to
Montreal; but others remained at the post, and ‘squatted’ on the land.
In 1780 Colonel Butler reports to Haldimand that four or five families
have settled and built houses, and he requests that they be given seed
early in the spring. In 1781 we know that a Loyalist named Robert Land
had squatted on Burlington Bay, at the head of Lake Ontario. In 1783
Lieutenant Tinling was sent to Niagara to survey lots, and Sergeant Brass
of the 84th was sent to build a saw-mill and a grist-mill. At the same
time Butler’s Rangers, who were stationed at the fort, were disbanded;
and a number of them were induced to take up land. They took up land on
the west side of the river, because, although, according to the terms of
peace, Fort George was not given up by the British until 1796, the river
was to constitute the boundary between the two countries. A return of the
rise and progress of the settlement made in May 1784 shows a total of
forty-six settlers (that is, heads of families), with forty-four houses
and twenty barns. The return makes it clear that cultivation had been
going on for some time. There were 713 acres cleared, 123 acres sown in
wheat, and 342 acres waiting to be sown; and the farms were very well
stocked, there being an average of about three horses and four or five
cows to each settler.
With regard to the settlement at Detroit, there is not much evidence
available. It was Haldimand’s intention at first to establish a large
settlement there, but the difficulties of communication doubtless proved
to be insuperable. In the event, however, some of Butler’s Rangers
settled there. Captain Bird of the Rangers applied for and received a
grant of land on which he made a settlement; and in the summer of 1784 we
find Captain Caldwell and some others applying for deeds for the land and
houses they occupied. In 1783 the commanding officer at Detroit reported
the arrival from Red Creek of two men, ‘one a Girty, the other McCarty,’
who had come to see what encouragement there was to settle under the
British government. They asserted that several hundred more would be glad
to come if sufficient inducements were offered them, as they saw before
them where they were nothing but persecution. In 1784 Jehu Hay, the
British lieutenant-governor of Detroit, sent in lists of men living near
Fort Pitt who were anxious to settle under the British government if they
could get lands, most of them being men who had served in the Highland
and 60th regiments. But it is safe to assume that no large number of
these ever settled near Detroit, for when Hay arrived in Detroit in the
summer of 1784, he found only one Loyalist at the post itself. There
had been for more than a generation a settlement of French Canadians at
Detroit; but it was not until after 1791 that the English element became
at all considerable.
It has been estimated that in the country above Montreal in 1783 there
were ten thousand Loyalists, and that by 1791 this number had increased
to twenty-five thousand. These figures are certainly too large.
Pitt’s estimate of the population of Upper Canada in 1791 was only
ten thousand. This is probably much nearer the mark. The overwhelming
majority of these people were of very humble origin. Comparatively few
of the half-pay officers settled above Montreal before 1791; and most
of these were, as Haldimand said, ‘mechanics, only removed from one
situation to practise their trade in another.’ Major Van Alstine, it
appears, was a blacksmith before he came to Canada. That many of the
Loyalists were illiterate is evident from the testimony of the Rev.
William Smart, a Presbyterian clergyman who came to Upper Canada in 1811:
‘There were but few of the U. E. Loyalists who possessed a complete
education. He was personally acquainted with many, especially along the
St Lawrence and Bay of Quinté, and by no means were all educated, or men
of judgment; even the half-pay officers, many of them, had but a limited
education.’ The aristocrats of the ‘Family Compact’ party did not come to
Canada with the Loyalists of 1783; they came, in most cases, after 1791,
some of them from Britain, such as Bishop Strachan, and some of them from
New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, such as the Jarvises and the Robinsons.
This fact is one which serves to explain a great deal in Upper Canadian
history.