Woodstock--Brock District--Little England--Aristocratic Society in the
Bush--How to settle in Canada as a Gentleman should do--Reader, did
you ever Log?--Life in the Bush--The true Backwoods.
We arrived at Woodstock at eight p.m., and were delighted with the
rich appearance of the settlement and country, resembling some of the
best parts of England, and possessing a good road macadamized from
granite boulders.
Woodstock is a long village, neatly and chiefly built of wood, fifty
three miles from Hamilton. It is the county town of the Brock
district; and here numbers of gentlemen of small fortunes have settled
themselves from England and Ireland. It is a thriving place, and their
cottages and country houses are chiefly built, and their grounds laid
out, in the English style, with park palings. Sir John Colborne has
the merit of settling this loyal population in the centre of the
western part of Canada.
The old road went through a place called absurdly enough Paris, from
the quantity of gypsum with which the neighbourhood abounds; and fine
specimens of silurian fossils of the trilobite family and of
madrepores, millepores, and corallics, are found here. Love's Hotel is
the best in the village, and a good one it is.
What with the truly English scenery of the Oak Plains, the good road,
and the British style of settlement, Woodstock would appear to be the
spot at which a man tired of war's alarms should pitch his tent; and
accordingly there are many old officers here; but the land is dear and
difficult now to obtain. A recent traveller says it is the most
aristocratic settlement in the province, and contains, within ten
miles round, scions of the best English and Irish families; and that
the society is quite as good as that of an average country
neighbourhood at home. The price of land he quotes at £4 sterling an
acre for cleared, and from £1 to £1 10s. for wild land. A friend of
his gave £480 for sixty cleared and one hundred uncleared acres, with
a log house, barn, and fences.
He moreover gives this useful information, that very few gentlemen
farmers do more than make their farms keep their families, and never
realize profit: thus, he says, a single man going to Woodstock to
settle ought to have at least one hundred pounds a year income quite
clear, after paying for his land, house, and improvements.
I have seen a good deal of farming and of farmers in Canada. Farming
there is by no means a life of pleasure; but, if a young man goes into
the Bush with a thorough determination to chop, to log, to plough, to
dig, to delve, to make his own candles, kill his own hogs and sheep,
attend to his horses and his oxen, and "bring in firing at requiring,"
and abstains from whiskey, it signifies very little whether he is
gentle or simple, an honourable or a homespun, he will get on. Life in
the Bush is, however, no joke, not even a practical one. It involves
serious results, with an absence of cultivated manners and matters,
toil, hardship, and the effects of seasoning, including ague and
fever.
_Recipe._--First buy your land in as fine a part of the province as
possible, then build your log-hut, and a good barn and stable, with
pig and sheep-pens. Then commence with a hired hand, whom you must not
expect to treat you _en seigneur_, and who will either go shares with
you in the crops, or require £30 currency a year, and his board and
lodging.
Begin hewing and hacking till you have cleared two or three acres for
wheat, oats, and grass, with a plot for potatoes and Indian corn.
When you have cut down the giant trees, then comes the logging.
Reader, did you ever log? It is precious work! Fancy yourself in a
smock-frock, the best of all working dresses, having cut the huge
trees into lengths of a few feet, rolling these lengths up into a
pile, and ranging the branches and brush-wood for convenient
combustion; then waiting for a favourable wind, setting fire to all
your heaps, and burying yourself in grime and smoke; then rolling up
these half-consumed enormous logs, till, after painful toil, you get
them to burn to potash.
Wearied and exhausted with labour and heat, you return to your cabin
at night, and take a peep in your shaving-glass. You start back, for,
instead of the countenance you were charmed to meet at the weekly
beard reckoning, you see a collier's face, a collier's hands, and your
smock-frock converted into a charcoal-burner's blouse.
Cutting down the forest is hard labour enough until practice makes you
perfect; chopping is hard work also; but logging, logging--nobody
likes logging.
Then, when you plough afterwards, or dig between the black stumps,
what a pleasure! Every minute bump goes the ploughshare against a
stone or a root, and your clothes carry off charcoal at a railroad
pace.
It takes thirty years for pine-stumps to decay, five or six for the
hard woods; and it is of no use to burn the pine-roots, for it only
makes them more iron-like; but then the neighbours, if you have any,
are usually kind: they help you to log, and to build your log-hut.
Your food too is very spicy and gentlemanlike in the Bush: barrels of
flour, barrels of pork, fat as butter and salt as brine, with tea,
sugar--maple-sugar, mind, which tastes very like candied
horehound--and a little whiskey, country whiskey, a sort of
non-descript mixture of bad kirschwasser with tepid water, and not of
the purest _goût_. Behold your _carte_. If you have a gun, which you
must have in the Bush, and a dog, which you may have, just to keep you
company and to talk to, you may now and then kill a Canada pheasant,
ycleped partridge, or a wild duck, or mayhap a deer; but do not think
of bringing a hound or hounds, for you can kill a deer just as well
without them, and I never remember to have heard of a young settler
with hounds coming to much good. Moreover, the old proverb says, a man
may be known by his followers: and it is as absurd for a poor fellow,
without money, to have great ban-dogs at his heels, as it would be for
a rich nobleman to live in his garret upon bread and water. Moreover,
in Canada, most sportsmen are mere idlers, and generally neglectful
either of their professions or of their farms. Many a fine young
fellow has been ruined in Canada, by fancying it very fine to copy the
officers of the army in their sportsmanship, forgetting that these
officers could afford both in time and money what they could not.
Keep your house, and your house will keep you. Almost all settlers too
have mothers, wives, sisters, brothers, cousins, to assist them, or to
provide for; and, if they are industrious, a few years make them happy
and independent.
Even £50 a year of clear income in the Bush is a very pretty sum, and
£100 per annum places you on the top of the tree--a magnate, a
magistrate, a major of militia.
I know many, many worthy families, who live well with their pensions
or their half-pay.
What a luxury to have your own land, two hundred acres!--to live
without the chandler, the butcher, the baker, the huxter, and the
grocer! Tea, a little sugar and coffee, these are your real luxuries.
Soap you make out of the ley of your own potash; fat you get from your
pigs or your sheep, which supply you with candles and food; and by and
by the good ox and the fatted calf, the turkey, the goose, and the
chicken, give your frugal board an air of gourmandism; whilst in this
climate all the English garden vegetables and common fruits require
only a little care to bring them to perfection. Indian corn and
buckwheat make excellent cakes and hominy; and you take your own wheat
to be ground at the nearest mill, where the miller requires no money,
but only grist. In like manner, the boards for your house are to be
had at the sawmill for logs, for potash, for wheat, for oats.
Keep a few choice books for an evening, and provide yourself with
stout boots and shoes, a good coat, and etceteras, besides your
smock-frock and shooting-jacket of fustian, and its continuations, and
let the rest follow; for you will at last take to wear country
homespun, when occasions of state do not require it otherwise, such as
church and tea-parties of more than ordinary interest.
People talk about life in the Bush as they do about life in London,
without knowing very much about either. Backwoods and backwoodsmen are
novelties which amuse for the moment. A backwoodsman, who never worked
at a farm, although he may be much in the habit of seeing farmers, has
not always just conceptions. He must not live in a village newly made,
but actually reside in a log-hut, just erecting, to know what life in
the Bush is. Gentlemen and lady travellers are the worst judges
possible, because, even if they go and visit their friends, the best
foot is always put foremost to receive them, and vanity or love
induces every sacrifice to make them comfortable.
They see nothing of the labours of the seven months' winter, of the
aguish wet autumn, of the uncertain spring, of the tropical summer, of
ice, of frost, of musquitoes and black flies, of mud and mire, of
swamp and rock, of all the innumerable drawbacks with which the spirit
of the settler has to contend, or the very coarse and scanty fare to
solace him after his toils of the day.
See a young pair of brothers, sons of an officer of high rank, whose
father dying left them but partially provided for, with a mother and
several grown-up daughters.
They fly to France to live. This resource might, by a war, be soon
broken up. The sons collect what remains of money--they arrive in
Canada. They purchase cheap land far in the interior, miles away from
any town. They build a log-hut, clear their land, and accumulate
gradually the furniture and household goods. Toil, toil, toil. The
log-hut is enlarged. The mother and daughters are invited from home to
join their "life in the Bush." They are expected. Everything is made
comfortable for them. The brothers are chopping in the woods--night
approaches. They return--return to find their log-house, furniture,
wardrobe, books, linen--every thing consumed. They are wanderers in
the wilderness. Do they despair? Yes, because one brother, the
strongest, takes cold--he lingers, he dies.
The survivor, indomitable, yet bowing under his accumulated
afflictions, assisted by his neighbours, builds another log-house. His
mother and sisters arrive, are dispersed among the nearest neighbours,
get the ague. Struggle, struggle, struggle! on, on, on! The pension
here is of service. The girls, brought up in luxury, scions of a good
race, turn their hands cheerfully to do every thing. Their conduct is
admired. Other settlers from the gentry at home arrive with some
capital. The locality turns out good. The girls marry well. The
surviving son, ten years afterwards, has four hundred acres of his
own--thinks of building a house fit for a gentleman farmer to live in,
and is surrounded by broad acres of wheat, without a stump to be seen,
with a large flock of sheep grazing peacefully on his green meadows,
and cattle enough to secure him from want.
This is one case, under my own eye, and the moral of it is, neither of
the sons drank whiskey.
Look at another picture. An officer of respectable rank, young and
tired of the service, where promotion is not even in prospect, settles
in Canada--he has money. He buys at once a fine tract of forest,
converts it by his money into a fertile farm, builds an excellent
house, furnishes it, marries.
Knowing nothing of farming, fond of his dogs and his gun, delighted in
a canoe and duck-shooting, absent day after day in the deer-tracks,
occasionally killing a wolf or a bear, absorbed in sport, he leaves
his farm to the sole care of an industrious man, who receives half
the crops. He is cheated at every turn; the man buys with the profits
land for himself, and leaves him abruptly.
The fine house requires repairs, the fences get out of order, the
cattle and the pigs roam wherever they like. Money, too much money,
has been laid out. The fine young man perhaps becomes a confirmed
drunkard. _Voilà le fin!_
This is another case under my own observation, and I very much regret
indeed to say that, of the class of gentlemen settlers, it is by far
more frequent and observable than the first. Habits of shooting beget
habits of drinking and smoking; and it is not at all uncommon in the
backwoods to see a man whom you have known on the sunny side of St.
James's, dressed in the height of fashion, and of most elegant
manners, walking along with his pointer and his gun in a smock-frock
or blouse, a pipe, a clay-pipe stuck in the ribbon of his hat, and
with evident tokens of whiskey upon him.
If he works at his farm, which all who are not overburthened with
riches must do, and those that are usually remain in England, he works
hard; and then reflect, reader, that chopping and logging, that
cradling wheat and ploughing land, are not mere amusements, but entail
the original ban, the sweat of the brow--he must every now and then
drink, drink, drink. I have seen a man who would otherwise have been a
high ornament to society, whose acquirements were very great, and who
brought out an excellent library, abandon literature and his army
manners, and drink whiskey, not by the glass but by the tumbler. And
what is it, you will naturally ask, that can induce a reasoning soul
to do thus? Why!--lack of society, want of current information, the
long and tedious winter, and the labours of spring and of autumn. In
fact, it is "the backwoods," the listlessness of the backwoods, which,
like the opposite extreme, the fatuity and _blasé_ life of a great
metropolis, causes men to rush into insane extremes to avoid
reflection. The mind is dulled and blunted.
The following facts, translated from an interesting article in the
"_Mélanges Religieux_," a Roman Catholic periodical, published in
Montreal, in the French language, may be relied on, to show how
narrowed the ideas of a man constantly residing in the woods are:--
"There arrived in Montreal, on Wednesday last, a
young man about twenty years of age, who had come
down from Hudson's Bay, without having, during his
long journey, stopped in any town, village, or
civilized settlement; so that he stumbled into
Montreal with as little idea of a town or of
civilization as if he had fallen from the moon, for
he had lived on the northern shores of the bay, and
had but seldom visited the fur-trading
establishments. He had only last spring seen, at
Abbititi, Messieurs Moreau and Durauquet, the Roman
Catholic Missionaries. He was born of Roman
Catholic parents, his father being Scotch, his
mother Irish. But he had never left the woods nor
the life in the wilds, and had never seen a priest
before last spring. How strange must have been the
emotions in the breast of this young man on finding
himself thus suddenly cast into the midst of this
large town, as one would throw a bale of furs! He
expressed his feelings at the time as partaking
more of stupor than of admiration.
"When he had recovered from the confusion of his
ideas consequent upon the novelty of his situation,
he sought the Bishop's residence, according to the
instructions of his father; and at length found
himself more at ease, for, understanding his
singular position, those he there met with assisted
him to collect his scattered thoughts. In answer to
the questions addressed to him (he speaks English,
and can read and write), he replied that he could
not consent to live in such a place; that the noise
deafened him, while the crowds of people, running
in all directions, agitated and astonished him in a
manner he could not explain. He experienced a
sensation of suffocation on finding himself
enclosed, as it were, in streets of lofty houses;
he saw and admired nothing, being every moment in
dread of losing himself in the labyrinth of
streets, more difficult for him to recognize than
the scarcely marked pathways of his native forests.
He was not curious to see any thing, and felt only
the desire to fly at once, and again to breathe
freely, away from what he felt to be the restraints
of civilization. He was taken to the cathedral,
where he saw the pictures, the paintings on the
roof, and all the ornaments of the church--they
were explained to him, and he prayed before the
high altar and that of the Holy Virgin. He believed
all the instructions of the Church, and was
sufficiently informed to receive baptism. During
his visit to the church, the organ was played, and
an explanation was given him of its harmony. In the
midst of all these to him surprising novelties, he
was asked what was the predominant sensation in his
mind; he answered fear, and that his other feelings
he was unable to explain.
"This simple child of nature, the _naïveté_ of
whose language, emotions, and habits so strongly
contrasted with the surrounding artificial
civilization, afforded a singular study to those
present. However humiliating to our self-love, the
conduct of this young man abundantly proved that
the civilization of which we are so proud, our
buildings, our wealth, our industry, all our
activity and noise, do not fill with the admiration
we expect those who are brought up far from our
opulent cities and our artificial manners. Nature,
in these immense solitudes, in these primitive
manners, has then charms unknown to us, to be
preferred to those which, in our existing state, we
find so incomparable. We must here close our
reflections, for fear of falling into paradoxes
difficult to be avoided in questions of this
nature.
"This young man has departed, without regret, and
has gone to the township of Raudon, where he has
relations. There he will again find forests, and
will be able to breathe freely, without fearing
that the lofty dwellings of the city will intercept
his view of the blue sky and the bright sun which
he loves."
Even near population, the settler has, in his way to town and market,
to bait his cattle at roadside taverns, where the bar is the place of
business, where he meets neighbours, and hears the news of the market
and of the world; and the facility with which, throughout Upper
Canada, these grog-shops obtain licenses from the magistrates is so
great that the evil every day increases.
In towns, this is most particularly observed, and also that, under the
designation of "beer-licenses" the most infamous houses for drinking
and vice are suffered to exist. It is full time that the parliament
interfered with these license-granters, who increase intemperance
instead of using their magisterial office to put a stop to it. Father
Matthew's principles are much wanted in Canada West.
In Eastern Canada, or, as it is better known, Lower Canada, the
contrary is the case. The Canadian French, as a people, are temperate,
although the canoe and batteaux men, lumberers and voyageurs, from
the lonely and hard lives they lead, drink to excess; yet the Canadian
is a sober character.