EARLY TRAVEL IN CANADA
Water Transport--Land Trails--Westward in 1800--Progress 1830--1850:
The Day of the Steamboat
British North America before the railway came was a string of scattered
provinces. Lake Huron was the western boundary of effective
settlement: beyond lay the fur trader's preserve. Between Upper and
Lower Canada and the provinces by the Atlantic a wilderness intervened.
With the peninsula of Ontario jutting southwest between Michigan and
New York, and the northeastern states of the Union thrusting their
borders nearly to the St Lawrence, the inland and the maritime
provinces knew less of each other than of the neighbouring states.
Settlement clung close to river, lake, and sea. Till the Eastern
Townships were settled, Lower Canada had been one long-drawn-out
village with houses close set on each side of the river streets. Deep
forest covered all the land save where the lumberman or settler had cut
a narrow clearing or fire had left a {14} blackened waste. To cut
roads through swamp and forest and over river and ravine demanded
capital, surplus time, and strong and efficient governments, all beyond
the possibilities of early days. On the other hand, the waterways
offered easy paths. The St Lawrence and the St John and all their
tributaries and lesser rivals provided inevitably the points of
settlement and the lines of travel.
The development of water transport in Canada furnishes a record of the
interaction of route and cargo, of need and invention, of enterprise
and capital. First came the bark canoe, quick to build, light to carry
round the frequent gaps in navigation, and large enough to hold the few
voyageurs or the rich-in-little peltry that were chief cargo in early
days. It was the bark canoe that carried explorer, trader, soldier,
missionary, and settler to the uttermost north and south and west. For
the far journeys it long held its place. Well on into the nineteenth
century fur traders were still sending in supplies from Montreal and
bringing back peltry from Fort William in flotillas of great bark
canoes. For shorter voyages the canoe gave place to the larger and
clumsier bateau, the characteristic eighteenth-century conveyance.
After the War of 1812 {15} the increasingly heavy downward freight of
grain and potash led to the introduction from the United States of the
still larger Durham boats. Along the coast and on the Great Lakes the
sailing schooner long filled a notable place. Finally the steamboat
came. In 1809, only one year after the _Clermont_ had begun its
regular trips on the Hudson, and before any steamboat plied in British
home waters, John Molson of Montreal with John Bruce and John
Jackson--luckily for Canada not all three baptized 'Algernon'--built at
Montreal the 40-ton steamer _Accommodation_. Seven years later Upper
Canada's first steamboat was launched, the 740-ton _Frontenac_, built
at the then thriving village of Ernestown. The fleet of river and lake
steamers multiplied rapidly. The speed and certainty and
comfort--relative, at least--of the steamboat at once gave a forceful
impetus to settlement and to travel, and for some sections ended the
pioneer period.
Meanwhile, the waterways were being improved. Little was needed or
done in the great network of New Brunswick's rivers or in Nova Scotia's
shorter streams, but on the St Lawrence system, with a fall of nearly
six hundred feet from Lake Erie to tide-water at {16} Three Rivers,
canal construction was imperative. As early as 1779 canals were built
round the rapids between Lake St Louis and Lake St Francis, on the St
Lawrence, with a depth of only a foot and a half of water on the sills.
Far westward, at Sault Ste Marie, the energetic North-West Company
built, about 1800, a canal half a mile long. In the early twenties,
after the failure of a private company, the province of Lower Canada
constructed a boat canal between Montreal and Lachine, and a less
successful beginning was made on a canal round the Chambly rapids on
the Richelieu. In Upper Canada the British government built the Rideau
Canal, chiefly for military purposes. The Welland Canal was begun by a
private company in 1824, opened for small boats five years later, and
taken over by the province in 1840, after a record notable alike for
energy and perseverance and for jobbery and inefficiency. After the
Union of 1841, when population, revenue, and credit were all growing,
energetic digging was begun on the St Lawrence system of canals, and by
1848 vessels of twenty-six foot beam and drawing nine feet of water
could sail from the ocean to Chicago.
Land transport came later than water {17} transport, and developed by
slower stages. Road-making was an art which the settler learned
slowly. The blazed trail through the woods sufficed for the visit to
the neighbour or the church, or for the tramp to the nearest grist-mill
with a sack of wheat on one's back. 'He who has been once to church
and twice to mill is a traveller,' the common saying ran. The trail
broadened to a bridle-road for pack-horse or saddle-horse. The winter,
that maligned stepmother of Canada, gave the settler an excellent
though fleeting road on the surface of the frozen river or across the
hard-packed snow. Through the endless swamps jolting 'corduroy' roads
were built of logs laid crosswise on little or no foundation. With
more hands and more money there came the graded road, fenced and
bridged, but more rarely gravelled. Finally, little earlier than the
railway, came the macadamized road, and that peculiar invention of
Upper Canada, the plank road, built of planks laid crosswise on a level
way, and covered with earth to lessen the wear and noise. Upon these
roads carriole or caleche, 'cutter' or 'lumber-wagon,' carried the
settler or his goods to meeting-place and market. By 1816 a stage
route was established from Montreal to Kingston, a year later {18} from
Kingston to York (Toronto), and in 1826 from Toronto to Niagara and
from Ancaster to Detroit.
Road-making policy fluctuated between the Scylla of local neglect and
the Charybdis of centralized jobbery. At first the settler was
burdened with the task of clearing roughly the road in front of his own
land, but the existence of vast tracts of Clergy Reserves, or other
grants exempt from clearing duties, made this an ineffective system.
Labour on roads required by statute, whether shared equally by all
settlers or allotted according to assessed property, proved little more
successful. On the other hand, the system of provincial grants for
road-building too often meant log-rolling and corruption, and in the
Canadas it was discontinued after the establishment of municipal
institutions in 1841. The reaction to local control was perhaps too
extreme, and we are to-day recognizing the need of more aid and control
by the central provincial authorities. In the Maritime Provinces the
system worked better, and when the railway came these provinces
possessed a good network of great roads and by-roads, without a single
toll-gate. With the passing of the Joint Stock Act by the Canadian
{19} legislature in 1849, toll-road companies were freely organized,
and many of the leading roads were sold by the government to these
private corporations, and without question their operations brought
marked improvement for a time.
To realize more concretely the mode of travelling before the railway
came, let us make the journey, say, from Quebec to Toronto, at three
different periods, in 1800, in 1830, and in 1850.
'In no part of North America,' wrote an experienced traveller just at
the close of the eighteenth century, 'can a traveller proceed so
commodiously as along the road from Quebec to Montreal.'[1] A posting
service had been established which could fairly be compared with
European standards. At regular intervals along the road the traveller
found post-houses, where the post-master kept four vehicles in
readiness: in summer the caleche, a one-horse chaise built for two
passengers, with a footboard seat for the driver and with the body hung
by broad leather straps or thongs of bull's hide; in winter the
carriole, or sledge, with or without {20} covered top, also holding two
passengers and a driver. The drivers were bound to make two leagues an
hour over the indifferent roads, and in midwinter and midsummer the
dexterous, talkative, good-humoured driver, or _marche-donc_, usually
exceeded this rate for most of the journey of three days. From
Montreal onward no one travelled in winter except an occasional Indian
messenger. Even in summer few thought of going by land, though some
half-broken trails stretched westward. The river was the king's
highway. The summer traveller at once purchased the equipment needed
for a week's river journey--tent, buffalo-skins, cooking utensils, meat
and drink--and secured passage on board one of the bateaux which went
up the river at irregular intervals in brigades of half a dozen. The
bateau was a large flat-bottomed boat, built sharp both at bow and
stern, with movable mast, square sail, and cross benches for the crew
of five or six. Sometimes an awning or small cabin provided shelter.
In still water or light current the French-Canadian crew--always merry,
sometimes sober, singing their voyageur songs, halting regularly for
the inevitable 'pipe'--rowed or sailed; where the current was strong
they {21} kept inshore and pushed slowly along by 'setting' poles,
eight or ten feet long and iron shod; and where the rapids grew too
swift for poling, the crews joined forces on the shore to haul each
bateau in turn by long ropes, while the passengers lent a hand or shot
wild pigeons in the neighbouring woods. At night the whole party
encamped on shore, erecting tents or hanging skins and boughs from
branches of friendly trees. With average weather Kingston could be
reached in seven or eight days; the return journey down-stream was made
in two or three. From Kingston westward the journey was continued in a
sailing schooner, either one of the government gunboats or a private
venture, as far as York, or even to the greater western metropolis,
Queenston on the Niagara river. In good weather thirty or forty hours
sufficed for the lake voyage, but with adverse winds from four to six
days were frequently required.
Thirty years later those to whom time or comfort meant more than money
could make the through journey in one-third the time, though for the
leaner-pursed the more primitive facilities still lingered. For the
summer trip from Quebec to Montreal the steamer had outstripped the
stage-coach. Even with {22} frequent stops to load the fifty or sixty
cords of pine burned on each trip--how many Canadian business men
secured their start in prosperity by supplying wood to steamers on lake
or river!--the steamer commonly made the hundred and eighty miles in
twenty-eight hours. The fares were usually twenty shillings cabin and
five shillings steerage, though the intense rivalry of opposing
companies sometimes brought reckless rate-cutting. In 1829, for
instance, each of the two companies had one boat which carried and
boarded cabin passengers for seven and six-pence, while deck passengers
who found themselves in food were crowded in for a shilling.
From Montreal to Lachine the well-to-do traveller took a stage-coach,
drawn by four spanking greys, leaving Montreal at five in the morning,
for stage-coach hours were early and long. At Lachine he left the
stage for the steamer, at the Cascades he took a stage again, and at
Coteau transferred once more to a steamer for the run to Cornwall.
Shortly after 1830 steamers were put on the river powerful enough to
breast the current as far as Dickenson's Landing, leaving only a
twelve-mile gap to be filled by stage, but in 1830 it {23} was still
necessary, if one scorned the bateau, to make the whole journey from
Cornwall to Prescott by land, over one of the worst through roads in
the province. The Canadian stage of the day was a wonderful
contrivance, a heavy lumbering box, slung on leather straps instead of
springs, and often made without doors in order that, when fording
bridgeless streams, the water might not flow in. With the window as
the only means of exit, heavy-built passengers found it somewhat
awkward when called upon, as they often were, to clamber out in order
to ease the load uphill, or to wait while oxen from a neighbouring farm
dragged the stage out of a mud-hole. The traveller who 'knew the
ropes' provided himself with buffalo-skins or cushions; others went
without. Arrived at Prescott, the passengers shifted to a river
steamer, fitted more commodiously than the little boats used in the
lower stretches, but still providing no sleeping quarters except in
open bunks circling round the dining-saloon.
For thousands of the immigrants who were pouring into Upper Canada the
fares of the river steamer were still prohibitive. Many came on
bateaux, sometimes poled along as {24} of yore, sometimes taken in tow
by a steamer. Often more than a hundred immigrants, men, women, and
children, would be crowded into a single thirty-foot bateau, 'huddled
together,' a traveller notes, 'as close as captives in a slave trader,
exposed to the sun's rays by day, and the river damp by night, without
protection.'[2] Still more used the Durham boat for the river journey.
This famous craft was a large, flat-bottomed barge, with round bow and
square stern. With centre-board down and mainsail and topsail set on
its fixed mast, it made fair progress in the wider stretches. But on
the up trip it was for the most part poled or 'set' along. Each of the
crew took his stand at the bow end of one of the narrow gangways which
ran along both sides of the boat, set firmly in the river bottom his
long, heavy, iron-shod pole, put his shoulder to it, and, bending
almost double, walked along the gangway to the stern and inch by inch
forced the boat up-stream. 'The noise made by the clanking of the iron
against the stones, as the poles were drawn up again toward the bow,
could be heard for a long distance on a calm summer's day.' Finally,
at Prescott or Kingston the Durham boat was exchanged for {25} the
lower decks of the steamer, and the rest of the journey made with
somewhat greater speed, if not much greater comfort.
The twenty years which followed 1830 saw the steamboat in its prime.
The traveller going westward from Quebec in 1850 had a simple task
before him: a change at Montreal was the only necessary break in a
relatively comfortable and speedy journey. Two days now sufficed for
the trip from Montreal to Toronto. In the United States, river boats
had been evolved which far surpassed anything Europe had to offer in
luxury and speed. Canadian business men were not far behind, and the
St Lawrence lake and river route was well supplied with crack steamers,
of the Royal Mail and rival lines, or with independent boats. The
competition was at times intense, both in fares and in speed. Many
Canadians of the day, absorbed in the local or personal rivalries of
these boats, and impressed by their magnificence and reliability, were
convinced that the last word in transportation had been said. Yet, on
the lake and river, winter barred all through traffic. The main
turnpike roads of the interior were greatly improved, but even on these
long-distance traffic was expensive, and the {26} by-roads, especially
in the spring and autumn, were impassable except at a snail's pace.
For traffic of town with town and province with province some means of
transport less dependent on time and tide was urgently needed.
[1] Isaac Weld, _Travels through the States of North America and the
Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada_ (Fourth Edition), p. 300.
[2] Shirreff, _A Tour through North America_, p. 143.
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