Capture of York--Immigration increasing--David
Annis--Niagara--Prosperous lumber business--Ship-building--High
freight rates--Salmon spearing--Meteoric showers--An affrighted
clergyman--Cold winters--A tragedy of the clearings.
“Peculiar both!
Our soil’s strong growth,
And our bold native’s hardy mind;
Sure heaven bespoke
Our hearts of oak
To give a master to mankind.”
On April 27th, 1813, upon the taking of York by Chauncey and his fleet,
orders were given by the officer left in command of the British militia
when General Sheaffe retreated to blow up the fort. The boom of the
explosion was distinctly heard by my grandsire, Thomas Conant, at his
home thirty-five miles distant. With the exception of this incident no
records connected with the events from that time until the close of the
war in 1814 have been preserved among the reminiscences of the family.
The supplies needed for the soldiers had encouraged agriculture in the
back townships and brought money into circulation in the country. At the
close of the war immigration increased, sturdy settlers coming into the
country both from the British Isles and the United States. The
settlement of the wild lands, the clearing of the forests and the
building of roads went on apace; an era of prosperity and wealth
succeeded as peace became assured.
The most thriving industry was that of the lumberman, awaiting whose axe
lay the magnificent forests of timber which covered so large a portion
of Upper Canada. My father embarked in this trade. His mother’s decease
induced his relative, David Annis, a bachelor, to ask for and adopt him
as his heir.
David Annis was a descendant of the Charles Annis mentioned in the
quit-rent deed given on page 29. Though unlettered and untaught, even
unable to write his own name, David was possessed of excellent business
ability and an untiring body; a man of fine heart, a friend to the poor,
and hospitable to all. It is said of him that no Indian or white ever
went from his door hungry. Together he and Daniel Conant built what was
probably the first lumber mill erected in the Home District. Its
capacity was seven thousand feet of lumber per day only. At page 135 a
picture of this mill is given.
All that lumber (generally pine) would have been
[Illustration: DAVID ANNIS.
THE AUTHOR’S UNCLE.]
valueless when manufactured unless means had been provided to take it to
market by schooner. Niagara, at the mouth of the Niagara River, was,
even as late as 1835, one of the largest towns in Upper Canada. Thither
the lumber must be taken to find a market. No wharves had then been
built upon the north shore of Lake Ontario, and lumber must be floated
down the stream from the mill in rafts to the lake, and so placed on
board the waiting schooners. Three vessels were built by ship carpenters
(many of whom came from the United States) of the lumber sawn at the
mill. They were built on fine lines and had excellent sailing
properties, their owners boasting they could sail them “as close to the
wind’s eye as any craft that ever floated.”
Pine lumber brought at that day (1835) $7 per thousand feet in cash at
Niagara; therefore the lumber mill paid $49 per day of twenty-four hours
during the season of sawing. To supply the demands of this trade vessel
after vessel was built, and soon return freights began to be offered,
such as salt from Sodus, N.Y., and flour in barrels, to be carried to
Kingston, until the business of lumber manufacturing and vessel
freighting was, at that early period in the history of Upper Canada, as
productive as the output of a paying gold mine. The author’s father
served on many of his schooners as captain and supercargo as well, and
never lost his love of the water and its attendant adventure.
One of the most important occurrences of the time, and one from which
many reckoned their local history, was a remarkable display of falling
meteors. The following account is taken from memoranda left by my
mother, and as told by my father:
On the night of the 12th of November, 1833, my father, then a young man,
was salmon-spearing in a boat in the creek, at its outlet into Lake
Ontario, now Port Oshawa. One of his hired men sat in the stern and
paddled, while he stood close beside the light-jack of blazing pine
knots, in order to see the salmon in the water. He, in common with the
inhabitants generally, was laying in a stock of salmon to be salted down
for the year’s use, until the salmon “run” again the following fall.
At or about ten o’clock of this evening, as nearly as he could judge,
from out of an intensely dark November night, globes of fire as big as
goose eggs began falling all around his boat. These balls continued to
fall until my father, becoming frightened, went home,--not forgetting,
he quaintly added, to bring with him the salmon already caught. On
reaching home, Lot 6, B. F. East Whitby, the whole household was
aroused, and frightened too; but the fires ceasing they went to bed, to
pass a restless night after the awe-inspiring scene they had witnessed.
Getting up before daybreak next morning, my father raked over the embers
of the buried back log of the big fire-place and quickly had a blaze.
Happening to glance out of the window, to his intense amazement he saw,
as he said, “the whole sky filled with shooting stars.” Quickly he
called to the men, his hired help in the lumbering business, to come
down stairs. They needed not a second invitation, and among them was one
Shields, who, on reaching the door, dropped in a twinkling upon his
knees and began to pray. The balls of fire continuing, his prayers grew
more earnest, if vigor of voice could be any index to his religious
fervor. Of the grandeur of the unparalleled scene my father said almost
nothing, for I am led to think they were all too thoroughly frightened
to think of beauty, that being a side issue entirely. The fiery shower
growing more dense, my father went out of doors and found the fire-balls
did not burn or hurt. Then he went to a neighbor’s--a preacher of renown
in the locality--having to pass through woods, and even in the darkness,
he affirms, the fire-balls lighted his way quite distinctly. The
preacher, already awake, was seated at the table beside a tallow dip
reading his Bible, with two other neighbors listening and too
frightened, he said, to even bid him good morning. He sat and listened
to verse after verse, and still the stars fell. The preacher gave no
explanation or sign, but read on. Looking eastward, at last my father
saw a faint glimmer of breaking day. Once more he came out into the fire
and made his way homeward. Before he reached there daylight broke.
Gradually the fire-balls grew less and less, and, with the day, ceased
altogether. To find a sign of them he hunted closely upon the ground,
but not a trace was left of anything. Nor was any damage done. What
became of the stars that fell he could not conjecture.
Realize that in 1833 astronomers had not taught Upper Canadians in
regard to meteoric showers, as we know to-day, and we do not marvel at
their consternation and fright. Such was the greatest meteoric shower
the world probably has ever known. Its greatest density was said to be
attained in this section of the continent.
A bit of doggerel went the rounds at that time. It was made, I believe,
by one Horace Hutchinson, a sailor whom my father had on one of his
schooners. Here is the first verse:
“I well remembered what I see
In eighteen hundred and thirty-three,
When from the affrighted place I stood
The stars forsook their fixed abode.”
A better sailor he was than a poet, and yet, bad as the verses were,
they were very popular in the thirties in a large section of the Home
District, of which this is a part.
E. S. Shrapnel, the artist, paints the picture (page 144) from an actual
photograph of the house, he obviously supplying the kneeling man.
Shields, who made so great a fuss, was employed by one of my father’s
foremen at the lumbering, and the picture and its story are true in
every essential particular.
Upper and Lower Canada were thought by many to have extremely severe
winters. It is probable the belief was well founded, but the climate of
Upper Canada has undergone a very material change since that period
(1835). To-day Upper Canada is pre-eminently a fruit-growing country.
Apples, pears, peaches and grapes are staples in this favored land.
COLD WINTERS OF YORE.
Old men tell us that our winters are less severe now than they were
fifty or sixty years ago. The long unbroken spells of extreme cold which
they used to experience in the early days of our history, are not known
now. It is true we do get a cold spell during the winter, now and again,
and sometimes deep snow; but these cold spells soon break, and the deep
snows do not remain all winter. Not long since I was talking with one of
the Grand Trunk Railway conductors, who had been on the line for over
twenty years. He said that when he first came on the line it was not at
all unusual to have the snow even with the car steps for miles. At other
places, he said, they would for long distances pass through tunnels of
snow piled or drifted as high as the car tops, whereas now the railway
company seldom send out their snow-plough at all, nor does the snow
seriously hinder the running of the trains.
It may be that the snow does not now lie as deep as it did before the
land was cleared, but is more drifted. This no doubt is true, in a
measure, but then if we got as much snow as our fathers used to, and
this drifted, the consequences would be most disastrous, and would be an
effectual bar to locomotion.
The winter’s cold of former years can be best illustrated by the
relation of an anecdote. An old gentleman, still alive and approaching
his fourscore years says he was one day driving through a seventeen-mile
belt of woods, in this province, with one horse drawing a jumper. The
jumpers of those days were made by using two green saplings for runners,
bending them up for the crooks. Beams and uprights were made of green
saplings, like the runners. An axe and an auger were the only tools used
in their construction, and generally there was not a particle of iron
in any shape. Rude as they were, they served their purpose admirably,
and lasted well enough through one winter. The day was intensely cold,
so cold that it was dangerous to leave any part of the body exposed for
a moment. He saw a man sitting bolt upright in the snow on the path
before him. His first thought was “What will this man be doing here
alone, sitting down in this awful cold.” Coming up to him, he reined up
his horse, and called to the man; receiving no answer, he tapped him
with his whip, and, to his astonishment, the blow resounded as if he
were striking a piece of marble. The poor fellow was frozen solid
through and through. He was a settler, who lived some thirty miles
farther on, and who had set out to go to some settlement, but becoming
exhausted by the long weary tramp in the snow, sat down for a few
moments’ rest, became drowsy from the soporific effects of the cold, and
froze as he sat.
To convey to the younger generation of Upper Canadians an idea of some
of the difficulties which our forefathers encountered in subduing the
dense forests of our Province, I will relate a true instance of an
occurrence about sixty years ago:
A man and his wife, with two children, moved into the Township of Ops,
into a dense forest, eight miles from the nearest settler. For months
he chopped away at the forest trees, all alone, and succeeded at length
in making a clearing in the forest, and erecting a log-house for himself
and his family. The logs were peeled and notched at the ends, and laid
up squarely, each tier making the house the diameter of a log higher. A
hole was cut through for a doorway, and another for a window. To form a
door he split some thin slabs from a straight-grained cedar, and pinned
them with wooden pins to cross slats. The most ingenious parts of the
construction, however, were the hinges. Iron hinges he had not, and
could not get. With the auger he bored a hole through the end of a
square piece of wood, and, sharpening the other end with his axe, he
then bored a hole into one of the logs of the house, constituting in
part a door-jamb, and drove the piece of wood into this hole. This
formed the top part of the hinge, and the bottom part was fashioned in
exactly the same way. Now to the door, in like manner, he fastened two
pegs of wood with holes bored through their ends. Placing the ends of
the hinges above one another they presented the four ends with holes
leading through them, the one above the other. Next he made a long pin
with his handy jacknife, leaving a run at one end of it, and making it
long enough to reach from the top to the lower hinge. Through the holes
at the ends of the hinge this long pin was placed, and thus the door was
hung.
The roof of the log-house was perhaps the greatest curiosity. Hollow
basswood (linden) trees were generally used. These were first cut the
length required, then split through the centre, each half forming a
trough. A layer of these troughs was laid lengthwise from the ridge-pole
to the eaves, all over the house-top, upon their backs, the bark side
down. Over these was laid a second layer, reversed, or bark side up, and
the edges of the upper layer fitted into the hollows of the lower one.
In this way the settler made a roof for his house quickly and easily.
Such a roof shed water tolerably well, too, until the logs began to rot.
This primitive house built, the settler put in a small crop in the tiny
clearing. At this period in the country’s history the virgin soil
produced bountifully, and the crops once put in were almost sure to give
fair returns. When autumn came with its gorgeous colors--the leaves of
the forest in the north temperate zone rivalling in beauty anything the
tropics can show us--the settler’s crop was a good one.
Unfortunately, however, he was confined to his rude bed, too ill to
gather in his harvest. Eight miles away his nearest neighbors followed
the “blazes”[A] on the trees through the woods and came and secured the
settler’s crop for him, then departed, leaving him and his household all
alone in the deep, silent forest. Days and weeks rolled along and no one
came again, while the poor man got perceptibly worse. Winter at last set
in with the severe cold of those days. Snow, deep and lasting, soon
fell, and covered all things animate and inanimate with a pure white
mantle. To have a huge pile of logs at the door was the custom of those
days, to supply the winter fire in the great capacious open fire-place.
Our settler had not neglected to secure the traditional and useful pile
of logs before his illness. Many dreary days passed over this little
snowed-in household, the husband and mainstay still sick, and gradually
growing weaker. Wolves howled around the door nightly. Seeing no one out
of doors, they gradually became bolder and would approach to the very
door of the cabin.
[A] Marks on the trees made by the axe to indicate a path or way from
one spot to another in the woods.
To the poor disconsolate wife’s inexpressible grief, the husband died
and left her alone in her solitary loneliness with her two children, the
eldest of whom was only eight years of age, and the second one just able
to walk. What dreadful isolation this, with no one nearer than eight
miles to help her perform the sacred rites of sepulture! Among the
tools in the house was an old mattock, used in grubbing up the forest
roots in the clearing. With this she attempted to dig a grave.
Unfortunately for her, however, the snow had fallen later than usual in
the autumn, after the ground had become frozen quite hard. All her
efforts failed to penetrate through the deeply frozen crust, and she
almost feared she could not bury her husband at all. To place the body
out of doors she dare not, for it would only become food for the
prowling wolves, and the idea was so revolting to her that she could not
entertain it. Some solution, however, must be sought for the difficult
problem, and this clever, self-reliant woman finally solved it.
Remembering that the pile of logs at the door beside the house had been
put there before the frost came, with the aid of a hand-spike she rolled
one back away from the side of the house. It was a large log from which
one above it had been removed for the daily burning on the hearth. To
her joy, under this log the ground was scarcely frozen, being under the
pile and sheltered by the side of the log cabin. There with the mattock
she dug a grave, dragged her husband’s body to it, rolled it gently in,
and covered it over with the soil she had taken out. Then back again
over the grave she rolled the log, to protect it and prevent the wolves
disinterring the body. She then went to the settlement, leading her
youngest child by the hand, the other following in the track made in the
deep snow.
A harrowing tale is this, but it is a true one. It was by just such
people that the Province of Upper Canada was made what it is, and by
their sufferings, buffetings and privations we enjoy the privileges
which we have to-day. Let us drop a kindly tear to the memory of this
brave woman, and look back with fond remembrance to our pioneer
ancestors who, although often unlettered and uncultured, did so much for
us.
[Illustration: ROGER CONANT TRADING WITH THE INDIANS FOR FURS.]