by Stephanie Williams
I spent a lot of time in remote timber cabins in the Canadian backwoods as a child. No electricity, no running water — we drew it from the lake at one end of the property, and did our washing at the other, taking care to swim out a good distance to rinse the soap from our hair. An outhouse stood in the woods about 50 yards from the house, and early one morning I met a bear on the path as I went out to do my business. I can't remember what I did — shout? wave my arms? — but he bolted off as soon as I spotted him.
Like so many Canadians, my family came to the country as pioneers. The wilds had been our home. Led by my great-great-great-grandfather, 62-year-old Thomas Benson, three generations of my family migrated in 1837 from a farm called Cinderbarrow, high on a hill overlooking a valley in Cumbria.
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| Cinderbarrow Farm today |
A house was raised with the help of all the neighbours gathered together in a raising ‘bee’; likewise whenever a big task was undertaken by surrounding pioneers, people gathered to help in logging ‘bees’, husking ‘bees’, chopping ‘bees’ and quilting ‘bees’. The work, and the meals they shared, bound the community together.
A log cabin consisted of logs stacked one on top of the other, notched at the ends to fit them together, the gaps between filled with plaster or lichens to keep out wind and rain. The rafters were covered with shingles, the floor was earth; a clay and stone chimney rose above an open hearth. It was makeshift and crude, but it was shelter. Gradually the cabin was extended to include a root cellar, a dairy, barns and outhouses. Tables, chairs, beds, buckets and pails were made by hand from surrounding timber.
The isolation of the bush
This was a time when such roads as existed were no more than wide breaks chopped through thick, brooding forest, curiously silent of wildlife. To go to town for supplies took a ponderous day each way: bringing in basic stores of salt, flour and sugar, needles, thread, and the essentials of hardware. The Mississaugas lived nearby — my grandmother remembered her mother setting out a couple of loaves of newly baked bread on a chopping block for them to take. Mosquitoes, black fly, illnesses and accidents; forest fires triggered by the extreme heat of summer, hurricanes, and the huge snows and freezing temperatures of winter — all were everyday hazards. It was a hard, hard life.
How much choice did a woman have if her husband was bent on becoming a settler? Catharine Parr Traill (1802–1899) left the gentle landscapes of Suffolk near Southwold for Canada in 1832 — five years before my family. Newly married, her husband was tempted by a grant of land he could claim as a serving army officer. Her younger brother, Samuel, had already emigrated in the 1820s. Catherine and her husband Thomas settled on a small land claim. They cleared the land and built their cabin. There she bore nine children.
Brought up short against the harsh realities of the Canadian bush, the terrible isolation from friends and family and the security of knowledge of her home country, it took no time for Traill to realise that if she and her family were to survive, it was up to her to feed and clothe them from the fruits of what first appeared a barren land. However prepared she was, she needed every ounce of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and expediency.
A writer in Upper Canada
Catherine Parr Traill - author and settler
Traill was also unusual: she, and four of her five sisters, were writers. She published her first book, a collection of children’s stories, at the age of 15, in 1818. Her younger sister Susanna Moodie — who followed her to Canada a few years later, was the author of Roughing It in the Bush. Her older sisters Agnes and Elizabeth later became so famous for their Lives of the Queens of England in 1840, that contemporaries compared the women to the Brontes and the Trollopes. Together, Traill, Moodie and Anne Langton, who wrote A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada, were the few female chroniclers of pioneering life in Canada.
Catherine's book The Backwoods of Canada, published in 1836, would almost certainly have been read by my family, who happened to follow the Traills to the same small area of southern Ontario, near Rice Lake and the Otonabee River (in Ojibwa the ‘river that beats like a heart’). But even more important to the Canadian pioneer woman was her Canadian Settler's Guide, first published in 1855, a step-by-step account of how to make a home in the bush. It predated Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management by six years.
Here Traill provides guidance on every aspect of a woman’s role in pioneer life: the house and the garden, providing food and clothing for the family. Keeping cows and sustaining them through ferocious winters — "where roots, such as good sound turnips, cannot be had, a quart of boiled oats, morning and night, will keep a cow in good order". Cooking, curing, making butter and cheese; refashioning clothes and shoes, knitting, weaving, dyeing — “one of the settler's great objects is to make as little outlay of money as possible”. Everything in the household was done by the hands of the family; boys would wittle axe handles; girls as young as six were knitting socks.
Nothing was to go to waste
Men and boys were to take care of the heavy work – felling trees, clearing rocks, building, plowing, hunting, fishing, curing skins and fashioning brooms, axe handles, furniture. A passionate botanist – she would later write Canadian Wild Flowers and Studies of Plant Life in Canada -- her advice on gardening in the wilds, planting orchards, grafting trees and identifying strange plants and fruits was invaluable.
We are instructed in detail on how to churn butter and make cream in the challenging alternating temperatures of baking summer and freezing winter; on drying and smoking fish; on making essence of beef for sick persons; and on the best substitutes for tea and coffee — hemlock tea, brewed from the branches of the tree, and coffee (which makes you go to sleep!) made from the roots of dandelions. For more coffee: “The acorns of the white oak, browned and ground are also used”. On making tallow candles from rendered beef or mutton fat, and soap from the clean ashes of hardwood and grease from the entrails of hog. Nothing was to go to waste.
Feathers plucked from wild ducks and geese were saved for pillows. Hams were salted, fruit preserved, jams and jellies made, herbs dried. Hops and potatoes were turned into yeast, and from that yeast came half a dozen kinds of breads and cakes — biscuits, crackers, loaves. "Indian rice”, which grows in vast beds in still water and is harvested in September, had to be well dried, soaked and boiled before it revealed itself as white. Indian corn was ground and baked.
From the dairy to the dye pot
Economic hints and practical ways of making a living thread through her writing. Old clothing was cut down and refashioned or torn into strips to make rag carpets. Wool from sheep was carded, spun and dyed: white wool and black woven together to make grey; the outer skins of onions boiled to yield a soft brown or fawn; the flowers of goldenrod for yellow; butternut for a strong coffee brown; the lye of wood ashes and copperas (ferrous sulphate) for a yellow buff or orange. Spinning was done on great wheels, the spinner walking back and forth, guiding the yarn with one hand while turning the wheel with the other. My great-grandfather was out of school and ploughing fields at eleven.
Whole sections of the book are devoted to raising potatoes (along with turnips, essential staples for feeding animals as well as humans through the winter), and tapping the sap of maple trees to boil up into syrup and maple sugar.
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| Boiling sap to make maple sugar |
Basic illnesses are covered. Ague – brought on near swamps and cleared land – was in fact malaria, repeatedly recurring, treated with quinine. Dysentery killed two of Catherine’s children; she saved a third by dosing it with extract from the root of American spikenard, Aralia racemosa – a cure probably handed to early settlers by the Mississaugas. In lonely places, she writes, where the aid of a medical man is difficult to be obtained, even severe wounds are healed, and simple fractures are reduced by the inhabitants themselves. Someone among them who has more nerve or more judgement than the rest is consulted upon such occasions and faith goes a great way with many patients in affecting cure.
Women -- yes, weak women and children
Forest fires were a frequent hazard. Sometimes people are exposed to considerable peril in new clearing from the running of fire in the woods… in such case where there is no near supply of water much can be affected by beating out the advancing flames and still more by opening the Earth with hoes and spade or better still by men yoking up the cattle and ploughing a few farrows to interpose the new earth between the advancing fire and the combustible matter. Women, yes, weak women and children, have battled against a wall of advancing flame and with hoes and other instruments have kept it back until help could be obtained.
In these days, when the upheavals of global politics crowd the headlines, my thoughts often turn to the grave threats that have been pushed aside: climate change, the future of energy and water, population movements, and the fragility of food supply. Catharine Parr Traill arrived in the wilderness as an English gentlewoman. Thomas was not a successful backwoodsman. She fell back on her skills as a writer to support the family -- and to record their life with clarity and without self-pity.
To read her is to understand not only how Canada was built, but what it truly costs to begin again from nothing.
Stephanie Williams is a historian and writer who lives in north London. Her latest book, telling the story of her four years as a Canadian, convent-educated girl, at an elite American women's college is The Education of Girls -- coming of age in 4 years that changed America, 1966-1970.
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