Volume I Part 3 (1/2)
The scene changes, the proud Indian is at the feet of his ensnarer; disease has relaxed his iron sinews; drunkenness has debased his mind; and the myriad crimes and vices of civilized Europe have combined to sweep the aborigines of the soil from the face of the forest earth. The forest groans beneath the axe; but, after a few years, the scene again changes; fertile fields, orchards and gardens, delight the eye; the city, and the town, and the village spires rise, and where two solitary wigwams of the red hunter were once alone occasionally observed, twenty thousand white Canadians now wors.h.i.+p the same Great Author of the existence of all mankind.
And to increase these fields, these orchards, these gardens, these villages, these towns, and these cities, year after year, thirty thousand of the children of Britain cross the broad Atlantic: and what seeks this ma.s.s of human beings, braving the perils of the ocean and the perils of the land? Competence and wealth! The former, by prudence, is soon attainable; the acquisition of the latter uncertain and fickle.
No free grants of land are now given, but the settler may obtain them upon easy terms from the government, or the Canada and British American companies.
The settler with a small capital cannot do better than purchase out and out. Instalments are a bad mode of purchasing; for, if all should not turn out right, instalments are sometimes difficult to meet; and the very best land, in the best locations, as we shall hereafter see, is to be had from 7s. 6d., if in the deep Bush, as the forest is called; to 10s., if nearer a market; or 15s. and 20s., if very eligibly situated.
Thus for two hundred pounds a settler can buy two hundred acres of good land, can build an excellent house for two hundred and fifty more, and stock his farm with another fifty, as a beginning; or, in other words, he can commence Canadian life for five hundred pounds sterling, with every prospect before him, if he has a family, of leaving them prosperous and happy. But he and they must work, work, work. He and all his sons must avoid whiskey, that bane of the backwoods, as they would avoid the rattlesnake, which sometimes comes across their path. Whiskey and wet feet destroy more promising young men in Canada than ague and fever, that scourge of all well watered woody countries; for the ague and fever seldom kill but with the a.s.sistance of the dram and of exposure.
Men nurtured in luxury or competence at home, as soon as the unfailing _ennui_ arising from want of society in the backwoods begins to succeed the excitement of settling, too frequently drink, and in many cases drink from their waking hour until they sink at night into sottish sleep. This is peculiarly the case where there is no village nor town within a day's journey; and thus many otherwise estimable young men become habitual drunkards, and sink from the caste of gentlemen gradually into the dregs of society, whilst their wives and families suffer proportionably.
In Lower Canada, this vice does not prevail to the same extent as in the upper portion of the province. The French Canadians are not addicted to the vice of drinking ardent spirits as a people, although the lumberers and voyageurs shorten their lives very considerably by the use of whiskey. The _lumberers_, who are the cutters and conveyers of timber, pa.s.s a short and excited existence.
In the winter, buried in the eternal forest, far, far away from the haunts of man, they chop and hew; in the summer, they form the timber, boards, staves, &c., into rafts, which are conveyed down the great lakes and the rivers St. Lawrence and Ottawa to Quebec--on these rafts they live and have their summer being. Hard fare in plenty, such as salt pork and dough cakes; fat and unleavened bread, with whiskey, is their diet.
Tea and sugar form an occasional luxury. Up to their waists in snow in winter, and up to their waists in summer and autumn in water, with all the moving accidents by flood and field; the occasional breaking-up of the raft in a rapid, the difficulty of the winter and spring transport of the heavy logs of squared timber out of the deep and trackless woods, combine to form a portion of the hard and reckless life of a lumberer, whose _morale_ is not much better than his _physicale_.
Picture to yourself, child of luxury, sitting on a cus.h.i.+oned sofa, in a room where the velvet carpet renders a footfall noiseless, where art is exhausted to afford comfort, and where even the hurricane cannot disturb your perusal of this work, a wood reaching without limit, excepting the oceans either of salt or fresh water which surround Canada, and where to lose the track is hopeless starvation and death; figure the giant pines towering to the clouds, gloomy and t.i.tan-like, throwing their vast arms to the skyey influences, and making a twilight of mid-day, at whose enormous feet a thicket of bushes, almost as high as your head, prevents your progress without the pioneer axe; or a deep and black swamp for miles together renders it necessary to crawl from one fallen monarch of the wood onwards to the decaying and prostrate bole of another, with an occasional plunge into the mud and water, which they bridge; eternal silence reigning, disturbed only by your feeble efforts to advance; and you may form some idea of a red pine land, rocky and uneven, or a cedar swamp, black as night, dark, dismal, and dangerous.
Here, after you have hewed or crept your toiling way, you see, some yards or some hundred yards, as the forest is close or open, before you, a light blue curling smoke amongst the dank and lugubrious scene; you hear a dull, distant, heavy, sudden blow, frequent and deadened, followed at long intervals by a tremendous rending, cras.h.i.+ng, overwhelming rush; then all is silent, till the voice of the guardian of man is heard growling, snarling, or barking outright, as you advance towards the blue smoke, which has now, by an eddy of the wind, filled a large s.p.a.ce between the trees.
You stand before the fire, made under three or four sticks set up tenwise, to which a large cauldron is hung, bubbling and seething, with a very strong odour of fat pork; a boy, dirty and ill-favoured, with a sharp glittering axe, looks very suspiciously at you, but calls off his wolfish dog, who sneaks away.
A moment shows you a long hut, formed of logs of wood, with a roof of branches, covered by birch-bark, and by its side, or near the fire, several nondescript sties or pens, apparently for keeping pigs in, formed of branches close to the ground, either like a boat turned upside down, or literally as a pigsty is formed, as to shape.
In the large hut, which is occasionally more luxurious and made of slabs of wood or of rough boards, if a saw-mill is within reasonable distance, and there is a pa.s.sable wood road, or creek, or rivulet, navigable by canoes, you see some barrel or two of pork, and of flour, or biscuit, or whiskey, some tools, and some old blankets or skins. Here you are in the lumberer's winter home--I cannot call him woodman, it would disgrace the ancient and ballad-sung craft; for the lumberer is not a gentle woodman, and you need not sing sweetly to him to ”spare that tree.”
The larger dwelling is the hall, the common hall, and the pig-sties the sleeping-places. I presume that such a circ.u.mstance as pulling off habiliments or ablution seldom occurs; they roll themselves in a blanket or skin, if they have one, and, as to water, they are so frequently in it during the summer, that I suppose they wash half the year unintentionally. Fat pork, the fattest of the fat, is the lumberer's luxury; and, as he has the universal rifle or fowling-piece, he kills a partridge, a bear, or a deer, now and then.
I was exploring last year some woods in a newly settled towns.h.i.+p, the towns.h.i.+p of Seymour West, in the Newcastle district of Upper Canada, with a view to see the nakedness of the land, which had been represented to me as flowing with milk and honey, as all new settlements of course are said to do. I wandered into the lonely but beautiful forest, with a companion who owned the soil, and who had told me that the lumberers were robbing him and every settler around of their best pine timber.
After some toiling and tracing the sound of the axes, few and far between, felling in the distance, we came upon the unvarying boy at cookery, the axe, and the dog.
My conductor at once saw the extent of the mischief going on, and, finding that the gang, although distant from the camp-fire, was numerous, advised that we should retrace our steps. We however interrogated the boy, who would scarcely answer, and pretended to know nothing. The dog began to be inquisitive too, and one of the dogs we had with us venturing a little too near a savoury piece of pork, the nature of the young half-bred ruffian suddenly blazed out, and the axe was uplifted to kill poor Dash. I happened to have a good stick, and interfered to prevent dog-murder, upon which the wood-demon e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed that he would as soon let out my guts as the dog's, and therefore my companion had to show his gun; for showing his teeth would have been of little avail with the young savage.
The settlers are afraid of the lumberers; and thus all the finest land, near rivers, creeks, or transport of any kind, is swept of the timber to such an extent that you must go now far, far back from the Lakes, the St. Lawrence, or the Ottawa, before you can see the forest in its primeval grandeur.
This robbery has been carried on in so barefaced and extensive a manner, that the chief adventurer, usually a merchant or trader, who supplies the axe and canoemen with pay in his shop goods, cent. per cent. above their value, becomes enriched.
The lumberer's life is truly an unhappy one, for, when he reaches the end of the raft's voyage, whatever money he may have made goes to the fiddle, the female, or the fire-water; and he starts again as poor as at first, living perhaps by a rare chance to the advanced age, for a lumberer, of forty years.
And a curious sight is a raft, joined together not with ropes but with the limbs and thews of the swamp or blue beech, which is the natural cordage of Canada and is used for scaffolding and packing.
A raft a quarter of a mile long--I hope I do not exaggerate, for it may be half a mile, never having measured one but by the eye--with its little huts of boards, its apologies for flags and streamers, its numerous little masts and sails, its cooking caboose, and its contrivances for anchoring and catching the wind by slanting boards, with the men who appear on its surface as if they were walking on the lake, is curious enough; but to see it in _drams_, or detached portions, sent down foaming and darting along the timber slides of the Ottawa or the restless and rapid Trent, is still more so; and fearful it is to observe its _conducteur_, who looks in the rapid by no means so much at his ease as the functionary of that name to whom the Paris diligence is entrusted.
Numberless accidents happen; the drams are torn to pieces by the violence of the stream; the rafts are broken by storm and tempest; the men get drunk and fall over; and altogether it appears extraordinary that a raft put together at the Trent village for its final voyage to Quebec should ever reach its destination, the transport being at least four hundred and fifty miles, and many go much farther, through an open and ever agitated fresh water sea, and amongst the intricate channels of The Thousand Islands, and down the tremendous rapids of the Longue Sault, the Gallope, the Cedars, the Cascades, &c.
But a new trade, has lately commenced on Lake Ontario, which will break up some of the hards.h.i.+ps of the rafting. Old steamboats of very large size, when no longer serviceable in their vocation, are now cut down, and perhaps lengthened, masted, and rigged as barques or s.h.i.+ps, and treated in every respect like the Atlantic timber-vessels. Into these three-masters, these Leviathans of Lake Ontario, the timber, boards, staves, handspikes, &c., from the interior are now s.h.i.+pped, and the timber carried to the head of the St. Lawrence navigation.
One step more, and they will, as soon as the ca.n.a.ls are widened, proceed from Lake Superior to London without a raft being ever made.
That this will soon occur is very evident; for a large vessel of this kind, as big as a frigate, and named the Goliath, is at the moment that I am writing preparing at Toronto, near the head of Lake Ontario, a thousand miles from the open sea, for a voyage direct to the West Indies and back again. Success to her! What with the railroad from Halifax to Lake Huron, from the Atlantic Ocean to the great fresh ocean of the West--what with the electric telegraph now in operation on the banks of the Niagara by the Americans--what with the lighting of villages on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Erie with natural gas, as Fredonia is lit, and as the city of the Falls of Niagara, if ever it is built, will also be, there is no telling what will happen: at all events, the poor lumberer must benefit in the next generation, for the worst portion of his toils will be done away with for ever.