Volume Ii Part 13 (1/2)
The young couple had now a family growing about them, and, as they were very old friends of mine, they asked me to come and see ”life in the Bush.”
Farmer Harry, as we will call my young friend, had now three instead of two hundred acres to attend to, but he had a flock of sheep, a pair of oxen, the _span_ of horses I brought for him, several cows, much poultry, and a whole drove of pigs, with barns full of wheat, peas, hay, and oats; an excellent garden, a fine little brook full of trout at his door, plenty of meadow, and his harvest just over.
To help him, he had a hired man, who drove the oxen and a.s.sisted in ploughing; and to bring in his harvest there were three hired labourers, at two s.h.i.+llings and sixpence a day each, and their food and beds, with two maid-servants, one to a.s.sist in the dairy. Labour, constant and toilsome labour, was still necessary in order to make the farm pay; for there is no market near, and everything is to be bought by barter.
Salt, tea, sugar, and all the little luxuries must be had by giving wheat, peas, timber, oats, barley, the fleeces of the sheep, salted pork, or any other exchangeable property; and thus constant care and constant supervision of the employed, as well as constant personal labour, are requisite in Canada on a farm for very many years, before its owner can sit down and say, ”I will now take mine ease.”
The female part of the family must spin, weave, make homespun cloth, candles, salt the pork, make b.u.t.ter for sale, and even sell poultry and eggs whenever required; in short, they must, however delicately brought up, turn their hands to every thing, to keep the house warm.
The labour of bringing home logs for fuel in winter is not one of the least in a farm, and then these logs have to be sawed and split into convenient lengths for the fireplaces and stoves.
But all this may be achieved, if done cheerfully; and, to show that it can, I will add that, amidst all this labour, my young friend was building himself a dam, where the beavers, in times when that politic and hard-working little trowel-tailed race owned his property, had seen the value of collecting the waters of the brook. He was repairing their decayed labours, for the purpose of was.h.i.+ng his sheep, of getting a good fish-pond, and of keeping a bath always full for the comfort of his family.
What a change in ten years! The forest, which had been silent and untrodden since the beavers first heard afar off the sound of the white men's axes, was now converted into a smiling region, in which a prattling brook ran meandering at the foot of gently swelling hill-sides, on which the snowy sheep were browsing, and the cattle lowing.
A field of Indian corn was rustling its broad and vivid green flaggy leaves, whilst its fruit, topped by long silky pennons, waving in the breeze, seemed to say to me, ”Good Englishman, why do your countrymen despise my golden spikes? do they think, as they do of my ugly, p.r.i.c.kly friend the oat, that I am not good enough for man, and fit only for the horse or the negro? You know better, and you have often eaten of a pound-cake made of my flour, which you said was sweeter and better than that of wheat. You have often tasted my puddings; come now, Mr. John Bull, were they not very good?”
”Certainly they were, Mr. Maize, and hominy and hoe-cake and all that sort of thing are good too; but pray don't ask me to devour you in the shape of mush, mola.s.ses and b.u.t.ter. Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves will never tremble.”
Jesting apart, the flour of Indian corn, or maize, is as much superior, as nutritive food, to potatoes, as wheat flour is to Indian corn. I wish the poor Irish had plenty of it.
The farmers in Upper Canada use it much, but in that wheat country it cannot of course be expected that it supersedes flour, properly so called. They also use buckwheat flour largely in the shape of pancakes, and a most excellent thing it is.
My friend's life was diversified; for, during the season that the crops are ripening, he had time to spare to go out on fis.h.i.+ng and shooting excursions on the Trent, and occasionally in winter a little deer-hunting, with, _longo intervallo_, a bear-killing event.
I went to a combined fis.h.i.+ng and shooting pic-nickery, and travelled from Rainey's mills and Falls all along the valley of the Trent to Healy's Falls.
The Trent is a beautiful and most picturesque river, rus.h.i.+ng and roaring along over a series of falls and rapids for miles together, and expanding in n.o.ble reaches and little lakes.
Rainey's Falls I have faintly sketched, to show the soft beauty of some parts of this river; at Healy's Falls it is more broken.
We went to Crow Bay, just above which the Crow River, from the iron mine country of Marmora, runs into the Trent. Here we found two friends, brothers, settled in great comfort. They had been about ten years in the ”Bush,” and had excellent farms and houses equal to any I have seen so far in the interior, with every comfort around them. In one of their pleasure-boats, we embarked for the junction of the rivers, on which it is intended to place a town when the country becomes more settled.
All is now forest, excepting a very extensive and very flouris.h.i.+ng settlement of twelve hundred acres, undertaken by a retired field-officer in the army, which was a grant about ten years ago for his services, and is now worth two thousand pounds, or perhaps more, since a bridge has been built by the provincial legislature over the Trent, in order to connect the mail route between the towns.h.i.+ps of Seymour-East and Seymour-West, as both are filling up rapidly, and land becomes consequently dear and scarce.
The price of land in Seymour at present is, improved farm, if a good house and barns are on it, at least two pounds an acre, including clearance and forest; Canada Company's land, from fifteen to twenty s.h.i.+llings an acre; wild land, in lots of one hundred or two hundred acres; Clergy Reserve, or College land, called School land, according to situation, from twenty-five s.h.i.+llings an acre upwards to thirty, all wild land. Private Proprietors' wild land, in good situations, twenty s.h.i.+llings an acre, and very little for less. Along the river-banks, none, I believe, is to be had, unless at very high prices.
It is intended, no doubt, to complete the navigation of this splendid river by and by, and thus holders of land are not very anxious to sell at a cheap rate; and as the Board of Works has constructed, at an expenditure of upwards of twenty thousand pounds, timber slides, along all the worst rapids by which the lumber is taken to the mouth of the Trent, a certain importance is now attained for this river which did not before exist; but this is of very little use to Seymour, in which, new as the towns.h.i.+p is, all the best pine has already been culled and cut down by the lawless hordes of lumberers, who, of course, no longer consume any of the farm produce; yet it adds to the importance of the river generally.
The first settlers in Seymour were lumber merchants, who, seeing the wealth of the country in pine, and oak, and ash, the great fertility of the soil, and the facilities afforded everywhere for erecting mills, established themselves permanently, and, before the agriculturists were induced to think of it, had removed from all land within miles of the river the only valuable timber that the towns.h.i.+p contained. Thus one source of profit, and that a very great one to the farming settler, has been destroyed, and the enterprising timber-merchant has established at convenient distances several saw-mills, where his lumber is converted into plank and boards for the lower markets, and where he is at all times ready to saw whatever timber the farmer has left into boards and planks for him, receiving so many feet of timber, and giving so many feet of lumber, as sawed timber is called, taking care of himself, of course, in the exchange.
The flour-mills at Percy proceed upon the same principle: a farmer brings sacks of grain and receives sacks of flour in exchange, said exchange being of course three to one, or more, against him.
Throughout Canada is this truck or barter system pursued, and very little money finds its way either into or out of the back towns.h.i.+ps, unless it be the receipts of the lumber-merchant from Quebec or the lakes. The lumber-merchant is, therefore, the lord of the Trent, or of any other great internal river, whereon are new settlements; and many of them have ama.s.sed large fortunes.
Thus came timber-slides, instead of ca.n.a.l, upon this splendid river, which must, as soon as the Murray Ca.n.a.l, on the Bay of Quinte, is undertaken, be also opened to navigation, as by it the richest part of Western Canada, both in soil and in minerals, will be reached, and a direct communication had in war-time from Kingston, the great naval key of the lakes, with Penetangueshene, and Lakes Huron and Superior.
I have not time now, nor would it amuse the reader, to give a detail of the project for ca.n.a.lling the Trent, part of which was well executed before the troubles of 1837; but the money was voted, and is not so enormous as to justify the non-performance of so important a public work. The timber-slides I look upon as mere temporary expedients.