Reminiscences of a Canadian Pioneer for the last Fifty Years: An Autobiography. Samuel Thompson
Bay territory, with the British flag displayed at each prow, was a sight never to be forgotten. And as they paddled, the woods echoed far and wide to the strange weird sounds of their favourite boat-song:—
"A la claire fontaine, M'en allant promener, J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle, Que je m'y suis baigné. Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, Jamais je ne t'oublirai."
From Lachine to the Coteau, thence by canal and along shore successively to Cornwall, Prescott, and Kingston, occupied several days. We were charmed to get on dry land, to follow our batteau along well-beaten paths, gathering nuts, stealing a few apples now and then from some orchard skirting the road; dining at some weather-boarded way-side tavern, with painted floors, and French cuisine, all delightfully strange and comical to us; then on board the batteau again at night. Once, in a cedar swamp, we were enraptured at finding a dazzling specimen of the scarlet lobelia fulgens, the most brilliant of wild flowers, which Indians use for making red ink. At another time, the Long Sault rapids, up which was steaming the double-hulled steamer Iroquois, amazed us by their grandeur and power, and filled our minds with a sense of the vastness of the land we had come to inhabit. And so we wended on our way until put aboard the Lake Ontario steamer United Kingdom for Little York, where we landed about the first week in September, 1833, after a journey of four months. Now-a-days, a trip to England by the Allan Line is thought tedious if it last ten days, and even five days is considered not unattainable. When we left England, a thirty mile railway from Liverpool to Manchester was all that Europe had seen. Dr. Dionysius Lardner pronounced steam voyages across the Atlantic an impossibility, and men believed him. Now, even China and Japan have their railways and steamships; Canada is being spanned from the Atlantic to the Pacific by a railroad, destined, I believe, to work still greater changes in the future of our race, and of the world.
CHAPTER VIII.
MUDDY LITTLE YORK.
When we landed at York, it contained 8,500 inhabitants or thereabouts, being the same population nearly as Belleville, St. Catharines, and Brantford severally claimed in 1881. In addition to King street the principal thoroughfares were Lot, Hospital, and Newgate streets, now more euphoniously styled Queen, Richmond and Adelaide streets respectively; Church, George, Bay and York streets were almost without buildings; Yonge street ran north thirty-three miles to Lake Simcoe, and Dundas street extended westward a hundred miles to London. More or less isolated wooden stores there were on King and Yonge streets; taverns were pretty numerous; a wooden English church; Methodist, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic churches of the like construction; a brick gaol and court-house of the ugliest architecture: scattered private houses, a wheat-field where now stands the Rossin House; beyond it a rough-cast Government House, brick Parliament Buildings uglier even than the gaol, and some government offices located in one-story brick buildings twenty-five feet square,—comprised the lions of the Toronto of that day. Of brick private buildings, only Moore's hotel at the corner of Market square; J. S. Baldwin's residence, now the Canada Company's office; James F. Smith's grocery (afterwards the Colonist office), on King street; Ridout's hardware store at the corner of King and Yonge streets, occur to my memory, but there may have been one or two others. So well did the town merit its muddy soubriquet, that in crossing Church street near St. James's Church, boots were drawn off the feet by the tough clay soil; and to reach our tavern on Market lane (now Colborne street), we had to hop from stone to stone placed loosely along the roadside. There was rude flagged pavement here and there, but not a solitary planked footpath throughout the town.
To us the sole attraction was the Emigrant Office. At that time, Sir John Colborne, Lieut. Governor of Upper Canada, was exerting himself to induce retired army officers, and other well-to-do settlers, to take up lands in the country north and west of Lake Simcoe. U. E. rights, i.e., location tickets for two hundred acres of land, subject to conditions of actual settlement, were easily obtainable. We purchased one of these for a hundred dollars, or rather for twenty pounds sterling—dollars and cents not being current in Canada at that date—and forthwith booked ourselves for Lake Simcoe, in an open waggon without springs, loaded with the bedding and cooking utensils of intending settlers, some of them our shipmates of the Asia. A day's journey brought us to Holland Landing, whence a small steamer conveyed us across the lake to Barrie. The Holland River was then a mere muddy ditch, swarming with huge bullfrogs and black snakes, and winding in and out through thickets of reeds and rushes. Arrived at Barrie, we found a wharf, a log bakery, two log taverns—one of them also a store—and a farm house, likewise log. Other farm-houses there were at some little distance, hidden by trees.
Some of our fellow travellers were discouraged by the solitary appearance of things here, and turned back at once. My brothers and myself, and one other emigrant, determined to go on; and next afternoon, armed with axes, guns, and mosquito nets, off we started for the unknown forest, then reaching, unbroken, from Lake Simcoe to Lake Huron. From Barrie to the Nottawasaga river, eleven miles, a road had been chopped and logged sixty-six feet wide; beyond the river, nothing but a bush path existed.
CHAPTER IX.
A PIONEER TAVERN.
We had walked a distance of eight miles, and it was quite dark, when we came within sight of the clearing where we were advised to stop for the night. Completely blockading the road, and full in our way, was a confused mass of felled timber, which we were afterwards told was a wind-row or brush-fence. It consisted of an irregular heap of prostrate trees, branches and all, thrown together in line, to serve as a fence against stray cattle. After several fruitless attempts to effect an entrance, there was nothing for it but to shout at the top of our voices for assistance.
Presently we heard a shrill cry, rather like the call of some strange bird than a human voice; immediately afterwards, the reflection of a strong light became visible, and a man emerged from the brush-wood, bearing a large blazing fragment of resinous wood, which lighted up every object around in a picturesque and singular manner. High over head, eighty feet at least, was a vivid green canopy of leaves, extending on all sides as far as the eye could penetrate, varied here and there by the twinkling of some lustrous star that peeped through from the dark sky without, and supported by the straight trunks and arching branches of innumerable trees—the rustic pillars of this superb natural temple. The effect was strikingly beautiful and surprising.
Nor was the figure of our guide less strange. He was the first genuine specimen of a Yankee we had encountered—a Vermonter—tall, bony and awkward, but with a good-natured simplicity in his shrewd features; he wore uncouth leather leggings, tied with deer sinews—loose mocassins, a Guernsey shirt, a scarlet sash confining his patched trowsers at the waist, and a palmetto hat, dragged out of all describable shape, the colour of each article so obscured by stains and rough usage, as to be matter rather of conjecture than certainty. He proved to be our landlord for the night, David Root by name.
Following his guidance, and climbing successively over a number of huge trunks, stumbling through a net-work of branches, and plunging into a shallow stream up to the ankles in soft mud, we reached at length what he called his tavern, at the further side of the clearing. It was a log building of a single apartment, where presided "the wife," a smart, plump, good-looking little Irishwoman, in a stuff gown, and without shoes or stockings. They had been recently married, as he promptly informed us, had selected this wild spot on a half-opened road, impassable for waggons, without a neighbour for miles, and under the inevitable necessity