A I ‘ f I V T 1 ' ■ \ 1 I r A''- CTui 4/t ^ ^ ^4l>^ SS^i ^ Crvt* J<{ - •*• .- • '-^ v; > ;V 5* i f -J: ‘ '’• * » • ■ • • , “I - .vv -.4s‘ ; • - • J I , . . ... l^r* t' ^ = ’ " : ' : r f*. -r;* :: ‘ ;'‘ • • ■' ’ i ^ rv>’r’ i.. , . • •• f • 'r* INTRODUCTION. ^ ’Tis pleasant sure to see one’s self in print ; A book’s a book, altho’ there’s nothing in’t.’ — Byron. When a man writes a book, the public, if they take any interest whatever in his lucubrations, wish to be informed on two points : firsts what were his motives for writing at all ; and, second, whether he is quali- fied to write on the subject he has chosen ; and as these desires are natural and reasonable, I shall wil- lingly gratify them at the outset. Some authors write for fame, some for money, some to propagate particular doctrines and opi- nions, some from spite, some at the instigation of their friends, and not a few at the instigation of the devil. I have no one of these excuses to plead in apology for obtruding myself on the public ; — for my motive, which has at least the merit of novelty to recommend it, is sheer laziness. — To explain this, it is necessary to state that, for some years past, I have been receiving letters from intending emigrants, con- taining innumerable queries respecting Upper Ca- nada ; — also from the friends of such children of the forest in posse, who seasoned the unpalatable task B i 2 INTRODUCTION. of writing on other people’s business with the assu- rance so consolatory to my vanity, that I was, of all men in the province, the one they considered best qualified to give such information, &c. These letters, always couched in the mpst polite terms, commenc- ing with the writer’s ‘ sincere sorrow for taking up so much of my valuable time,’ and ending with ‘ the most perfect reliance on my knowledge and can- dour,’ required to be answered ; and so long as they came ‘ like angel visits, few and far between,’ it was no great grievance to do so. But, after having written some reams in answer to them, and when every other packet brought one, and no longer ago than last week I had two to answer, things began to look serious, and so did I : for I found that, if they went on at this rate, I should have no ‘ valuable time’ to devote to my own proper affairs. And there- fore, it being now mid-winter, and seeing no prospect of my being able to follow my out-of-door avoca- tions fpr some weeks, I set myself down in some- thing like a pet, to throw together and put in form the more prominent parts of the information I had been collecting, to the end that I might be enabled in future to answer my voluminous correspondents after the manner of the late worthy Mr. Abernethy, by referring them to certain pages of My Book. As for my qualifications to give information rela- tive to this province, I have only to state, that it INTRODUCTION. 3 is now nearly twenty years since I first came to the country, having served here during the war in the years 1813, 14, and 15 ; and that, since the year 1826, my principal employment has been, to traverse the country in every direction, and visit nearly every township in it for the express purpose of obtaining statistical information. If, therefore, the reader will only be pleased to allow that my judgment is equal to that of the ordinary average of mankind, it must be pretty evident that I have sufficient knowledge for the undertaking ; and I, on my part, can assure him or her, (for I am in hopes I shall have both sexes for readers,) that 1 will, according to the formula of the oath, speak ‘ the truth, the whofe truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’ At the present moment, when public attention is so much turned to the Canadas, authentic informa- tion is much called for ; and though many works have been written on the subject, yet most of them have been inaccurate from want of information, or partial, in so far as the writer, being only acquainted with one section of the country, has described it as an epitome of the whole. From this censure, how- ever, we must exempt Mr. Gourlay, who wrote a really valuable and useful i statistical account of the province. But his work is now eight or nine years old ; and in a country like this, where the population doubles every seven years, and improvement goes on B 2 4 INTRODUCTION. with a rapidity altogether unknown in older countries, an old book on statistics is of little more use than an old almanac or newspaper. My endeavour in these pages shall be to give such information to emigrants, that they may not be dis- appointed on their arrival in Canada ; — that they may know how to proceed and where to go, and not, as too often happens, waste their time and their money in the great towns, making fruitless inquiries of people just as ignorant of the nature and capabi- lities of the country as themselves, with this differ- ence, that they are aware of their ignorance, whereas their advisers think they know something about the matter, and thereby often unintentionally mislead and deceive them. In looking over this my introduction, I find I have been most abominably egotistical ; — so much so indeed, that my printer, were I to continue through the work in this strain, might have the same excuse that poor John Ballantine had for his delay in print- ing a learned work by the Earl of B , viz. that he had not a sufficient number of capital Is in his printing-office. But if the reader will overlook this fault for once, I shall try to avoid it in future. Chapter L Who should come to Canada ? Come a* thegether, You *re a’ the welcomer ea^l3^ Sir W ALTER. I AM no great dab at political economy, though I once did study Adam Smith, and thought at the time that I understood him. But he is out of date now-a-days ; Peter M‘Culloch reigns in his stead, — and he and his compeers have turned political eco- nomy into what may be defined to be the science of paradoxes. But it is unfair to condemn what we cannot comprehend. However, though avowedly ignorant, I am not without my own theory on the subject of distress and emigration, and it is this : — From many causes, of which machinery is the most prominent, Great Britain can manufacture as much in ten months as all her customers can con- sume in twelve. It follows, therefore, that manu- facturers must be one-sixth part of their time out of employment. Now if this sixth were apportioned in the shape of one day in each week, the poor people might scramble through, by pinching a little from 6 ARTIZAN EMIGRANTS. the means they gained on the other five working days. But when it comes two or three months at a time, tlien commence distress and poor-rates, patriot- ism, and potato mobs in our manufacturing towns ; and in Parliament, what Dame Quickly would call ‘ an old abusing of God’s patience and the King’s English’ in a debate on ‘ the state of the country,’ — the cause of which state lies all the while too close under the noses of the disputants, to be visible to those who are looking for it with telescopes in the moon. The disease, then, is redundancy of manufac- tures and a paucity of consumers ; the remedy, to send the overplus of the manufacturing population to the colonies, where at one and the same moment they lose the character of manufacturers, and assume that of consumers : — and the manufactures consumed in this province are no trifle, as from the Custom House returns it appears that every man, woman, and child in these colonies uses, on an average, forty shillingsworth of British goods annually. Who then are to go to Canada to restore the equilibrium between demand and supply ? In the first place, all who cannot comfortably support them- selves by their labour at home ; because, let a man be ever so poor in this country, his wages as a labourer will more than support his family, — and if he be prudent and sober, he may in a short time save money enough to purchase for himself a farm, — and if he has a family, so much the better, as children are the best stock a farmer can possess, the artizan emigrants. 7 labour of a child seven years old being considered worth his maintenance and education, and the wao-es of a boy of twelve or fourteen years of age being higher than those of a stout and skilful ploughman in most parts of Great Britain, generally from three to four dollars a month, with bed, board, and wash- ing besides. At home they talk of ‘ a poor man with a large family but such a phrase in Canada would be a contradiction of terms ; for a man here who has a large family must, under ordinary circumstances, soon cease to be a poor man. Mechanics and artizans of almost all descrip- tions, — millwrights, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, tailors, shoemakers, tanners, millers, and all the ordinary trades that are required in an agri- cultural and partially ship-owning and commercial country, will do well to come to Canada, Weavers liave but little to expect in the way of their trade, though such of them as are employed in customer- work can make from ten to twelve shillings a day ; but they soon make good farmers. A friend of mine asserts, that they make better farmers for this country than agricultural labourers, alleging as a cause, that as they have no prejudices to overcome, they get at once into the customs of the country as copied from their neighbours, and being in the habit of thinking, improve on them. But my friend is from Paisley, and, consequently, prejudiced in favour of weavers. However, there is no denying that the weavers from Renfrew and Lanark shires, in the Bathurst district. 8 ARTIZAN EMIGRANTS. are very good and very prosperous settlers ; and that the linen weavers from the north of Ireland make the best choppers, native or imported, in the province, as they, to a man, can chop with either hand forward, and by clianging their hand they relieve themselves and obtain a rest. This ambi-dexterousness is ascribed by their countrymen, how justly I know not, to their habit of using both hands equally in throwing the shuttle. Of these trades, the blacksmith, tailor, shoemaker, and tanner, are the best. If there were in nature (which is doubtful) such a being as a sober black- smith, he might make a fortune. One exception there is, however, in the case of mechanics. First-rate London workmen will not re- ceive such high wages, either positively or relatively, as they would at home, — for this reason, that there are few on this continent who either require or can afford work of the very first order, and those that do> send to London for it. Farmers and tradesmen of small capital will find in Canada a good investment. A farmer who com- mences with some money, say 250/., ought, in the course of five or six years, to have all his capital in money, and a good well-cleared and well-stocked farm into the bargain, with the requisite dwelling- house and out-buildings on it, besides having sup- ported his family in the meantime. Unless a man of large capital, by which term in this country I mean about 5000/., has a large fa- CAPITALISTS. 9 mily, lie had better lend the surplus on mortgage at six per cent., than invest it in business, except he means to become a wholesale storekeeper in one of the towns. If he attempts to set up a mill, a distil- lery, a tannery, a fulling and saw mill, and a store, as is often found to be profitable from the one trade playing into the hands of the other, and if he has not sons capable of looking after the different branches, he must intrust the care of them to clerks and ser- vants. But these are not to be had ready-made : — he must, therefore, take a set of unlicked cubs and teach them their business ; and when that is fairly done, it is ten to one but, having become acquainted with his business and his customers, they find means to set up in opposition, and take effectually the wind out of their former patron’s sails. Where, however, a man has a large family of sons, he can wield a large capital in business, and to very good pur- pose too. A man of fortune, in my opinion, ought not to come to Canada. It is emphatically ‘ the poor man’s country j’ but it would be difficult to make it the country of the rich. Though the necessaries and most of the luxuries of life are cheaply and easily procured ; yet the elegancies of life, refined or literary society, public amusements, first-rate libraries, col- lections of the fine arts, and many things that are accounted almost as necessaries of life by the higher ranks, belong, of necessity, to a state of society much 10 JUVENILE EMIGRANTS. more advanced than the Canadas, or, perhaps, even the American continent can as yet pretend to. It is a good country for a poor man to acquire a living in, or for a man of small fortune to economise and pro- vide for his family; but I can conceive no possibility of its being for centuries to come a fitting stage for the heroes or heroines of the fashionable novels of Mr. Bulwer or young D’Israeli. There is one species of emigration, which it is astonishing should never have struck the authorities at home, and which would be most beneficial to all parties, — I mean juvenile emigration. The idea was suggested to me nearly six years ago by my late worthy and excellent friend. Major William Robinson, of the King* s regiment, a gentleman in- timately acquainted with the province, where his name is endeared to the inhabitants by his determined bravery, added to a gaiety and good humour, which rendered him at once the favourite of all ranks and classes, and the most efficient partizan leader, with the exception of, perhaps. General Brock, that Ca- nada possessed during the arduous struggle with the United States. From the time I returned to the country I have consulted many hundreds on the feasibility of the scheme, and, in every instance, have been assured, that it was not only practicable, but would be highly beneficial to all concerned ; the plan is briefly as follows ; — JUVENILE EMIGRANTS. 11 Let a number of parish children, of from six to twelve years of age, be sent out to Canada under a qualified superintendent. Let there be established in every county, or in every two or three townships, if necessary, a com missioner, or board of commissioners, to receive ap- plications from farmers, mechanics, and tradesmen! wanting apprentices or servants, taking from them, at the same time, a bond with securities, that they will teach them their trade, craft, or mystery, — keep them, educate them, and, when their apprenticeship is up, give a small sum, (say 25Z.,) to set up in business those who have been indented apprentices. With younger children, whose work will not at first be equal to their maintenance, it will only be neces- sary to bind the person taking them to educate them ; for, by a law of the province, parents, or persons standing in loco parentis^ are entitled to the work of their children or wards, till they attain the age of majority. The objection that would strike an Englishman most forcibly to such an arrangement, would be the possibility of the children being ill-treated ; but this is hardly a supposable case in this country. Their labour is too valuable for their master lightly to risk the loss of it by ill-usage, when the boy could so easily abscond ; and in this country, the fault of fa- thers and masters leans more to the side of a total disregard of King Solomon’s advice as to the pro- priety of using the rod for the purpose of promoting 12 JUVENILE EMIGRANTS. infantine morality, than an over-zealous conformity with the dicta of the inspired writer. Besides, public opinion would always side with the child; and as, if this plan were to be carried into effect, the children must, in some degree, be considered as wards of the king, the legislature could easily pro- vide some simple and summary means, whereby any injustice or infraction of agreement might be punished promptly and efficaciously. The advantages of this system must be apparent to all. Parishes would get rid of young paupers, who, in the course of time, grow up, and, perliaps, become a heavier burden on the parish by the addi- tion of a family, — and would get quit of them too at an expense not exceeding one fourth of what an adult could be removed for, — seeing that 4Z. would be the maximum for which they could be conveyed to Canada. And here we should get settlers at an age when they could be easily habituated to the work, the climate, and the wavs of the country. It will most probably be found a bad plan to bring out adult parish paupers ; — for of course the gentry and yeomanry of a parish will strain every nerve to keep at home the honest, industrious, and sober part of the peasantry, and send us out only the drunken, the vicious, and the idle, who here, as elsewhere, will be a burden on the community, and have not the slightest prospect of improving their own condition. There is one security, however, that we must always have against such a contingency, namely, that the PREPARATIONS FOR EMIGRATION. 13 rapscallionly part of the community, knowing that, if they remain 'in England, the parish must maintain them, and that if they go to Canada they must work for their living, may not be easily induced to quit their present advantageous position. Chapter II. * Bake me a bannock, and roast me a collop, and I’ll go and pouse my fortune .’ — Scotch Nursery Tale, Preparations for Emigration, When a man has determined to quit home, and settle himself in a foreign land, and he should not do so on slight grounds, much trouble and vexation may be saved by his taking a little good advice, and that we are about to give in this chapter, in so far as emigration to Canada is concerned. It cannot be too strongly impressed upon emi- grants the inexpediency of carrying to the woods of Upper Canada heavy lumbering articles of wooden furniture. All these can be procured here for far less than the cost of transport from Quebec and Montreal. The only exception to this rule is, when a person has valuable furniture for which he cannot get any thing like a reasonable price at home ; and in that case, it may be cheaper to carry it to Canada 14 CLOTHING MEDICINES. than to sacrifice it in England. But as a general rule, mahogany furniture is not in keeping with the rest of a Canadian establishment ; and our own black walnut makes, in my opinion, more handsome furni- ture than mahogany, and possesses this great advan- tage over its more costly and exotic neighbour, that it does not so easily stain, — a property which saves much scrubbing and not a little scolding in families. Clothes, more particularly coarse clothing, such as slops and shooting jackets, bedding, shirts, (made, for making is expensive here,) cooking utensils, a clock or time-piece, books packed in barrels, ho- siery, and, above all, boots and shoes, (for what they call leather on this continent is much more closely allied to hide than leather, and one pair of English shoes will easily outlast three such as we have here,) are among the articles that will be found most useful. As a general rule also, every thing that is made of metal, (for ironmongery is very dear,) as well as gardening and the iron parts of farming tools, and a few of the most common carpenters* tools, can never come amiss ; for though a man may not be artist enough to make money as a carpenter for other people, he may save a great deal himself by having the means within his reach of driving a nail or put- ting in a pane of glass. A few medicines ought to be taken for the voyage, and those chiefly of the purgative kind, as ships are very frequently but in- differently furnished with a medicine chest. Among these I would recommend Anderson’s, or any other CHOICE OF A SHIP. 15 of the aloetic and colocynth pills, Epsom salts, mag- nesia and emetics, made up in doses. If you take Seidlitz powders, or soda powders, or any of that tribe of acids and alkalies, let them be made up in phials, well stopped, not, as usual, in papers, for in that case they will get melted, or (as the learned express it) deliquate, before the passage is half over. With these phials will of course be required mea- sures, to take out the proper proportions of each powder. Fishing and shooting tackle ought also to be taken ; but of these I shall come to speak more at large when I treat, as I mean to do in a separate chapter, of the field-sports of Upper Canada. In the choice of a ship, steerage passengers should look out for one high, roomy, and airy between decks ; and there can be no great difficulty in finding one of that description, as a very great number of the timber ships are so constructed. A fast sailer also should be preferred ; for the difference of a fort- night or three weeks in arriving at your destination may make the difference of nearly a year’s sub- sistence to the emigrant. If he arrive in time to put in a small crop of potatoes, turnips, oats, Indian corn, and a little garden stuff, it will go a great way towards the maintenance of a family for the first year, as it will enable them to feed pigs and keep a cow, which they could not otherwise accomplish. For a similar reason, it will be to the obvious advan- tage of all settlers to come out in the earliest ships that sail. 16 MONEY. To all passengers, but more especially to those of the cabin, a civil, good-tempered captain ought to be a very great inducement to sail in his ship, — as much of the comfort or discomfort of a voyage de- pends upon him. There are many of the regular traders between Montreal and Greenock and Liver- pool who answer this description, as well as on the London and Liverpool lines to New York. And to any person who goes by the latter route, I would strongly recommend my worthy, though diminutive friend. Captain Holridge of the G. Washington, by much the best ship and the best captain on the line. Above all, passengers of every description should ascertain, that the captain with whom they sail is a sober man ; for the most fatal accidents may occur, and have occurred, from drunkenness on the part of the officers of the ship. I prefer coming to Canada via Montreal, as it saves money, time, and tranship- ment of baggage. It is a question often asked, how should money be taken to Canada ? I reply, in any way except in goods. Not that I have not often known that mode of bringing it prove highly profitable ; but it is a risk ; few who come out being good judges of the price of goods at home, and none of them knowing what kind of goods will suit the Canada markets. British silver or gold make a very good investment ; as the former is bought up by merchants and trades- men, and used to purchase bills on the Treasury through the Commissariat, and the latter is remitted PROVISIONS. 17 by the same classes to meet their engagements in England. A sovereign generally fetches 23s. or 24s. currency, that is 5s. to the dollar ; — Is, sterling passes for Is. 2d, currency ; — so that either descrip- tion of bullion gives a good remittance. One great objection, however, to bringing out money, is the liability there is of losing or being robbed of it : so that, upon the whole, the better way perhaps may be, to lodge it at the Canada Company’s Office in St. Helen’s Place, taking an acknowledgment ; and then you can draw upon the fund from Canada, re- ceiving the premium of the day on the exchange. People who find themselves on the outward voy- age should lay in a very considerable quantity of potatoes and oatmeal, not only because these arti- cles are cheap, but because they have a tendency to correct the scorbutic qualities of salt meat. A few onions and leeks likewise will be found a great com- fort on a long voyage, as also a good supply of vinegar and pickles. Emigrants would find their account in bringing out small quantities of seeds, particularly those of the rarer grasses, as lucern, trefoil, &c. ; for if they did not need such articles themselves, they would find plenty who would buy them at a high price. To these may be added some small parcels of potato oats, and of the large black oat of the south of Ireland for seed, as that grain, if not renewed, degenerates into something little better than chaff in the course of time. c 18 STOCK. All kinds of good stock are wanted here, and those who can afford it will always find their account in bringing such. Pigs are valuable, in many parts of this country, according to the size to which they can be fatted. Thus, supposing a hog which weighs 2 cwt. fetched twopence halfpenny per lb., one weighing 3 cwt. would fetch threepence, and so on, adding a halfpenny per lb. for each cwt. of the weight. A good bull would also be of great value ; and it is my firm belief, that we have not a first- rate draught stallion in the province. I have no doubt, moreover, that a Clydesdale cart-horse, a Suffolk punch, or even a moderate-sized Flanders stallion, would be a good speculation. The best description of working cattle we have is the Lower Canadian horse, wdiich has many of the properties and much the appearance of the Scotch galloway : he is strong, active, and indefatigable in harness, but makes a bad saddle horse, as he is often not sure-footed. A breed between this and the Ame- rican horse makes a good, useful farm-horse ; and it is possible that a cross between the Canadian mare and the Flanders horse would make something like the Clydesdale, — tradition asserting, that the an- cestors of the Carnwath breed sprang from a cross ' of some Flanders mares brought to Scotland by the Duke of Hamilton with the galloway stallions of the country. As to dogs for household use, the English sheep- dog or Scotch colley, or the lurcher, would be highly SALT FOR CATTLE. 19 valuable, particularly if trained to bring home the cattle, which often stray in the woods and get in- jured by not being regularly milked. With careless settlers, indeed, one half the day is often spent in hunting up and driving home the oxen. It has often struck me, that much time and trouble might be saved in collecting and bringing home the cattle, by taking out a few hundred weight of rock salt from Liverpool. In Cheshire they used to prepare lumps, for the purpose of putting in sheep- walks, by cutting them in the form of a ball, so that the rain ran off them without melting them. These might be put in certain places of the woods, and the cattle would not stray far from them ; and they might be removed from time to time, as the pasture became scarce. Wherever there is a salt spring, or a salt ‘ lick,' as salt earth is called in this coun- try, the deer and cattle flock to it from all quarters. A friend of mine had one on his farm, and no fence could keep off these intruders ; till at last he was obliged to come to a compromise with the four- footed congress, and fairly fenced in a road to the spring, and by this species of Whig conciliation, by a sacrifice of part of his rights, saved the rest of his property. When you arrive in the St. Lawrence, having been on shortish allowance of water, you will be for swallowing the river water by the bucketfull. Now, if you have any bowels of compassion for your intes- tinal canal, you will abstain from so doing ; — for to c 2 20 LANDING AT QUEBEC. people not accustomed to it, the lime that forms a considerable constituent part of the water of this country, acts pretty much in the same manner as would a solution of Glauber’s salts, and often gene- rates dysentery and diarrhoea ; and though I have an unbounded veneration for the principles of the Tem- perance Societies, I would, with all deference, re- commend, that the pure fluid be drank in very small quantities at first, and even these tempered with the most impalpable infusion possible of Jamaica or Cognac. Chapter III. ‘ Lord, have compassion upon me a poor unfortunate sinner, three thousand miles from ray own country, and seventy-five from any where else.’ Irishman's Prayer in the woods between New York and Canada. A,D. 1784. What is to be done on Landing at Quebec ? If you are a rich man, and it makes no difference to you what money you spend, or how soon or late you settle ; then, as you are at Quebec at any rate, your best plan will be to go to Paine’s hotel, visit the heights of Abraham, the fortifications of Cape Diamond, the cathedral and the convents, make an excursion to Montmorenci and Lorette, and do all FORWARDING OF SETTLERS. 21 the other things that the ‘ Guide Book’ and ‘ The Picture of Quebec’ can tell you much better than I can. But if you have no money to throw away, and wish to have snug quarters for yourself and your family next winter, you will not stay one hour in Quebec, or ill any other town, longer than you can possibly avoid, — but get your luggage on board the Montreal steam-boat, and be off if possible in ten minutes after anchor has been let go ; — for by daudling about Quebec, Montreal, Kingston, and York, you will spend more money and lose more time, than, if pro- perly employed, might have lodged and fed yourself and family during the first and worst year of your residence in the new world. The Canada Company have an agent at Quebec for the purpose of for- warding emigrants, who makes contracts with a class of common carriers, called forvvarders ; and any emi- grant, whether he intends to settle upon the Com- pany’s lands or not, may avail himself of this advan- tage by applying to their agent, and will thus be transported to the head of Lake Ontario more cheaply and expeditiously than he otherwise could be, were he to make his own bargain. It would be well for all emigrants to take advantage of this arrange- ment. If you have friends already settled in the province, the best thing you can do, is to write to them to select land for you in their own neighbourhood, if possible, and to enter into such preliminary arrangements as will enable you to take possession the moment you 22 PURCHASE OF LAND. arrive, and lose not a day in setting to work upon your farm. If you do not possess this advantage, you ought to proceed to York, the capital of the province, where the greatest quantity of land is for sale, and there fix on the proper place to set up your staff. If you have little or no money, you may apply to the agent for emigrants, who will put you in the way of procuring lands at a cheap rate, and on easy con- ditions, in the back townships ; or, if you prefer work- ing to enable you to pay for lands in a better-settled country, he may probably inform you where good wages can be procured. If you have money enough to pay a first instalment and keep yourself and family for a year, you had better apply at the office of the Canada Company or the Crown Commis- sioner, where you will receive every information as to the lands most suitable to your circumstances and views, and learn the terms on which they are willing to sell them. Those of the Canada Company are generally as follows : — Having fixed upon a lot, you offer the price at which their surveyors have valued it, and on paying a first instalment of one-fifth down, and signing five notes of hand, each for one-fifth of the remainder payable yearly with in- terest, till the whole is liquidated, you receive what is called a letter of license, which at once acknowledges the receipt of the money paid, and gives you full possession of the lands ; and when the last promissory note is paid off, you receive a PURCHASE OF LAND. 23 regular deed for the lands, and forthwith become entitled to all the privileges, dignities, and immuni- ties of Canadian freeholders. Strangers in the pro- vince sometimes get taken in, in an unscriptural sense of the term, by purchasing lands from indivi- duals with defective titles, or no titles at all. If the party pays the whole money at once, this risk may be obviated, as there is a register office in each county, and by consulting that, he can ascertain if any and what burthens are upon the estate : but if he is to pay the purchase-money by instalments, he must depend wholly on the character of the seller; for even though he register his lien on the farm, he is* laying out his labour and money on it, which is enhancing its value to a much greater amount than the mere repayment of his instalments will cover. If you have no particular motives to induce you to settle in one part of the province more than another, I would recommend to you the Canada Company’s Huron Tract, and for the following rea- sons : — 1st. The land, as I shall have occasion to show^ is equal to any in the province, and superior to much the greater part of it. 2d. The very great extent of land (nearly eleven hundred thousand acres) gives the settler an exten- , sive power of selection, which he does not possess in any other part of the province ; and when a commu- nity, however numerous, comes out, they are enabled 24 PURCHASE OF LAND. to settle together, without any other party interfering with them. 3cl. It possesses numerous streams capable of driving any given quantity of machinery, whether for mills, manufactories, or farming purposes, and it has water-conveyance to carry away produce. 4th. Being from 120 to 400 feet above the level of Lake Huron, it is healthy, and the prevalent winds, the north-west, west, and south-west, blowing over the lake, which from its depth never freezes, temper the rigour of the winter frost and summer heat ; and the snow, which has always hitherto fallen in sufficient quantity to afford good winter roads, prevents the frost from getting into the ground, so that the moment it melts the spring commences, and the cattle have pasture in the woods fully three weeks sooner than in the same parallel of latitude on the shores of Lake Ontario — a great advantage to the farmer under any circumstances, but an invalu- able privilege to a new settler, whose chief difficulty is to procure feeding for his stock during winter. 5th. Crown and clergy reserves have long been a bar to the settlement and improvement of the pro- vince, though the nuisance is now, to a certain extent, abating by their sale on fair terms ; but no legislative enactment can secure the people against absentee proprietors, that is, persons about the government who have received large grants of land, or others who have purchased from these, and who hold them PURCHASE OF LAND. 25 till, by the labour of their neighbours, roads are cut, and their value increased. Now, in the Huron tract there are no reserves of any kind ; and as for absentee proprietors, the Company’s regulations compel all its settlers to clear about three and a half per cent, of their land annually for the first seven years. This is no hardship ; for a man, if he means to do good, will clear much more of liis own accord, and if he has no such intention, it is only fair to prevent him from injuring his neighbour. The Company has made good roads through the tract ; and this regulation, by making every farm be opened towards the road, not only keeps them so, from letting in the sun and air upon them, but secures the residence of eight families on every mile of the road, by whose statute labour it can be kept in the very best repair. It has been objected by some, that this tract of country is out of the world; but no place can be considered in that light, to which a steam-boat can come ; and on this continent, if you find a tract of good land, and open it for sale, the world will very soon come to you. Sixteen years ago, the town of Rochester consisted of a tavern and a blacksmith’s shop — it is now a town containing upwards of 16,000 inhabitants. The first time the Huron tract was ever trod by the foot of a white man was in the summer of 1827; next summer a road was commenced, and that winter and in the ensuing spring of 1829, a few individuals made a lodgment : now it contains upwards of 600 26 PURCHASE OF LAND. inhabitants, with taverns, shops, stores, grist and saw mills, and every kind of convenience that a new settler can require ; and if the tide of emigration con- tinues to set in as strongly as it has done, in ten years from this date it may be as thickly settled as any part of America, — for Goderich has water-powers quite equal to Rochester, and the surrounding coun- try possesses much superior soil. Emigrants are often anxious to purchase a farm partially cleared ; and for those who can afford it, this is a very good plan. But you must not let your English prejudices against stumps lead you, without further inquiry, to give an extravagant price for a farm where the stumps have disappeared ; for from the slo- venly mode of farming pursued in this country, these farms are often what are emphatically denominated exhaiistedy — that is to say, crop after crop of wheat has been taken off them until they are so completely deprived of the power of supporting vegetable life, that they will yield nothing ; and then when they will not retwrn the seed that is sown in them, the wily proprietor finds a greenhorn who wants a fine cleared farm, which he lets him have for a handsome con- sideration ; and next autumn the poor man discovers too late, that it will cost him more money to bring his purchase into heart, than would have bought and cleared a wild farm. To such an extent is this sys- tem carried, of growing wheat without relieving the land by a rotation of crops, or a single cart-load of manure, that I have known twenty-seven crops of PURCHASE OF LAND. 27 wheat taken off a field consecutively, and then, as a matter of course, if it cannot be sold, it is allowed to grow up with briars and brambles, and the owner sets himself to clear new land. Persons wishing to buy a cleared farm would do well to take a farm for a year or so, until they have acquired sufficient know- ledge of the country to be able to judge for them- selves as to what purchase would be eligible for the purposes they have in view. Chapter IV. Capt, B , — * Well, John, what kind of night have we had ?’ Servant . — ‘ AVhy, your honour, it snew a little in the fore part of the night, but towards morning it frizz horrid.* Dialogue between an Officer and his man John, Climate of Upper Canada. The people of England, generally speaking, are not aware that such a part of the world as Canada exists ; and those few whose researches have been so well conducted as to have arrived at that important fact, have heard of General Wolfe, who, in the reign of George the Second, took Quebec, and may pos- sibly have heard that Quebec was not worth the taking, — more especially if they have listened to the philosophy which proves that colonies are a burden to the mother country, or have read in Voltaire’s Can- dide, (I think, for having no books here except the 28 CLIMATE. Bible, I am obliged to quote from memory,) ‘ that France and England were then engaged in a contest for some acres of ice and snow in North America.’ Now to these worthy folk we are about to tell some- thing worth knowing. It never has been accountable to me, how the heat of the sun is regulated. There is no part of Upper Canada that is not to the south of Pen- zance, yet there is no part of England where the cold is so intense as in Canada; nay, there is no cold in England equal to the cold of Virginia, which, were it on the European side of the hemisphere, would be looked upon as an almost tropical climate. To explain to an European what the climate of Upper Canada is, we would say, that in summer it is the climate of Italy, in winter that of Holland ; but in either case we should only be giving an illus- tration, for in both winter and summer it possesses peculiarities which neither of these two climates pos- sess. The summer heat of Upper Canada generally ranges tow’ards 80° Fahrenheit ; but should the wind blow twenty-four hours steadily from the north, it will fall to 40° during the night. The reason of this seems to be the enormous quantity of forest over which that wind blows, and the leaves of the trees affording such an extensive surface of evaporation. One remarkable peculiarity in the climate of Canada, when compared with those to which w^e have likened it, is its dryness. Far from the ocean, the CLIMATE. 29 salt particles that somehow or other exist in the at- mosphere of sea-bounded countries are not to be found here ; roofs of tinned iron of fifty years’ stand- ing are as bright as the day they came out of the shop ; and you may leave a charge of powder in your gun for a month, and find, at the end of it, that it goes off without hanging fire. The diseases of the body, too, that are produced by a damp atmosphere, are uncommon here. It may be a matter of surprise to some to hear, that pectoral and catarrhal complaints, which, from an association of ideas, they may connect with cold, are here hardly known. In the cathedral at Montreal, where from three to five thousand people assemble every Sunday, you will seldom find the service interrupted by a cough, even in the dead of winter and in hard frost ; whereas, in Britain, from the days of Shakspeare, even in a small country church, ^ coughing drowns the parson’s saw.’ Pulmonary consumption, too, the scourge alike of England and the sea-coast of Ame- rica, is so rare in the northern parts of New York and Pennsylvania, and the whole of Upper Canada, that in eight years’ residence I have not seen as many cases of the disease as I have in a day’s visit to a provincial infirmary at home. The only disease we are annoyed with here, that we are not accus- tomed to at home, is the intermittent fever, — and that, though most abominably annoying, is not by any means dangerous : indeed, one of the most annoying circumstances connected with^ it is, that, instead of 30 CLIMATE. being sympathised with, you are only laughed at. Otherwise the climate is infinitely more healthy than that of England. Indeed, it may be pro- nounced the most healthy country under the sun, considering that whisky can be procured for about one shilling sterling per gallon. Though the cold of a Canadian winter is great, it is neither distressing nor disagreeable. There is no day during winter, except a rainy one, in which a man need be kept from his vvork. It is a fact, though as startling as some of the dogmas of the Edinburgh school of political economy, that the thermometer is no judge of warm or cold weather. Thus, with us in Canada, when it is low, (say at zero,) there is not a breath of air, and you can judge of the cold of the morning by the smoke rising from the chimney of a cottage, and shooting up straight like the steeple of a cliurch, then gra- dually melting away in the beautiful clear blue of the morning sky ; yet in such weather it is impossible to go through a day’s march in your great coat; whereas, at home, when the wind blows from the north-east, though the thermometer stands at from 55° to 60°, you find a fire far from oppressive. The fact is, that a Canadian winter is by far the plea- santest season of the year, for everybody is idle, and everybody is determined to enjoy himself. Between the summer and winter of Canada a season exists, called the Indian summer. During* this period, the atmosphere has a smoky, hazy effect. CLIMATE. 31 which is ascribed by the people generally to the simultaneous burning of the prairies of the western part of the continent. This explanation I take to be absurd ; since, if it were so to be accounted for, the wind must necessarily blow from that quarter, which is not in all instances the case. During this period, which generally occupies two or three weeks of the month of November, the days are pleasant, and with abundance of sunshine, and the nights present a cold clear black frost. When this disappears, the rains commence, which always precede winter ; for it is a proverb in the Lower province, among the French Canadians, that the ditches never freeze till they are full. Then comes the regular winter, which, if rains and thaws do not interfere, is very pleasant ; and that is broken up by rains again, which last until the strong sun of the middle of May renders everything dry and in good order. A satirical friend of mine gave a caricature account of the climate of the province, when he said that, for two months of the spring and two months of the autumn, you are up to your middle in mud ; for four months of summer you are broiled by the heat, choked by the dust, and devoured by the mosqui- toes ; and for the remaining four months, if you get your nose above the snow, it is to have it bit off by the frost. 32 Chapter V. ‘ ’Tis merry, *tis merry, in the good green wood, When the mavis and merle are singing, When the deer sweep by, and the hounds are in cry, And the hunter’s horn is ringing.’ Sir Walter Scott. Field-Sports in Canada. Having settled yourself, and got things into some kind of tolerable order and comfort, you will next begin to think how you may amuse your leisure hours. And in the midst of forests abounding with game, and lakes and rivers teeming with fish, (more especially if, as often liappens with the new settler, his principal food should be salted provisions,) the gun and the fishing-rod naturally suggest themselves, not merely as an innocent mode of passing an hour, but as the means of furnishing the family larder with the most savoury part of its contents. If any one doubted the doctrine of original sin and the innate perverseness of mankind, the conduct of the English emigrants arriving in this country would go a good way to convert him to a more or- thodox way of thinking. There have arrived in the province within these three last years perhaps 15,000 English agricultural labourers ; and it is no very great stretch of the imagination to suppose that FIFLD-SPORTS. 33 every twentieth man of them, when at home, was a poacher, or at least had some practical knowledge of the use of a fowling-piece, and had in his days infringed on the laws of the land in defiance of the wrath and displeasure of the squire, the denun- ciations of the parson, the terrors of the gaol, the treadmill, the hulks and Botany Bay, and the disgrace which attaches to one whose life is an ha- bitual war with the laws. Yet, when these fellows have been a few months in Canada, they no more think of shooting than if they were cockneys. And why ? Because here it would be not only a harm- less amusement, but an honest, respectable, and useful mode of making the two ends of the year meet, while there it was fraught with danger to both life and character. Accordingly we find, that York, on the banks of a lake, and surrounded by a forest, is not to say indifferently supplied, but positively without any thing like a regular supply of fish or game ; and when you do by accident stumble on a t brace of partridges, or a couple of wild ducks, you pay more for them than you would in almost any part of Great Britain, London excepted. In fiict, unless a man is himself a sportsman, or has friends who are so, and who send him game, he may live seven years in York, and, with the exception of an occasional haunch or saddle of venison, may never see game on his table. I wonder, would a total re- peal of the game-laws i^roduce anything of a similar effect at home ? D 34 FIELD-SPORTS. Few people, then, in this country, except such whose sporting propensities have still stuck by them, and some officers at the different garrisons, who want something to kill the time, engage in a regular day’s shooting ; but when a man goes into the woods, at any rate he takes his gun with him, in case he should fall in with a deer that might replenish his stock of provisions, or a bear whose skin he may wish to bor- row against next winter. Many gentlemen coming out to Canada think that, as the country is rough, nothing but the spaniel or setter will do. Tliere cannot be a greater mistake. A setter is useless when he is not under your eye, and that he never can be for any very long time in Canada: he is naturally rash and self-willed, and no error that he commits can with safety be passed over without a most unmerciful castigation, if you mean that he shall ever stand the least in awe of you ; but when he finds that only one fault out of ten which he commits can be detected, he will take his beating for that, in the hope that he will escape the next time, (for with animals, as with man, it is much more the certainty than the quantum of punishment that ren- ders it efficacious,) and you will soon find that he will scamper into the midst of a covey, and follow them full cry under your very nose. Therefore, before you sail for Canada, make a present of your setter Carlo to your cousin, who is going to the north next August for the grouse season ; — there his strength and travel will render him invaluable, his rough feet FIELD-SPORT?. 35 never be injured by the heather, and above all, the openness of the moor will enable his master to ob- serve his every motion at a mile’s distance ; and bring to this country your smooth-haired pointers, Juno and Ponto, whose more gentle, docile, and timid dis- positions will render them more amenable to your voice and whistle when out of your sight, and whom, if they do offend, one sound drubbing will overawe for four-and-twenty hours at least. In pheasant shooting the cocker would be useful ; for pheasants are found in swamps and close cover where it is very difficult to go; and when once sprung, the barking of the dog makes them sooner take to a tree again, where the continuation of the uproar at once makes them sit, and warns you where they are to be found. Of dogs that follow by scent, I should prefer the stag-hound ; and if he has a cross of the blood-hound, so much the better. Study his voice as sedulously as you would that of Mr. Braham or Madame Pasta ; for on his musical powers much of his usefulness as a member of society depends. His business is to hunt the deer into the water ; and as you must attack in a canoe, and may be at a great distance at the time, it is necessary that he should possess a suf- ficiently powerful bravura to let you know where you are wanted though three miles off. Greyhounds have been calumniated in this country. It is said first, that they won’t live ; and second, that they would be of^no use if they did. — I deny both the D 2 36 FlELD-SPOllTS. one assertion and the other ; for I have seen many live greyhounds in this country ; and though a small, thin-skinned, sillfy-haired, drawing-room pet of a Surrey hound cannot be expected to dash through thick cover that would endanger the safety of its slender limbs, yet, could a wolf-hound, or failing that, a strong, rough, wire-haired monster, such as is used in the hilly districts of Scotland, be intro- duced, I think he might prove effective in the woods with fox, deer, or wolf, and at all events would breed lurchers, — a highly valuable dog in this country, where we are apt to apply to the taking of game, the rule that Napoleon applied to the taking of nations, viz., that the end justifies the means. In fact. Trans- atlantic sporting is a very non quo sed quomodo kind of proceeding. Wherever there are vermin, terriers are invaluable. In Canada there are plenty of the former, therefore let the latter be brought hither. The Scotch wire-haired, black-muzzled, or the Eng- lish snow-ball, is the best. If you have a rifle, you may just as well bring it, or, if you have plenty of money, you may buy one from Nock, who is the best maker in London ; but if you have a good town-made double-barrel, a rifle is unnecessary, as a little ball-practice will enable you to put a ball into a playing card at thirty- five or forty paces, and that is as far out as, during the greater part of the year, you will ever see deer ; and by loading one barrel with shot, and the other with ball or buck-shot, you are in utmmque paratus. FIELD-SPORTS. 37 In India, the deer and tiger hunters have long ex- changed the rifle for the Manton, which from prac- tice they use with equal precision, and much greater quickness. There were, in the year 1818, three ofli- cers in one cantonment, any one of whom would liave taken a bet of three to one, that he would hit a cricket ball bowled away, with a single bullet. If, however, you prefer the rifle, you can get them in this country, coarsely finished to be sure, but perfectly true and cheap, at from bl. to 15Z. currency. In Canadian sporting, it is often necessary to fire at night, or in the imperfect light of the evening or morning. In that case you will find it a very great assistance to mark the barrel with a chalk line from the breech to the sight. This hint may be useful in coming home at night in England, when you often walk up a covey too tired with their day’s exertion to be wild. At the head of our quadruped game is the deer. He is larger than the fallow deer of England; and his horns, we should say, are turned the wrong way, and are differently shaped from those of the deer of Europe. They are found in great abundance in every part of the province. Deer-stalking is much practised ; but, to practise it with success, you must be acquainted with the topography of the neighbour- hood, and know the salt-licks and other haunts. Another way is, to let a canoe or raft float down a stream during the midsummer night with a bright light upon it. This seems to dazzle or fascinate the 38 FiELD-SPORTS. animal, who is fond of standing in the water when the mosquitoes are troublesome in the woods; and if the manoeuvre be skilfully managed without noise, he will allow you to come within a few yards of him ; — so near indeed will he allow you thus to approach, that there have been instances known of his having been killed with a fish-spear. The most certain and deadly mode of proceeding, however, is to send your dogs into the woods some miles from the banks of a lake or great river, and ‘ hark down’ on the scent, when he will be sure to run for the water, where you can knock him on the head from a boat or canoe. But even in this defenceless position you must not approach him rashly, for he gives an ugly wound with his horns ; and with the sharp hoofs of his fore feet, he has been known to deal such a blow as has sepa- rated the muscle from the bone of a man’s leg. You must, therefore, either shoot him, knock him on the head, drown him by holding down his head with an oar, or seize hold of him by the scut, and make him tow the boat until he is exhausted, and can be mas- tered. In deer-stalking, and, indeed, all kinds of sport- ing in this country, it is often necessary to camp out, -—that is, bivouac in the w^oods. This w^ould appear to a man who is curious in well-aired sheets as the next way to the other w^orld ; but in reality there is nothing either dangerous or unpleasant in the pro- ceeding. Every man carries with him in the woods, punk, that is, German tinder, a fungous excrescence of FIELD-SPORTS. 39 the maple, and a flint. With this and the back of his knife, a light is struck, and the ignited piece cut oiT from the mass. This is put into dry moss, and blown or swung round the head until it blazes, and thus a large fire of logs is kindled. Spruce and hemlock are stripped, and moss gathered to make a bed ; and if it be dry overhead, nothing further is ne- cessary, the party all sleeping with their feet turned towards the fire. If, however, it threatens rain, a tent or wigwam of bark can soon be erected, per- fectly weather-tight. And in winter this may be rendered more comfortable by shovelling the snow up on the walls so as to exclude the wind. When a bear runs away with one of your pigs, there is no use in going after him, hallooing, without a gun. You may scare him away from the mutilated carcass, but it will make but indifferent pork ; since, not being bred in Leadenhall or Whitechapel, he has but a slovenly way of slaughtering. But trace to where he has dragged it, and near sunset let self and friend hide themselves within easy distance, and he will be certain to come for his supper, which, like all sensible animals, he prefers to every other meal. Nay, it is highly probable, if he possesses the gal- lantry which a well-bred bear ought to have, he will bring Mrs. Bruin and all the children along with him, and you can transact business with the whole family at once. In hunting the bear, take all the curs in the village along with you. Game dogs are useless for this pur- 40 FIELD-SPORTS. pose; for, unless properly trained, they fly at the throat, and get torn to pieces or hugged to death for their pains. The curs yelp after him, bite his rump> and make him tree*, where he can be shot. The bear of Canada is seldom dangerous. He is always ready to enter into a treaty similar to what my Lord Brougham negotiated lately with Lord Londonderry, viz. let-be for let-be; but if wounded, lie is dan- gerous in the extreme. You should always, there- fore, hunt him in couples, and have a shot in reserve, or a goodly cudgel, ready to apply to the root of his nose, where he is as vulnerable as Achilles was in the heel. Some ludicrous stories are told of bear- hunting ; for Bruin is rather a humorist in his way. A friend of mine, witli his surveying party, ten men in all, once treed a very large one ; they immediately cut clubs, and set to work to fell the tree. Bruin seemed inclined to maintain his position, till the tree began to lean, when he slid down to about fifteen feet from the ground, and then clasped his fore-paws over his head and let himself tumble amongst them. *‘Tree-to^ — an American verb active, signifying to make any animal take to a tree. In Kentucky, and other places inter barbaroSj nigger hunting is a favourite sport. When a slave runs away so often that there is no hope of the terror of the cow*skin keeping him at home, a party is made up for a nigger- hunt, for the purpose of shooting him ‘ pour encourager les autres.’ It is looked upon as adding considerable zest to the sport, when you have the good luck to tree the nigger ; as then you can exhibit your dexterity, and, like Bob Acres, ‘ bring him down at a long shot.* FIELD-SPORTS. 41 Every club was raised, but Bruin was on the alert ; he made a charge, upset the man immediately in front, and escaped with two or three thumps on the rump, which he valued not one pin. When once they have killed a pig, if you do not manage to kill the bear, you will never keep one long ; for they will come back till they have taken the last of them ; — they will even invade the sacred pre- cincts of the hog-stye. An Irishman in the New- castle district once caught a bear Jlagranie delicto^ dragging a hog over the walls of the pen. Pat, in- stead of assailing the bear, thought only of securing his property ; so he jumped into the stye, and seized the pig by the tail. Bruin having hold of the ears, they had a dead pull for possession, till the whilliloo- ing of Pat, joined to the plaintive notes of his protege^ brought a neighbour to his assistance, who decided the contest in Pat’s favour by knocking the assailant on the head. A worthy friend of mine, of the legal profession, and now high in office in the colony, once, when a young man, lost his way in the woods, and seeing a high stump, clambered up it with the hope of looking around him. AVhile standing on the top of it for this purpose, his foot slipped, and he was precipitated into the hollow of the tree, beyond the power of extricating himself. Whilst bemoaning here his hard fate, and seeing no prospect before him save that of a lingering death by starvation, the light above his head was suddenly excluded, and his view of the sky, his only prospect, shut out by the inter 42 FIELD-SPORTS. ventioii of a dense medium, and by and by he felt the hairy posteriors of a bear descend upon him. AVith the courage of despair he seized fast hold of Bruin’s behind, and by this means was dragged once more into upper day. Nothing, surely, but the instinct of consanguinity could have induced Bruin thus to ex- tricate his distressed brother. Otters are abundant ; and I should think, were an otter pack brought out, the sport would be as good here as in England; but it has never been tried. The foxes are smaller and of a more delicate fur than ours ; indeed, the silver fox produces one of the finest furs we have. An animal, something between the hare and the rabbit, frequents the swamps. It is commonly trapped, and makes good soup, but is poor in any other shape. The racoon is hunted in marshy grounds, by moonlight, treed by dogs, and then either shot or killed by felling the tree. He is valuable for his fur, and when baked with potatoes his flesh is esteemed a delicacy. I never ate it myself, from prejudice, — which is the more inconsistent, as I do not object to a black squirrel, and have made a most comfortable breakfast off a liind quarter of a bear cub. The beaver is rarely seen, as you must look for him deep in the woods, he always flying the habitations of man. The varieties of the pole-cat kind are numerous, including the ermine. The wolf is the only very mischievous beast of prey we have, and he worries sheep ; but the legislature having FIELD-SPORTS. 43 offered a premium for their destruction, they will soon be thinned out. There is one curious phenomenon that may just as well be mentioned here as any where else — the ex- traordinary and unaccountable migration of certain animals of this continent. Squirrels, weazles, mice, moles, &c., appear in great numbers for a month or six weeks, and then as suddenly disappear — ‘ Come like shadows, so depart.' With the squirrel tribe tliis can be accounted for. This continent contains, perhaps, one thousand times as much uncleared as cultivated land ; and when the acorns and beech-! mast fail in the woods, the squirrels must seek for subsistence in the corn-fields. In the summer and autumn of 1828 , black squirrels were so abundant that the boys killed them with sticks or with blunted arrows, to such an extent that they sold their skins for five shillings per hundred ; since that time they are rarely to be met with in the cultivated fields. In the year 1827 , the party exploring the now Canada Company's Huron tract were much annoyed by an animal called by the inhabitants of the coun- try a mole, and by the French Canadians the same {iaupe)^ though it is more like the shrew-mouse than the European mole, except in the structure of its fore-paws, for it does not construct its mines and galleries in the earth, but among the roots of the grass and the leaves. These pests kept running over the faces of the party all night, poking their 44 FIELD-SPOPwTS. long slender noses up tlie nostrils and into the eyes of the poor 'people while asleep ; and, on one occa- sion, one of them commenced making a meal on the upper lip of an unfortunate Scotchman, who raised a cry that wakened the whole camp, under the conviction that the Indians had made a night attack on them. Whenever a fish was caught and laid on the beach, you were sure, if absent ten minutes, to find it deprived of its eyes ; and if for half an hour, four or five of them would have formed a lodgment in the abdomen, while as many more were lugging at its sides. In fact, so numerous were these vermin, that you killed many by treading on them. From that date, July, 1827, to the present, February, 1833, not one single solitary individual of the species has been seen on the same ground. Now, though we can account for squirrels, whose kingdom seems to be the top of the forest, and who Iiave the power of swim- ming rivers and traversing immense tracts of coun- try with a rapidity that nothing unwinged can equal, advancing and retiring like Cossacks, — how can we account for such slow, sluggish animals as I have described, who, if they had travelled above the surface, must have become a perfect banquet to the kites and owls, appearing and disappearing in the numbers stated? Some years ago, the Talbot settle- ment was invaded by an army of weazles, which boldly entered the houses ; and though from six to a dozen of them were kiiled every day, in one gen- FIELD-SPORTS. 45 tleman’s house, not a single female was ever found among the casualties. How can this be accounted for ? ‘ I pause for a reply, ^ as orators say. The wild turkey takes the lead of our Upper Ca- nadian feathered game. He is found in the London and Western Districts exclusively ; though I have heard, that in New England, he is domiciliated much farther to the north. He is large, weighing from 25 to 351bs., of a dark colour, which in some indi- viduals is lighter, and in others approaches to a leaden grey ; and is very like the domestic turkey of the country, which, there is little doubt, must in many instances hold the same relation to him as the half Indian (or ‘ bois brule,’ as the French call him) does to the original proprietor of the soil. You can only distinguish him from his civilized cousin by a quick, firm, light infantry step in his gait, and his independent, watchful look. At certain periods of the year he is any thing but shy. I have walked along the highway for half a mile at least, with a flock of fourteen of them marching in front of me all the time within easy shot : some of them marching in the middle of the road, some hopping up on the rail fences and running along them, some jumping over into the neighbouring field, but none showing any unreasonable fear of me. They are game, for pointers will set them ; and in lawns at home I have seen a pointer draw upon a turkey; but all that I have heard about dark flesh and game flavour I have found utter trash. If you 46 FIELD-SPORTS. shoot them, and do not bleed them, their flesh is not so white as that of the turkeys we see on our tables ; but so I suspect would be that of a domestic turkey if it were treated in the same way ; and as for the game flavour, so far as I can judge, I defy the lord mayor and court of aldermen to point out the differ- ence between a wild and a tame turkey, if placed on the table before them. Like all wild gallinaceous fowls, he runs like a Belgian ; and if you wing him and have not a dog, it is pretty certain, whether he escape death or not, he will escape you. I heard of a respectable, fat elderly gentleman who wounded one in a four-acre field, and who had nearly broken his wind in pursuing him and trying to hem him into a corner, when a Samaritan, passing by, recom- mended his trying the effect of another shot upon him, which succeeded to admiration, for he bagged him without further trouble. Wild geese and wild swans we only see in tran- situ, In Canada the climate is too hot for them in summer, and too cold in winter ; so they pass the former on the shores of Hudson’s Bay, and the latter among the jolly planters in the southern states, — thereby showing their good taste, for these last are the only body of gentlemen that as yet exists upon this continent. A bird called the partridge, though it is in reality of the pheasant kind, is found all over the American continent ; they are of two sorts, the spruce and the birch, so called from the different buds which they FIELD-SPORTS. 47 select for their food. The spruce partridge has often a disagreeable turpentine flavour, from the nature of its diet. These build upon the ground, but as soon as they can fly, perch upon trees. It is said, that, if you shoot the lowest first, you can sometimes bag the whole covey ; but I have never been able to get more than two shots at a time. Grouse are found on the plains of the Western District. They are like the European grouse, but smaller. I have never eaten any of them, so I can- not say any thing as to their taste or flavour, but they make good sport. The quail here I take to be a small species of the partridge ; for, whereas the quail of Europe is a bird of passage, that of America remains all the year- round, and faces even the severest winter, when they may be seen like chickens round the barns and farm- yards. They make excellent sport, as they are nume- rous and very swift on the wing. They are found abundantly in the Home, Gore, Niagara, London, and Western Districts. The snipe and woodcock are also abundant, — the former a little larger and the latter a little less than the English bird. In this country there are two sea- sons for shooting them, — the spring when they arrive to breed, and the autumn after the young have flown. In the latter season they are still found in families, — the old pair, and from three to five young ones. They are in great numbers in both provinces ; but in the neighbourhood of Sorel, in the Lower province, when 48 FIELD SPORTS. they arrive in tlie spring, they rise in such flocks, that YOU have only to fire in among them to bring down two or three at a shot ; and at Chippewa I have known a gentleman shoot 173 brace of snipe and woodcock in a day. There is a great variety of the duck tribe ; but the finest for sport is the wood, or tree-duck. He is ele- gant in his form, and with none of the aldermanic waddle in his gait that distinguishes the tame duck ; lie has a beautiful crest of about two inches long, which distinguishes him from every other of his species ; and he builds in a tree near a brook, so that tracing up the course of any brook you are pretty sure to meet with him. Every person who has been in America has described the interminable flocks of wild pigeons ; so I shall not trouble my reader on that score. Some two summers ago, a stream of them took it into their heads to fly over York ; and for three or four days the town resounded with one continued roll of firing, as if a skirmish were going on in the streets, — every gun, pistol, musket, blunderbuss, and fire-arm of what- ever description, was put in requisition. The con- stables and police magistrates were on the alert, and offenders, without number, were pulled up , — among whom were honourable members of the executive and legislative councils, crown lawyers, respectable staid citizens, and, last of all, the sheriff of the county : till at last it was found that pigeons, flying within easy shot, were a temptation too strong for FIELD-SPORTS. 49 human virtue to withstand ; and so the contest was given up, and a sporting jubilee proclaimed to all and sundry. The stream is no less prolific in sport than the forest and field. And if a man thinks proper, in the words of Izaak Walton, ‘ to be pleasant and eat a trout,’ he can gratify his taste tojany extent in Upper Canada. Trout are only found in the small streams, not in the larger rivers ; the large fish, pro- bably, making the latter unsafe quarters for them. They, generally speaking, are small, like those of the moorland-burns at home, but very delicately flavoured. When, however, mill-dams are erected on streams, tliey increase in size ; and in the beautiful clear streams, fed from springs in the Long Point coun- try, they are as large as I have seen them anywhere in England. The banks being overhung with trees, fly-fishing is rarely to be had, except you station yourself on a bridge or mill-dam ; but the bait they take at all seasons, from the middle of winter, when you catch them through a hole in the ice, to summer, when you wade down the middle of the stream with it floating before you. Not being acquainted with the ways of the world and the deceits of man- kind, a piece of beef is as good a bait for Canadian trout as any that can be found. Of other fish there is no lack ; and many of them have no European name, but are very good fish for all that. The pike, pickerel, maskanonge, black and white and rock bass, are to be trolled for ; the carp, E 50 FIELD-SPORTS. sucker, and mullet, are taken by net or spear ; the cat-fish, and some others, by night-lines. We have also the salmon and sturgeon ; but the former never visiting the salt-water, are not like the same fish we have at home. The white-fish are caught in such quantities as to be, even in the infant state of our fisheries, an' article of commerce; and the herring, which some people, with no more palate than a pig, compare to the Loch- Fine, are very numerous ; but the monarch of the Canadian waters is the Mac- kinaw trout, peculiar to Lakes Huron and Superior, which seldom weighs less than twentv, sometimes fifty, and in some rare instances has been caught ninety pounds weight, and for richness and flavour far exceeds any fish we have. As a general rule, the farther west you go, the better are the lake fish. Thus the fish of Erie are superior to those of Ontario, Huron to Erie, and Superior to all. Every settler who can afford it, and who intends to settle near a lake, ought to bring out a seine net with him. Spearing fish is a pretty amusement. It is done by standing in the bow of the canoe and motioning with your spear how you wish to be guided ; and it is much more productive at night by torch-light than in the day-time. But I would recommend all infant Neptunes, who are only learning the use of their tridents, to practise for some time in shallow water ; for so sure as they commence their career, they will let their zeal outrun their discretion, and upset the FIELD-SPORTS. 51 canoe at least twice for once they will strike the fish. It is only since writing the above that I fell in with the first volume of Moore’s Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald ; and I cannot describe the plea- sure I received from reading his vivid, spirited, and accurate description of the feelings he experienced on first taking on him the life of a hunter. At an earlier period of life than Lord Edward had then attained, I made my debut in the forest, and first assumed the blanket-cloak and the rifle, the moccasin and the snow-shoe; and the ecstatic feeling of Arab-like in- dependence, and the utter contempt for the advan- tage and restrictions of civilization, which he de- scribes, I then felt in its fullest power. And even now, when my way of life, like Macbeth’s, is falling ‘ into the sere, the yellow leaf,* and when a tropical climate, privation, disease, and thankless toil are combining with advancing years to unstring a frame the strength of which once set hunger, cold, and fatigue at defiance, and to undermine a constitution that once appeared iron-bound, still I cannot lie down by a fire in the woods without the elevating feeling, which I experienced formerly, returning, though in a diminished degree. And this must be human nature; — for it is an undoubted fact, that no man who associates with and follows the pursuits of the Indian, for any length of time, ever voluntarily returns to civilized society. What a companion in the woods Lord Edward £ 2 52 FIELD-SPORT?. must have been ! and how shocking to think that, with talents which would have made him at once the idol and the ornament of his profession, and affections which must have rendered him an object of adora- tion in all the relations of private life, — with honour, with courage, with generosity, with every trait that can at once ennoble and endear, — he should never have been taught that there is a higher principle of action than the mere impulse of the passions, — that he should never have learned, before plung- ing his country into blood and disorder, to have weighed the means he possessed with the end he proposed, or the problematical good with the cer- tain evil ! — that he should have had Tom Paine for a tutor in religion and politics, and Tom Moore for a biographer, to hold up as a pattern, instead of warning, the errors and misfortunes of a being so noble, — to subserve the revolutionary purposes of a faction, who, like Samson, are pulling down a fabric which will bury both them and their enemies un- del it. 53 CHAPrER V. Dutch dish stewed in its own grease.* — S hakspeare, ‘ As to ph3'sical causes (of commercial power) we shall place at their head the public roads, and establishments which facili- tate the transport and render safe the deposit of merchan- dise.* — D upin. Travelling and Communications in Canada, ' Formerly, that is to say, previous to the peace of 1815, a journey between Quebec and Sandwich was an undertaking considerably more tedious and troublesome than the voyage from London to Que- bec. In the first place, the commissariat of the expedition had to be cared for ; and to that end every gentleman who was liable to travel had, as a part of his appointments, a provision basket which held, generally, a cold round of beef, tin plates and drinking cups, tea, sugar, biscuits, and about a gallon of brandy. These, with your wardrobe and a camp bed, were stowed away in a batteau or flat- bottomed boat ; and off you set with a crew of seven stout, light-hearted, jolly, lively Canadians, who sung their boat songs all the time they could spare from smoking their pipes. You were accompanied by a fleet of similar boats, called a brigade, — the crews of which assisted each other up the rapids, and 54 TRAVELLING. at night put into some creek, bay, or uninhabited island, where fires were lighted, tents made of the sails, and the song, tlie laugh, and the shout, were heard, with little intermission, all the night through ; and if you had the felicity to have among the party a fifer or a fiddler, the dance was sometimes kept up all night, — for if a Frenchman has a fiddle, sleep ceases to be a necessary of life with him. This mode of tra- velling was far from being unpleasant, for there was something of romance and adventure in it ; and the scenes you witnessed, both by night and day, were picturesque in the highest degree. But it was tedi- ous ; for you were in great luck if you arrived at your journey’s end in a month ; and if the weather were boisterous, or the wind a-head, you might be an indefinite time longer. But your inarch of improvement is a sore destroyer of the romantic and picturesque. A gentleman, about to take such a journey now-a-days, orders his servant to pack his portmanteau, and put it on board the John Molson, or any of his family ; and at the stated hour he marches on board, the bell rings, the engine is put in motion, and away you go smoking and splashing and wallopping along, at the rate of ten knots an hour, in the. ugliest species of craft that ever disfigured a marine landscape. By land there are only two seasons when you can travel with any degree of comfort, — midsummer and midwinter. During the former part of the year, travelling on horseback is preferable, or in a light COOKERY. 55 waggon — during the latter, when there is snow on the ground, in a sleigh, which, from the smooth, gliding, half-flying sensation you experience, is by far the most deliglitful mode of land gestation (as the learned would call it) I ever experienced. Our inns are bad : that is to say, many of them clean and comfortable indeed enough, and the landlords almost uniformly civil and obliging, but the proverb of ‘ God sending meat and the devil cooks' never was so fully illustrated as in this coun- try ; for, with a superabundance of the raw material^ the manvfaciured ariicle of a good dinner is hardly to be found in a public-house in the province. The radical cause of this defect seems to me to be, that the cookery of America is derived from that of Holland ; so they are inferior pupils of an indifferent school ; — for, though both countries have produced painters of great eminence, I never have yet heard of either producing a cook of even moderate genius. Soup is unknown in these parts. The gridiron, if to be found at all, is only an ornamental, not a useful implement of an American kitchen ; its place is usurped by the frying-pan, and every thing is deluged with grease and butter. I saw some days ago, in the New York Spectator^ a clever announcement of a work about to be published, by a fair spinster from somewhere Mown East,' (as she herself, being a New Eng- lander, would say,) on American Cookery. The lady is benempt Miss Prudence Smith ; and it appears that, in America, the mysteries of cookery hitherto, 5G COOKERY. like those of the Druids of old, have been preserved by oral tradition, which this young lady is now about to collect, arrange, and classify in a code of Transatlantic culinary economics, and thus will be- come the Justinian and Napoleon of her national gastronomy — the Meg Dods and Hannah Glasse of the New World. I have no acquaintance with Prudence ; yet I sincerely wish her all manner of success in her patriotic and philanthropic under- taking; and in the mean time I shall, to give tlie reader a kind of notion of what he may expect, present him with a few receipts, as I saw them prac- tised in the kitchen of not the^ London tavern. To Dress a Beef Steak. Cut the steak about a quarter of an inch thick, wash it well in a tub of water, wringing it from time to time after the manner of a dish-clout; put a pound of fresh butter in a frying-pan, (hog’s-lard will do, but butter is more esteemed,) and when it boils, put in the steak, turning and ^peppering it for about a quarter of an hour ; then put it into a deep dish, and pour the oil over it till it floats, and so serve it. To boil Green Peas. Put them in a large pot full of water, boil them till they burst. Pour off one half of the water, leaving about as much as will cover them ; then add about the size of your two\fists of butter, and stir the whole round with a handful of black pepper. Serve in a wash-hand basin. COOKERY. 57 To Pickle Cucumbers. Select for this purpose cucumbers the size of a man’s foot, — if beginning to grow yellow, so much the better ; split them in four, and put them into an earthen vessel — then cover them with whiskey. The juices of the cucumber, mixing with the alcohol, will run into the acetous fermentation, so you make vinegar and pickles both at once ; and the pickles will have that bilious, Calcutta-looking complexion, and slobbery, slimy consistence, so much admired by the Dutch gourmands of this country. To make Butter Toast. Soak the toasted bread in warm milk and water; get ready a quantity of melted butter and dip the bread in it ; and place the slices stratum super stra- tum in a deep dish, and pour the remainder of the melted butter over 4;hem. How poultry is dressed, so as to deprive it of all taste and flavour, and give it much the appearance of an Egyptian mummy, I am not sufficiently skilled in Transatlantic cookery to determine ; unless h be by first boiling it to rags and then baking it to a chip in an oven. But I shall say no more on the subject, as it would be ungallant to anticipate Miss Prue. 58 CANALS. CANALS. If any man will only take the trouble to cast his eye over a map of the province, he will perceive that no country under heaven was ever so completely adapted for internal navigation. He will then see the line of the St. Lawrence and the lakes ; the line from the Bay of Quinte to Lake Simcoe, and that from the foot of Lake Ontario to the Ottawa by the Cata- raqui and Rideau ; from the Lake of the Thousand Islands to the Ottawa, by the Petite Nation ; from Lake Huron to the Ottawa, by the double line of Lake Simcoe and Lake Nippissing; and the nume- rous tributaries of all these, which very little expense would render navigable; — so that, were Mr. Brindley to rise from the dead, he would boldly pronounce that Nature intended all these as feeders to canals, to intersect the country in every possible direction. There is one thing that, as far as I know, is pecu- liar to Upper Canada, and the nearer parts of the State of New York, viz., that lakes have often two or more outlets running in different or opposite direc- tions. This affords great facilities in canalling ; for you have the reservoir on the summit level, and you have not to cut, (which is generally the most expen- sive operation in constructing a canal,) but merely to dam and lock the beds of these streams, as is done with the River Weaver in Cheshire, and the Rideau and the Cataraqui here. A bill too has passed the provincial Parliament this winter, authorizing the CANALS. 59 same to be done on the Grand River, or Ouse, which it is to be hoped will be the precursor of a similar improvement of every stream of any magnitude in the province. Twelve years ago the means of communication were as I described them. What are they now ? As soon as the ice which now binds our rivers and lakes shall have dissolved in the spring, or at all events long before they shall again feel the effects of the winter's frost, a vessel capable of crossing the Atlantic may sail up the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, the Rideau, the Cataraqui, Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and land her cargo at the Sault de Ste. Marie, which connects Huron with Superior, — an internal navigation of nearly fifteen hundred miles in extent. The first link of this noble chain is the Lachine Canal. It overcomes the first rapid that intercepts the navigation of the St. Lawrence between Mon- treal and Lachine. This canal was cut at the expense of the Lower Province. It is done in the most durable, substan- tial, and workmanlike style. It has five feet depth of water, and locks of twenty feet by one hundred. But if another canal is not cut in rear of the island of Montreal, these will be altered to the same size as those of the Rideau chain. This canal, with the assistance of one lock at Van- drieul, throws up the water to the level of the first rapid of the Ottawa, where a shore canal takes you 60 CANALS. up to that of the Chute h Blondeau ; and another, from the foot of the Longue Sault, puts you into an unbroken sheet of water, more resembling a deep narrow lake than a river, and extending sixty miles to the falls of the Chaudiere, where the Rideau joins it. The Rideau Canal is the principal branch of this splendid navigation through the interior of these pro- vinces, — a navigation which, among other benefits, brings into connexion with the markets of Montreal and Quebec (estimating the depth of two townships on each side of it) three millions of acres of arable land, which were either partially or totally shut off from communication ; and for any thing that the country gained by them, the greater part might as well have been totally barren. The principle on which this work is carried on, as far as extent at least goes, is new in engineering. Tlie rivers and lakes are raised at different points to the levels required by immense dams, some of which must sustain a pressure of an atmosphere and a half at the base, and by these means excavation to an enormous extent is saved. It commences at Kingston and ends at Bytovvn. The distance be- tween these two points is as yet not quite accurately ascertained, but it is believed to be about 130 miles. 61 Chapter VI. * We came into the land whither thou sentest us, and surely it floweth with milk and honey / — Numbers xiii. 27. Soil of Upper Canada, In describing the different parts of the province, I shall adopt the natural divisions indicated by the difference of the soil, rather than adhere to those arbitrary lines which form the political boundaries of districts and counties. For this purpose I would divide the province into three tracts, viz. — 1. The Eastern, comprising the land situated be- tween the two great rivers St. Lawrence and Ottawa, including the eastern Ottawa, Bathurst, Johnstown, and a part of the midland districts. 2. The Middle, which takes in all lands on the shores of Lake Ontario, containing the western part of the Midland district, the whole of the Newcastle district, and part of the Home and Gore districts. 3. The Western, that triangle formed by the three lakes and the River Detroit, and the Lake and River of St. Clair, being part of the Home and Gore dis- tricts, and the whole of the Niagara, London, and Western districts. Before going into the consideration of these dif- 62 SOIL. ferent divisions of the province, it may be as well to make a few general remarks that apply to them all. The eastern and western sections of the country possess relative advantages and disadvantages. The soil of the eastern portion is very inferior to that of the western ; and as the line of the River St. Law- rence and the lake runs about as much to the south- ward as to the westward, it follows of course, that the climate of the western must be much more mild than that of the eastern, and, also, that the winter is shorter by some weeks. To counterbalance these deficiencies, all kinds of produce fetch a higher price in the east than in the west ; for, as Montreal is the market of both, the eastern farmer gets as much for his produce in Mon- treal (where he can take it in a day, or a couple of days at the utmost, by water conveyance) as the price paid to the western farmer, added to the expense of transport from Lake Erie or Lake Huron to Montreal : besides, the eastern settler, from the proximity to market, can sell many articles of farm produce, which, in Canada, constitute the farmer’s most profitable return, — among which may be enu- merated potatoes, poultry, eggs, and fresh butter, which his western neighbour, unless situated near to York or a garrison, cannot dispose of. But, under all the circumstances, I would recommend settlers to go to the westernmost division of the province, that is to say, beyond the head of Lake Ontario, on the principle acted on by the Dutchman, that roads may SOIL. 63 improve and markets may be formed near you, but bad land will never become good. And so, to a great extent, it has already proved, — for the Welland and Rideau canals have greatly diminished the expense of transport, and every penny that is taken off the conveyance of wheat to market, of course goes into the pocket of the farmer. The price of labour is cheaper in the eastern por- tion of the colony than the west. This is owing to its proximity to the Lower Province, where the French Canadians work for wages not much, if at all, higher than those of a labourer in England, and the many poor emigrants, who have to work their way before they can manage to travel farther up the country, — also to the cutting of the Grenville and Rideau canals, which, on the principle of demand producing supply, brought a great many labourers together, and those who could not be employed on these public works were content to work for the farmers on moderate wages, rather than risk a long journey on the chance of getting a larger remuneration. This advantage, liowever, will most likely get more nearly equalized as the country fills up. EASTERN HALF OF EASTERN DIVISION. In treating of the eastern division of the province, I shall divide it into two parts ; the first, or eastern* most, consisting of the eastern and Ottawa districts nearly ; and, second, the westernmost portion, com- prising the Bathurst and Johnstown districts, with 64 SOIL. part of the midland, where a different geological formation obtains. The eastern portion of this division forms an irre- gular four-sided figure, about thirty miles in breadth and sixty in length. The surface is broken into gentle swells ; but there is not, in any part, anything that could with propriety be denominated a hill, although the ground rather nearer the Ottawa than the St. Lawrence may be some 300 feet or upwards above the level of either of the rivers. This forms a ridge running in a south-westerly direction, and terminating or disappearing at the south-west corner of the eastern district. At this point the height of land is so close to the St. Lawrence, that the river Petite Nation, which, after running about sixty miles, discharges itself into the Ottawa, arises within three-quarters of a mile of the river at Johnstown. On the top of this and other rises, the soil is light and gravelly, and contains large pieces of water-worn limestone and granite, with other masses of the same material, whose angular appearance seems to indicate their having come there more recently. The land in the bottoms, formed by the soil washed from these rises, is rich and deep, being generally a black loam. From the levelness of the country, cedar swamps are common in these bottoms; and these swamps, for the most part, contain strata of black and red peat-moss, though seldom to a greater depth than fifteen inches, which covers a rich productive clay soil, very much prized by the Lower Canadians for its SOIL. 65 properties of bearing repeated crops of wheat, without either manure or the trouble of cropping, and deno- minated by them terre glaise^ in contradistinction to the cold and unproductive clay, which they denomi- nate argille. This rich clay they plough in the autumn, and leave it to be pulverised by the action of the winter frosts ; then early in spring, before the frost is out of the ground, they sow it with spring wheat, — the moisture retained causes rapid germina- tion, and the crop is reaped soon after the autumn wheat. The best soil in this district is in the two townships of East and West Hawkesbury, and the lands lying on the banks of the Petite Nation river, though these last, from the flatness of the country, are subject to the inconvenience of being overflowed in the spring. In many places, indeed, to such an extent does this go, that along parts of the river, cleared passages through the woods, which in summer are used as roads for carriages, in spring perform the office of canals to float down rafts of timber to the main stream. The climate of the northern part of this division, being on a parallel with Montreal, is pretty much the same as in that quarter, but on the banks of the St. Lawrence it is much better : in fact, it is astonishing what a difference a degree of latitude in this country makes in climate. On the 16th December, 1826, when I was on my first visit to this quarter, they were driving about in sleighs on the Ottawa, while the plough was going on the banks of the St. Lawrence. F 66 SOIL. The principal villages in this part of the country are Cornwall, the capital of the eastern district, Williamstown, Hawkesbury, and L’Original, the ca- pital of the Ottawa district. WESTERN HALF OF EASTERN DIVISION. The greater part of this fs, perhaps, the least pro- ductive region in the whole province, and, probably, would not have been settled half so well as it already is, had it not been for fortuitous circumstances. The peace of 1815 came upon us suddenly; — all the colonial corps, and several regiments of the line, were disbanded, — and the regiments which were about to return to Europe left their seven years’ men in Canada. These, with their officers, were all en- titled to grants of lands, and also provisions and agri- cultural implements. Government saw that, if they settled all these in a group, they might open a new country at once, settle the men more beneficially for themselves and at less expense to the public, and secure besides a first-rate militia force at their command in case of emergency. Accordingly, their location was chosen more with a military than agricul- tural eye ; and they were placed in the rear of King- ston, which, from its local advantages, is and must always be the great naval depot of Upper Canada. This plan has perfectly answered the purposes for which it was intended ; for the men, so far from hav- ing forgot their military training, have taught it to their children ; and the very drummers, fifers, and buglers, SOIL. 67 though their instruments are handed to them only on the days of training, perform upon them as well as if they had been doing garrison duty from the day on which they were disbanded: — so that, should their services be required, the Bathurst district could pour down through the Rideau canal an efficient army of between four and five thousand men, commanded by officers of skill and experience, and garrison King- ston to overflowing, in twenty-four hours. The distress amonor the manufacturino’ classes in O O Scotland produced an extensive emigration in the years 1818-19-20, and 21; and the friends of these emigrants have been coming out in greater or smaller numbers every year since, and have proved valuable and useful settlers in and about the townships of Ramsay, Lanark, and Dalhousie, having brought from Scotland with them their desire of education and information. The best library in the province is in Dalhousie, supported by the contributions of the farmers. In 1826, when all these people were fairly settled, and had plenty of surplus produce to dispose of, but a great difficulty of bringing it to market, the very best market in the province came to their door. The Rideau canal began to be cut. As they could not supply provisions for so large a body of men, some part of the supply had to come from Montreal ; and this fixed the price at that of Montreal, with the addi- tion of tlie freight and carriage from Montreal to the Rideau, which might amount to fifty per cent. more. F 2 68 SOIL. Besides all this, they got work at high wages for themselves and their teams, which enabled them to extend their farms ; and now that the Rideau is finished, they are better situated with regard to a market than if their farms were on the banks of Lake Ontario. The strongest proof of the improvement caused by this great undertaking is, that lands, which in 1824 were valued at one shilling and threepence* would now fetch from twenty to thirty shillings per acre ; and the wealth thus produced has introduced among them a spirit of enterprise that goes far to overcome the natural disadvantages of the country they live in. The lands of this section of country, which are situated near the banks of either of the great rivers, are many of them positively bad, and none first- rate ; indeed, it may be taken as a general rule in this country, that the best land is never to be found on the very banks of either lake or river* The reason is, that in former ages, the waters, both running and standing, have been much higher than they are now ; and the land on their immediate banks consists of their deserted channels, com- posed of rock, stone, gravel, and sand, covered with a thin stratum of alluvium, the deposit of the sub- siding waters, augmented by the decay of the vege- table matter which may since have sprung up on their surface. Through the centre of this section runs the great granite chain, which, commencing on the northern SOIL. eg shores of Lake Huron, intersects the continent, and falls into the ocean on the coast of Labrador ; while a branch of it running, in a south-easterly direction, through the northern parts of this province, loses itself in the St. Lawrence, at the Lake of the Thou- sand Islands*, and its western ridge, crossing the continent towards the rocky mountains, is lost in the sea on the shores of the Pacific. The centre of the country, where the best land is found, is much broken by lakes, and in many places by large granite rocks, many of them from 250 to 300 feet in height ; but in the valleys and interstices there is much good land ; and whenever agricultural knowledge, accompanied by capital, shall be so far advanced as to induce the inhabitants to clear, drain, and cultivate the swamps, which, after all, are the richest lands in the province, an enormous quantity of produce will be supplied by them. CENTRE DIVISION. Of the whole midland district, with the exception of the peninsula of Prince Edward, it may be said, that the great portion of the land is bad, and that the * In speaking of the Lake of the Thousand Islands, which begins at Kingston, and ends near Brockville, if we wish to be precise, we should add, like the Irish attorney who challenged a gentleman to meet him in the Fifteen Acres, ‘ be the same more or less,’ for there are upwards of sixteen hundred of them, of all sorts, shapes, and sizes, and a sail through them presents a scene of constantly-changing romantic beauty, unequalled,. I believe, in any part of the globe. 70 SOIL. good and fertile lots are the exceptions to the general rule. The surface for the most part is stony, rocky, or swampy, of a light description, and such as with- out manuring must soon be exhausted. To atone in some degree for this deficiency in fertility, it abounds, however, with valuable minerals, and on that account may one day become of great importance to the province. Iron ore is found in all its different shapes of bog, sand, and stone ore, but all of them unparalleledly rich. Marble, too, of different kinds, is also found ; and this may be considered as the best field for the mineralogist in the province, as the strata seem here overturned and intermixed in a way very different from the regular forms of hori- zontal alluvial stratification observable in almost every other quarter. The quantity of iron ore found in this neighbourhood induced a gentleman to lay out a large sum of money some time ago in build- ing very extensive iron-works at Marmora; but they have not answered the expectations of their pro- jector. This failure arose principally from a large portion of the money being injudiciously expended in grist mills, and oilier buildings, by no means necessary for the purposes of smelting or forging iron, and partly from the difficulty of conveying their wares to market, the works being situated far from water conveyance. But were practical people to buy up the works at their real value, (not the price for which they were erected,) and lay out a SOIL. 71 few thousand pounds in rendering the Trent and Crow rivers navigable, there can be little doubt that in a short time the concern might be made to yield a profit sufficient to satisfy reasonable men, though not to become that El Dorado which could only have existed in the heated imaginations of its original projectors. The county of Prince Edward is an irregularly-shaped peninsula, forming the outer or southern side of a beautiful arm of Lake Ontario, called the Bay of Quint6, — a sail up which presents one of the most romantic prospects of which the colony can boast. This peninsula contains a very great proportion of good table land, consisting of a rich mould, resting upon limestone rock, which is the best soil known in America for summer crops, as it never becomes exhausted. The low lands, in many parts, require some draining ; there is much of it fine pasture ; good pine and white cedar abound — but beech and maple form the most com- mon wood : the tract is tolerably well watered, but being all but an island, there are no large streams ; and the farming seems to be carried on in a more successful manner than in many other parts of the province. There are a good many Quakers and Low Dutch among the inhabitants of this region ; and these, though generally ignorant, and prejudiced in favour of the wisdom of their ancestors, to such an extent that many of them commence sowing, reaping, and other agricultural operations on the day of the 72 SOIL. iTionth which tradition has sanctified as the proper day for such labours, without paying the slightest attention to existing circumstances, are almost uni- formly men of sober, steady, and industrious habits ; and such, in all countries, will render success in business probable, but in this certain. At the head of the Bay of Quintd, the land begins to improve ; and in what is called the Rice Lake County, that is, the centre of the Newcastle dis- trict, it is first-rate. This land was the scene of an experiment in emigration some years ago. The Honourable Peter Robinson, under the orders of government, brought out a great number of poor emigrants from the south of Ireland, and settled them here. So far as concerns the beneficial effects of emigration to the emigrants, the experiment has succeeded beyond the expectation of the most san- guine ; for, from being absolutely pennyless, they are now in the most comfortable and independent, and many of them in even what may be called affluent, circumstances. Their morals, too, contrary to the general rule, have improved with their circumstances ; for they are (considering always that they are Irish- men) a quiet, peaceable, sober, and industrious population ; and the very men who, if at home, might be figuring as Caravats, Shanavists, or Carders, rebelling against all authority, and tracing their path with burning haggards and roasted Peelers, are quietly pursuing a peaceful and useful career in the back woods ; grateful to the government SOIL. 73 to whom they owe all the advantages they enjoy, they are the most loyal and devoted of his Majesty’s subjects ; and, having got quit of the feeling of hope- lessness and despair of ever bettering their con- dition, that weighs down and paralyzes the Irish peasant in his own country, they have acquired the self-respect so essential to respectability, and which the habitually-oppressed can never know. So far, moreover, from requiring a civil and military force to compel obedience, the ministrations of my worthy friend, the priest, are found quite effective in main- taining order among them ; though it must be con- fessed, that the worthy ecclesiastic does not depend exclusively on spiritual thunder, but, with hardened and impenitent sinners, sometimes resorts to the secular co-operation of an oak stick, — an argument which no man in the province can handle with more power and emphasis. It is true, that this experiment cost a good deal of money ; but were it to be repeated, from the know- ledge the government has attained of emigration, it could be effected for much less ; and, indeed, our wor- thy lieutenant-governor is now thickly settling many townships with poor emigrants, at an expense trifling in the first instance, and which must ultimately be repaid to government with interest. Would that the legislature of Great Britain would consider this, and back him in his laudable endeavours! for we be- lieve, that even Joseph Hume himself, were the thing fairly stated to him, (in figures^) would not 74 SOIL. hesitate to recommend a small advance to rescue hundreds of thousands of his countrymen from want, turbulence, and vice, and place them in a situation at once so comfortable to themselves and advantageous to the nation. It is to be hoped, however, that, should the British government ever again actively interfere in emigra- tion, they will employ men to conduct the under- taking who know something about it ; or, if these cannot be found, at all events honest men, who will neither betray the people intrusted to their charge, nor the government which employs them. Their essay last summer was certainly anything but creditable. They collected a number of army pensioners, and came the old soldier over them, by commuting their pensions at a certain rate, — which rate (the poor fellows not being used to the calculation of an- nuities) was highly advantageous to the govern- ment ; and instead of remitting the whole or a greater part of the money to Canada, there to be paid them when they were settled on their farms, they paid them a large portion in London, — where, as might have been anticipated by any one who knows what an old soldier is made of, they drank it, and one half of them never embarked at all. Those who did come to Quebec without warning, had the rest of their money paid, spent it there, and got scattered about without advice or guidance. A few found their way to Upper Canada, where the go- vernment provided for them ; but many, it is feared, SOIL. 75 will return to England, where the evil report they will bring will be partly shared by the country, while, in justice, the blame ought to rest entirely with Lord Goderich and his Majesty’s ministers. The emigrant, unless he has some of the induce- ments already alluded to, will do well not to think of settling until he has reached the Newcastle dis- trict ; and when once there, he will find himself amid land, which, with a few exceptions, (as, for instance, the sandy soil on both sides of the town of York, and tracts broken by the ridge of limestone rock, which, at a greater or less distance from its shores, surrounds Lake Ontario,) is of a fair average quality, and which, as a general rule, he will always find to improve the farther west he travels. The rear of the Home district contains likewise a great quantity of good land, particularly in the neighbourhood of Lake Simcoe ; and the market of York, the capital, which is growing more rapidly in proportion than even the rest of the province, gives settlers a great advantage. There is also a great deal of excellent land in the western part of the Home, and eastern portion of the Gore district, though the latter is cut up in one direction by a bed of limestone rock, but with ex- cellent soil on either side of it. All that country, too, has the very great advantage of lying near to the lake, which gives a great facility in transporting pro- duce for the longest part of the way to market by water conveyance. 76 SOIL. WESTERN DIVISION. Commencing at the head of Burlington Bay, and drawing a line in a south-westerly direction that would strike about the mouth of Cat-fish Creek, you will include the whole of the Niagara district, and a part of the Gore and London districts, which to a certain extent are assimilated in soil and climate, being composed of strong, stiff clayey land, or light sandy loam, degenerating towards Long Point into something very little superior to the sand of the sea- beach, — though the Arabs who inhabit this sandy desert, like their eastern brethren and indeed all mankind, believe their own to be the most favoured country on the face of the earth. The reason of tliis belief is two-fold : first, because it is their country ; secondly, because the trees being at a distance from each other, after the manner of a gentleman’s park in England, it is easily cleared, or rather wants no clearing at all ; for, if you cut down any little under- wood there may be, and girdle, (that is, cut a ring through the bark, and a little way into the wood of the large oaks, so as to cause their death,) you can harrow up the surface and put in a crop of wheat, which in all probability will double the price of the land and labour. Then, indeed, if they would lay it down in grass, they would have a first-rate dairy or sheep farm ; for it makes beautiful pasture, and, by a kind disposition of Providence, gypsum, which in this country is found the best and cheapest manure SOIL. 77 for light lands, is always abundant in their neigh- bourhood. But such is by no means the custom of Upper Canada. Crop after crop of wheat is sown and reaped, till the soil is so impoverished that the more provident farmers sow a crop of clover or buck- wheat, which they plough down to prepare the land for their wheat ; while the more careless, or, as they «ay in this country, shiftless^ abandon their farm, and go on to another, to be abandoned again in its turn. From everything I can learn, this is very much the kind of land that is found in New South Wales. But to the settler in this country I would state, that land is rich and lasting just in proportion to the size and quantity of timber which it bears ; and, there- fore, the more] trouble he is put to in clearing his land, the better will it repay him the labour he has expended on it. This is by far the finest fruit country in the pro- vince. But, though in any part of it the fruits that grow in England, as well as grapes, come to perfec- tion in the open air, you must get to the Niagara frontier, or to the south of it, before you can depend on the more delicate fruits, such as the peach and nectarine, ripening. At Long Point, the papoa, a kind of semi-tropical fruit, is found abundantly grow- ing wild in the woods. Having got through the small portion of second- rate land, we now come to the garden of Canada, — the London and Western districts. This country occupies fully one-third of the whole province, and 78 SOIL. there is not on the continent of America so large a tract of unexceptionable land. The soil seems to have been laid down by the water ; for it is based on limestone rock, — then comes a stratum of clay, — and generally, between that and the mould, there is a layer of gravel of greater or less thickness. The soil on the surface is of the loamy description, — sometimes sandy and sometimes clayey, but in every case highly productive. The timber is such as in this country indicates tlie best land : and it is necessary that you should, in the choice of land, be aware of what kind of timbered and is the best. A mixture of maple, bass-wood, (a kind of lime,) elm, and cherry, indicates the very best soils; an intermixture of beech is no objection ; and black walnut is found on first-rate soils. But if beech be the only wood or the prevalent one, you may be sure that the soil is light. Pine grows on sandy soil, as often does oak, and always chesnut. We see in England, that Hampshire produces the best oaks ; and the soil of that county is ten degrees more barren than that of the Long Point country just described. Cedar is found in the swamps, and hemlock (one of the pine tribes) in wet clayey grounds by river sides. The tamarac (larch) grows in the very worst swamps ; for, where you see it, were you to drain the marsh, you would only convert it into a bed of sand. The growth and appearance of the tim- ber, as well as the species, will enable you to judge of the nature of the soil. In the best soils, the timber SOIL. 79 is large, tall, and with a broad-spread bushy top, the bark clean and without moss. If in addition to this you find weeds, particularly a large species of nettle taller than yourself, and that the trees rise out of the ground at once like a broomstick, without at all displaying those roots which Gray calls ‘ wild fantastic,’ and which poets and painters admire, but Canadian farmers abominate, you will find you have got a rich deep inexhaustible soil — where, if you sow wheat the first year, unless you eat it down with your stock in spring, you will have a crop of straw, but, if you adopt the above- recommended precaution, you may count on a return of from thirty to forty bushels per acre. The great majority of the lands of this division are of this de- scription. This country owes its settlement solely to the per- severing industry of my worthy and excellent friend. Colonel Talbot. Forty years ago, while exploring the about-to-be province, on the staff of its governor. General Simcoe, he was struck with the beauty and fertility of this tract ; and afterwards observing that, from the improvident grants of the colonial govern- ment to friends and favourites, this fertile country, if left in their hands, would continue for ages a howl- ing wilderness, he procured from the authorities at home an exclusive power of settling it. For this purpose he set himself down in the very midst of the territory, without another human habitation within fifty miles of him, and commenced his arduous un- 80 SOIL. dertaking by cutting out roads, amidst much head- shaking from the sage, and sneering from the igno- rant. He however never was a man who held as a part of his creed the wise aphorism, so often quoted in the present day, ‘ Vox populi vox Dei / but held steadily on in the teeth of opposition, vexation, and disappointment, until, after about fifteen years of un- remitting labour and privation, it became so notorious in the province, that even the executive government at York became aware that there was such a place in existence as the Talbot settlement, where roads were cut, and farms in progress : — and hereupon they rejoiced, — for it held out to them just what they had long felt the want of, — a well-settled, opened, and cul- tivated countrv, wherein to obtain estates for them- selves, their children, born and unborn, and their whole kith, kin, and allies. When this idea, so creditable to the paternal feelings of these worthy gentlemen, was intimated to the Colonel, he could not be brought to see the fitness of things in an ar- rangement which would confer on the next genera- tion, or the next again, the fruits of the labour of the present ; and accordingly, though his answer to the proposal was not couched in terms quite so di- plomatic as might have been wished, it was brief, soldier-like, and not easily capable of misconstruc- tion ; — it was in these words, * Til be d d if you get one foot of land here and thereupon the parties joined issue. On this, war was declared against him by his SOIL. 81 Excellency in Council, and every means were used to annoy him here, and misrepresent his proceedings at home ; but he stood firm, and by an occasional visit to the Colonial Office in England, he opened the eyes of ministers to the proceedings of both par- ties, and for awhile averted the danger. At length, some five years ago, finding the enemy was getting too strong for him, he repaired once more to England, and returned in triumph with an order from the Colonial Office, that nobody was in any way to interfere vvith his proceedings ; and he has now the pleasure of con- templating some hundreds of miles of the best roads in the province, closely settled on each side by the most prosperous farmers within its bounds, who owe all they possess to his judgment, enthusiasm, and perseverance, and who are grateful to him in pro- portion to the benefits he has bestowed upon them, though in many instances much against their will at the time. I spent a fortnight with him some eighteen months ago ; and certainly one of his levees vvith his settlers would, if as well reported, be quite as amusing as one of those Mornings at Bow Street — that, about the time I left London, were styled, by some wag, the leading: articles of the Morninor Herald. The whole of this tract is watered by beautiful streams and rivers, many of which are even majestic. Among these may be enumerated the Thames, which, originating within forty miles of Lake Ontario, runs parallel to Lake Erie, and discharges itself into Lake St. Clair ; Bear Creek, which waters much of the G 82 SOIL. Western district; the river Aux Sables, the Bayfield, and the Maitland, which flow through the Canada Company’s land, and empty themselves into Lake Huron ; and on the east side, the grand river Ouse, and its tributary the Nith, which falls into Lake Erie, where a harbour is now constructing at the upper end of the Welland canal. At the extreme west of the province will be seen a peninsula, and a delta of islands in Lake St. Clair. This constitutes the greater part of the Western dis- trict, and as its formation is curious it is worthy of remark. By a glance at the map it will be seen, that the rivers St. Clair, Thames, and Bear Creek, fall into Lake St. Clair, near each other. These, all running through rich alluvial soils, bring down a large quan- tity of mud, which, so long as the river is moving rapidly, is kept suspended by the water, but the mo- ment it is poured into the still basin of the lake, begins to subside. Tliis deposit, by the sweep of the eddy, forms bars below the mouth of the river of a semicircular form. On these bars rushes and aquatic plants grow; and when these fall to the bottom, they carry with them small boughs, straws, leaves, &c., which they had collected during the summer, and which increase and give consistency to the bar, soon converting it into a shallow, and from a shallow to an island, sweeping round in a crescent form, and enclosing a marsh. The first high wind drives the surf, impregnated with the mud of the shore, over SOIL. 83 this, and thus not only augments it, but fills up the marsh gradually to above the level of the lake, till it becomes dry land. Then another bar forms outside this in the same manner ; and thus have been formed many thousands of square miles of the finest level, deep, alluvial soil, — always retaining its original character of a ridge, alternating with a prairie and a marshy run of water, and then a ridge again ; — until at last, there is no doubt, the whole of the present bed of Lake St. Clair will become a fertile plain, with a reedy, sluggish, Dutch-looking river running through the centre ; and after all the mud and material that can be employed in this work shall come to be expended, the same process will com- mence in Lake Erie; so that, perhaps, future ages may see miles of waving grain covering the rich plains where once flowed the great inland seas of America. My attention was first called to alluvial formations of this sort, on the banks of the Ganges, some four- teen or fifteen years ago, where they go on so rapidly, that the geologist who runneth cannot help reading ; and I was surprised to find the St. Clair, where it issues from Lake Huron, presenting all the features of the sacred river of Hindustan ; and still more were the functionaries of the United States, occupying Fort Gratiot, surprised to hear me pro- phesy, in the year 1827, the destruction of their lighthouse, then many yards from the banks of the river, whose stream now flows over what was its G 2 84 SOIL, foundation. I this winter was higlily delighted by reading in the Quarterly review of Lyell’s Geology, a confirmation of my own theories — given in such a masterly style, that I began to suppose that I must have not only seen the same kind of formations which the writer has so ably described, but examined them along with him. As that, however, is impos- sible, I must only console myself, with honest Puff in the Critic^ that ‘ All that can be said is, that two people hit on the same thought, only Shakspeare had it first — that’s all.’ This, as may be supposed, furnishes a deep and fertile soil. Every here and there you have an immense prairie, furnishing pasture for more cattle than are likely to graze on them for a century to come. But there is no unmixed good in this world. A rich soil, abundant pasture, no rent, no taxes, have, in the course of little more than a century, (for the French settled Detroit the same year that William Penn founded Philadelphia,) produced, what the same circumstances never fail to produce on man, (naturally an inert animal, and unless stimu- lated by the new and artificial wants consequent on education and refinement, little prone to any gratui- tous exertion,) laziness and indolence. — A Scotch gardener emigrating to England, or a New England farmer to the west, surprise their neighbours by their industry, their intelligence, and their success; and each hugs himself in the belief, that this arises from the superiority of his race, his education or his SOIL. 85 individual intellect, when in fact it springs from nothing else than the badness of his native soil and climate, which renders the greatest industry, joined with the most unremitting attention, neces- sary to make it produce anything. When these virtues are exercised on a more favourable field, they produce a superabundance ; — but their children have no more inducement to follow their footsteps than the bees at the Cape had to prepare for a Dutch winter, after they had discovered that summer lasted all the year round. The only drawback to this fine country is, the want of running water through the summer in the interior. Much of the wealth of the people consists in cattle which, when near a stream, are branded, and run at large during the whole year; but when water must be drawn from wells for a large herd of them, as is often the case for three months in the year, it is a great additional trouble to the farmer. 86 Chapter VII. ^ To supply the wants of indust^, of trade, of government^ between the mother-country and possessions scattered on the shores of every sea, a vast number of ships is necessary even in time of peace. And these ships, ready to sail at a mo- ment’s notice towards the threatened point, carry thither rein- forcements and succom*, which render it impregnable either by famine or by force.*— Di/pm on the Commercial Power of Great Britain, The Lumber Trade, The lumber trade, as an extensive and increasing branch of commerce in this country, is well worthy the serious consideration of all who take an interest in the welfare of the colony; and in considering it in all its bearings, many erroneous and partial views of the subject require to be got rid of, and many prejudices to be overcome. There are two sets of opinions entertained on this subject, by two very different sorts of persons, — those who are interested in the trade, and those who are not. The first of these, looking at the hands and shipping it employs, consider it the great staple trade of the country, and in this they are backed by the mercantile interest at Montreal and by the ship- ping interest at home. The others, who are land- holders and cultivators, consider it a trade which diverts so much capital and industry from the agri- LUMBER TRADE. 87 cultural improvement of the colony, which they look upon as the only legitimate pursuit in so large and improvable a country, and do not hesitate to brand it as a speculative and ruinous business to all con- nected with it, — demoralizing the people, and creating in all who follow it a distaste for regular labour and habits, which unfits them for ever for the duties of useful and respectable members of society. To enable us to judge between such conflicting opinions, it will be necessary to consider the effects of the trade, as it is and has been, — and what, in the common course of affairs, by the increase of the amount of business done, and increase of capital introduced, and a proper division of the business into separate departments, it may be expected to become in the course of time. The lumber trade has been carried on pretty much after the following manner : — A person, possessed of little or no capital, and inflated with the spirit of speculation, hires a num- ber of hands, and purchases a quantity of provisions, (on credit), and betakes himself to the woods. His terms with his men are to feed them, supply them with what necessaries they may require, and pay them when he sells his raft. This mode of proceed- ing is one which has a manifest tendency to render a business unprofitable. No capital being required, of course any number of competitors may come into the trade ; and the provisions, goods, and wages, being not only bought on a long credit, but their 88 LUMBER TRADE. ultimate payment depending on a contingency, a very large profit must be laid on to cover the risk - incurred by such an arrangement. Besides, by the want of ready money, the master is put in the power of his men, whom, if idle or dissipated, he cannot pay off; and though fewer hands would be sufficient to conduct the raft to Quebec, still all hands must stick to it, not only till it arrives at its destination, but until it be sold, at the same expense all the while to their master as if they were engaged in productive labour, — because, if they quit the pro- perty over which they have a lien, they abandon the only security they have for their wages. But the worst feature in this system is, that it has a tendency to perpetuate itself ; for, should a person with capital come into the trade, almost the only advantage he would possess over his poorer rival would be in getting his provisions and store-goods at something nearer their marketable value, (it being probable that, from the tendency of mankind to hope the best, were he to pay his men every Saturday night, they would still take but very little less than if paid at the end of the season,) and the power of paying off his men when he no longer required them. Another pernicious effect produced by the trade is, that it draws farmers from their legitimate occu- pations, and makes them neglect the certainty of earning a competence by a steady perseverance in their agricultural pursuits, for a vision of wealth LUMBER TRADE. 89 never to be realized. In fact, the only proper or profitable way in which a farmer can interfere with lumber, is by employing himself, his servants, and his cattle, in bringing out timber during the winter months, and selling it on the spot when the naviga- tion opens ; — thus employing to profit a season that would otherwise be lost to him, and converting his produce, which may not be saleable, into a commo- dity which is marketable. On the other hand, it must be remembered that the evils here ascribed to the lumber trade are not neces- sarily inseparable from it. One great disadvantage would be done away with, were there a division of labour and trade. It is an axiom in commerce, that a manufacturer seldom succeeds who is his own exporter, because the two businesses require two capitals. What then are we to say of the prospects of a man who carries on two businesses with no capital at all ? In fact, to make this anything like a steady trade, we must have a set of middle-men, who will purchase the timber on the river, and allow the hewers of wood to return to the forest, and get out more, while the purchaser, with a set of men who will act as pilots and raftsmen, sends it to his agent at Quebec, who, as soon as it is safely moored in the cove, pays off the men and awaits his market. It has also been said, that this pursuit induces dissipated habits. This is true, but not to the extent supposed. We see the lumber-man, after he has returned from the woods, where he has been con- 90 LUMBER TRADE. fined to hard labour and as hard fare for nine or ten months, and when, like a sailor returned to port, he is making up to himself for past privations, by in- dulging in excesses which it is easier to account for by the propensities of human nature than to defend on principles of strict morality. Again, the business he is employed in ought only to receive the fair share of the blame that attaches to his tergiversations. It ought to be remembered, that it is not the sober, the industrious, the persevering lovers of order and comfort, that engage in such employments — it is those restless and adventurous spirits who despise regular industry, and wish to make money during one period that they may dissipate it at another, — or, as the sailors say, to earn like horses and spend like asses. In Norway and Sweden, lumbering has been an occupation time out of mind ; but we have never heard it complained of, that those employed in it were more vicious than their brethren who pursued the vocations of commerce, manufactures, or agriculture. In our own country, it has been said, that mining murders morality ; and certainly the conduct of many of our colliers gives some colour to the assertion ; and most men are content to give implicit faith to a pithy apophthegm, particularly when, like the one just quoted, it has the virtues of brevity and alliteration to recommend it, and are always willing to convince themselves, that those who are avowedly depraved are in their natuml and necessary state, and to forego LUMBER TRADE. 91 the trouble of inquiring why they are so, and^how they can be extricated from it. It has been discovered of late years, however, that cotton- mills and coal-mines, which were con- sidered as nurseries of vice and crime, can, by proper and judicious means, be made just as good schools of morality as any other places where moral and re- ligious instruction are bestowed. And it would be worth the consideration of those concerned, to try to remedy the evils complained of, rather than to look on with the apathy of a man who should quietly con- template his neighbour’s house on fire, instead of using his best endeavours to extinguish the flames. Before we condemn the trade e,n masse^ we should recollect that it gives the colony the support of two most powerful and influential bodies in the mother- country ; for so long as the men who procure, and the sailors who export the timber, consume so much of our agricultural produce as to prevent the landed interest of England from becoming jealous of us, we are secure from their opposition ; and so long as that trade employs eight hundred ships, which are unfit for any other traflic, we ensure the support of the ship-owners. But the great advantage of the lumber-trade to British America is, that, from the home being so much more bulky than the outward cargo, an im- mense number of ships must come out in ballast, and these necessarily will transport emigrants to our shores at any price that will be a saving one. The 92 LUMBER TRADE. result is, that, while in the New York packet-ship the steerage passage is forty dollars without provi- sions, the same terms can be procured in a Quebec timber- ship for something less than as many shil- lings, though the one vessel is quite as commodious as the other ; — so that the lumber-trade acts as a direct premium to the settlement of the British colonies, in preference to the United States, and if we can only manage to keep it up for half a dozen years longer, we shall by that time have wheat enough to send to England, to employ a sufficient number of ships to carry out our emigrants. If the ministers at home, indeed, were to give us that length of time as warn- ing, it would save nearly all loss to individuals who have invested capital in saw-mills, &c., as the natural life of a saw-mill is not above fifteen years. Should our present rulers, however, in their spirit of ultra-liberality, see fit to do away with those duties which protect at once the produce of our colonies and our manufacturing, commercial, and shipping interests, it would be well for them to con- sider what must be the result of such sweeping alterations on the well-being of individuals and the nation at large. The object to be obtained, we are told, is to pro- cure lumber from the Baltic, cheaper than the people of England pay at present for inferior timber from the colonies ; and the means of obtaining this end is to equalise the duties. Now, let us see for a mo- ment how such a plan is likely to work. LUMBER TRADE. 93 The equalising of the duties will, in the first in- stance, throw out of employment eight hundred sail of ships, and the crews that navigate them, — a very considerable item in our commercial navy, and a sacrifice not rashly to be made by a country whose very existence depends on her naval superiority. For, as we cannot imagine that such ultra Huskissonians would tolerate any law less liberal than the old navigation laws, which permitted every nation to bring its own produce into British ports in its own bottoms, — and considering that the dwellers on the shores of the Baltic, living in a w’orld of timber^ hemp, iron, pitch, tar, and rosin, have the advantage of us in regard to ship-building materials, — seeing^ moreover, that they are much more lightly taxed, and must also have the advantage in building and sailing them, — it is clear that, in such case, we must send our timber-ships to heat bakers’ ovens, and their crews to man the navies of rival nations, or to add to the strength of our parish poor. Our manufacturing and commercial interests would not be improved by such a change; as it has been shown that it would operate against the colo- nies, which are one of our best markets, and in favour of the Baltic, which is our worst. But the harm it would do both these interests, in Upper and Lower Canada, is trifling, when compared with its effect on Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, whose resources, and consequently means of paying for goods, it would utterly annihilate. 94 LUMBER TRADE. But still, say the liberals, we will get our deal boards cheaper, and that is all we want. You will get them cheaper, but not quite so much cheaper as you imagine. Thus, supposing timber can be shipped at Quebec and Memel at 50«. per ton, — that the freight of the one is 60s. and of the other 20.9., and that you put 20.9. duty on the one and 60^. on the other, the whole price of either at London will be 61. IO 5 . But if you equalise the duty, by either lowering that on the foreign to the rate of the colonial, or raising that on the colonial to the rate of the foreign, you give the foreigner a bounty of 405. over the subject. Now, suppose such foreigner is contented to add only 305. to his present profits, he excludes the sub- ject totally, — he gets a market for a million of tons additional annually — you save IO 5 . or 7|- per cent, on your deals ; and the 305. instead of going into the exchequer, or to support your navy, your colo- nial, commercial, manufacturing, or shipping interest, goes into the pocket of the Prussian merchant and landholder, who will not buy a cotton handkerchief from you the more for all the sacrifice you have made. It has been proposed in England for parishes to send out their poor to Canada, Were the lumber trade done away with, 201. per head would not put them on their farms here. As it is, the labouring poor are very busy sending out themselves: 55,000 came to the Canadas last year, and 100,000 are expected in this. Were it not for the cheap passages LUMBER TRADE. 95 afforded by the ships employed in the timber trade, nine-tenths of these people could not afford to come out, and you must maintain them at home, which would absorb a little of the profit that would ac- crue from the chejp lumber ; whereas, these 50,000 and 100,000 will, in the course of a year or two, re- quire 300,000/. worth of British goods annually, and that will go on increasing in geometrical progression, — a consideration by no means to be slighted by our manufacturers in these hard times*. * The first part of this chapter was written three years ago, on the Ottawa, among the lumber men. I now hear that what I proposed has to a great extent taken place, and that a great quantity of timber is bought, for the mercantile houses in Quebec, at By town, and other places on the Ottawa. 96 Chapter VIII. ‘ Though gilded domes and splendid fanes, And vestures rich, and choral strains, And altars richly dress’d, And sculptured saints, and sparkling gems, And mitred heads, and diadems, Inspire with awe the breast ; The soul resign’d, devout, sincere. With equal piety draws near The holy house of God, That rudely rears its rustic head. Scarce higher than the peasant’s shed. By peasant only trod.’- — Miss Bowles. ‘ New light never cometh into a tenement, save through a crack in the tiling.’ — Ignoramus. Religious Sects, A VERY natural question for a man to ask on his arri- val in a country, is, what are the means of religious instruction, and what are the religious tenets of its inhabitants ? It is long since the French reproached the English with having twenty religions, and only one sauce. In Canada, we have two hundred reli- gions, and no sauce at all. It would be a waste of RELIGIOUS SECTS. 97 time even to enumerate all the religious sects, much less to discuss their tenets ; but the chief are, as in England, the Catholic, Church of England, Pres* byterian, and Methodist. Of these, the Church of England is supported partly from the funds of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and partly by an annual grant from the Imperial Par- liament; the Presbyterian and Catholic by their own congregations and a small grant from govern- ment; the Methodist by a society in the United States, and by contributions from their congrega- tions. When the Upper Province was separated from the Lower, one-seventh of all the lands was set aside for a Protestant clergy, under the title of Clergy Reserves. This the Church of England laid claim to as theirs exclusively ; but after much dis- pute, a despatch has been received from the Colonial Office, and communicated to the House of Assem- bly, of which nobody has yet been found who could undertake to explain the meaning ; but the general impression is, that it is intended, some way or other,, that the two established churches of England and Scotland, are to be supported from the funds arising from the sale of these Clergy Reserves. In the mean time, before the receipt of this despatch, the House of Assembly, by an overwhelming majority (42 to 6, I think), had addressed his Majesty, re- questing that tlie whole sum should be applied to the purposes of education ; and there can be no doubt, H 98 RELIGIOUS SECTS. were the entire province polled, they would be nearly as unanimous in favour of such an appropriation as were their representatives. But, if it be resolved that it should be applied exclusively to religious purposes, it will be both unjust and impolitic to exclude the Catholics from a share of it. When the province of Quebec was ceded to Great Britain, their laws and religion were secured to them by the treaty which changed their government. That religion was Ca- tholic, and those laws provided a maintenance for the Catholic clergy by tithes, as well as by very wealthy endowments and foundations, among which may be enumerated the seminary of St. Sulpicius, the supe- riors of which are the seigneurs, or lords of the manor, of the whole island and city of Montreal, and were they not the most moderate of all possible landlords, 50,000/. per annum would not pay their rents. When, for political reasons, the government at home saw fit to divide the province of Quebec into the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, and the Parliament of Upper Canada first adopted the English law and then abolished tithes, the provision which the treaty secured to the Catholics was done away with. It is therefore very clear, that the Ca- tholics of Upper Canada had strong ground of com- plaint, when, in a political arrangement, their interests were overlooked. How much greater ground of complaint will they have, if other churclies are en- dowed, and they left unprovided for ? But there is another reason which often weighs more HELIGIOUS SECTS. 99 with government than justice, expediency. The Catholics, as I have said before, are by far the most devotedly loyal subjects his Majesty has in Canada. It is well known that, during the war, Ogdensburg was taken by the gallant charge made, under a heavy fire from the enemy’s batteries, by the Catholics of Glengarry, headed by their priest, the Rev. Alex- ander M‘Donell, now Catholic bishop of Upper Canada; and a very large proportion of General Brock’s army, who took Detroit, were the French Catholics of the Western district, fighting, be it re- membered, against their brethren of the United States frontier. The Irish Catholic is by far the easiest conciliated of any emigrant who cornea to this province ; for at home, being habituated to oppres- sion, and looked upon as a Helot, he considers sim- ple justice a favour ; and when, on his arrival here, he finds that he is emancipated in spirit as well as in letter, — that he is admitted into the legislative coun- cil, the House of Assembly, and the magistracy, if his rank or talent entitle him to such a distinction, as a matter of course — and that there is no prejudice that condemns those of his faith to be degraded in the eyes of their fellow-subjects, as if of a lower order of the human family, — he feels his heart over- flow with gratitude to the government under which he lives, and forgets in a moment the wrongs that he and his ancestors have suffered for ages. It is only within these few years that Irish Catholics came to tliis colony in any number : formerly they went to H 2 100 RELIGIOUS SECTS. the United States, and still they go there in such number, that their army is to a great extent com- posed of them, and Irish labourers are as common in New York and Philadelphia as in London. Were the government to do anything that would even have the appearance of countenancing them, they would to a man prefer continuing their allegiance to iheir own government, to going over to strengthen a rival power. If, therefore, it be determined that the Clergy Reserves remain a provision for a Pro« testant clergy, let government make, as in duty, in gratitude, and in policy bound, a provision for the Catholic clergy also. Were government to set apart a tract of wild land, and let it be known in Ireland, that, from the sale of this, the Catholic church was to be provided for, a crusade would be preached in favour of Ca- nada, and in a few seasons the new territory would be filled to suffocation with men who would form a wall of steel around the colonial possessions of Great Britain. An elder of the Kirk, and bred in the most orthodox part of Scotland, I came to this coun- try strongly prejudiced against Catholicism and its ministers; but experience has shown me that these prejudices were unjust. I expected to find both priests and people as violently opposed to the British government here as at home, — I found them the strongest supporters of the constitution. I had been taught to believe, that a Catholic priest RELIGIOUS SECTS. 101 was a hypocritical knave, who ruled his misguided followers for his own selfish purposes, — I have found them a moral and zealous clergy, more strict in their attention to their parochial duties than any body of clergy I ever met in any part of the world, and not a bit more intolerant than their clerical brethren of any other sect. And I look upon this public avowal and recantation as a penance for my sins of ignorance, and I hope it will be accepted as such. I have no very particular leaning, as may well be supposed, towards the doctrines of the Church of Rome, but I merely wish, like Lord Byron, ‘ Justice to do to Trojan and to XjTian, For I was bred a moderate Presbyterian.’ There are two bodies of Presbyterians in the pro- vince, the Established Church of Scotland, and the Presbytery of Upper Canada. The first are, as their name imports, in connexion with the Church of Scotland ; the second is composed of the Scotch seceders, licentiates of the Synod of Ulster, and of various Presbyteries in the United States. Their tenets, doctrine, and discipline, are precisely similar ; for the causes of separation in Scotland, patronage and burghers’ oaths, do not exist in this province ; — the only apparent difference is in the American con- gregations, where they sing psalms to the tune of Paddy Whack. Under these circumstances a union will, in all probability, take place; — indeed, the laity are all in favour of such a measure, and the only chance of opposition is apprehended from the clergy 102 RELIGIOUS SECTS. of both sides. It is a melancholy fact, that there is something in the clerical character of all persuasions, strongly repulsive towards their brethren, who differ from them in the slightest degree, or even have the appearance of differing, — on the same principle, that factions are formed among school-boys to fight others, because they live in a different street of the town or district of the parish. But it would perhaps be too much to expect people to practise as well as to preach Christian charity. There is no sect to which this province, in its earlier stages, owed more than to the Methodists. They were the pioneers of religion, kept the spirit of it alive, and prepared the way for the other sects. But there is a tendency in all human insti- tutions to corruption. As they became numerous, it was obvious that they could be turned to a political account, and they did not long want a leader. A person of the name of Ryerson, who from some cause or other had been refused ordination in the Church of England, (and what the cause could be, it is impossible to divine, for God knows they are anything but fastidious here,) turned Methodist, and from being a man of education, and the generality of preachers of the sect being ignorant mechanics, he soon obtained an ascendency over them, and became a bishop and primate of all Upper Canada. In revenge for the insult offered his dignity by his mother-church, this person has been exerting a poli- tical influence over his followers, inciting them by RELIGIOUS SECTS. 103 every means in his power to hatred and contempt of the British Government, — while his brother in Eng- land was busy begging for contributions, and ex- hibiting, as a pious raree-show, a young man of the name of Peter Jones, — the son of an Englishman by a squaw, and who was brought up at school with Europeans, — to the too credulous John Bull, as a civilized and methodized Indian ; and as Shakspeare says that in England, ^ where they would not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they would give ten to see a dead Indian,’ there is no doubt, John’s purse- strings will be most liberally drawn for the pleasure of seeing a live one. The mode by which religion and politics are joined is, I believe, peculiar to the American con- tinent, riz., by newspapers inculcating the tenets of a sect, and at the same time the politics of the leaders of it ; and this unholy alliance have the Me- thodists set up to blend treason with the Gospel, and to abuse all other sects, and in a more especial manner their brethren the Wesleyans, who are much less numerous, but infinitely more respectable than themselves. This blasphemous mixture of political and reli- gious dogmas, however it may add to the numerical strength of any sect, must be pernicious in the ex- treme to the true interests of Christianity. Pure religion is like pure gold ; — ^it cannot be alloyed without being depreciated. 104 Chapter IX. De omnibus rebus et qulbiisdam aliis. Agriculture — Hemp — Flax — Tobacco — ^Vineyards — Houses and Buildings — Education — Servants and Labourers — Wages — Population — Comparative advantages of Emigration to Ca- nada and the United States — Revenue — Expenditure— Debt — Valedictory Peroration. Odds and Ends. Of agriculture, as practised in this province, I have very little to say, except that, were the same slovenly system pursued in any country less favoured by nature, it would not pay for the seed that is used. I have already stated the ruinous mode of taking repeated crops of wheat off the land; and on the river Thames, in the Western district, I witnessed a refinement on this barbarism, viz., burning the stub- ble before the land was ploughed for winter wheat, and thus depriving it of even that trifling strength that it might derive from the decomposition of the straw. It is only in some parts of the province that ma- nure is used at all ; and it is not an uncommon occurrence, when the stable-litter has accumulated in front of the building called the barn, (which generally contains all the farm offices,) to such a de- gree as to have become a nuisance, that a man invites ODDS AND ENDS. 105 his neighbours to assist him in removing the barn, which is always a frame building, away from the dunghill, instead of transporting the dunghill to the wheat field. But the spirit of improvement has gone forth. Three years ago, the Provincial Parliament passed an act, whereby, if a certain sum should be subscribed by any district in the province, to carry on a Society for the improvement of Agriculture, the Legislature gave also a sum to assist. Most of the districts have taken advantage of this highly judicious enactment ; the Newcastle and western districts have distin- guished themselves by the spirited manner in which they have commenced proceedings ; and should, as is highly probable, the emigration of the better classes continue and increase, there is no doubt that our agriculture will be improved as well as every other interest in the province. One question, which everybody asks, and which I have not been able satisfactorily to solve, is, what is the average amount of wheat and other grain to an acre ? I can only state my belief, that it is con- siderably above that of England — but how much, I am quite incapable of pronouncing. I shall not waste my reader’s time nor my own with estimates of the result of farming pursuits, or how they ought to be set about. It is quite enough that they are, if prudently conducted, uniformly suc- cessful. And any man may get more informa- tion from the first farmer he meets in the township 106 ODDS AND ends; in which he takes up his abode, than he would from me, were I to write a book on the subject, like the Dutch poet’s, as thick as a cheese. There is one agricultural product for which the soil and climate of Upper Canada are admirably adapted, and to which it would be of great import- ance, in a national point of view, that the attention of the farmers should be fairly called ; — I allude to Hemp. There is a great deal of very rich bottom land, which is too rank for the growth of wheat in the first instance, but which, were it reduced by a crop or two of hemp, would be made fit for wheat and other grains. In the more remote parts of the country, hemp would be a much more profitable return than wheat, as it is more valuable in proportion to its weight, and consequently, what in one instance goes to the carrier, in the other would go into the pocket of the farmer; and if Britain possessed a colony that could supply her with this article, so indispensable to a maritime power, it would render her independent of the northern nations ; and in the existing state of things, it is highly desirable that she should not de- pend on Europe for anything. Hitherto attempts to grow hemp have proved abortive, because they have been made by solitary individuals, and where a mill was set up by one en- terprising and public-spirited gentleman, the farmers in the neighbourhood would not enter into the spirit of the thing, so that he got little or no plant to ODDS AND ENDS. 107 operate on but what he raised himself. But, were a community of farmers to build a mill, and enter into an agreement to raise a certain quantity of hemp each, there is no doubt but it would become a staple of the country, as the difference of duty on foreign and colonial hemp would of itself be a profit sufficient to repay the grower. Flax would also be a profitable article, but as yet there is not a single flax-mill in the province. All that is raised is used for domestic purposes, and is dressed with a hand-brake, by the farmer who grows it, and spun, and in many instances woven, by the women of the family. Tobacco is grown in very considerable quantities in the western district, and it' is a very profitable product for people who have large young families, as the culture is much like that of a garden, and the stripping, weeding, worming, &c. &c., is better done by children, who have a less distance to stoop, than by grown persons. As they are the principal la- bourers, it is found expedient to enlist their interests on the side of their duty; and therefore it is cus- tomary, when they have by their industry and dili- gence saved the crop, to give them, as a reward, the second crop, which is less in quantity and much infe- rior in quality, but which, if not assailed by frosts early in the autumn, often produces enough to pur- chase as many good things, and as much finery, as to render the poor urchins, in their own estimation, persons of fortune for that year at any rate. lOS ODDS AND ENDS. The tobacco of Canada is, however, avowedly in- ferior to that of Virginia, which the people here ascribe to want of skill in the management of it. That may be the case to a certain extent ; but it is probable too, that the climate and soil are not so well adapted to a plant a native of the tropics, as a more southerly latitude. Some German soldiers, who had settled in the west after the American revolutionary war, were joined two years ago by some of their friends from the banks of the Rhine, bringing with them the Rhenish vine, which they planted in the autumn of 1830. Of course we cannot tell how wine-makins: will succeed, for the grape-vine is the most capri- cious of all possible plants. But as the climate is more congenial to its culture than that of many parts of Germany where wine is produced, there is no doubt we may have wine of some sort or other, though it be rather too much to expect a Canadian Hockheimer. There are different kinds of houses in Canada, about which a few words may be useful to the set- tler. Most of the houses, more particularly those of recent settlers, are built of logs. When a man gets on a little in the world, he builds a frame-house, weather-boarded outside, and lathed and plastered within ; and in travelling along the road, you can form a pretty accurate estimate of the time a man has been settled, by the house he inhabits ; — indeed, in some instances, you may read the whole history ODDS AND ENDS. 109 of his settlement in the buildings about his farm- yard. The original shanty, or log-hovel, which sheltered the family when they first arrived on their wild lot, still remains, but has been degraded into a piggery ; the more substantial loghouse, which held out the weather during the first years of their sojourn, has, with the increase of their wealth, become a chapel of ease to the stable or cowhouse ; and the glaring and staring bright-red brick house is brought forward close upon the road, that the frame dwelling, which at one time the proprietor looked upon as the very acme of his ambition, may at once serve as a kitchen to, and be concealed by, its more aspiring and aristocratic successor; just like a man who having acquired wealth from small beginnings, is anxious to conceal from the world the gradations by which he rose, and to exhibit only the result of his successful industry. If you can afford to build a brick or stone house at first, by all means do so; but if you cannot, take my advice, and, like a good fellow, don’t build a frame one. It is the most uncomfortable dwelling ever man lived in. It is utterly impossible to make it air-tight, so that it is as hot as an oven in summer, and as cold as an open shed in winter. Build a log- house; not a thing that is put up in the course of a forenoon, but with corners neatly squared and jointed, as if a carpenter had dovetailed them. Point it with mortar, not clay, and whitewash it 110 ODDS AND ENDS. outside and in ; and give it a cottage roof, the eaves projecting at least twenty inches, so that the drip may never touch the walls. As you will hardly get seasoned wood, you had better lay your floors rough, and run up temporary wooden partitions. With such a house, you may make a shift for the first winter. Next spring, the boards will be seasoned ; so you can take them up room by room, and have them properly planed, ploughed, tongued and laid ; and then, when you plaster your walls and partitions, the logs having dried and settled as much as there is any chance of their ever doing, you will have a comfortable house for the remainder of your life. We build very ugly houses in Canada, very ill laid out, and very incommodious ; but this is our misfortune not our fault, for there are no people on the face of the earth more willing to learn, and if by any chance a man once lays out a cottage a little neater than his neighbours, you will see it imitated for ten miles on each side of him along the road. Therefore, if you will bring out with you a set of neat designs and elevations of small houses, it will not only enable you to build a good house yourself, but you will become a public benefactor, by showing to the whole of your neighbourhood how they may do the same. Education met with early consideration from the Legislature of this province ; small endowments were made for common schools, and 100/. per an- num voted for a grammar-school in each district ; ODDS AND ENDS. Ill but still, until lately, there was no seminary in the province superior to a Scotch parochial school, when the lieutenant-governor, at his own risk, esta- blished a college, consisting of a principal, three classical, and one mathematical master, a drawing and French master, and an establishment for read- ing, writing, and arithmetic. And these masters being chosen from Oxford and Cambridge, of which universities they are graduates, for their talents, we may say that the means of education are now as good in Canada as at any of the great chartered schools of England. The only objection is, that the majority of the masters are Cantabs; whereas it would have been more advisable had they been selected from the more orthodox and gentlemanly university. A large fund is set aside for endowing an univer- sity; but the charter being too exclusively Church of England, for a community so mixed as the popu- lation of Canada, it has wisely not been carried into effect, under the hope that the home government will remedy this defect. What, as it appears to me, would be the most beneficial plan, would be to add chairs in the different faculties to the present college, steering clear of divinity altogether ; and if any particular sect should wish to have a professor of its own creed, let the university give him a hall to lecture in, and keep his library, and let the sect who appoint him pay him. It is very questionable policy to bring out either 112 ODDS AND ends. servants or labourers to Canada. They are apt to get discontented, and either leave you, or behave in such a way as will induce you to turn them off. If you bring servant maids, I would recommend to you the policy of Donna Inez : — ‘ Her maids were old, and if she got a new one, She was quite sure to be a perfect fright.' For if you bring out any thing tolerably young or good-looking, she will get married in the course of the two first months of her sojourn. The same rule applies more forcibly to governesses ; for though a cook maid may be replaced here, a lady of education cannot. Our servants are not exactly what in London would be considered first-rate ; but, with a little drilling and scolding, we get on pretty comfortably; and then we have the incalculable satisfaction of knowing that there is nobody better oS than ourselves. The wages of women are from 20^. to 305. per month, of men from 2L to 31. ; but, with all this, it is not nearly so expensive to keep servants here as in London, as the price of their board there alone would keep them altogether here. Labourers* wages are 35 . 9d. per day, or 4Z. per month, finding themselves, or from 21. 105. to 31. 155. if found. As a general rule, how- ever, the settler will find his account in doing every thing that he possibly can do by contract, and this more especially in clearing land. The population of the province is stated, accord- ODDS AND ENDS. IIS ^ ing to the census of March, 1831, to be 234,800 ^ but a great many of the townships were not returned, and we know of about 35,000 emigrants who have arrived and been settled in the province during the last year ; so that with those and the internal increase and the emigration we have not yet heard of, the- population cannot be much, if at all, under 300,000. It is a question with many intending emigrants,, whether to go to Canada or the United States^ I think Canada preferable, and for the following reasons ; — It is to many, who happen to have consciences, no light matter to forswear their allegiance to their king, and declare that they are willing to take up arms^ against their native country at the call of the country of their adoption ; and unless they do so, they must remain aliens for ever ; nay, even if they do manage to swallow such an oath, it is seven years before their apostacy is rewarded by the right of citizenship. Im landing in his Majesty’s dominions, they carry with them their rights of subjects, and immediately on becoming 40s. freeholders, have the right of voting for a representative. The markets of Canada for farm produce are and must be better than those of the United States ; for Canadian corn is admitted into both British and AVest Indian Ports on much more advantageous terms than foreign grain, and the taxes on articles required for the consumpt of the inhabitants are not 114 ODDS AND ENDS. one-twelfth so great in Canada as in the United States. Thus, all British goods pay at Quebec only per cent, ad valorem, whilst at any American port they pay from 33^ to 60 per cent. Very erroneous notions are current in England with regard to the taxation of the United States. The truth is, that though America is lightly taxed in comparison with England, it is by no means to be considered so when compared to most of the conti- nental nations. The account usually rendered of American taxation is fallacious. It is stated, that something under six millions sterling, or about 105. per head on an average, pays the whole army, navy, civil list, and interest of debt of the United States, while we require fifty millions, or nearly 2Z. 105. each, for the same purpose. But the fact is, that that sum is only about half what the Americans pay in reality ; for each individual state has its own civil list, and all the machinery of a government to support ; and insignificant as the expenses of that government appear in detail, yet the aggregate is of very serious importance. For instance, there are five times as many judges in the state of New York alone as in Great Britain and Ireland; and though each individual of these were to receive no more than we would pay a macer of the court, yet when there comes to be two or three hundred of them, it becomes a serious matter; nor does it make any difference, in fact, whether they are paid out of the ODDS AND ENDS. 115 exchequer of the state, or by the fees of the suitors in their courts ; they are equally paid by a tax on the people in either case. Although the necessaries of life are cheap in Ame- rica, and equally cheap in Canada, the luxuries of life are higher by several hundred percent, in the one country than the other. Thus, wine in the United States is so highly taxed, that in a tavern at New York you pay more for a bottle of Madeira than in one at London, viz, five dollars, — and fifteen shillings for port. In Canada we have stumbled by accident, or had thrust upon us by some means or other, what may be considered the great desideratum in financial science, viz., the means of creating a large revenue with alight taxation. This arises from three causes : first, that we derive a very large sum annually from lands the pro- perty of the crown, which are sold to the Canada Com- pany, and from timber cut on crown lands, &c. ; second, that we derive a revenue from public works, which have been constructed at the expense of the province, and which are in a fair way of yielding a much greater return than the interest of the money expended on them, and from shares in the bank of Upper Canada, of which the government took a fourth of the stock ; and, thirdly, because we make our neighbours, the good people of the United States, pay a little of our taxes, and shall, with the blessing of God, if they keep on their tariff, make them pay a pretty penny more. i2 116 ODDS AND ENDS, The following is a statement of our probable revenue for this year, classed under these different heads, taken from the public accounts of last year laid before the House of Assembly. Resources of the Province of Upper Canada^ esti^ mated for the Year 1832. From the Canada Company for £. Crown Reserves .... 17500 . . From Timber cut on Crown Lands 3420 From Proceeds of Sales of do. 1400 . . From Rent of Crown Reserves 280 . . From Jesuits’ Estates in Lower Canada 335 . . From Survey Fees, Fees on Patents and Leases, Fines, Forfeitures, and Seizures, and Rents of Mills and Ferries . 3000 . . 25935 From the Welland Canal . . 1500 From Burlington Bay Canal . 1500 From Kettle Creek Harbour . 200 From Oakville Harbour . . 200 From York Lighthouse . . 175 From Bank of Upper Canada . 3000 From Duties on Imports at Quebec 37600 6575 ODDS AND ENDS. 117 From Duties on Goods, Wares and Merchandise, and Salt, imported from the United £. States ...... 6390 • * From Licences to Hawkers, Pedlars, and Auctioneers, • and Duties on Auction Sales 3500 . . 47490 .esoooo Estimate of Expenditure of the Province, Officers of the Legislature . . 840 , Eleven District Schools . . 1100 . Adjutant-Generars Establish- ment 650 * Inspector-General’s Salary • 406 . Receiver-General’s Salary . • 778 . Common School Appropria- tions 2000 . Five Pensioners .... 100 . Interest on Public Debt . . 8565 Contingencies of the Legisla- ture 4500 . Militia Pensions .... 1000 . Lighthouses ..... 350 . Permanent Salaries, 1 Will. IV. chap. 14. 7223 . Civil List Estimate . . . 8629 . 116 ODDS AND ENDS. Balance or Surplus for the Re- £. demption of the Public Debt, &c. &c. &c 43859 . . 80000 The Public Debt of Upper Canada. For Militia Pensions ♦ . . 25000 For Service of the year 1824 • 16000 For Burlington Bay Canal . 17250 For Welland Canal • . . 150000 For Kettle Creek Harbour . 4000 For Oakville Harbour • . . 2500 For Roads and Bridges • . 20000 Of which is redeemed 234750 42000 Leaving a balance of £192750 Which is nearly all secured by liens on the above public works, upon which the whole amount (less 19000L) has been expended; so that it may be said, the public debt now forms, or will presently become, a source of revenue to the province. From these statements it wdll appear, that the re- venues of the colony are in a very flourishing state ; as last year we paid off 10 per cent, of the public debt, and this year, the Upper House having rejected the supplies on nearly the last day of the Session, when the mischief could not be remedied, it is pro- bable the surplus will be considerably greater. ODDS AND ENDS. 119 It has been eloquently said of the Earl of Chat- ham, that he ‘ advanced the nation to a high pitch of prosperity and glory by commerce, for the first time united with and made to flourish by war/ In like manner, though by no means Chathams, the legis- lators of Upper Canada have, for the first time I suspect, succeeded in uniting revenue with debt and making it flourish by debt; for it will be seen that the debts of the province have been contracted chiefly for the purposes of public improvement, and that the public works, as they develop themselves, will not only repay the money expended on them, but become a permanent source of revenue to the colony. Of the 47490/. of taxes raised on the subject, directly and indirectly, we may estimate that 10,000/. is paid by the United States, for British goods smuggled across the frontiers, leaving 37,490/. as the whole of the provincial taxes to be paid by 300,000 people, — that is to say, in even money, about 2s. sterling a head. So that it appears, brother Jona- than, with all the apparent economy of his insti- tutions, pays to his general and particular governments ten times as*much as we do; and unfortunate John Bull, who, poor fellow, is much worse able to afford it, just about twenty-five times as much. Now, gentle reader, that you have got this length, permit me to compliment you on your patience ; a virtue which I shall no , longer call upon you to 116 ODDS AND ENDS. Balance or Surplus for the Re- £. demption of the Public Debt, &c. &c. &c 43859 . . 80000 The Public Debt of Upper Canada, For Militia Pensions . . . 25000 For Service of the year 1824 . 16000 For Burlington Bay Canal . 17250 For Welland Canal . . . 150000 For Kettle Creek Harbour • 4000 For Oakville Harbour . • . 2500 For Roads and Bridges • . 20000 Of which is redeemed 234750 42000 Leaving a balance of . £192750 Which is nearly all secured by liens on the above public works, upon which the whole amount (less 19000Z.) has been expended ; so that it may be said, the public debt now forms, or will presently become, a source of revenue to the province. From these statements it will appear, that the re- venues of the colony are in a very flourishing state ; as last year we paid off* 10 per cent, of the public debt, and this year, the Upper House having rejected the supplies on nearly the last day of the Session, when the mischief could not be remedied, it is pro- bable the surplus will be considerably greater. ODDS AND ENDS. 119 It has been eloquently said of the Earl of Chat- ham, that he ‘ advanced the nation to a high pitch of prosperity and glory by commerce, for the first time united with and made to flourish by war.' In like manner, though by no means Chathams, the legis- lators of Upper Canada have, for the first time I suspect, succeeded in uniting revenue with debt and making it flourish by debt; for it will be seen that the debts of the province have been contracted chiefly for the purposes of public improvement, and that the public works, as they develop themselves, will not only repay the money expended on them, but become a permanent source of revenue to the colony. Of the 47490/. of taxes raised on the subject, directly and indirectly, we may estimate that 10,000/. is paid by the United States, for British goods smuggled across the frontiers, leaving 37,490/. as the whole of the provincial taxes to be paid by 300,000 people, — that is to say, in even money, about 2s. sterling a head. So that it appears, brother Jona- than, with all the apparent economy of his insti- tutions, pays to his general and particular governments ten times as -much as we do; and unfortunate John Bull, who, poor fellow, is much worse able to afford it, just about twenty-five times as much. Now, gentle reader, that you have got this length, permit me to compliment you on your patience ; a virtue which I shall no ^longer call upon you to 120 ODDS AND ENDS. exercise, than by requesting you, in the diplomatic phrase, to accept the assurances of my highest con- sideration, until we meet, as I hope we shall do next summer, on the banks of Lake Huron. Goderich, March, 1832. THE END, London; — William Clowks, Stamford-street. - - «• : C .V- ^ ^ f L^: I '■ it Z6Bt3oX