Most Canadians are either immigrants or their descendants. By 1840 French Canadians had been here over two hundred years, about seven generations, and their folk memories reached back to their beginnings. Robert de Roquebrune (1889-1978) remembered tales from his father and grandfather and other forebears; for example, the marriage of his seventeenth-century ancestor LaRoque de Roquebrune, a French army officer, to Suzanne-Catherine de St-Georges, a vivacious Montreal girl of fifteen in the 1690s. Robert’s father would tell how they were married by Bishop Laval in Quebec, how they returned to Montreal, as they had come, by canoe, arriving at moonrise, the young bride sleeping, and how Roquebrune carried his tender burden home against his shoulder. It was a story young Robert, growing up in L’Assumption in the 1890s, always loved. His ancestors! There were many other stories: his grandfather’s role in the Rebellion of 1837, and his subsequent marriage to the handsome young woman who had helped him escape British troops. Robert’s father would pull out from a chest some piece of clothing, carefully preserved, and tell the family history associated with it. Much of French-Canadian life had this interior intimacy—language, memories, and family history all mixed together.
Other immigrants came from England, Scotland, and Ireland. Why did they choose to come to Canada? Usually it was for solid material reasons, rather than because of religious pressures. And as a rule it was a particular type of person who came, often to join a relative who had done well here already. The typical immigrant was young, ambitious, beset back home by an old-country society and economy too rigidly structured to allow success or a change of status. They were often men and women displaced by economic difficulties not so serious as to cause actual poverty, but serious enough to make the uprooting attractive. These immigrants had usually saved a little money, enough for the passage and to keep them going until the first Crop was harvested. Those in the old country who were rich neither needed nor wanted to emigrate; the very poor could not, as a rule, afford it.
There was one celebrated exception here: the Irish famine migration of 1847-48. The westward passage across the Atlantic in creaky, ill-built timber ships—which would otherwise have been empty for the return voyage to Canada—was very cheap. Those Irish immigrants were so poor, so ill-fed, so ill-prepared, that they created horrendous social problems wherever they landed, whether New York, Boston, Saint John, Quebec, or Montreal. Theirs was a migration of desperation. But the majority of immigrants were capable, vigorous, and yearning for material improvement— bourgeois virtues. Don’t go, said one adviser in Britain in 1821, if you can earn a comfortable even if homely living in Britain. Don’t go if you dislike work. Don’t go if you’re a tradesman and know no farming. Do go—to Prince Edward Island, as was the advice in this instance—if you have, if not felt want, at least feared it.
Crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century was not quite the experience of a century before. Auxiliary steam was not yet available on most vessels, and conditions were still primitive, but passages were improving. There was no denying, however, that even in the 1840s conditions for immigrants were anything but healthy. Hundreds of passengers, from children to people in their eighties, would be huddled together with little light or air, contagion rampant, food seldom sufficient (or sufficiently cooked). From a 700-ton vessel, the Atlantic can be both benign and malignant, cheerful and frightening. A winter passage was to be avoided at almost any price, but storms were always bad whatever the time of year, and sometimes dangerous. Vessels could simply disappear without trace. Many did. James Affleck, the father-in-law of Sir John Thompson, later Prime Minister, was a sea-captain out of Halifax; he, his crew, and his ship just vanished in the summer of 1870. So did regular passenger ships: the City of Cork went down that same summer. The Hungarian, a regular Allan Line ship with steam auxiliary travelling from Portland, Maine, to Liverpool, caught the south-western tip of Nova Scotia one wild February night in 1860 and drove aground on Cape Ledge with the loss of over a hundred lives. Atlantic travel was for the sturdy and the determined, who were willing to risk themselves and their children on a long and often perilous voyage.
Once across the ocean and past immigration and quarantine, the immigrant in the New World needed some money to get him where he wanted to go. (In the years before Canada’s acquisition of the great West, land had to be purchased, except in special cases such as Loyalists and half-pay British officers. It only became generally free in the Dominion Lands Act of 1872.) He had also to support himself and family until the land produced a crop. It was, none of it, easy; but neither was it impossible. It could be done, given reasonable luck with the land, willingness and competence to do the work. Experience with axe or plough helped.
There are many stories of failure; but more important, because more pervasive, are the successes, which are told less often than they should be. James Croil was born in Glasgow in 1821 and came to Quebec early in the 1845 season with a wife and family, landing with seven sovereigns in his pocket. (A sovereign was worth ?1, or twenty shillings.) Some of it he used to get his family to Glengarry County, Upper Canada, where his wife’s brother lived. The brother-in-law lent Croil seed, stock, and implements, and with what was left of his seven sovereigns he laid in provisions for the summer. He started work with five shillings left over. He had a good crop in 1845, and returned his brother-in-law the seed and half the produce of the land. Croil’s half of the produce bought him provisions for 1846. In the spring of that year he rented a small farm at ?20 per annum, and by the end of the 1848 season, when his lease expired, he had implements and stock of his own. In 1849 he rented two adjoining farms at ?33 per annum. In the autumn of 1851 the two properties were offered for sale. Croil had no savings yet, but the land looked good and his sons were growing healthy and strong. A family council was held; Croil told his boys that if they would
James Croil and Party. Croil, a Scottish immigrant who became the editor of the Presbyterian Record, was the author of several books. This 1888 photograph recreating the family’s arrival in Canada in the 1840s is by William Notman & Sons; Notman (1826-91) was a prize-winning photographer with branch studios right across eastern Canada and the U. S.
Canadian Wedding. A dance at a Lower Canadian wedding; the fiddler is on the right. Note the metal stove in the middle of the room, a much more efficient mode of heating than a fireplace. Watercolour (c. 1845) by James Duncan (1806-82).
All work they could pay for it. After all, as one historian has noted, the main motive force on the family farm was the farm family. Accordingly, the double farm was bought for ?300, to be paid off at ?50 per annum, plus interest at about 4 or 5 per cent. Forty acres were already cleared, and Croil and his sons cleared six acres further per year. Thus, by 1861, sixteen years after their arrival in Canada, the debt was paid, a hundred acres (forty hectares) were cleared, and the farm itself was worth ?1,000. (This was in colonial pounds—“Halifax currency”—although Canada had officially converted to a dollar currency around 1858.) The two older boys had left to set up farms for themselves, but with his two younger sons Croil still worked his land.
The economy he describes in his memoirs is fascinating. In summer the family lived on bacon, beef, and ham, smoked by themselves, supplemented by their own eggs, and cheese and butter homemade from their own cows. In October they killed a cow or a young bull; the blacksmith got a quarter, the shoemaker another, the tailor a third, and the family kept the fourth. Another beast was killed in December; it was cut up, frozen, and packed away in barrels with straw, where it would keep until the end of March. The hide of the second beast went to the tanner, who kept half.
Harvest Festival in Lower Canada. This watercolour (c. 1850) is attributed to William Berczy, Jr. (1791-1873). Of German-Swiss origin, Berczy followed his father, William Berczy, Sr., in pursuing a career as a portrait, landscape, and genre painter in Upper and Lower Canada.
Returning the other half to Croil. Then, once a year, the shoemaker came to the farm and made shoes for all. The tallow from the beasts was rendered and made into candles, the refuse scraps boiled up with wood ashes to make soap. The women spun the wool and wove the cloth, sewed the quilts and counterpanes, made the feather beds. Whenever a son or daughter married, Croil would sell a pair of horses and a cow or two and give the young couple, as he put it, “a decent outfit.” Best of all, he was none the poorer, for new calves and colts were always coming. The farm economy needed its calves, colts, and children!
The point about the farm economy, at least in the East, was that there was nearly always a crop of something. If it was too wet for the wheat, potatoes flourished and so did hay. For the farmers of eastern Canada the sheer diversity of their production meant that they could produce nearly everything they needed, and often in some abundance. Of course, Croil’s account takes for granted everyday tasks that are now
Colonel Samuel Strickland (standing, right) and his family. Strickland—brother of authors Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill (third from left, holding child)—was sheriff of Belleville, Ontario, for thirty years, and wrote Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West (1853).
Easy to forget. The sheer brute labour of clearing land—those six acres a year—cutting the trees, sawing them up, burning the slash, finally those heart - and back-breaking stumps! Even alter they had rotted for a few years, they were terrible to get out. And then there were the normal farm routines. Even in winter there was no holiday from animals; cows had to be milked twice a day, every day; horses, chickens, pigs had to be fed and looked after. Wood for fires had to be cut and split. Fences had to be built or mended; barns repaired; the jam and pickles made; the spinning, weaving, and quilting done—and the thousand tasks which had been left until winter came and the outside work finally stopped.
Country recreation was dances, square dances usually, with fife and fiddles. There
Casimir Gzowski (1813-98) and family, photographed at their Toronto home, around 1857, by Armstrong, Beere, 8c Hime. Born in Russia, Gzowski came to Canada in the 1840s, and worked as an engineer. He became the Province of Canada’s superintendent of public works, in charge of roads, parks, bridges, harbours, and waterways, but is most remembered for his railway construction and for the International Bridge from Fort Erie to Buffalo.
Was a whole range of country dances, Scottish, Irish, American. Whisky was the universal drink in Ontario and Quebec, and rum in the Atlantic provinces, coming cheap off the vessels from the West Indies. Whisky could be made from almost anything—frosted rye, mouldy pumpkins, or proper malted barley—but it came strong and raw. It burned, inside and out, with a pale blue flame. At times drinking and farming did not consort well together. There were always bees, very popular in the countryside, a source of fun and frolic and often more. Bees for raising a barn or house required at least some modicum of sobriety; it was the logging-bees Susanna Moodie hated. “Noisy, riotous, drunken,” was her description in Roughing It in the Bush. Mrs. Moodie—an English gentlewoman who moved to Canada with her husBand in 1832—had good cause to know; she had to cope with the food and drink for thirty-two men for a three-day bee. Many social institutions could not have managed without punch. Choir practices in Halifax, and elsewhere no doubt, had to be lubricated, and there was usually someone who knew how to mix rum, lemon juice, and sugar for a little reinforcement at intermission. Singing was thirsty business!
Drink permeated male society. It was not unbecoming for gentlemen, so-called, to be drunk; it was an eighteenth-century style still holding on manfully into the nineteenth. There is a 1787 account by a twenty-two-year-old naval captain in Halifax who sat down to dinner with twenty other gentlemen at the Governor’s. Sixty bottles of claret and a dozen or two beers later, those who were still able essayed walking up Citadel Hill to try their luck with the girls on Barrack Street.
But by the nineteenth century the teetotallers were fighting back. Beginning about the 1830s, there were temperance movements preaching the transcendent virtues of cold water. The Sons of Temperance actually succeeded in persuading the government of New Brunswick to try the experiment of prohibition; it was adopted in 1852, effective January 1, 1853, but repealed the following year as utterly unworkable. Another version was bravely brought in in 1855, effective January 1, 1856. It brought down the government and was repealed too. After that. New Brunswick governments left the whole question severely alone, as well they might. No other colony made such an attempt. Nevertheless, the colonies had a growing segment of Protestants who deplored sin and gin equally. Temperance movements were strong among the Methodists and Baptists, and also among Presbyterians; they were unobtrusive among Anglicans, and virtually non-existent with Roman Catholics. It was, after all. Saint Benedict who held that a pint of wine a day was neither sinful nor dangerous.
It should not be assumed that meetings of temperance societies were all preaching and piety. A young man or woman brought up under the aegis of a drunken father already knew what whisky could do, without hellfire lectures. Temperance societies were often of young, vigorous, enterprising types, anything but milk-and-water; they sponsored dances, picnics, suppers, and sleigh-riding parties in winter. On a sleigh ride there were ways of keeping warm at least as good as—if not better than—drinking whisky. As these societies developed and matured, they created such offshoots as building societies and insurance companies. Business collectivities were often the result of private ones.
However high-mindedly these rural delights may have begun, there was a kind of cultural Gresham’s law on the frontier, whereby more primitive customs tended to drive out more civilized ones. The Protestant churches—indeed all churches—tried to hold onto civilization as best they could. But rural society in British North America could be narrow, intolerant, and occasionally brutal. For example, the charivari, a noisy serenade to a newly married couple, was often a harmless and cheerful social custom, but it could turn malicious, particularly if the couple were not popular.
The Orange and the Green sides of Irish life and politics, exported to Canada, made their own contribution to recreational violence and factional infelicities. It was fortunate, perhaps, that Irish Catholics tended to the towns, and Irish Protestants more to the countryside. Even so, an Orange march in Toronto or elsewhere could easily (and, after a few draughts of whisky, effortlessly) be translated into Protestant hooligans on the loose. Axe handles were especially valuable in any fracas.
Duelling was on the wane by the 1840s, but although illegal it was still around. It was difficult for a gentleman to refuse a duel and still retain his self-respect or, as important, the respect of his friends. Joseph Howe in Halifax illustrates the transition. On being challenged by John Halliburton, the son of Chief Justice Sir Brenton Halliburton, Howe—a newspaper editor in his thirties—said he had no option but to accept. He had either to hazard his life or to “blight all prospects of being useful.”
An election day in Montreal in 1860 or 1861, near the Champs de Mars; open (public) voting was the rule until well after Confederation. Intimidation and rough-housing were common, and police were frequently called in to protect dissenting voters.
So the duel was fought, early on the morning of Saturday, March 14, 1840, at the Martello tower in Point Pleasant. It was on the usual principles: pis-
The majesty of the law, in Canada West—as seen from the Old Country. Top: A witness taking the oath at a country trial in Dufferin County in the 1850s. This would almost certainly be a minor case; important trials went to the County Court. Bottom: Only five “good men and true” deliberating the verdict in a nearby orchard. From The Illustrated London News (February 17, 1855).
Tols for two, coffee for one. It is not known what the distance was; fifty paces was not uncommon, though Sir Lucius ©’Trigger, the Irish duellist in Sheridan’s play The
Rivals, declares that “a pretty gentleman’s distance” is twenty paces! John Halliburton fired first and missed. Howe, who was a good shot (having grown up in the woods along the North West Arm), fired into the air. He was not, he said afterward, going to deprive an old man of his only son. The best part of Howe’s story, and the lesson in it, was that he was then free to duel or not, as he chose, for ever. He did not need to explain or apologize. A month and a half later he got a second challenge, from Sir Rupert George, the Provincial Secretary. Had Howe not been out with Halliburton, that challenge would have been impossible to refuse; now, however, Howe simply said no. He had no personal quarrel with Sir Rupert, and would not fire if he did go out; and he had no great fancy for being shot at whenever, as a newspaperman, he happened to contrast a man’s capacities with his pay. The result in Halifax was that Sir Rupert was merely laughed at. It was much the best solution.
Inevitably, politics too was a struggle animated by local loyalties and passions. Small towns had their rival hotels; larger towns developed rival newspapers in which opponents were freely damned, painted as black as possible, and supporters made to look as white as snow. Families relished their political loyalties and passed them on to the next generation. In Antigonish County, Nova Scotia, it used to be said that a mixed marriage was not between Catholic and Protestant but between Conservative and Liberal.
Voting was then very different from what it is now. The hustings were a rowdy place, and voting was a public and social occasion. A man did not vote with a clandestine, secret ballot. He stood up openly and declared his choice. The crowds around the hustings cheered or derided, or both. This was called, rather euphemistically, the manly British system of open voting. It was occasionally followed by the less manly, but also British, system of knocking your opponent on the head.
This description of British North American society suggests a rough world. It could be that, sometimes, as in the 1840s Shiners’ War in Ottawa between Irish and French-Canadian lumbermen. But it was only so at irregular intervals, when the passions of a group boiled over, when the social controls normally in place from church and community failed to work, as in the Rebellion Losses Bill riot of 1849, or the 1853 Gavazzi riots in Quebec and Montreal caused by Catholic fury over the maligning of their church by a renegade priest.
The system of law enforcement was rooted in the community too, but it was less casual than it might appear. As in Britain, colonial justice relied heavily on the unpaid Justice of the Peace. Appointed by colonial governments, the jp could be a man of almost any calling—farmer, tinsmith, fisherman, merchant—though usually a man of some standing in the community. He might or might not know much about law. As a rule, jPs were not lawyers; there was an old colonial saying that lawyers made more money defending criminals than arranging their prosecution. The jP was also in many ways a creature of the community he lived in: that was both the strength of the institution, and in some parts of British North America its weakness. What did one do about a jp so much under the thumb of local roughs that he was afraid to have them prosecuted, or to sentence them properly when they were convicted? And since JPS made their money from fees, some could be venal and treacherous. In Sam Slick, the Clockmaker, Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s stories about Nova Scotian life in the 1830s, Justice Pettifog’s horse carries more roguery than law. Justice Pettifog and his Constable Nabb are as precious a yoke of rascals as one would meet in a day’s ride.
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (6673)
The diversity of Behind Bonsecours Market, Montreal is extraordinary: vegetables, adults, children, animals, and the sailing ships and steamboats of the St. Lawrence in the distance. The church, just visible here on the left, is Notre Dame de Bonsecours, founded by Marguerite Bourgeoys in 1657 and rebuilt in 1771. The oil (1866) is by German-born Jewish immigrant William Raphael (1833-1914).
The Canada Southern Railway. This line, running across the Niagara Peninsula of southern Ontario, was designed to tap American traffic between Detroit and Buffalo, and to steal business from Canada’s Great Western. The International Bridge, built by Casimir Gzowski, was opened on November 5,
1873, and a Canada Southern train was the first over it twelve days later. Oil (c. 1873) by Robert Whale (1805-87).
Royal Ontario Museum, Ethnology Department, Toronto (912.1.26)
Alexander Ross, a Red River settler, accompanied 400 Metis riders on a similar bison hunt around 1850; “the surface was rocky and full of badger holes,” he observed. “Twenty-three horses and riders were at one moment all sprawling on the ground; one horse, gored by a bull, was killed on the spot; two more were disabled by the fall; one rider broke his shoulderblade; another burst his gun and lost three of his fingers by the accident; and a third was struck on the knee by an exhausted ball.” Oil (c. 1850) by Paul Kane, Metis Running Buffalo.
Public Archives of Canada, Art and Photography Division, Ottawa (c-2775)
Expedition to the Red River in 1870 under Sir Garnet Wolseley. Advance Guard Crossing a Portage. This 1871 oil by Frances Ann Hopkins shows government troops on the Kaministiquia River below Kakabeka Falls, on their way west to put down Louis Riel’s Red River Rebellion.
Sunrise on the Saguenay, an 1880 oil by Lucius R. O’Brien (1832-99), first president of the Royal Canadian Academy. This was O’Brien’s diploma piece for the inaugural exhibition of the Academy, which opened in Ottawa in March 1880. The event is commemorated in a Canadian Illustrated News engraving (inset) depicting the Governor General, the Marquess of Lome, declaring the exhibition open; note O’Brien’s canvas on the wall behind him.
The Rogers Pass, an 1886 oil by John A. Fraser, was painted at the behest of Cornelius Van Horne, vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. First opened up by the cpr in 1882, the Rogers Pass, at 4,340 feet (1,323 metres), is virtually the only route through the Selkirk Mountains.
The Covent Garden Market, London, Ontario. Markets were favourite themes of 19th-century artists, and Paul Peel (1860-92) painted this oil of his hometown market in 1883. Peel, who studied in Philadelphia and Paris, is famous for his luminous studies of pre-pubescent nudes, but his interest in light and shade in landscape and cityscape is obvious here.
Royal Ontario Museum, Canadiana Department, Toronto (955.175)
The Robert Simpson Company, Toronto
This handsome View of King Street, Toronto, showing the Jail and Court House, attributed to Thomas Young (d. 1860), shows the old Toronto market (later the site of St. Lawrence Hall) on the left, St. James Cathedral on the right, and the view westward from Jarvis Street. Note the gas streetlamps, installed just three years before. Oil, c. 1844-45.
Lights of a City Street shows Toronto newsboys and pedestrians on a rainy evening at the corner of Queen and Yonge streets, while bicycles and electric streetcars signal the approach of the 20th century. Oil (1894) by EM. Bell-Smith (1846-1923).
World History
