Sisters in the Wilderness (44 page)

Catharine chose her tone deliberately. She wanted the large-format, literary volume to “foster a love for the native plants of Canada” and persuade readers to pay attention to the “floral beauty that is destined sooner or later to be swept away, as the onward march of civilization clears away the primeval forest, reclaims the swamps and bogs, and turns the waste places into a fruitful field.” Her preface acknowledged that “the scientific reader may possibly expect a more learned description of the plants, and may notice many defects and omissions,” but Catharine was writing for people like herself, not for lofty scientists.

Once Agnes had finished her lithographs,
Canadian Wild Flowers
took most of 1867 to put together. “I got the proof sheet and Agnes's design of the specimen sheet for the book of Canadian Flowers,” Catharine wrote to her daughter Kate in February that year. “I re-wrote one article and corrected and sent it by post to Lovell.” Although she acknowledged that it was mostly her niece's work, she was soon getting as irritated with Lovell and Agnes as she had been with the Hamilton Horticultural Society. “I have been writing at my flower book but have not heard from Lovell …how very uncourteous these publishers are.” She resented the way that Agnes failed to consult her on every detail. She complained to Susanna that “I do not even know who is correcting the press for Agnes writes hasty letters and seldom comes to the point on business matters.” She knew Susanna would sympathize with her exasperation—Susanna knew Agnes's haughty manner all too well.

Exasperation apart, Catharine did her bit to sell subscriptions. She and Kate did the rounds of likely readers in the Peterborough area. Loyal friends like Frances Stewart bought several. “Your approval dear friend of the book,” Catharine wrote to her, “cheered me not a little for I was
much disappointed with my share of the work.” But other potential buyers looked askance at the high-priced, large format volume. Catharine described to her daughter Annie how “[a] hard-fisted, hard-headed hardware merchant … looked … as if he would have liked nothing better than throwing one of his hammers or hoes at [Kate's] head when he paid down hard cash for his book. One man kept us a long time in suspense, and at last declined on the plea that his children always tore all the books in his wife's drawing room to pieces, calling on a lean, ill-favoured vinegar bottle of a wife to endorse the fact which she did saying, ‘I guess they do.' I merely hinted that it was rather a bad plan to let them destroy things. ‘Wal I guess it is but they will do it so it's no use buying things to be tore up,' she said—so there was an end to the matter.”

The proposed volume received a better reception amongst the English relatives. By now, Agnes Strickland had resumed a regular, if frosty correspondence with Susanna, who had described to her English sisters her own and Catharine's various writing projects. Agnes was in a forgiving mood, because she had discovered yet another rich run of royals for Elizabeth Strickland and herself to write about: the Tudor princesses. She loyally promised to support
Canadian Wild Flowers.
“I hope that [the work that] your interesting daughter Agnes … and dear Kate are preparing will answer,” she wrote to Susanna in 1868. “I have not heard the price, but I will subscribe for a copy.”

The first edition of
Canadian Wild Flowers
appeared at the end of 1868, and it was an instant triumph. It was the first botanical book for the general reader; it had been put together by two indomitable women; and it was a proudly Canadian production at a most propitious moment. The previous year, to the accompaniment of brass bands, blazing fireworks and sonorous speeches, the United Provinces (present-day Ontario and Quebec) and two of the British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard (New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) had come together to form the Dominion of Canada. Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, knighted at Confederation, was determined to expand and promote the newly minted nation. There was a popular hunger for the symbols of nationhood: in
England, the Staffordshire potter Thomas Furnival replaced the pictures of Niagara Falls on ironstone dinner services destined for Canada with pictures of beavers and maple leaves. A book celebrating the Dominion's flora had instant appeal.

The
Montreal Daily News
wrote: “This beautiful work must be regarded as a most valuable addition to the literature of Canada. It is a joint production of two ladies, Mrs. Agnes Fitzgibbon of Toronto and her aunt, Mrs. Traill of North Douro, a lady well-known to the literary world, sister of Miss Agnes Strickland, the celebrated authoress of the Lives of the Queens of England … Between them these ladies have produced a work of great merit; and we rise from its perusal full of hope for the future literary reputation of the Dominion.” The periodical
New Century
referred to the book as “[o]ne of the most remarkable works ever attempted by a woman.” Agnes Fitzgibbon, who had stayed in Montreal to oversee the first printing, easily found subscribers amongst that cosmopolitan city's literary set for a second and then a third edition within a few months.

Spurred by success, Catharine and Agnes planned English and American editions, and further botanical collaborations. Catharine must have hoped that this triumph would stimulate interest amongst publishers for her longer manuscript about plants. But all these hopes and plans were quickly overtaken by events. A more attractive proposition than literary sweat and toil came along for pretty, clever Agnes Fitzgibbon: a new suitor. While selling subscriptions for
Canadian Wild Flowers
in Ottawa, she had been introduced to Colonel Brown Chamberlin. Chamberlin, a lawyer who owned the Montreal
Gazette
, was active in the militia and was the Conservative member of Parliament for the Eastern Townships riding of Missisquoi. Moreover, the dashing Colonel Chamberlin had served Sir John A. Macdonald, his political boss, so well that a patronage plum came his way: in early 1870, he was appointed Queen's Printer, which gave him a very comfortable annual salary of $2,000. Within a year of first meeting, Agnes and her suitor were married. Agnes had achieved what every young widow of the era prayed for:
a second chance. Moreover, unlike Charles Fitzgibbon, Brown Chamberlin offered the three Rs—he was rich, respectable and reliable. In 1871, thirty-eight-year-old Agnes Chamberlin gave birth to her fourth daughter and (counting the four earlier deaths) ninth child. She no longer had the time or inclination to scrape a living in the book world.

In July 1870, tragedy struck Catharine Parr Traill's family. Her son Harry had recently got a job as a guard at Kingston Penitentiary. One day, while he was supervising a limekiln within the prison grounds, two convicts attacked and killed him in the course of a planned escape. It was a brutal crime: Harry's head was split open by a crowbar wielded from behind him. The newspapers covered the trial and conviction of the murderers the following November with ghoulish interest—it was the first time a prison guard had been murdered in the line of duty in Canada.

The loss of her second son devastated Catharine. She told Frances Stewart how she desperately tried to forget “the terrible details of this most disastrous event, and to think only that he is gone from amongst us.” Susanna's sympathy for her sister was unstinting—although clothed, as usual, with snatches of her own enduring grief. “Oh dear, dear Katie, you have my fullest, deepest sympathy….The poor wife will feel it most, for in the course of Nature, you and I will soon join our dear ones again, but she poor thing has a long sad life of widowhood before her.”

Catharine worried about Harry's widow, Lily, and three children. She prayed that “God who is the father of the orphan, and the protector of the widow will not leave them comfortless … to His gracious care we must commend poor desolate-hearted Lily and her children.” More practically, she invited Harry's only daughter and her own namesake, three-year-old Katharine Parr, to stay with her and her daughter. There were now three Catharine Traills (with variations in the spelling) living at Westove: the writer Catharine, sixty-eight; “Aunt Kate,” as Catharine's thirty-four-year-old daughter was now called; and “Little Katie.” The two older women found Little Katie “a source of great interest yet of anxious care.” Most of the child-rearing fell on the shoulders of Aunt Kate, but Catharine took on herself the responsibility of teaching Little Katie the
letters of the alphabet and names of wildflowers. She had less time to pursue botanical research and a publisher for her plant life manuscript.

It was not simply Catharine's preoccupation with family affairs that kept her long manuscript on plant life unpublished during the 1870s. The more fundamental problem was that Catharine was a nineteenth-century woman writing in an eighteenth-century idiom. Botany was changing; natural history was giving way to scientific technique; laboratory work was replacing nature study. Charles Darwin had rocked the intellectual establishment of the English-speaking world when he published
The Origin of Species
. Professional botanists now sought evidence of evolutionary change rather than divine intervention when they studied the propagation of plants. Catharine's writing style—the attractive mix of scientific nomenclature and literary elegance that she had learned from Gilbert White—was increasingly out-of-date. Interest faded in books that reflected sheer love of nature's bounty and admiration of God's handiwork. There was no room for female gifted amateurs amongst the academically qualified male scientists in professional associations. In 1897, when D.P. Penhallow, professor of botany at McGill University, published a review of Canadian botany from 1800 to 1895, there was not a single woman mentioned in his list of over one hundred people who had contributed to the subject.

But Catharine, who was as little interested in intellectual fashions as she was in clothing fashions, remained determined to get her manuscript in print. “Nothing is done, my dear,” she remarked to her daughter Katie, “without trying, and if one thing fails I must try another.” Her dog-eared manuscript on plant life would see the light of day during her own lifetime because of her persistence and because, for all its faults, it had its charms.

Chapter 18

A Trip to Stony Lake

S
usanna leaned heavily on the arm of her nephew, Percy Strickland, as she hobbled along the dusty road. It was a sultry June morn-ing—the hottest day so far of 1872—and the distance from Westove, Catharine's cottage, to the Lakefield steamer dock seemed longer than she recalled. She regretted that she had agreed to walk with Percy when she could have been riding with her sister in his horse-drawn buggy. But Percy had put her on her mettle with a careless remark, as he looked at his two stout aunts, that the buggy would “scarcely hold two fairies” like them. Determined not to let her seventy-year-old sister show her up, sixty-eight-year-old Susanna had insisted on walking the mile to the dock situated just behind the little Anglican Church built by her late brother Sam, who had died five years earlier. Now her lace-up black leather boots were pinching her corns. She would have loved to stop and mop the “glow” from her brow.

Once the landing dock was in sight, however, her good humour returned. It had been a pleasant surprise when Percy had arrived at Catharine's front door that morning to invite his aunts to join a family excursion on the steamer to Stony Lake. Susanna had not seen Stony Lake for years. She vividly recalled the expedition that she and John had made in 1835 by canoe from their log home on Lake Katchewanooka. They had been in Canada less than three years and were still enjoying their “halcyon days” in the bush. The trip been an epiphany for her—a moment when the sheer grandeur of the Canadian landscape had blotted out the endless gnaw of homesickness. The opportunity to revisit such an achingly beautiful landscape was irresistible.

When Percy and Susanna stepped onto the dock, a small crowd was already waiting to board the steamer
Chippewa.
There was Catharine's friend, the Reverend Vincent Clementi, and his wife and niece; Catharine and her daughter Kate; Percy's brothers George, Robert and Roland Strickland, and Roland's wife and Robert's two daughters; plus a handful of other Lakefield residents. There was also a pile of luggage. The gentlemen all had fishing rods and baskets; the ladies had straw hats, parasols and reticules filled with remedies for seasickness and sunburn; Catharine had the basket she always carried for rock, fern and flower specimens; Mrs. Vincent Clementi and Mrs. Roland Strickland had the makings of a picnic.

Catharine and Susanna settled themselves on the wooden seats in the cabin of the little vessel, while the men stood on the deck overhead, by the engine room. Acquaintances often confused the two sisters, with their sharp blue eyes, white hair and lacy widows' bonnets. But differences were more apparent than similarities when they were together. “I am dark and much older looking,” Susanna insisted, “and she is a pretty old lady with a soft smiling face and nice pink cheeks.” The
Chippewa
, which had been plying the Lakefield to Stony Lake route since the previous year, was emitting an urgent hiss: it had got up enough steam in its boiler to cast off. Its red-painted funnel gave a resounding whistle as the boat headed upstream through Lake Katchewanooka towards Clear Lake.