Like that pattern of all good housewives described by the prudent mother of King Lemuel, it could be said of the immigrant’s wife, “She layeth her hand to the spindle and her hands hold the distaff; she seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands; she looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.” And when Madame de Léry was presented at the Court of George III. her beauty forced the monarch to say, “If such are all my new Canadian subjects I have indeed made a conquest.”
The women of ’37 combined all these virtues with a few heroic ones. From the dark days of civil dissensions, when Canadians, like their sisters of Deborah’s time, saw their husbands obliged to travel by the by-paths because the high roads seemed to each to be occupied by his foes, “A company of ghosts steal out
And join their voiceless sobs and cries.”
And there is laughter, too; for when she forgot for a moment to cry—her tears dropping into her teacup—Deborah did not disdain to see the humorous side of affairs. If the survivor be the fittest, then Place aux dames of the Tory stripe.
“Nay, we would in the title glory,
For every honest man’s a Tory,”
is the burden of their song. It is a song which loses half its thrill without the pointed reply, the little electric sparkles which run through it. Those who have furnished the bulk of the following pages shall tell their own stories:
“I am just that kind of Tory that the only time I went to the United States I put Canadian earth in my shoes, so that I might not walk on Yankee soil.
“I do indeed remember ’37 and Mackenzie, and how angry we all were that he escaped in a woman’s clothes. ‘He need not have cheated the authorities by putting on our clothing,’ we said; it was hard to forgive him that.
“My father had a logic of his own. ‘Show me a Reformer,’ he used to say, ‘and I’ll show you a Radical; show me a Radical, and I’ll show you a rebel; show me a rebel, and I’ll show you a traitor to his country and his Queen; and a man who is untrue to his Queen is untrue to his God.’ He always declared he could smell a Radical in the next concession. A sword on one side of his bed and a gun on the other, and it was death to anyone who touched either. He always called my mother madame. ‘Madame, do you remember so and so?’ ‘Madame, is dinner ready?’ He was a volunteer in 1812, and, like many other loyal-hearted men, had to leave wife and family to look after themselves as best they might. He took part in all the chief battles then, and often was away for a month at a time. It was during one of these absences that McArthur’s freebooters, infamous marauders, plundered the country, pretending they were a branch of the United States army. When they got to our house they first of all removed a baking of bread, taking off the oven doors to do so; then they emptied the feather-beds on the brush-heap, and filled the ticks with cornstalks for fodder; they took our best blankets to cover their horses, and stole the silverware and valuables. They then destroyed what they could not carry away; one, more infamous than the rest, hurled a tomahawk through a large and valuable mirror. Some time afterwards, a Loyalist, when passing Colonel Talbot’s, saw a little copper tea-kettle hanging in a tree and a silver spoon with it, and Colonel Talbot recognized the crest on the spoon—a lamb encircled with a wreath—and the things were returned. My mother had buried what she could—her own clothes and whatever she could manage to secrete—and put brush over the place, and anything not lucky enough to be buried was taken. My father’s sister was alone when the marauders reached her house, so she called as loudly as she could, ‘John, Joe, Dick, all of you, make haste down—here they are!’ as if she was just waiting for them. She was a very resolute woman. Then she took down an old musket that always hung on two wooden hooks, rested it on the window-sill and fired at random; but random happened to be a good mark. The leader of the gang was at that moment riding towards the window, and the charge nearly carried off his horse’s leg; the animal fell, and remained there till it died. Then the whole party of these moss-troopers, who were alarmed as much by her shouts as by the shot, thought they had to encounter a number of men in the house, and made off as fast as they could. This was the time that Colonel Burwell’s place was burned and that Colonel Talbot made such a narrow escape from the same party. Colonel Burwell was ill with fever and ague; they took him prisoner and sent him to Chilicothe, where they left for him some time. They burnt his house, but his wife, after sending a message to Colonel Talbot to advise him of their coming, made her escape on her Indian pony. The marauders were all masked. She had recognized the leader, an American from across the border at Fort Erie, where she was born. She kept him interested while her messenger was on his way to Colonel Talbot—no new kind of work for Mrs. Burwell; in her old home she had had a similar experience, during which a small brother had improved the opportunity of the soldiers’ absence, while they ransacked the house, to make a visit to their stacked muskets, take a dipper and fill up every muzzle with water. When Mrs. Burwell arrived at our house, my mother dug up some of her wardrobe, and as the visitor often said afterwards, ‘Whatever should I have done if you had not given me something to wear!’ She remained with us till the next day, and Colonel Talbot in the meantime was lucky enough to look like a shepherd or labourer in his homespun smock. He was about to milk his cows, and would have made a queer figure to grace a triumph. The marauders had among them some Indians and scouts who figured at Tecumseh’s last battle, and an Indian was the first to enter on the scene. ‘You an officer?’ he said to Captain Patterson, Talbot’s friend and neighbor. ‘Oh, yes, big officer—captain.’ But this answer did not divert suspicion, and looking towards the ravine to which Colonel Talbot was directing his steps, the Indian continued, ‘Who that yonder—he big officer, too?’ ‘No, no,’ said Captain Patterson, ‘he is only the man who tends the sheep.’ Notwithstanding this assurance and the appearance which bore it out, two guns were levelled at the retreating figure. Twice they tried to cover him, but each time were diverted by the assurance repeated. The Colonel dropped into the ravine, and their chance was gone. They burned the mill, they plundered Castle Malahide, in the booty took some valuable horses, and they drove off the cattle; but two quart pots of gold and the plate, snug under the front wing of the house, escaped.
“The daughters of Joris Janson Rappelje went through much the same kind of thing. The father, a descendant of a Huguenot, had come here in 1810 with a detailed account of the family farming life, how the Dutch Governor of the New Netherlands had given a silver spoon to Sarah Rappelje, the first white child born in the colony—1635—and many other items of family interest, closely written in a fat manuscript volume. His American experiences had been stirring ones; at Lundy’s Lane it was no figure of speech to say they waded ankle deep in blood, and yet everybody said that the worst scourge of all was the raid of this band of McArthur’s marauders. They were one thousand strong, mounted, and unfortunately the camp was pitched at the Rappelje farm, where St. Andrew’s Market in St. Thomas now is. By night-time the place was in a glow of light from the fence-rails burning in heaps, the shadows of the overtopping trees making gloom above and beyond. By morning Rappelje’s sheep were all slaughtered, crops destroyed and the crib emptied of the corn. When Colonel Talbot tried to hide his valuables he gave Mrs. Rappelje a specially precious box, which was to be guarded at all hazards. It had so far been underneath a bed, a safe enough hiding in ordinary times, but she now took it out and put it between the beehives, sure that her lady bees would make good guards. Her young daughter Aletta would have fought the raiders herself had she been allowed, but she had to content herself by telling the commander that he was a thief and a scoundrel.[5]
“When the news of the uprising of ’37 reached us my father was off again, and my brothers too. One of the boys took down the big poker from the fireplace, the only weapon he could find, and I cried out to him by way of encouragement, ‘Mind you don’t get shot in the back!’ I and another girl, Margaret Caughill, sat up all night running bullets, and we had an apronful in the morning. I turned the grindstone, too, for one of the officers to sharpen his sword.
“It so happened that Dr. John Rolph was at my father’s place for three months. He poisoned the minds of a great many.”
In the house of a high Tory, who could smell a Radical in the next concession, the seditious doctor seemed to enjoy himself and showed a particular fondness for the blood-thirsty little Tory maid. “Come here, my fair child,” he would say, and when wanted and not to be found her mother would remark, “Oh, I suppose she is on Dr. Rolph’s knee.” She got at his quicksilver once, divided it with her finger to make it run, investigated the mysteries of his big watch, and helped him eat the johnnycake which he insisted her mother should bake in the ashes. The flaxen-haired, blue-eyed damsel was danced up and down by the light of the big fire— “Send them back to Yankeeland
To hoeing of their corn,
And we will eat a johnnycake
While it is good and warm,”
is the song associated with the man of whom his best biographer records there was no such thing as self-abandonment, never giving himself to frolicsomeness or fun. It is almost a relief to find him in this out-of-the-way corner of the wilderness in such homely and off-guard actions. “What do you think this little one wants—she wants my money-bags,” and up she was on his knee again to examine the leather money-belt where he kept his guineas.