Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1

by Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

But much remains to be done on this important head. A melancholy error was committed in making the President, and consequently all the officers and employés, of the Board of Works, partizans of the ministry of the day; thus paralyzing the efforts of a zealous man, on the one hand, by the fear of dismissal upon any change of the popular will, and neutralizing his efforts whilst in office, by rendering his measures mere jobs.

This has been amended under Lord Metcalfe's administration; and it is to be hoped that the office of President of the Board of Works will hereafter be one subjected to severe but not to vexatious scrutiny, and at the same time carefully guarded against political influence, and only rendered tenable with honour by the capacity of the person selected to fill it and of his subordinates. Canada is, as I have written two former volumes to prove, a magnificent country. I doubt very much if Nature has created a finer country on the whole earth.

The soil is generally good, as that made by the decay of forests for thousands of years upon substrata, chiefly formed of alluvion or diluvion, the deposit from waters, must be. It is, moreover, from Quebec to the Falls of St. Mary, almost a flat surface, intersected and interlaced by numberless streams, and studded with small lakes, whilst its littorale is a river unparalleled in the world, expanding into enormous fresh water seas, abounding with fish.

If the tropical luxuries are absent, if its winters are long and excessively severe, yet it yields all the European fruits abundantly, and even some of the tropical ones, owing to the richness of its soil and the great heat of the summer. Maize, or Indian corn, flourishes, and is more wholesome and better than that produced in the warm South. The crops of potato, that apple of the earth, as the French so justly term it, are equal, if not superior, to those of any other climate; whilst all the vegetables of the temperate regions of the old world grow with greater luxuriance than in their original fields. I have successively and successfully cultivated the tomato, the melon, and the capsicum, in the open air, for several seasons, at Kingston and Toronto, which are not the richest or the best parts of Western Canada, as far as vegetation is concerned. Tobacco grows well in the western district, and where is finer wheat harvested than in Western Canada?—whilst hay, and that beauty of a landscape, the rich green sod, the velvet carpet of the earth, are abundant and luxuriant.

If the majesty of vegetation is called in question, and intertropical plants brought forward in contrast, even the woods and trackless forests of Guiana, where the rankest of luxuriance prevails, will not do more than compete with the glory of the primeval woods of Canada. I know of nothing in this world capable of exciting emotions of wonder and adoration more directly, than to travel alone through its forests. Pines, lifting their hoary tops beyond man's vision, unless he inclines his head so far backwards as to be painful to his organization, with trunks which require fathoms of line to span them; oaks, of the most gigantic form; the immense and graceful weeping elm; enormous poplars, whose magnitude must be seen to be conceived; lindens, equally vast; walnut trees of immense size; the beautiful birch, and the wild cherry, large enough to make tables and furniture of.

Oh, the gloom and the glory of these forests, and the deep reflection that, since they were first created by the Divine fiat, civilized man has never desecrated them with his unsparing devastations; that a peculiar race, born for these solitudes, once dwelt amidst their shades, living as Nature's woodland children, until a more subtile being than the serpent of Eden crept amongst them, and, with his glittering novelties and dangerous beauty, caused their total annihilation! I see, in spirit, the red hunter, lofty, fearless, and stern, stalking in his painted nudity, and displaying a form which Apollo might have envied, amidst the everlasting and silent woods; I see, in spirit, the bearded stranger from the rising sun, with his deadly arms and his more deadly fire-water, conversing with his savage fellow, and displaying the envied wealth of gorgeous beads and of gaudy clothing.

The scene changes, the proud Indian is at the feet of his ensnarer; disease has relaxed his iron sinews; drunkenness has debased his mind; and the myriad crimes and vices of civilized Europe have combined to sweep the aborigines of the soil from the face of the forest earth. The forest groans beneath the axe; but, after a few years, the scene again changes; fertile fields, orchards and gardens, delight the eye; the city, and the town, and the village spires rise, and where two solitary wigwams of the red hunter were once alone occasionally observed, twenty thousand white Canadians now worship the same Great Author of the existence of all mankind.

And to increase these fields, these orchards, these gardens, these villages, these towns, and these cities, year after year, thirty thousand of the children of Britain cross the broad Atlantic: and what seeks this mass of human beings, braving the perils of the ocean and the perils of the land? Competence and wealth! The former, by prudence, is soon attainable; the acquisition of the latter uncertain and fickle.

No free grants of land are now given, but the settler may obtain them upon easy terms from the government, or the Canada and British American companies.

The settler with a small capital cannot do better than purchase out and out. Instalments are a bad mode of purchasing; for, if all should not turn out right, instalments are sometimes difficult to meet; and the very best land, in the best locations, as we shall hereafter see, is to be had from 7s. 6d., if in the deep Bush, as the forest is called; to 10s., if nearer a market; or 15s. and 20s., if very eligibly situated. Thus for two hundred pounds a settler can buy two hundred acres of good land, can build an excellent house for two hundred and fifty more, and stock his farm with another fifty, as a beginning; or, in other words, he can commence Canadian life for five hundred pounds sterling, with every prospect before him, if he has a family, of leaving them prosperous and happy. But he and they must work, work, work. He and all his sons must avoid whiskey, that bane of the backwoods, as they would avoid the rattlesnake, which sometimes comes across their path. Whiskey and wet feet destroy more promising young men in Canada than ague and fever, that scourge of all well watered woody countries; for the ague and fever seldom kill but with the assistance of the dram and of exposure.