Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2

by Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

The first good view of the Grand River was attained three miles from Brantford, and, although the name is rather too sounding, the Grand River is a very fine stream. It put me singularly in mind, with its oak-forested banks, its tall poplars, and its meandering clear waters, of the Thames about Marlow, where I remember, when I was a boy at the Military College, seeing the fish at the bottom on a fine day, so plain that I longed to put a little salt on their tails.

You look down near the Union Inn, Carr's, on a most beautiful woodland view, undulating, rich, and varied. This part of the country is a sandy soil, and is called the Oak Plains. Here once flourished the Indian. His wars, his glory, his people—where are they? Gone! The Saxon and the Celt have swept off the race, and their memory is as a cloud in a summer's sky, beautiful but dissolving.

Brantford is a very long village, with four churches or chapels, one of them a handsome building, and with fine prospects of the country, through which runs the Grand River. The houses are mostly of wood, a few of brick, with some good shops, or stores, as they are universally called in America and Canada, where every thing, from a pin to a six-point blanket, may be obtained for dollars, country produce, or approved bills of exchange—chiefly however by barter, that true universal medium in a new country, as may be gleaned from any Canadian newspaper about Christmas time, when the subscribers are usually reminded that wood for warming the printer will be very acceptable.

Plank side-walks, a new feature in Canadian towns, are rapidly extending in Brantford, which is just starting into importance; as the government, though it is so far inland, intend to make a port of it, by thoroughly opening the navigation of the Grand River from its mouth in Lake Erie. The works are near completion, and a steamboat, the Brantford, plies regularly in summer. Thus an immense country, probably the finest wheat-land in the world, will be opened to commerce, and the great plaster of Paris quarries of the river find a market, for increasing the fertility of the poorer lands of the lower part of the province.

Brantford is named after Brant, the celebrated Indian warrior chief, and here the Mohawk tribe of the Five Nations have their principal seat. This excellent race, for their adhesion to British principles in the war of the Revolution, lost their territory in the United States, consisting of an immense tract in the fair and fertile valley of the Mohawk river, in the State of New York, through which the Erie Canal and railroad now run, and possessed by a flourishing race of farmers.

I remember being told a curious story of the Dutch, who have their homesteads on the Mohawk Flats, the richest pasture land in New York. These simple colonists, preserving their ancient habits, pipes, breeches, and phlegm, looked with astonishment at the progress of their Yankee neighbours, and predicted that so much haste and action would soon expend itself. At last came surveyors and engineers, those odious disturbers of antiquity and quiet rural enjoyments: they pointed their spirit-levels, they stretched their chains across the fair fields of the quiet slumbering valley of these smoking Dutchmen. The very cows looked bewildered, and Mynheer, taking his meerschaum from his lips, sighed deeply.

They told him that a railroad was projected across his acres; he would not have minded a canal. He had survived the wars of the Indians; he had forgotten Sir William Johnson and his neighbouring castle; he had gone through the rebellion of Washington without being despoiled; and had finally, as he thought, settled down in the lovely valley of the meandering Mohawk, in a flat very like what his ancestors represented to him as the pictured reality of Sluys or Scheldtland. He had smoked and dozed through all this excitement, and was just beginning to understand English. The American character was above his comprehension. He remembered George the Third with respect, because his great grandfather was a Dutchman, who had ascended the British throne, and had proclaimed Protestantism and Orange boven as the law of the colonies. He still thought George the Third his ruler; and never knew that George Washington had, Cromwell-like, ousted the monarch from his fair patrimony, on pretence that tea was not taxable trans-atlantically.

The railroad came: Acts of Congress or of Assembly passed; and fire and iron rushed through the happy valley. The patriarchs lifted up their hands and their pipes in utter dismay.

"Ten thousand duyvels!" exclaimed one old Van Winkle; "vat is dis?—it is too ped! King Jorje is forget himsel. I should not vonder we shall hab a rebublic next."

"I dink ve shall," was the universal response from amidst a dense cloud of tobacco vapour.