CHAPTER XIV.
Intense Heat—Pigs, the Scavengers of Canada—Dutch Country—Moravian Indians—Young Father Thames—Ague, a cure for Consumption—Wild Horses—Immense Marsh.
I never remember so hot a day as the 13th of July; people in England can have no idea of the heat in Canada, which they always figure to themselves as an hyperborean region. On our journey from Thamesville, when near Louisville, a neat hamlet by the wayside, in a beautiful country, settled by old Dutch families, on a fine bend of the Thames, we passed in the woods a dead horse, and found some friends at Chatham, who told us that it had dropped down from the intense heat. Those scavengers of Canada, the pigs, were like certain politic worms already busily at work on the carcase, in which indeed one had buried itself.
In this Dutch country, you find the new road to Lake Erie, to the Rondeau from Chatham graded, or ready for planking, for twenty-six miles, and the new road to Windsor is also nearly finished; so that Chatham will now have an excellent land route to the Detroit river, as well as to Lake Erie; and as the Rondeau, a remarkable round littoral lake, is also converting into an excellent harbour, all this portion of Canada, the fairest as well as the most fertile, will progress amazingly.
I saw the chief of the Moravian Indians near Thamesville, and had some conversation with him. He is a modest, middle-aged man, and rules over about two hundred and fifty well-behaved people. The government have given him two hundred acres of land in sight of the Moravian village, and there he dwells in patriarchal simplicity.
Their spiritual and temporal concerns are under the supervision of the brethren at Bethlehem, the principal settlement of the Moravian fraternity in the United States; and they have a neat chapel and school, conducted with the decorum and good results for which that sect are noted.
Petrolean springs and mineral oil fountains are frequent near this village, and the whole country here appears bituminous, the bed of the Thames being composed of shales highly impregnated with it. Salt is manufactured in small quantities by the Indians from brine-springs here.
We saw the remarkable harvest of 1845 in all its glory on this route, as the Dutch farmers were every where at this early period cutting the wheat, and heard that on Willett's farm on the Thames it had been cut as early as the 10th of July.
My compagnon de voyage I had taken up in the morning, on account of the intelligence which he displayed, and in return for the ride he gave me much information.