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.
Men nurtured in luxury or competence at home, as soon as the unfailing ennui arising from want of society in the backwoods begins to succeed the excitement of settling, too frequently drink, and in many cases drink from their waking hour until they sink at night into sottish sleep. This is peculiarly the case where there is no village nor town within a day's journey; and thus many otherwise estimable young men become habitual drunkards, and sink from the caste of gentlemen gradually into the dregs of society, whilst their wives and families suffer proportionably.
In Lower Canada, this vice does not prevail to the same extent as in the upper portion of the province. The French Canadians are not addicted to the vice of drinking ardent spirits as a people, although the lumberers and voyageurs shorten their lives very considerably by the use of whiskey. The lumberers, who are the cutters and conveyers of timber, pass a short and excited existence.
In the winter, buried in the eternal forest, far, far away from the haunts of man, they chop and hew; in the summer, they form the timber, boards, staves, &c., into rafts, which are conveyed down the great lakes and the rivers St. Lawrence and Ottawa to Quebec—on these rafts they live and have their summer being. Hard fare in plenty, such as salt pork and dough cakes; fat and unleavened bread, with whiskey, is their diet. Tea and sugar form an occasional luxury. Up to their waists in snow in winter, and up to their waists in summer and autumn in water, with all the moving accidents by flood and field; the occasional breaking-up of the raft in a rapid, the difficulty of the winter and spring transport of the heavy logs of squared timber out of the deep and trackless woods, combine to form a portion of the hard and reckless life of a lumberer, whose morale is not much better than his physicale.
Picture to yourself, child of luxury, sitting on a cushioned sofa, in a room where the velvet carpet renders a footfall noiseless, where art is exhausted to afford comfort, and where even the hurricane cannot disturb your perusal of this work, a wood reaching without limit, excepting the oceans either of salt or fresh water which surround Canada, and where to lose the track is hopeless starvation and death; figure the giant pines towering to the clouds, gloomy and Titan-like, throwing their vast arms to the skyey influences, and making a twilight of mid-day, at whose enormous feet a thicket of bushes, almost as high as your head, prevents your progress without the pioneer axe; or a deep and black swamp for miles together renders it necessary to crawl from one fallen monarch of the wood onwards to the decaying and prostrate bole of another, with an occasional plunge into the mud and water, which they bridge; eternal silence reigning, disturbed only by your feeble efforts to advance; and you may form some idea of a red pine land, rocky and uneven, or a cedar swamp, black as night, dark, dismal, and dangerous.
Here, after you have hewed or crept your toiling way, you see, some yards or some hundred yards, as the forest is close or open, before you, a light blue curling smoke amongst the dank and lugubrious scene; you hear a dull, distant, heavy, sudden blow, frequent and deadened, followed at long intervals by a tremendous rending, crashing, overwhelming rush; then all is silent, till the voice of the guardian of man is heard growling, snarling, or barking outright, as you advance towards the blue smoke, which has now, by an eddy of the wind, filled a large space between the trees.
You stand before the fire, made under three or four sticks set up tenwise, to which a large cauldron is hung, bubbling and seething, with a very strong odour of fat pork; a boy, dirty and ill-favoured, with a sharp glittering axe, looks very suspiciously at you, but calls off his wolfish dog, who sneaks away.
A moment shows you a long hut, formed of logs of wood, with a roof of branches, covered by birch-bark, and by its side, or near the fire, several nondescript sties or pens, apparently for keeping pigs in, formed of branches close to the ground, either like a boat turned upside down, or literally as a pigsty is formed, as to shape.
In the large hut, which is occasionally more luxurious and made of slabs of wood or of rough boards, if a saw-mill is within reasonable distance, and there is a passable wood road, or creek, or rivulet, navigable by canoes, you see some barrel or two of pork, and of flour, or biscuit, or whiskey, some tools, and some old blankets or skins. Here you are in the lumberer's winter home—I cannot call him woodman, it would disgrace the ancient and ballad-sung craft; for the lumberer is not a gentle woodman, and you need not sing sweetly to him to "spare that tree."
The larger dwelling is the hall, the common hall, and the pig-sties the sleeping-places. I presume that such a circumstance as pulling off habiliments or ablution seldom occurs; they roll themselves in a blanket or skin, if they have one, and, as to water, they are so frequently in it during the summer, that I suppose they wash half the year unintentionally. Fat pork, the fattest of the fat, is the lumberer's luxury; and, as he has the universal rifle or fowling-piece, he kills a partridge, a bear, or a deer, now and then.
I was exploring last year some woods in a newly settled township, the township of Seymour West, in the Newcastle district of Upper Canada, with a view to see the nakedness of the land, which had been represented to me as flowing with milk and honey, as all new settlements of course are said to do. I wandered into the lonely but beautiful forest, with a companion who owned the soil, and who had told me that