Читать книгу Candid Chronicles: Leaves from the Note Book of a Canadian Journalist - Hector Willoughby Charlesworth - Страница 6

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The problem of Canadianizing the citizenship of this country is one on which some of my friends like to speculate, but it is a subject with which I have never been personally concerned. In my case the process of Canadianization began many decades before I was born. So far as anyone of British blood may claim to be a died-in-the-weave Canadian, that am I; and it is not without pride that I speak of forebears who played their part not only in the beginnings of British settlement in Lower and Upper Canada but in the West itself—for one of my grandfathers was born on the site of what is now Winnipeg before the Battle of Waterloo was fought. The last of my progenitors to cross the Atlantic for the purpose of making a home in the new world came nearly a century ago, and others of them were in Canada long before.

Thus, with the exception of certain memories of a girlhood in Yorkshire, which one of my grandmothers used to relate, all the family lore and traditions which a listening child picks up and unconsciously remembers were, in my case, Canadian. Though from babyhood I have myself lived in or about cities, these traditions reflected a life quite different from that which I have known—a life of struggling scattered communities too busy in the task of creating a new civilization in imitation of that which had been left behind, to be quite conscious of themselves. I realize now that as a boy I missed priceless opportunities to collect material for a book on the earlier life of Canada. The truth of the matter is that until within the present century, Canadians as a people were all too indifferent toward the records of their social and political history. Like their French predecessors, the Britishers who came to Canada during the first seven or eight decades after the British conquest in 1759 were by nature adventurous, else they would not have come at all. Like all persons of adventurous temperament they were thinking of the present and future rather than of the past. Thus experiences which viewed from the standpoint of the present generation seem romantic and even harrowing were to them affairs of no exceptional moment—part of the routine. Since the dawn of the present century we have all suddenly awakened to the importance of historical records and pioneer lore; and systematic service has been rendered by men like my friend, Prof. George M. Wrong, and many others in collecting the records and presenting the epic of Canadian development. How recent this movement is may be realized by the fact that Lord Minto, when he returned to Canada as Governor-General in 1898, was astonished to find that steps had never been taken to preserve the official records of Canadian historical events, and that it was by his insistence, rather than that of any Canadian statesman, that the Dominion Archives department was established. The Canadian Battlefields Commission is of even more recent origin. Public indifference to records was merely symptomatic of the sentiment of Canadians as a whole toward their own traditions and history during the period of my boyhood. They were too busy getting on, and watching for the next turn of events, to bother about them.

Now that a new spirit of enquiry has come over the land it is too late for some of us to uncover the wealth of material that once was open to us in the form of family recollections, and which, in the cant of my trade, would have made "good copy". Yet intelligent children listening to the talk of elderly relatives do unconsciously store away in odd corners of the brain a good deal of lore. Personally I am Saxon and Celt in almost equal proportions, and physically almost always identified by Highland Scotsmen when I come into their company as one of themselves—this despite the fact that I bear the pure Saxon-Yorkshire name of Charlesworth. They even treat me as an equal—which, as every Scotsman knows, is a concession. Since it was the Celtic or maternal side of my ancestry that played the more adventurous part in the early settlement of English-speaking Canada, it is on that which I shall first touch. My great grandfather was a Sutherlandshire Highlander of the name of McEachern, which means in the Gaelic, McHector. The McEacherns in the old warlike days were a sept of the great clan of the Macdonalds of Glencoe. He himself had been a soldier and very probably his forebears were Jacobites. In 1811 he journeyed to Fort Garry via the Hudson's Bay route on some mission in connection with Lord Selkirk's ill-fated plan of founding the Red River Colony in what is now Manitoba. His wife was, I believe, a MacVicar and he had connections who were Hudson's Bay Company officers.

At Fort Garry, shortly after his arrival, his wife bore him a son, who was John McEachern, my maternal grandfather, one of the very first white babies to be born west of Lake Superior. In other volumes, those interested in the history of the Red River Settlement may learn of the sad adventures of Lord Selkirk's party; how they became involved in the fur trading war between the Hudson's Bay Company and the younger Northwest Company—a commercial conflict that involved bloodshed. This must have been a harrowing experience for a woman like my great-grandmother, who had a young baby. Now that the Hudson's Bay route is so much discussed in the West it is interesting to be able to boast of ancestors whose advent to Canada was by that route. Life in the vicinity of Fort Garry in 1812 was too exciting even for a Highland Scotsman like my great-grandfather, and shortly with his young wife and baby he made his way East to Montreal. How I should like to have had the privilege of listening to the personal narrative of the brave woman who with a nursing baby travelled by canoe over the waterways of Northern Ontario, the route by which the furs of the West were brought to the market centre on Beaver Hall Hill, Montreal.

Though my great-grandparents came to the East under these picturesque circumstances, they left behind them relatives, especially the MacVicar connection, who appear in all the lore attaching to the early settlement not only of the Red River region, but of Fort William and Port Arthur. Coming East to escape the perils and hardships of the West, my great-grandparents were but falling from the frying pan into the fire (though the chances for a young mother were better), for the war of 1812 had commenced, and the whole Canadian border was menaced. There was work for a soldier to do, and I learned quite recently from W. D. Lighthall, LL.D., of Westmount, Quebec, who through the McEachern connection is my cousin in several removes, that my great-grandfather fought under Colonel de Salaberry at Chateauguay as the comrade of French Canadians. The Bonne Entente, of which so much has been said of late, was thus early established among my own people. Liking and respect for the original white race of Canada's history was taught me in earliest childhood.

All Canadian historians unite in emphasizing the significance of the Battle of Chateauguay, not only because it was as important in repelling invasion in Lower Canada as was the engagement of Queenston Heights in Upper Canada, but because it furnished decisive proof of the loyalty of French Canadians to British institutions, and of their valour in defending that allegiance. I am proud to say that it was mainly due to the efforts of a great-uncle of mine, the late Lieut.-Col. Archibald McEachern, C.M.G., that the significance of the battle was commemorated in the erection of the Chateauguay Monument, forty years ago. The latter was a younger brother of my grandfather, born at Lachine in 1819, where my great-grandparents had settled. Subsequently they moved to Ormston, in the united counties of Beauharnois and Huntingdon, and I have many distant cousins scattered through that populous district.

John McEachern, my grandfather, never returned to the West where he was born. In the early days of steam navigation on the St. Lawrence he became a mariner, and two or three years ago I was gratified to learn from an article on early navigation published in the Huntingdon Gleaner that his name was still remembered in the district south of Montreal. He is credited with having invented certain devices for navigating the Lachine rapids in the days before steam vessels on inland waters had become as powerful as they are to-day, and was associated in business with his connections, the DeWitts, who figure prominently in the early history of Montreal navigation. It would surprise many young people of to-day to know the relatively great part which inland navigation played in the economic life of Canada eighty years ago, compared with that of to-day, when railways run everywhere and the science of bridge building has produced the engineering marvels to link them up.

While endeavouring to avoid the tedium of such an author as Moses, credited, perhaps unfairly, with the "begat" chapters of the Old Testament, I cannot refrain from saying something of my maternal grandmother, Charlotte Burrell, whose connection with Canada antedated that of her husband, the young mariner, John McEachern. She was a daughter of George Burrell, a Dublin Irishman, who through the influence of a cousin, Sir Peter Burrell, for a short period in the later Georgian era, Lord Chancellor, had obtained an appointment in the British administration of Lower Canada. My sister possesses an heirloom with the initials "G. & J. B." deeply engraved thereon, which stands for George and Jennifer Burrell. The surname of this Jennifer, who was my great-grandmother, I have forgotten if I was ever told it, but I do recall that she was a native of the Province of Quebec, and the name indicates Cornish origin. It is Cornish for Guinevere and has rather a lively significance—for the carryings on of Queen Guinevere with Sir Lancelot are not forgotten among the Cornish peasantry, and the noun "jennifer" is sometimes used as a synonym for hussy. I have never met the word elsewhere than in the Cornish heroine of George Bernard Shaw's drama, The Doctor's Dilemma. The story of Jennifer Burrell illustrates one of the early social customs of Eastern Canada, which, according to Louisa M. Alcott, was also common to northern New England—namely, early marriage—child-marriage almost. Critics are given to questioning the text of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet where the age of the girl for whom her parents are arranging marriage is given as fourteen. But in Lower Canada and New England (circa 1800), fourteen was looked upon as the marriageable age of a girl, at which time she began to prepare her linen and other details of the wedding equipment. George Burrell was not Jennifer's first husband; she had been married at fourteen and at sixteen was widowed, with a child.

Of her four daughters, who bore the stately old-fashioned names of Eleanor, Amelia, Harriet and Charlotte, the latter, my grandmother, was the youngest. They were brought up in the Anglican faith of their father, George Burrell, but since they were educated in a French convent at Quebec they had a very kindly feeling for Roman Catholics, and were social favourites among the educated French-Canadian youths of the day. My great-aunt, Harriet, a tall and stately woman, used to boast that they attributed to her a quality which the French term "je ne sais quoi". In later life Aunt Harriet and my grandmother both became ardent Methodists, but I never heard them speak in other but kindly words of the Catholic associations in which they were reared. Once when I was a little boy I heard my grandmother, though in ordinary intercourse almost inhumanly gentle, sharply rebuke a fellow Methodist for speaking slightingly of the Mother of Our Lord. She lived long enough to attain second childhood; and, then, to the dismay of her daughters, to whom she had neglected to teach French, would converse only in that language, which she had used constantly as a little girl. Facility in two languages is a great convenience for domestic purposes. My mother often told of how aggravating it was when her elders, becoming conscious of "little pitchers", would turn suddenly to French and carry on long animated conversations on subjects they did not wish the children to understand.

My grandmother, after her marriage to John McEachern, lived at Chateauguay Basin, and vividly remembered the episodes of the rebellion led by Louis Papineau in 1837. The rising in Upper Canada under William Lyon Mackenzie was rather a joke in its way. I once asked the late Thomas Anderson, of Eglinton, who had taken up arms with Mackenzie, was imprisoned and made a sensational escape, what the rebellion in Upper Canada was all about. His retort was, "Just some of the boys raising hell, I guess". But in Lower Canada it was much more than a joke. My grandmother, though the daughter of a British official, was indignant at the reprisals which followed Papineau's rising. She told me of fine young Frenchmen, whom she regarded as merely thoughtless and impulsive, being taken from their homes and shot. And I suspect that her husband with his Jacobite ancestry was not sympathetic toward the severely punitive measures adopted.

It was at Chateauguay Basin that my mother, also named Charlotte, was born, but when she was a little girl her father, who had given up navigation, removed to Hamilton, Ont., where, with her elder brothers and sisters, she was reared, and where I myself was born. Ties with the old Huntingdon district, however, were not broken; as a young girl she made long visits there in the home of her uncle, Col. Archibald McEachern, who in 1860 was appointed Collector of Inland Revenue. This uncle, who was no stern pietist like my grandfather, lived the life of a laird among the Scottish folk, at that time numerous in Huntingdon and Beauharnois. In the Highland Scottish people there exists an abnormal psychic faculty attested by many legends. Col. McEachern was credited with peculiar psychic powers, and my mother, who had no hereditary belief in the occult and was skeptical by nature, has told me of occasions on which she knew him to summon persons to his presence by mere mental effort. He would simply will that some fellow-townsman should come and see him and he would come. He commanded the Huntingdon Borderers, and when in 1870 the Fenians projected an invasion on the Quebec border, to redeem the fiasco at Fort Erie in 1866, he disposed his troops so well that the invaders were afraid to cross the Trout River. For this timely service he received the honour of "C.M.G." and it used to be a joke with my mother that Uncle Archie had been honoured by Queen Victoria for having never fired a shot. After all the best military tactics in such a case was to scare away the enemy without injury to anyone. Unlike my grandfather, "old Uncle Archie", as we used to call him to distinguish him from a younger uncle of the same name, lived to a ripe old age. He passed away in 1898 in his 79th year. One of the activities of his old age was the organization of the Chateauguay Literary and Historical Society to perpetuate the memory of those who won the victory of Chateauguay. This organization succeeded in raising funds for the Chateauguay Monument, and at its unveiling in October, 1885, he presided.

The military enthusiasm which is inherent in many men of Highland Scottish blood persisted in my mother's elder brother, my uncle John McEachern. From him and from many others who have passed away I learned of the disturbing effect of the American Civil War on Canadian youth. It was very difficult to keep lads of adventurous spirit at home. They knew little of what the war was about, but the influence of American war songs which became popular throughout Canada, and the accounts of battles in an uncensored press, inflamed the spirit of adventure that lurks in all healthy youths. A great deal of censorious rubbish has been written about Canada's attitude toward the anti-slavery struggle. The fact is that the Washington Government at the outset did everything that it conceivably could to alienate Canadian sympathy from the Northern cause. Lincoln's chief adviser, Ex-Governor Seward, of New York, had promulgated a plan to avert civil war by uniting the whole American nation in a war for the annexation of Canada and Mexico. This policy was favoured by many Republican politicians. It was the old Russian plan of promoting wars abroad to avert troubles at home, and with Canada situated as she was in 1860-5 warm sympathies with the North could hardly be expected. Sir John A. Macdonald was indeed so alarmed at this covert menace to Canadian security that he sent Sir Alexander Galt to Washington to ask Lincoln a direct question as to whether he intended to make war on Canada. The President gave his word in the negative and kept it. But there were others around Lincoln who were not so magnanimously disposed. On the other hand the South made every effort to cultivate British and Canadian good-will. Under the circumstances then the attitude of the Canadian people during the Civil war, so frequently censured by historians, was only human. And the fact remains that something like one hundred thousand Canadians, chiefly mere boys, served in the armies of the North. A few of the more adventurous made their way to the South and fought for the Confederacy. When in the latter stages of the war Washington offered a bounty of $1,000 in gold to any Canadian who would enlist, it was impossible to hold them. Of course some of them were "bounty jumpers" who took the $1,000 and deserted at the first opportunity, but the sentiment of the Canadian community was against this dirty form of trickery, and most of those who enlisted went through with it in a spirit of true adventure. My uncle, John McEachern, was one of them. He ran away to Buffalo and enlisted under the name of John McNair. He was only seventeen, but in the armies of Grant he found many companions of his own age. He fought so bravely that he had the distinction of being selected as one of the sixteen privates to attend General Grant as a guard of honour at the signing of the Peace of Appomattox.

The particular act of bravery which earned him the honour of being present at this great historical event illustrates the folly of certain military customs dating from the middle ages which still persisted in the sixties. The Northern troops went into battle with their colours borne in advance surrounded by a guard of seven—a sure target for enemy marksmen. In one of the final engagements of Grant's campaign the colour guard were all shot down, and a call for volunteers was made. The Canadian lad, "alias John McNair", was the first to volunteer, and this action led to his selection as one of Grant's escort. Uncle John came through bloody battles unwounded, but the hardships he endured left him a lifelong victim of asthma. He went to Golden, Colorado, in the late sixties and enjoyed many adventures in the pioneer days there. Naturally on his rare visits home he was a hero to his nephew, for he had much to tell not only of soldiering but of adventure in the West—all touched with drollery. The $1,000 bounty money, which he carried in his belt, was stolen from him. He never could prove who took it, but he had his suspicions because one of his comrades thereafter performed every menial service for him, acted as his batman, so to speak, though he was but a private. And he always thought this chap was trying to atone for the theft. He said that the only time the horror of war really "got him" was one night when a group of privates were sitting round a campfire. The idea was abroad in the army that the South was crumpling up and that the war would soon be over. One of the soldiers commenced to talk of the girl whom he was going home to marry, and chanted her praises. As he talked a chance bullet from an enemy sniper caught him through the mouth and he fell over dead. His companions laid their heads on the ground and wept. The tales of Uncle John, that I recall, show that in one respect at least the boys who fought in the Great War of our time were better off than those who fought in the Civil War. That was in the matter of commissariat. Often in the lean and desolate tracts of the South, food supplies would fail and the soldiers went hungry. Once starvation had lasted for three days when the company discovered an old lean cow in a swamp. She was speedily slain and apportioned, and most of the soldiers were so hungry that they ate their rations raw.

In the light of mature consideration I cannot but think that the more useful hero was my uncle Hector McEachern, who, while the other brother John was soldiering abroad, stayed at home and worked manfully to help support his younger brothers and sisters. He was on the staff of the old Great Western Railway, which prior to its purchase by the Grand Trunk had its headquarters at Hamilton; and his bosom chum and companion was Samuel R. Callaway. The latter was deeply attached to my mother, and Uncle Hector hoped that they would marry. If they had I would not be writing a book of Canadian reminiscences, for Samuel Callaway went to the United States, found favour with the Vanderbilt interests, and became President of the New York Central Railroad in succession to Chauncey Depew. While still a young man my Uncle Hector succumbed to tuberculosis, a few weeks previous to my mother's marriage to my father in 1871. He was my mother's idol, and I, who was born a year after his death, not only bear his name, but in early manhood resembled him so closely, that some old Hamiltonians regarded me almost as a reincarnation of him.