Читать книгу Clearing in the West. My Own Story - Nellie Letitia McClung - Страница 4

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My father, John Mooney, came to Bytown in Upper Canada from Ireland in the year 1830, crossing the ocean in a sailing vessel which took ten weeks to make the voyage. He was then a lad of eighteen, who had never done anything but go to school, but the famines in Ireland were driving the young men to seek their fortunes elsewhere; and already some of his kinsmen had made the venture of coming to the New World. His two older brothers, William and Thomas came with him, and a cousin, Robert Clarke.

My grandfather, William Mooney of Nenagh, Tipperary, near the rock of Cashel was a steward for a nobleman, and lived in a fine stone house, “rent free, with kail yard and byre,” and had what was considered a good position, but the family was large and growing, so he was quite willing to let the three eldest boys go, and outfitted them generously with hand-woven blankets and frieze coats.

My father’s mother, Elizabeth Scott, had died when he was eight years old, and my grandfather had married again, and the second family, numbering five, would be enough for him to look after. Maria, my father’s sister came out the next year, and on her arrival in Bytown, married Robert Clarke, the cousin, who had come out with my father.

My Uncle Tom, who was a school-teacher, soon found a position in a settlement school near Bytown. William who could make a fiddle “do everything but talk,” was a welcome guest at George Clark’s tavern, on the Main street of the four-year-old village. My father went with the shanty men, who were bringing down rafts of logs on the “Grand River,” as the Ottawa was called then. It was a rough life for a boy of eighteen, but wages were good and there was plenty of companionship, and adventure. Bytown, named for Colonel By, came into being by the building of the Rideau Canal, begun in 1826 by the Imperial Government, and a great project it was, to open a waterway between Bytown and Kingston, a distance of one hundred and twenty-six miles, at a cost of one million pounds. The money came from the Old Country in half-crowns, packed in kegs which helped to put silver in circulation in Canada.

He remembered seeing Colonel By many times riding on his black horse, as he watched the progress of his men, and when many years later the name of Bytown was changed to Ottawa, my father thought it a great pity to lose the name of this fine soldier whom every one admired.

The shanty men, mostly French and Irish were a wild crew, he said, with whiskey running free in every shebeen, and many a time the streets of Bytown were filled with drunken, cursing fighters. He remembered seeing an Irish Roman Catholic priest, with a horsewhip flogging the members of his flock into a better frame of mind, and demanding that they appear at the confessional the next day. And they did.

After several years of logging, and many narrow escapes from drowning, he began to think of farming as a better and pleasanter way of living. He had earned good wages on the river but he had saved very little. He knew of the new gravel road that was being built from the Georgian Bay to Toronto, in the western part of the Province, and that free grants of land could be taken on each side of the road. He had heard about it first from a Methodist missionary, who worked among the Ojibways, still farther west, and who had come to Bytown to visit his relatives there.

The Shouldice family, cousins of the Mooneys, living in Neapean, had made the move, making the trip safely across Georgian Bay in a bateau, by keeping close to the shore. While this matter was being turned over in his mind, Bytown suffered an outbreak of typhoid fever, and his brother Tom took it and died. Later in the same year William also died, and my father, alone now, except for his sister, Mrs. Robert Clarke, who lived in Neapean decided to make the move.

He made the trip across the Georgian Bay in 1841, took up the free grant of fifty acres, and by helping to chop out the road earned another fifty acres, and then settled down to the tremendous task of clearing his land, which was all heavily timbered with hard maple, hemlock and elm. Each fifty-acre lot had a frontage of forty rods and a depth of two hundred rods. The first ten years seem to have been a sort of endurance test, and I remember of hearing the sad but heroic tale of one settler called Barnes, thirteen miles down the road who actually died of starvation and no one knew of it until he was dead. He had tried to live on cow-cabbage, refusing to take any of the potatoes or cow’s milk from the children.

In 1850, the township of Sullivan, on the west side of the gravel road, was organized in proper form, with a reeve and a council. The records show that John Mooney was the first treasurer, and received for his labors the sum of one pound, ten shillings. There were one hundred and thirty-three ratepayers and the amount collected was one hundred and twenty-three dollars and eighty-one cents, and after all expenses were paid there was a balance on hand of eight dollars and twenty-six cents to start the new year. So the balance was on the right side of the ledger. They built a school that year, and there was a stipulation that any religious denomination might use the building. Each child who attended the school must pay at the rate of one shilling and sixpence per month, and each third child was to be taught free of charge. The teacher boarded around. William Buchanan who was the first teacher received a salary of twelve pounds per annum.

The gravel road was called the Garafraxa, which is surely as fitting a name as any gravel road ever received, and was completed to Toronto in 1842.

My Uncle Tom, the school-teacher, has always been a shadowy figure to me, leaving no trace of his personality in my memory, though I do remember a box of old Irish school-books in calfskin bindings, yellow vellum and long s’s with his name written in them in violet ink. But William, the boy who could “turn the heart in ye,” when he played the “Irish Lament”—William with his brown eyes and auburn hair, slim and straight as a gun-barrel; with a laugh that you would hear in a room full of people, for the lilt of it; William who was talked of in all the lumber camps and on the rafts, as the men were coming down the rivers; who died in his twenty-fifth year in a noisy room above the bar in a Bytown tavern, where he had so often played for dances, was one of my infant heroes, and I was disposed to boast about him, when I played with other children, though he was dead forty years before I was born. When I heard music that swept my young heart with longing, I knew it was something like the performance of my Uncle William. My father had been up the river when William died, and he never ceased to regret his absence.

After taking up his land on the Garafraxa, my father married Jane Shouldice, his cousin, but Jane lived only a little over a year.

When the news went back to Nenagh, Ireland, that Johnny’s wife had died, and that Johnny was the only one left of the three fine lads who had sailed from Limerick, and that he was alone on a bush farm, old Judy Connor, one of the servants in my grandfather’s house in Nenagh—and she was then fifty years of age—braved the terrors of the Atlantic, and came all the way to Sydenham to keep house for him.

In 1858 he married my mother, Letitia McCurdy, who had come with her mother, Margaret Fullerton McCurdy, and a younger sister Ellen from Dundee, Scotland, the year before.

Judy Connor lived with them all her days, and it has always been a regret to me that I was not born early enough to have met Judy, in the flesh, with her belief in fairies, and banshees.

Judy at certain times and seasons, that had to do with the moon, took the precautionary measure of leaving a pan of milk on the grass for the fairies to wash in. It seems it was always done in Ireland to keep the little people in good-humor. But one night my mother, who did not believe in fairies, gave the milk to the pigs, and used the pan for something else, and the next day she slipped on a stone in the milkhouse, and turned her ankle, and Judy told her it was “well for her, it wasn’t worse,” so the pan was left thereafter. When Judy lay dying, she had everyone listening for the banshee, who should, by all the laws of compensation and tradition, have cried below the window, but no sound troubled the stillness of the maple trees around the house, until Watch, the dog, sensing that something was happening, lifted his head to the stars, and howled drearily. Judy heard him through the shadows that were closing around her, and opening her eyes, she looked at my mother in triumph. “Now, thank God, I can die,” she said, and she did!

Mother’s father, Duncan McCurdy, who was of the McCurdy’s from the Isle of Bute, had died of cholera in the outbreak of 1856, in Dundee and it was then, with their breadwinner gone, and under necessity to make their own living, that the women of the family came to Canada. An older sister, Elizabeth, was married to a man named John Taylor in Dundee, and stayed behind, afterwards emigrating to Australia.

My grandmother’s two sisters had emigrated two years before with their families, and settled in the township of Holland, east of the Garafraxa where the land was more fertile than in Sullivan, where my father settled. As a result of this, the Holland relatives, as the years went by, prospered more than we did and grew comparatively rich. The two aunts were rather patronizing to my grandmother, whom I remember as a slight little woman, in a gray dress, with reddish hair, who was always ready to tell a story to me. Her two sisters, older than she, did not even talk like anyone else, accounted for by the fact, that in Scotland they had lived in “Enbro,” and so rather despised the more commercial city of Dundee. As a final proof of their magnificence, in each of their homes in Holland, there was an organ, but they did not call it that. It was the “instrument,” and could not be played on Sunday. I was taken to one of their homes once and there was no music from the “instrument;” it stood in the corner, a complicated bulk of carved wood, and red velvet, locked tight and ornamented with two high and fluted gray vases of dead grass. The red velvet, showing so enticingly through the wood-carving called to me to poke one small finger through and see for myself if it could be pushed back, but some good angel stayed my hand.