Part 11
"On this, war was declared against him by his Excellency in council, and every means were used to annoy him here, and misrepresent his proceedings at home; but he stood firm, and by an occasional visit to the Colonial Office in England, he opened the eyes of ministers to the proceedings of both parties, and for a while averted the danger. At length, some five years ago, finding the enemy was getting too strong for him, he repaired once more to England, and returned in triumph with an order from the Colonial Office, that nobody was in any way to interfere with his proceedings; and he has now the pleasure of contemplating some hundreds of miles of the best roads in the province, closely settled on each side by the most prosperous farmers within its bounds, who owe all they possess to his judgment, enthusiasm, and perseverance, and who are grateful to him in proportion to the benefits he has bestowed upon them, though in many instances, sorely against their will at the time."
The original grant must have been much extended; for the territory now under Colonel Talbot's management, and bearing the general name of the Talbot Country, contains, according to the list I have in his own handwriting, twenty-eight townships, and about 650,000 acres of land, of which 98,700 are cleared and cultivated. The inhabitants, including the population of the towns, amount to about 50,000. "You see," said he gaily, "I may boast, like the Irishman in the farce, of having peopled a whole country with my own hands."
He has built his house, like the eagle his eyry, on a bold high cliff overhanging the lake. On the east there is a precipitous descent into a wild, woody ravine, along the bottom of which winds a gentle stream, till it steals into the lake: this stream is in winter a raging torrent. The storms and the gradual action of the waves have detached large portions of the cliff in front of the house, and with them huge trees. Along the lake-shore I found trunks and roots of trees half buried in the sand, or half overflowed with water, which I often mistook for rocks. I remember one large tree which, in falling headlong, still remained suspended by its long and strong fibres to the cliff above. Its position was now reversed: the top hung downwards, shivered and denuded; the large spread root, upturned, formed a platform, on which new earth had accumulated, and a new vegetation sprung forth, of flowers, and bushes, and sucklings. Altogether it was a most picturesque and curious object.
Lake Erie, as the geography book says, is two hundred and eighty miles long, and here, at Port Talbot, which is near the centre, about seventy miles across. The Colonel tells me that it has been more than once frozen over from side to side; but I do not see how this fact could be ascertained, as no one has been known to cross to the opposite shore on the ice. It is true that more ice accumulates in this lake than in any other of the great lakes, by reason of its shallowness: it can be sounded through its whole extent, while the other lakes are found in some parts unfathomable.
But to return to the chateau. It is a long wooden building, chiefly of rough logs, with a covered porch running along the south side. Here I found suspended, among sundry implements of husbandry, one of those ferocious animals of the feline kind, called here the cat-a-mountain, and by some the American tiger, or panther, which it more resembles. This one, which had been killed in its attack on the fold or poultry-yard, was at least four feet in length, and glared on me from the rafters above ghastly and horrible. The interior of the house contains several comfortable lodging-rooms, and one really handsome one, the dining-room. There is a large kitchen with a tremendously hospitable chimney; and underground are cellars for storing wine, milk, and provisions. Around the house stands a vast variety of outbuildings of all imaginable shapes and sizes, and disposed without the slightest regard to order or symmetry. One of these is the very log hut which the Colonel erected for shelter when he first "sat down in the bush," four-and-thirty years ago, and which he is naturally unwilling to remove. Many of these outbuildings are to shelter the geese and poultry, of which he rears an innumerable quantity. Beyond these is the cliff, looking over the wide blue lake, on which I have counted six schooners at a time with their white sails. On the left is Port Stanley. Behind the house lies an open tract of land, prettily broken and varied, where large flocks of sheep and cattle are feeding, the whole enclosed by beautiful and luxuriant woods, through which runs the little creek or river above mentioned.
The farm consists of six hundred acres; but as the Colonel is not quite so active as he used to be, and does not employ a bailiff or overseer, the management is said to be slovenly, and not so productive as it might be.
He has sixteen acres of orchard-ground, in which he has planted and reared with success all the common European fruits, as apples, pears, plums, cherries, in abundance; but what delighted me beyond everything else, was a garden of more than two acres, very neatly laid out and enclosed, and in which he evidently took exceeding pride and pleasure; it was the first thing he showed me after my arrival. It abounds in roses of different kinds, the cuttings of which he had brought himself from England in the few visits he had made there. Of these he gathered the most beautiful buds, and presented them to me with such an air as might have become Dick Talbot presenting a bouquet to Miss Jennings.[14] We then sat down on a pretty seat under a tree, where he told me he often came to meditate. He described the appearance of the spot when he first came here as contrasted with its present appearance, or we discussed the exploits of some of his celebrated and gallant ancestors, with whom my acquaintance was (luckily) almost as intimate as his own. Family and aristocratic pride I found a prominent feature in the character of this remarkable man. A Talbot of Malahide, of a family representing the same barony from father to son for six hundred years, he set, not unreasonably, a high value on his noble and unstained lineage; and, in his lonely position, the simplicity of his life and manners lent to these lofty and not unreal pretensions a kind of poetical dignity.
I told him of the surmises of the people relative to his early life and his motives for emigrating, at which he laughed.
"Charlevoix," said he, "was, I believe, the true cause of my coming to this place. You know he calls this the 'Paradise of the Hurons.' Now I was resolved to get to paradise by hook or by crook, and so I came here."
He added, more seriously, "I have accomplished what I resolved to do--it is done; but I would not, if any one was to offer me the universe, go through again the _horrors_ I have undergone in forming this settlement. But do not imagine I repent it; I like my retirement."
He then broke out against the follies, and falsehoods, and restrictions of artificial life, in bitter and scornful terms; no ascetic monk or _radical_ philosopher could have been more eloquently indignant.
I said it was granted to few to live a life of such complete retirement, and at the same time such general utility; in flying from the world, he had benefited it: and I added, that I was glad to see him so happy.
"Why, yes, I'm very happy here." And then the old man sighed.
I understood that sigh, and in my heart echoed it. No, "it is not good for man to be alone;" and this law, which the Father of all life pronounced himself at man's creation, was never yet violated with impunity. Never yet was the human being withdrawn from, or elevated above, the social wants and sympathies of his human nature, without paying a tremendous price for such isolated independence.
With all my admiration for what this extraordinary man has achieved, and the means, the powers, through which he has achieved it, there mingles a feeling of commiseration which has more than once brought the tears to my eyes while listening to him. He has passed his life in worse than solitude. He will admit no equal in his vicinity. His only intercourse has been with inferiors and dependents, whose servility he despised, and whose resistance enraged him--men whose interests rested on his favour--on his will, from which there was no appeal. Hence despotic habits, and contempt even for those whom he benefited; hence, with much natural benevolence and generosity, a total disregard, or rather total ignorance, of the feelings of others--all the disadvantages, in short, of royalty, only on a smaller scale. Now, in his old age, where is to him the solace of age? He has honour, power, obedience; but where are the love, the troops of friends, which also should accompany old age? He is alone--a lonely man. His constitution has suffered by the dreadful toils and privations of his earlier life. His sympathies have had no natural outlet; his affections have wanted their natural food. He suffers, I think; and not being given to general or philosophical reasoning, causes and effects are felt, not known. But he is a great man who has done great things; and the good which he has done will live after him. He has planted, at a terrible sacrifice, an enduring name and fame, and will be commemorated in this "brave new world," this land of hope, as Triptolemus among the Greeks.
For his indifference or dislike to female society, and his determination to have no settler within a certain distance of his own residence, I could easily account when I knew the man; both seemed to me the natural result of certain habits of life acting upon a certain organisation. He has a favourite servant, Jeffrey by name, who has served him faithfully for more than five-and-twenty years, ever since he left off cleaning his own shoes and mending his own coat. This honest fellow, not having forsworn female companionship, began to sigh after a wife--
"A wife! ah! Saint Marie Benedicite, How might a man have any adversite That hath a wife?"
And, like the good knight in Chaucer, he did
"Upon his bare knees pray God him to send A wife to last unto his life's end."
So one morning he went and took unto himself the woman nearest at hand--one, of whom we must needs suppose that he chose her for her virtues, for most certainly it was not for her attractions. The Colonel swore at him for a fool; but, after a while, Jeffrey, who is a favourite, smuggled his wife into the house; and the Colonel, whose increasing age renders him rather more dependent on household help, seems to endure very patiently this addition to his family, and even the presence of a white-headed chubby little thing, which I found running about without let or hindrance.
The room into which I first introduced you, with its rough log-walls, is Colonel Talbot's library and hall of audience. On leaving my apartment in the morning, I used to find groups of strange figures lounging round the door, ragged, black-bearded, gaunt, travel-worn and toil-worn emigrants, Irish, Scotch, and American, come to offer themselves as settlers. These he used to call his land-pirates; and curious, and characteristic, and dramatic beyond description, were the scenes which used to take place between this grand bashaw of the wilderness and his hungry, importunate clients and petitioners.
Another thing which gave a singular interest to my conversations with Colonel Talbot was, the sort of indifference with which he regarded all the stirring events of the last thirty years. Dynasties rose and disappeared; kingdoms were passed from hand to hand like wine decanters; battles were lost and won;--he neither knew, nor heard, nor cared. No post, no newspaper brought to his forest-hut the tidings of victory and defeat, of revolutions of empires, "or rumours of unsuccessful and successful war."
When he first took to the bush, Napoleon was consul; when he emerged from his solitude, the tremendous game of ambition had been played out, and Napoleon and his deeds and his dynasty were numbered with the things o'erpast. With the stream of events had flowed by equally unmarked the stream of mind, thought, literature--the progress of social improvement--the changes in public opinion. Conceive what a gulf between us! but though I could go to him, he could not come to me--my sympathies had the wider range of the two.
The principal foreign and domestic events of his _reign_ are the last American war, in which he narrowly escaped being taken prisoner by a detachment of the enemy, who ransacked his house, and drove off his horses and cattle; and a visit which he received some years ago from three young Englishmen of rank and fortune, Lord Stanley, Mr. Stuart Wortley, and Mr. Labouchere, who spent some weeks with him. These events, and his voyages to England, seemed to be the epochs from which he dated. From these occasional flights he returns like an old eagle to his perch on the cliff, whence he looks down upon the world he has quitted with supreme contempt and indifference, and around that on which he has created, with much self-applause and self-gratulation.
[Footnote 12: Vide Sartor Resartus.]
[Footnote 13: Dr. Dunlop.]
[Footnote 14: Dick Talbot married Frances Jennings--la belle Jennings of De Grammont's Memoirs, and elder sister of the celebrated Duchess of Marlborough.]
* * * * *
PORT TALBOT.
It was not till the sixth day of my sojourn at Port Talbot that the good Colonel could be persuaded to allow of my departure.
He told me, with good-humoured peremptoriness, that he was the grand autocrat of the forest, and that to presume to order horses, or take any step towards departing, without his express permission, was against "his laws." At last he was so good as to issue his commands--with flattering reluctance, however--that a vehicle should be prepared, and a trusty guide provided; and I bade farewell to this extraordinary man with a mixture of delighted, and grateful, and melancholy feelings not easily to be described, nor ever forgotten.
My next journey was from Port Talbot to Chatham on the river Thames, whence it was my intention to cross Lake St. Clair to Detroit, and there take my chance of a vessel going up Lake Huron to Machinaw. I should, however, advise any future traveller, not limited to any particular time or plan of observation, to take the road along the shore of the Lake to Amherstberg and Sandwich, instead of turning off to Chatham. During the first day's journey I was promised a good road, as it lay through the Talbot settlements; what was to become of me the second day seemed a very doubtful matter.
The best vehicle which the hospitality and influence of Colonel Talbot could provide was a farmer's cart or team, with two stout horses. The bottom of the cart was well filled with clean soft straw, on which my luggage was deposited. A seat was slung for me on straps, and another in front for the driver, who had been selected from among the most respectable settlers in the neighbourhood as a fit guide and protector for a lone woman. The charge for the two days' journey was to be twelve dollars.
As soon as I had a little recovered from the many thoughts and feelings which came over me as we drove down the path from Colonel Talbot's house, I turned to take a survey of my driver, and from his physiognomy, his deportment, and the tone of his voice, to divine, if I could, what chance I had of comfort during the next two days. The survey was, on the whole, encouraging, though presenting some inconsistencies I could by no means reconcile. His dress and figure were remarkably neat, though plain and homely; his broad-brimmed straw hat, encircled with a green ribbon, was pulled over his brow, and from beneath it peered two sparkling, intelligent eyes. His accent was decidedly Irish. It was indeed a brogue as "nate and complate" as ever was sent forth from Cork or Kerry; but then his face was not an Irish face; its expression had nothing of the Irish character; the cut of his features, and his manner and figure altogether in no respect harmonised with his voice and accent.
JOURNEY TO CHATHAM.
After proceeding about three miles, we stopped in front of a neat farmhouse, surrounded with a garden and spacious outbuildings, and forth came a very pretty and modest-looking young woman, with a lovely child in her arms, and leading another by the hand. It was the wife of my driver; and I must confess she did not seem well pleased to have him taken away from her. They evidently parted with reluctance. She gave him many special charges to take care of himself, and commissions to execute by the way. The children were then held up to be kissed heartily by their father, and we drove off. This little family scene interested me, and augured well, I thought, for my own chances of comfort and protection.
When we had jogged and jolted on at a reasonable pace for some time, and I had felt my way sufficiently, I began to make some inquiries into the position and circumstances of my companion. The first few words explained those discrepancies in his features, voice, and appearance, which had struck me.
His grandfather was a Frenchman. His father had married an Irishwoman, and settled in consequence in the south of Ireland. He became, after some changes of fortune, a grazier and cattle-dealer; and having realised a small capital which could not be safely or easily invested in the old country, he had brought out his whole family, and settled his sons on farms in this neighbourhood. Many of the first settlers about this place, generally emigrants of the poorest and lowest description, after clearing a certain portion of the land, gladly disposed of their farms at an advanced price; and thus it is that a considerable improvement has taken place within these few years by the introduction of settlers of a higher grade, who have purchased half-cleared farms, rather than waste toil and time on the wild land.
My new friend, John B----, had a farm of one hundred and sixty acres, for which, with a log-house and barn upon it, he had paid 800 dollars (about 200_l._); he has now one hundred acres of land cleared and laid down in pasture. This is the first instance I have met with in these parts of a grazing farm, the land being almost uniformly arable, and the staple produce of the country, wheat. He told me that he and his brother had applied most advantageously their knowledge of the management and rearing of live stock; he had now thirty cows and eighty sheep. His wife being clever in the dairy, he was enabled to sell a good deal of butter and cheese off his farm, which the neighbourhood of Port Stanley enabled him to ship with advantage. The wolves, he said, were his greatest annoyance; during the last winter they had carried off eight of his sheep and thirteen of his brother's flock, in spite of all their precautions.
The Canadian wolf is about the size of a mastiff, in colour of a dirty yellowish brown, with a black stripe along his back, and a bushy tail of about a foot in length. His habits are those of the European wolf; they are equally bold, "hungry, and gaunt, and grim,"--equally destructive, ferocious, and troublesome to the farmer. The Canadian wolves hunt in packs, and their perpetual howling during the winter nights has often been described to me as frightful. The reward given by the magistracy for their destruction (six dollars for each wolf's head) is not enough. In the United States the reward is fifteen and twenty dollars a head, and from their new settlements the wolves are quickly extirpated. _Here_, if they would extend the reward to the Indians, it would be of some advantage; for at present they never think it worth while to expend their powder and shot on an animal whose flesh is uneatable, and the skin of little value; and there can be no doubt that it is the interest of the settlers to get rid of the wolves by all and any means. I have never heard of their destroying a man, but they are the terror of the sheepfold--as the wild cats are of the poultry yard. Bears become scarcer in proportion as the country is cleared, but there are still a great number in the vast tracts of forest land which afford them shelter. These, in the severe winters, advance to the borders of the settlements, and carry off the pigs and young cattle. Deer still abound, and venison is common food in the cottages and farmhouses.
My guide concluded his accounts of himself by an eloquent and heartfelt eulogium on his wife, to whom, as he assured me, "he owed all his _peace of mind_ from the hour he was married!" Few men, I thought, could say the same. _She_, at least, is not to be numbered among the drooping and repining women of Upper Canada; but then she has left no family--no home on the other side of the Atlantic--all her near relations are settled here in the neighbourhood.
SETTLERS IN THE BUSH.
The road continued very tolerable during the greater part of this day, running due west, at a distance of about six or ten miles from the shore of Lake Erie. On either side I met a constant succession of farms
## partially cleared, and in cultivation, but no village, town, or hamlet.
One part of the country through which I passed to-day is settled chiefly by Highlanders, who bring hither all their clannish attachments, and their thrifty, dirty habits--add also their pride and their honesty. We stopped about noon at one of these Highland settlements, to rest the horses and procure refreshments. The house was called Campbell's Inn, and consisted of a log-hut and a cattle-shed. A long pole, stuck into the decayed stump of a tree in front of the hut, served for a sign. The family spoke nothing but Gaelic; a brood of children, ragged, dirty, and without shoes or stockings (which latter I found hanging against the wall of the best room, as if for a show), were running about--and all stared upon me with a sort of half-scared, uncouth curiosity, which was quite savage. With some difficulty I made my wants understood, and procured some milk and Indian corn cakes. This family, notwithstanding their wretched appearance, might be considered prosperous. They have a property of two hundred acres of excellent land, of which sixty acres are cleared, and in cultivation: five cows and forty sheep. They have been settled here sixteen years,--had come out destitute, and obtained their land gratis. For them, what a change from abject poverty and want to independence and plenty! But the advantages are all outward; if there be any inward change, it is apparently retrogradation, not advancement.