Furniture and Life in Early Canada

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From Adventures in Canada; or, Life in the Woods by Cunningham Geike, 1882.

Our first concern, when we had got fairly into the house, was to help to get the furniture and luggage brought from the wharf, two miles off, for we had to leave everything except our bedding there on landing. It was a great job to get all into the wagon, and then to open it after reaching the house. The wharf was a long wooden structure, built of logs driven into the shallow bed of the river for perhaps a hundred yards out to the deep water, and planked over. There was a broad place at the end to turn a wagon, but so much of it was helped up with what they called "cordwood''—that is, wood for fuel, cut four feet long—that it took some management to get this done.

A man whom we had hired as servant of all work, at two pounds and his board and lodging a month, brought down the wagon, and I shall never forget how we laughed it his shouting and roaring all the way to the oxen, as he walked at their heads with a long beech wand in his hand. He never ceased bellowing; at them in rough, angry names, except to vary them by orders, such as Haw! Gee! Whoa! Hup! which were very ridiculous when roared at their ears loud enough to have let them know his wishes if they had been on the other side of the river. Somehow, everyone who drives oxen in Canada seems to have got into the same plan; we ourselves, indeed, fell into it more than I would have thought, after a time. When we had begun to move the luggage, what boxes on boxes had to be lifted!

We all lent a hand, but it was hard work. There was the piano, and the eight-day clock, in a box like a coffin, and carpets, and a huge wardrobe, packed full of I don't know what, large enough to have done for a travelling show, and boxes of books, and crockery, and tables, and a great carpenter's chest, not to speak of barrels of oatmeal, and flour, and salt, and one of split peas. I think the books were the heaviest, except that awful wardrobe and chest of drawers, which were packed full of something. But they paid over and over for all the trouble and weight, proving the greatest possible blessing. If we had not brought them we would have turned half savages, I suppose, for there were none to buy nearer than eighty or ninety miles, and besides, we would not have had money to buy them.

We had a whole set of Sir Walter Scott's charming stories, which did us a world of good, both by helping us to spend the winter evenings pleasantly, by the great amount of instruction in history and antiquarian lore they contained and by showing my young sisters, especially, that all the world were not like the rude people about us. They got a taste for elegance and refinement from them that kept them ladies in their feelings while they had only the life of servants.

When we had got all the things into the house, the next thing was to unpack them. A large pier-glass, which would have been very useful, but rather out of the way in such a house, was discovered to be shivered to fragments; and some crockery had found the shaking on the journey too much for its powers of resistance. That horrid wardrobe, which had sprained our backs to get on the wagon, would barely go in at the door, and we were very much afraid at first, that, after bringing it more than three thousand miles, we should have to roof it over, cut holes in it, and make it a hen-house.

It was all but too large, like the picture in the "Vicar of Wakefield," which would not go in at any door when it was brought home. There was not room for nearly all our furniture, and one end of my sister's loft; was packed like a broker's store-room with part of it. My brothers being in America before, had however saved us from bringing as outrageous things as some who afterwards settled in the neighborhood. I remember one family who brought ever so many huge heavy grates, not knowing that there was no coal in Canada, and that they were useless. They would, indeed, be able to get Ohio coal now, in the larger towns; but there was none then anywhere. The only fuel burned all through the country parts, in fireplaces, is, still, great thick pieces of split logs, four feet long.

One settler from Ireland had heard that there were a great many rattlesnakes in Canada; and as he had been a cavalry volunteer, and had the accoutrements, he brought a brass helmet, a regulation sabre, buckskin breeches, and jack-boots with him, that he might march safely through the jungle which he supposed he should find on his route.

The young clergyman who afterwards came out had a different fear. He thought there might be no houses for him to sleep in at nights, and brought out a hammock to swing up under the trees. What he thought the people to whom he was to preach lived in, I don't know; perhaps he fancied we cooked our dinners under the trees, and lived without houses, like the Indians. In some countries, hammocks are used in travelling through uninhabited places, on account of the poisonous insects on the ground and the thickness of the vegetation; but in Canada such a thing is never heard of, houses being always within reach in the parts at all settled; and travellers sleep on the ground when beyond the limits of civilization. But to sleep in the open air at all makes one such a figure before morning with mosquito-bites, that nobody would try it a second time, if he could help it.

I was once on a journey up Lake Huron, of which I shall speak by and by, where we had to sleep a night on the ground, and, what with ants running over us, and with the mosquitoes, we had a most wretched time of it. A friend who was with me had his nose so bitten that it was thicker above than below, and looked exactly as if it had been turned upside down in the dark.

It took us some time to get every thing fairly in order, but it was all done after a while. We were all in good health; every thing before us was new; and the weather, though very warm, was often delightful in the evening. Through the day it was sometimes very oppressive, and we had hot nights now and then that were still worse. A sheet seemed as heavy as if it had been a pair of blankets, and when we were sure the door was fast, we were glad to throw even it aside. We always took a long rest at noon till the sun got somewhat cooler, but the heat was bad enough even in the shade. I have known it pretty nearly, if not quite, 100° some days in the house.

I remember hearing some old gentlemen once talking about it, and telling each other how they did to escape it: the one declared that the coolest part of the house was below the bed, and the other, a very stout clergyman, said he found the only spot for study was in the cellar. Captain W. used to assert that it was often as hot in Canada as in the West Indies.

My sisters never went with so little clothing before; and, in deed, it was astonishing how their circumference collapsed under the influence of the sun. As to us, we thought only of coolness.

Coarse straw hats, with broad brims, costing about eightpence apiece, with a handkerchief in the crown to keep the heat off the head; a shirt of blue cotton, wide trousers of dark printed calico, or, indeed, of any thing thin, and boots, composed our dress.

But this was elaborate, compared with that adopted by a gentleman who was leading a batchelor life back in the bush some distance from us. A friend went to see him one day, and found him frying some bacon on a fire below a tree before his door;—a potato-pot hanging by a chain over part of it, from a bough—his only dress being a shirt, boots, a hat, and a belt round his waist, with a knife in it. He had not thought of any one penetrating to his wilderness habitation, and laughed as heartily at being caught in such a plight as my friend did at catching him. For my part, I thought I should be cooler still if I turned up my shirt-sleeves; but my arms got forthwith so tanned and freckled, that even yet they are more useful than beautiful.

One day there chanced to be a torn place on my shoulder, which I did not notice on ironing out. I thought, after a time, that it was very hot, but took it for granted it could not be helped. When I came in at dinner, however, I was by no means agreeably surprised when my sister Margaret called out to me, "George, there's a great blister on your shoulder," which sure enough there was. I took care to have always a whole shirt after that.

We had hardly been a month on the river when we heard that a man, fresh from England, who had been at work for a neighbor, came into the house one afternoon, saying he had a headache, and died, poor fellow, in less than an hour. He had a sun-stroke. Sometimes those who are thus seized fall down at once in a fit of apoplexy, as was the case with Sir Charles Napier in Scinde. I knew a singular instance of what the sun sometimes does, in the case of a young man, a plumber by trade, who had been working on a roof in one of the towns on a hot day.

He was struck down in an instant, and was only saved from death by a fellow-workman. For a time he lost his reason, but that gradually came back. He lost the power of every part of his body, however, except his head, nothing remaining alive, you may say, but that. He could move or control his eyes, mouth, and neck, but that was all. He had been a strong man, but he wasted away till his legs and arms were not thicker than a child's. Yet he got much better eventually, after being bedridden for several years, and when I last was at his house, could creep about on two crutches.

I used to pity my sisters, who had to work over the fire, cooking for us. It was bad enough for girls who had just left a fashionable school in England, and were quite young yet, to do work which hitherto they had always had done for them, but to have to stoop over a fire in scorching hot weather must have been very exhausting. They had to bake in a large iron pot, set upon embers, and covered with them over the lid: and the dinner had to be cooked on the in the kitchen fireplace, until we thought of setting up a contrivance made by laying a stout stick on two upright forked ones, driven into the ground at each end of a fire outside, and hanging the pots from it.

While I think of it, what a source of annoyance the cooking on the logs in the fireplace was before we got a crane! I remember we once had a large brass panful of raspberry jam, nicely poised, as we thought, on the burning logs, and just ready to be lifted off when, lo! some of the firewood below gave way and down it went into the ashes! Baking was a hard art to learn. What bread we had to eat at first! We used to quote Hood's lines —

“Who has not heard of home-made bread—
This heavy compound of putty and lead!"

But practice, and a few lessons from a neighbor's wife, made my asters quite expert at it. We had some trouble in getting flour, however, after our first stock ran out. The mill was five miles off, and, as we had only oxen, it was a tedious job getting to it and back again. One of my brothers used to set off at five in the morning, with his breakast over, and was not back again till nine or ten at night—that is, after we had wheat of our own. It had to be ground while he waited. But it was not all lost time, for the shoemaker's was near the mill, and we always made the same journey do for both.

In winter we were sometimes badly off when our flour ran short. On getting to the mill, we, at times, found the wheel frozen hard, and that the miller had no Hour of his own to sell. I have known us for a fortnight having to use potatoes instead of bread, when our neighbors happened to be as ill provided as we, and could not lend us a "baking."

But baking was not all that had to be done in a house like ours, with so many men in it. No servants could be had; the girls round, even when their fathers had been laborers in England, were quite above going out to service, so that my sisters had their hands full. We tried to help them as much as we could, bringing in the wood for the fire, and carrying all the water from the river. Indeed, I used to think it almost a pleasure to fetch the water, the river was so beautifully clear. Never was crystal more transparent. I was wont to idle as well as work while thus employed, looking at the beautiful stones and pebbles that lay at the bottom, far beyond the end of the plank that served for our "wharf."

Geike, Cunningham. Adventures in Canada; or, Life in the Woods, Porter & Coates, 1882.

Cunningham Geike

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