Canada and the Canadians
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Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle >> Canada and the Canadians
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I do not know any coach ride in British America more pleasing than that
from Niagara to Queenston. You cross a broad green common, with the
expanse of Lake Ontario on one side, the forest and orchard on the
other; and, after passing through a little coppice, suddenly come upon
the St. Lawrence, rolling a tranquil flood towards the great lake below.
High above its waters, on the edge of the sharp precipitous bank,
covered with trees--oak, birch, beech, chestnut, and maple--runs the
sandy road, bordered by corn-fields, by orchards, and occasionally by
little patches of woodland, looking for all the world like Old England,
excepting that that unpicturesque snake fence spoils the illusion.
Now, bright and deep, rolls the giant flood onward; now it is hidden by
a turn of the bank; now, glittering, it again appears between the trees.
Thus you travel until within a couple of miles or so of Queenston, when,
the road leaving the bank, and the river forming a large bay-like bend,
a splendid view breaks out.
You catch a distant glimpse of that narrow pass, where a wall of rock,
two hundred feet high on each side, and somewhat higher on the American
shore, vomits forth the pent-up angry Niagara. Above this wall, to the
right and left, towers the mountain ridge, covered with forest to the
south, and with the greenest of grass to the north, where, stately and
sad, stands the pillar under whose base moulder the bones of the gallant
Brock, and of Mac Donell, his aide-de-camp.
Rent from summit to base, tottering to its fall, is Brock's monument,
and yet the villain who did the deed that destroyed it lives, and dares
to show his face on the neighbouring shore.
I cannot conceive in beautiful scenery any thing more picturesque than
the gorge of the Niagara river: it combines rapid water, a placid bay, a
tremendous wall of rock, forest, glade, village, column, active and
passive life.
Queenston is a poor place; it has never gained an inch since the war of
1812; but, as a railroad has been established, and a wharf is building
in connection with it, it will go ahead. Opposite to it is Lewiston, in
the United States, less ancient and time-worn, full of gaudily-painted
wooden houses, and with much more pretension. Queenston looks like an
old English hamlet in decay; melancholy and miserable; Lewiston is the
type of newness, all white and green, all unfinished and all
uncomfortable.
The odious bar-room system of the Northern States is fast sweeping away
all vestiges of English comfort. The practice of lounging, cigar in
mouth, sipping juleps and alcoholic decoctions in common with smugglers
and small folk, is fast unhinging society. The plan of social economy in
the mercantile cities is rapidly spreading over the whole Union, and the
fashion of ladies' drawing-rooms being absorbed into the parlour of an
hotel or boarding-house has brought about a change which the next
generation will lament.
It is the restless rage for politics, the ever present desire for
dollars, which has brought about this state of things; the young husband
seeks the bar-room as a merchant does the Change; and thus, except in
the wealthy class, or among the contemplative and retired, there is no
such thing as private life in the northern cities and towns. Huge
taverns, real wooden gin palaces, tower over the tops of all other
buildings, in every border village, town, and city; and a good bar is a
better business than any other. Thus in Lewiston, in Buffalo, in short,
in every American border town, the best building is the tavern, and the
next best the meeting-house; both are fashionable, and both are anything
but what they should be; for he who keeps the best liquors, and he who
preaches most pointedly to the prevailing taste, makes the most of his
trade. The voluntary system is a capital speculation to the publican as
well as to the parson; but, unfortunately, it is more general with the
former than with the latter.
The Niagara frontier is a rich and a fertile portion of Canada,
surrounded almost by water, and intersected by rivers, and the Welland
Canal, with an undulating surface in the interior. It grows wheat,
Indian corn, and all the cereal gramina to perfection, whilst Pomona
lavishes favours on it; nor are its woods less prolific and luxuriant.
Here the chestnut, with its deep green foliage and its white flowers,
forms a pleasing variety to the sylvan scenery of Canada.
It would be, from its healthiness alone, the pleasantest part of Canada
to live in, but it is too near the borders where sympathizers, more keen
and infinitely more barbarous than those on the ancient Tweed, render
property and life rather precarious; and, therefore, in war or in
rebellion, the Niagara frontier is not an enviable abode for the
peaceable farmer or the timid female.
The ascent to the plateau above Queenston is grand, and the view from
the summit very extensive and magnificent; embracing such a stretch of
cultivated land, of forest, of the habitations of men, and of the
apparently boundless Ontario, the Beautiful Lake, that it can scarcely
be rivalled.
The railroad has, however, spoiled a good deal of this; it runs from the
summit of the mountain, along its side or flank, inland to Chippewa,
beyond the Falls; and you are whirled along, not by steam, but by three
trotting horses, at a rapid rate, through a wood road, until you reach
the Falls, where you obtain just a glimpse and no more of the Cataract.
On the top of the mountain, as a hill four or five hundred feet above
the river is called, is a place which was the scene of an awful
accident. The precipice wall of the gorge of the Niagara is very close
to the road, but hidden from it by stunted firs and bushes. Colonel
Nichols, an officer well known and distinguished in the last American
war, was returning one winter's night, when the fresh snow rendered all
tracks on the road imperceptible, in his sleigh with a gallant horse.
Merrily on they went; the night was dark, and the road makes a sudden
turn just at the brink, to descend by a circuitous sweep the face of
the hill into Queenston. Either the driver or the horse mistook the
path, and, instead of turning to the left, went on edging to the right.
The next day search was made: the marks of struggling were observed on
the snow; the horse had evidently observed his danger; he had floundered
and dashed wildly about; but horse, sleigh, and driver, went down, down,
down, at least two hundred feet into the abyss below; and sufficient
only remained to bear witness to the terrific result.
The railroad (three horse power) takes you to the Falls or to Chippewa.
If you intend visiting the former, and desire to go to the Clifton
House, the best hotel there, you are dropped at Mr. Lanty Mac Gilly's,
where the four roads meet, one going to the Ferry, one to Drummondville,
a village at Lundy's Lane, now cut off from the main road; the other you
came by, and the continuation of which goes to Chippewa, where a
steamer, called the Emerald, is ready to take you to the city of
Buffalo in the United States. As I shall return by way of Buffalo from
the extreme west of Canada, we will say not a word about any thing
further on this route at present than the Falls, and perhaps the reader
may think the less that is said about them the better.
But, gentle reader, although it be a well-worn tale, I had not seen the
Falls for five years, and I wish to tell you whether they are altered or
improved; and most likely you will take some little interest in so old a
friend as the Falls of Niagara; for you must have read about those
before you read Robinson Crusoe, and have had them thrust under your
notice by every tourist, from Trollope to Dickens. They say, _on dit_, I
mean, which is not translatable into English, that this is the age of
Materialism and Utilitarianism. By George, you would think so indeed, if
you had the chance of seeing the Falls of Niagara twice in ten years.
They are materially injured by the Utilitarian mania. The Yankees put an
ugly shot tower on the brink of the Horseshoe at the beginning of that
era, and they are about to consummate the barbarism, by throwing a wire
bridge, if the British government is consenting, over the river, just
below the American Fall. But Niagara is a splendid "Water Privilege,"
and so thought the Company of the City of the Falls--a most enlightened
body of British subjects, who first disfigured the Table Rock, by
putting a water-mill on it, and now are adding the horror of
gin-palaces, with sundry ornamental booths for the sale of juleps and
sling, all along the venerable edge of the precipice, so that trees of
unequalled beauty on the bank above, trees which grow no where else in
Canada, are daily falling before the monster of gain.
What they will do next in their freaks it is difficult to surmise; but
it requires very little more to show that patriotism, taste, and
self-esteem, are not the leading features in the character of the
inhabitants of this part of the world.
If the Colossus of Rhodes could be remodelled and brought to the Falls,
one leg standing in Canada, and the other in the United States, there
would be a company immediately formed for hydraulic purposes, to convey
a waste pipe from the tips of the fingers as far as Buffalo; and another
to light the paltry village of Manchester, all mills and mint-juleps,
with the natural gas which would be made to feed the lamp. A grogshop
would be set up in his head; telescopes would be poked out of his eyes,
and philosophers would seat themselves on his toes, to calculate whether
the waters of the British Fall could not be dammed out, so as to turn a
few cotton mills more in Manchester, as it is called, which scheme some
Canadian worthy would upset, by resorting to Mr. Lyell's proof that the
whole river might once have flowed, and may again be made to flow, down
to St. David's--thus, by expending a few millions, cutting off
Jonathan's chance.
But it is of no use to joke on this subject; Niagara is, both to the
United States and to England, but especially to Canada, a public
property. It is the greatest wonder of the visible world here below,
and should be protected from the rapacity of private speculations, and
not made a Greenwich fair of; where pedlars and thimble-riggers, niggers
and barkers, the lowest trulls and the vilest scum of society,
congregate to disgust and annoy the visitors from all parts of the
world, plundering and pestering them without control.
The only really pretty thing on the British side is the Museum, the
result of the indefatigable labours of Mr. Barnett, a person who, by his
own unassisted industry, has gathered together a most interesting
collection of animals, shells, coins, &c., and has added a garden, in
which all the choicest plants and flowers of North America and of
Britain grow, watered by the incessant spray of the Great Fall. In this
garden I saw, for the first time in Canada, the English holly, the box,
the heath, and the ivy; and there is a willow from the St. Helena stock.
It requires unremitting watchfulness, however, to keep all this
together, for _loafers_ are rife in these parts. He had gathered a very
choice collection of coins, which was placed in a glass case in the
Museum. A loafer cast his eye upon them, visited the Museum frequently,
until he fully comprehended the whereabouts, and then, by the help of a
comrade or two, broke a window-pane, passed through a glazed division of
stuffed snakes, &c., and bore off his prize in the dead of the night. By
advertising in time, and by dint of much exertion, the greater part was
recovered, but the proprietor has not dared publicly to exhibit them
since.
He is now forming a menagerie, and also has a collection of fossils and
minerals from the neighbourhood, with a camera obscura. He is, in short,
a specimen of what untiring industry can accomplish, even when
unassisted.
There are some tulip-trees near the Falls, but this plant does not grow
to any size so far north; and, although native to the soil, it is,
perhaps, the extreme limit of its range. The snake-wood, a sort of
slender bush, is found here, with very many other rare Canadian plants,
which are no doubt fostered by the continual humidity of the place; and,
if you wish to sup full of horrors,[4] Mr. Barnett has plenty of live
rattlesnakes.
[Footnote 4: This puts me in mind of the vulgar received opinion that my
godfather Fuseli supped on pork-steaks, to have horrid dreams.
Originally said in joke, this absurd story has been repeated even by
persons affecting respectability as writers. His Greek learning alone
should have saved his memory from this.]
To wind up all, the Americans are going to put up another immense
gin-palace on the opposite shore; and, as a climax to the excellent
taste of the vicinage, they are about to place a huge steamboat to cross
the rapids at the foot of the Manchester Falls. The next speculation, as
I hinted above, must be to turn the Niagara into the Erie, or into the
Welland Canal, and make it carry flour, grind wheat, and do the duty
which the political economists of this thriving place consider all
rivers as alone created for.
One traveller of the Utilitarian school has recorded, in the traveller's
album at the Falls, the number of gallons of water running over to
waste per minute; and another writes, "What an almighty splash!"
I went once more to see the Burning Spring, and have no doubt whatever
that the City of the Falls, that great pre-eminent humbug, if it had
been built, might have easily been lit by natural gas, as it abounds
every where in the neighbourhood, the rock under the superior Silurian
limestone being a shale containing it, as may be evidenced by those
visitors, who are persuaded to go under "the Sheet of Water," as the
place is called where the Table Rock projects, and part of the cataract
slides over it; for, on reaching the angle next to the spiral stair, a
strong smell is plainly perceptible, something between rotten eggs and
sulphur; and there you find a little trickling spring oozing out of the
precipice tasting of those delectable compounds.
A Yankee, with the soaring imagination of that imaginative race,
proposes to set fire to the Horseshoe Fall, and thus get up a grand
nocturnal exhibition, to which the Surrey Zoological pyrotechny would
bear the same ratio as a sky-rocket to Vesuvius.
There is no great impossibility in this fact, if it was "not a fact"
that the rush of the Fall disturbs the superincumbent gases too much to
permit it; for there can be but little doubt that there is plenty of
_materiel_ at hand, and, some day or other, a lighthouse will be lit
with it to guide sleepy loons and other negligent water-fowl over the
Falls. I wonder they do not get up a Carburetted Hydrogen Gas Company
there, with a suitable engineer and railway, so that visitors might
cross over to Goat Island on an atmospheric line. There are plenty of
railway stags on both shores, if you will only buy their stock to
establish it; and, at all events, it would improve the City of the
Falls, which now exhibits the deplorable aspect of three stuccoed
cottages turned seedy, and a bare common, in place of a magnificent
grove of chestnut trees, which formerly almost rivalled Greenwich Park.
But the crowning glory of "the City" is the Reflecting Pagoda, a thing
perched over Table Rock bank; very like a huge pile engine, with a
ten-shilling mirror, where the monkey should be. Blessings on Time!
though he is a very thoughtless rogue, he has touched this grand effort
of human genius in the wooden line slightly, and it will soon follow the
horrid water-mill which stood on that most singular and indescribable
freak of Nature, the Table Rock. I would have forgiven Lett, the
sympathizer, if, instead of assassination and the blowing-up of Brock's
Monument, he had confined his attentions to a little serious Guy Fauxing
at the Mill and the Reflecting Pagoda.
Niagara--Ne-aw-gaw-rah, thou thundering water! thy glories are
departing; the abominable Railway Times has driven along thy borders;
and, if I should live to see thee again ten years hence, verily I should
not be astounded to find thee locked-up, and a station-house staring me
in the visage, from that emerald bower, in thy most mysterious recess,
where the vapour is rose-coloured, and the bright rainbow alone now
forms the bridge from the Iris Rock!
I was so disgusted to see the spirit of pelf, that concentration of
self, hovering over one of the last of the wonders of the world, that I
rushed to the Three Horse Railway, and soon forgot all my misery in
scrambling for a place; for there was no alternative. There were only
three carriages and one open cart on the rail; the three aristocratic
conveniences were full; and the coal-box--for it looked very like
one--was full also, of loafers and luggage; so I despaired of quitting
the Falls almost as much, by way of balance, as I rejoiced when they
once again met my ken.
But women are women all the world over; a black lady nursed Mungo Park,
when he was abandoned by the world; and a charitable she-Samaritan
crowded to make room for a disconsolate wayfarer.
I felt very much as the nigger's parrot at New York did.
Blacky was selling a parrot, and a gentleman asked him what the bird
could do. Could he speak well? "No, massa; no peaky at all." "Can he
sing?"--"No, massa; no peaky, no singy." "Why, what can he do, then,
that you ask twenty dollars for him?" "Oh! massa, golly, he thinky
dreadful much." So, when the daughter of Eve made way for me in the
rail-car, why I thinky very much, that, wherever a stranger meets
unexpected kindness, it is sure to be a woman that offers it.
There were the usual host of American travellers in the cars; and as one
generally gets a fund of anecdote and amusement on these occasions, from
their habits of communicativeness, I shall put the English reader in
possession of the meaning of words he often sees in the perusal of
American newspapers and novels which I gathered.
New York is the Empire State, and with the following comprises Yankee
land, which word Yankee is most properly a corruption of Yengeese, the
old Indian word for English; so that, by parity of reasoning, John Bull
is, after all, a Yankee.
Massachusetts The Bay State, Steady Habits.
Rhode Island Plantation State.
Vermont Banner State, or Green Mountain Boys.
New Hampshire The Granite State.
Connecticut Freestone State.
Maine Lumber State.
These are the Yankees, _par excellence_; and it is not polite or even
civil for a traveller to consider or mention any of the other States as
labouring under the idea that they ever could, by any possibility, be
considered as Yankees; for, in the South, the word Yankee is almost
equivalent to a tin pedlar, a sharp, Sam Slick.
Pennsylvania is The Keystone State.
New Jersey The Jersey (pronounced Jar-say) Blues.
Delaware Little Delaware.
Maryland Monumental.
Virginia The Old Dominion, and sometimes the Cavaliers.
North Carolina Rip Van Winckle.
South Carolina The Palmetto State.
Georgia Pine State.
Ohio The Buckeyes.
Kentucky The Corncrackers.
Alabama Alabama.
Tennessee The Lion's Den.
Missouri The Pukes.
Illinois The Suckers.
Indiana The Hoosiers.
Michigan The Wolverines.
Arkansas The Toothpickers.
Louisiana The Creole State.
Mississippi The Border Beagles.
I do not know what elegant names have been given to the Floridas, the
Iowa, or any of the other territories, but no doubt they are equally
significant. Texas, I suppose, will be called Annexation State.
This information, although it appears frivolous, is very useful, as
without it much of the perpetual war of politics in the States cannot be
understood. Yankee in Europe is a sort of byword, denoting repudiation
and all sorts of chicanery; but the Yankee States are more English, more
intellectual, and more enterprising than all the rest put together; and
Pennsylvania should be enrolled among them.
In short, in the north-east you have the cool, calculating, confident,
and persevering Yankee; in the south, the fiery, somewhat aristocratic,
bold, and uncompromising American, full of talent, but with his energies
a little slackened by his proximity to the equator and his habitual use
of slave assistance.
In the central States, all is progressive; a more agricultural
population of mixed races, as energetic as the Yankee, but not
possessing his advantages of a seaboard. The Western States are the
pioneers of civilization, and have a dauntless, less educated, and more
turbulent character, approaching, as you draw towards the setting sun,
very much to the half-horse, half-alligator, and paving the way for the
arts and sciences of Europe with the rifle and the axe.
It is these Western States and the vast labouring population of the
seaboard, who have only their manual labour to maintain them, without
property or without possessions of any kind, that control the
legislature, their numerical strength beating and bearing down mind,
matter, and wealth.
Doubtless it is the bane of the republican institution, as now settled
in North America, that every man, woman, and child, in order to assert
their equality, must meddle with matters far above the comprehension of
a great majority; for, although the people of the United States can, as
George the Third so piously wished for the people of England, read their
bible, whenever they are inclined to do so, yet it is beyond
possibility, as human nature is constituted, that all can be endowed
with the same, or any thing like the same, faculties. Too much learning
makes them mad; and hence the constant danger of disruption, from
opposing interests, which the masses--for the word mob is not applicable
here--must always enforce. The north and the south, the east and the
west, are as dissimilar in habits, in thought, in action, and in
interests, as Young Russia is from Old England, or as republican France
was from the monarchy of Louis the Great.
Hence is it that a Canadian, residing, as it were, on the Neutral
Ground, can so much better appreciate the tone of feeling in America, as
the United States' people love to call their country, than an
Englishman, Scotchman, or Irishman can; for here are visible the very
springs that regulate the machinery, which are covered and hidden by the
vast space of the Atlantic. You can form no idea of the American
character by the merchants, travelling gentry, or diplomatists, who
visit London and the sea-ports. You must have lengthened and daily
opportunities of observing the people of a new country, where a new
principle is working, before you can venture safely to pronounce an
attempt even at judgment.
Monsieur Tocqueville, who is always lauded to the skies for his
philosophic and truly extraordinary view of American policy and
institutions, has perhaps been as impartial as most republican writers
since the days of the enthusiast Volney, on the merits or demerits of
the monarchical and democratic systems; yet his opinions are to be
listened to very cautiously, for the leaven was well mixed in his own
cake before it was matured for consumption by the public.
Weak and prejudiced minds receive the doctrines of a philosopher like
Tocqueville as dictations: he pronounced _ex cathedra_ his doctrines,
and it is heresy to gainsay them. Yet, as an able writer in that
universal book, "The Times," says, reason and history read a different
sermon.
That democracy is an essential principle, and must sooner or later
prevail amongst all people, is very analogous to the prophecy of Miller,
that the material world is to be rolled up as a garment, and shrivelled
in the fire on the thirteenth day of some month next year, _or_ the year
after.
These fulminations are very semblable to those of the popes--harmless
corruscations--a sort of aurora borealis, erratic and splendid, but very
unreal and very unsearchable as to cause and effect.
There can be, however, very little doubt in the mind of a person whose
intellects have been carefully developed, and who has used them quietly
to reason on apparent conclusions, that the form of government in the
United States has answered a purpose hitherto, and that a wise one; for
the impatience of control which every new-comer from the Old World
naturally feels, when he discovers that he has only escaped the dominion
of long-established custom to fall under the more despotic dominion of
new opinions, prompts him, if he differs, and he always naturally does,
where so many opinions are suddenly brought to light and forced on his
acquiescence, to move out of their sphere. Hence emigration westward is
the result; and hence, for the same reasons, the old seaboard States,
where the force of the laws operates more strongly than in the central
regions, annually pour out to the western forests their masses of
discontented citizens.
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