Roughing It in the Bush: Two Sisters in the Backwoods of Upper Canada, 1832

In the summer of 1832 two sisters from a family of writers in Suffolk sailed for Upper Canada with their husbands, both half-pay officers from Orkney. Catharine Parr Traill went straight into the backwoods of Douro Township, north of Peterborough; Susanna Moodie followed in February 1834, after a year and a half on a cleared farm near Cobourg. Both of them wrote everything down — the house raised by sixteen neighbours, the logging bee, the fever summer of 1834, the debts, the Michi Saagiig Anishinaabe neighbours whose sugar bush it had been, and what it really cost to turn forest into a farm. This is how they lived in the backwoods of Upper Canada, in their own words. 📌 What you'll learn • Why two officers' families took up wild land in 1832, what half pay was worth, how their brother Samuel Strickland found them lots on Lake Katchewanooka, and what the crossing in the cholera summer looked like from the cabin of a brig • How a backwoods house was actually built — the raising bee, the hand-sawn floor, the frozen plaster — what ten acres of chopping cost, and what went into the teapot when the tea ran out • What the winters and the fever summer of 1834 were like in two log houses a walk apart, and what both sisters wrote about their neighbours the Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg (Mississaugas), who are Curve Lake and Hiawatha First Nations today • Why both families had left the bush farm by 1840 — a sold commission, twenty-five steamboat shares and the price of wheat — how The Backwoods of Canada and Roughing It in the Bush came to be written, and what you can still see in Lakefield Images are reconstructions drawn in the manner of the 1830s; every quotation comes from The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and Roughing It in the Bush (1852), checked against the texts, and real records are held by Library and Archives Canada and the Peterborough Museum and Archives — links below. Educational and historical content. 📚 Key sources • Catharine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada (London: Charles Knight, 1836) — Project Gutenberg no. 13559 • Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (London: Richard Bentley, 1852) — Project Gutenberg no. 4389 • Dictionary of Canadian Biography — Strickland, Catharine Parr (Traill); Strickland, Susanna (Moodie); Strickland, Samuel • Ontario Heritage Trust — provincial plaques at Lakefield: Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Colonel Samuel Strickland • Maritime History of the Great Lakes — records of the steamer Cobourg, 1832–1834 — and other sources. #UpperCanada #SusannaMoodie #CatharineParrTraill #CanadianHistory #HowWeLivedHere ℹ️ About this video Educational and historical content. The script, research and edit are the author's own, based on the sources listed in the description. The visual reconstructions and the narrator's voice are created with the help of AI, for illustrative purposes — these are not real recordings or authentic archival footage. Stories are simplified for a general audience and may contain small approximations. Purpose: to inform and to remember. 🕰️ Historical context The events described took place under legal and social conditions very different from today's. They are presented for historical understanding, without intent to justify or condemn any person, community or group.