Canadian Scenery, Volume 1 (of 2)Willis, Nathaniel Parker
History
Canadian Scenery, Volume 1 (of 2)
Willis, Nathaniel Parker
Canada -- Description and travel; Canada -- History
“I do not know why he regarded a connexion with the Mohawks as
degrading, for they were members of the celebrated confederation
of the Six Nations—the Iroquois Confederation. The other
members were the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, the
Senecas, and the Tuscaroras.”
[Illustration: _The Chaudière Falls,_
near Quebec.]
It is our wish to assemble pictures of Canada by as many different
classes of observers, and during as many different seasons, as is
possible. Here are some winter sketches, which are not unentertaining.
“Nothing could be more Siberian than the aspect of the Canadian
frontier; a narrow road, choked with snow, led them through a
wood, in which patches were occasionally cleared on either side
to admit the construction of a few log-huts, round which a brood
of ragged children, a starved pig, and a few half-broken rustic
implements, formed an accompaniment more suited to an Irish
landscape, than to the thriving scenes we had just quitted. The
Canadian peasant is still the same unsophisticated animal whom
we may suppose to have been imported by Jacques Carrier. The
sharp unchangeable lineaments of the French countenance, set off
with a blue or red night-cap, over which is drawn the hood of a
grey capote, fashioned like a monk’s cowl, a red worsted girdle,
hair tied in a greasy leather queue, brown moccasins of
undressed hide, and a short pipe in his mouth, give undeniable
testimony of the presence of Jean Baptiste. His horse seems to
have been equally solicitous to shame neither his progenitors
nor his owner, by any mixture with a foreign race, but exhibits
the same relationship to the horses, as his rider to the
subjects of Louis XIII. Now, too, the frequent cross by the road
side, thick-studded with all the implements of crucifixional
torture, begins to indicate a catholic country: distorted
virgins and ghastly saints decorate each inn room, while the
light spires of the parish church, covered with plates of tin,
glitter across the snowy plain.
[Illustration: _Raft on the St. Lawrence, Cape Sante._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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