Reminiscences of a Canadian Pioneer for the last Fifty Years: An Autobiography — John Shaqi
Reminiscences of a Canadian Pioneer for the last Fifty Years: An AutobiographyThompson, Samuel
History
Reminiscences of a Canadian Pioneer for the last Fifty Years: An Autobiography
Thompson, Samuel
Frontier and pioneer life -- Ontario; Thompson, Samuel, 1810-1886; Toronto (Ont.) -- Biography; Toronto (Ont.) -- History
From Lachine to the Coteau, thence by canal and along shore successively
to Cornwall, Prescott, and Kingston, occupied several days. We were
charmed to get on dry land, to follow our batteau along well-beaten
paths, gathering nuts, stealing a few apples now and then from some
orchard skirting the road; dining at some weather-boarded way-side
tavern, with painted floors, and French cuisine, all delightfully
strange and comical to us; then on board the batteau again at night.
Once, in a cedar swamp, we were enraptured at finding a dazzling
specimen of the scarlet _lobelia fulgens_, the most brilliant of wild
flowers, which Indians use for making red ink. At another time, the
Long Sault rapids, up which was steaming the double-hulled steamer
_Iroquois_, amazed us by their grandeur and power, and filled our minds
with a sense of the vastness of the land we had come to inhabit. And so
we wended on our way until put aboard the Lake Ontario steamer _United
Kingdom_ for Little York, where we landed about the first week in
September, 1833, after a journey of four months. Now-a-days, a trip to
England by the Allan Line is thought tedious if it last ten days, and
even five days is considered not unattainable. When we left England, a
thirty mile railway from Liverpool to Manchester was all that Europe had
seen. Dr. Dionysius Lardner pronounced steam voyages across the Atlantic
an impossibility, and men believed him. Now, even China and Japan have
their railways and steamships; Canada is being spanned from the Atlantic
to the Pacific by a railroad, destined, I believe, to work still greater
changes in the future of our race, and of the world.
CHAPTER VIII.
MUDDY LITTLE YORK.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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