Roughing It In The Bush »

Susanna Moodie was born Susanna Strickland in Bungay, Suffolk, England, in 1803. The sixth and final daughter of a retired dock manager, she grew up in a middle-class family that encouraged the children in reading and in writing. Her sisters Agnes and Elizabeth would write Lives of the Queens of England and other biographies of the aristocracy, her sister Catharine Parr (later Traill) would emigrate to Canada and write several natural history books, and her brother Samuel, another emigrant to Canada, would write of the settler's life. Susanna’s juvenilia include poetry and many fiction tales for young adults.

In 1831 Susanna Strickland married John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, a military officer who had returned to England from South Africa to explore publication projects and to find a wife. A year later, they emigrated to Upper Canada (Ontario). In Flora Lyndsay (1854), Susanna Moodie gives a fictionalized account of the family’s move to Canada, concluding with the journey up the Saint Lawrence River.

For their first seventeen months in Canada, the Moodies lived on cleared farmland near Port Hope. In 1834 they moved to a bush farm in Douro Township north of Peterborough and near the homes of Samuel Strickland and Catharine Parr Traill. The farm was the Moodie home for five years, and Roughing It in the Bush (1852), describes their life in these two backwoods areas.

From 1837 to 1839 Dunbar Moodie served in the Upper Canada militia, and in 1839 he was appointed Sheriff of Victoria District (later Hastings County). His family moved to Belleville in 1840, their home until his death in 1869. After her husband’s deathSusanna Moodie spent her time with her various grown children and with her sister Catharine.

Susanna Moodie died in Toronto, Ontario, in 1885.

Nature has lavished all her grandest elements to form this astonishing panorama. There frowns the cloud-capped mountain, and below, the cataract foams and thunders; wood, and rock, and river combine to lend their aid in making the picture perfect, and worthy of its Divine Originator.

Advertisement     IX
Introduction     1
Canada     7
A Visit to Grosse Isle     11
Quebec     26
Our Journey Up the Country     42
Tom Wilson's Emigration     57
Our First Settlement, and the Borrowing System     84
Old Satan and Tom Wilson's Nose     113
Uncle Joe and His Family     126
John Monaghan     148
Phoebe H-, and Our Second Moving     166
Brian, the Still-Hunter     180
The Charivari     202
The Village Hotel     229
The Land-Jobber     245
A Journey to the Woods     276
The Wilderness, and Our Indian Friends     293
Burning the Fallow     328
Our Logging-Bee     338
A Trip to Stony Lake     354
The "Ould Dhragoon"     371
Disappointed Hopes     382
The Little Stumpy Man     398
The Fire     424
The Outbreak     446
The Whirlwind     471
The Walk to Dummer     482
A Change in Our Prospects     513
Adieu to the Woods     526
Canadian Sketches     543
Introductory Chapter to the-1871 Edition     580
Afterword     592