Raw Life. J. Patrick Boyer

Чтение книги онлайн.

      The exhilarating promise of a fresh start in life drew many improbable settlers to this wilderness frontier. An anxious jumble of characters abandoned their problems and set out for Muskoka to start anew on their hundred acres of “free” land, hoping to cash in on a promise Ontario’s government and its immigration agents were aggressively promoting through advertisements in American and British newspapers and in the booklet Emigration to Canada: The Province of Ontario, circulated widely in 1869 to publicize Muskoka’s glowing agricultural prospects for new settlers.

      Few heading to Muskoka sought a transformation more complete than a desperate thirty-five-year-old lawyer who, early one September morning in 1869, boarded the train in New York as Isaac Jelfs, but stepped off in Toronto as James Boyer. Accompanying him was a pregnant woman, their little girl, a curly-haired teenager, and another woman in her early twenties. Nobody could have mistaken this formally dressed family group for pioneer settlers heading into Muskoka’s wilds to hack a homestead out of dense forest. Yet, such was their intent.

      Not only was Jelfs abandoning his name. He was forfeiting a long-craved legal career with the politically influential Broadway Avenue firm of Brown, Hall & Vanderpoel. He was relinquishing his recording secretary’s role with the Episcopalian Methodist Church in Brooklyn. He was abandoning the vice-presidency of the Brooklyn Britannia Benevolent Association, an office to which he’d been glowingly elected in May that year, being presented with a copy of Byron’s poetical works and making, as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “one of his happy speeches on the occasion.”

      The real kicker was that he had closed the front door of the Jelfs’s18th Street family home in Brooklyn for the last time. Overnight Isaac vanished from the life of his wife, Eliza, and their young daughter, Elizabeth. The pregnant woman on the train, Hannah Boyer, was not his wife in law, but had become a second wife in reality after she’d captured Isaac’s heart at a Britannia Benevolent Association Saturday night dance several years before. The two-year-old girl on the train was their first love child, Annie, whose birth the couple had discreetly left unrecorded in New York’s registries. Equally absent from official documents was any record of their marriage, since neither in New York nor later in Canada would they ever have a legal wedding. James and Hannah and their affiliated family travelled by train, boat, stagecoach, and boat again to at last reach the village wharf in Bracebridge and their new life.

      “Mr. and Mrs. James Boyer” had quit a bustling, overcrowded, foul city to enter a pristine wilderness, whose thick silence was punctuated only by bird songs, the hollow rushing of quiet breezes in tall pines, and the steadily comforting sound of crashing waterfalls. Muskoka’s pure air had special buoyancy, its dampness releasing the pungent earthy muskiness of fresh wood and mossy rock, a swilling mixture with heady evergreen scents made even fresher by breezes crossing the district’s rocky expanses and crystalline lakes. Bracebridge itself, a stark settlement barely a decade old, was a tiny scattering of shacks, tree stumps, and rough, muddy pathways, isolated, primitive, and much further from New York than all the miles the Boyers had journeyed to get here.

      Hannah and James Boyer settled in Macaulay Township, east of Bracebridge, where he soon set about clearing land for farming. James cherished the remoteness, as did other settlers resolved on escaping their pasts. His New York years had simply been the latest chapter in a life buffeted by fate so poignantly that Edward Greenspan remarked, “The tale of his life’s journey would not be out of place in a Charles Dickens novel, except that James’s story is not fictitious.” Greenspan believes “the chapters on James’s life are essential to this book.” Yet the telling of his story and of the equally stirring, entwined saga of Hannah Boyer would require more space, to do their story justice, than can be accommodated here. So it will appear as a separate volume entitled Another Country, Another Life.

      In 1868 Bracebridge was designated district capital because of its geographic centrality, and soon several provincial government offices opened to serve the entire Muskoka territory, which not only contributed to the settlement’s growth, but also helped establish the community’s character as the centre for Muskoka government and administration of justice. Muskokans, irregularly scattered across a large and rugged landscape with poor transportation and rudimentary communication, recognized the emergence of a central hub. In Bracebridge itself, these officials and courts faced plenty of work sorting out the human and economic hodgepodge emerging from Muskoka’s raw opening phase.

      In the larger picture, the provincial policy of building colonization roads and offering free land had served its intended purpose. The district was being populated and settlements were growing.