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Updated: June 22, 2025
It was a delightful contrast to those dense dark forests through which for so many many miles the waters of the Otonabee had flowed on monotonously; here it was all wild and free, dashing along like a restive steed rejoicing in its liberty, uncurbed and tameless. Yes, here it was beautiful!
I left my little son in the care of his Irish nurse, and quitted my friend's house, with a heavy heart, for my new settlement at Otonabee. I RETURNED in sadness to my lonely and desolate home, feeling like a shipwrecked mariner, cast upon a desert shore. In fact, I had to begin life again, without the stimulus of domestic love to quicken my exertions.
"He and the Indians at least feel grieved for our departure," I thought. Love is so scarce in this world that we ought to prize it, however lowly the source from whence it flows. We accomplished only twelve miles of our journey that night. The road lay through the bush, and along the banks of the grand, rushing, foaming Otonabee river, the wildest and most beautiful of forest streams.
That jar embedded in the hot embers contains sassafras tea, an aromatic beverage, in which the squaws delight when they are so fortunate as to procure a supply. This has been brought from the Credit, far up in the west, by a family who have come down on a special mission from some great chief to his brethren on the Otonabee, and the squaws have cooked some in honour of the guests.
There is on the eastern bank of the Otonabee, a pretty rounded knoll, clothed with wild cherries, hawthorns and pine-trees, just where a creek half hidden by alder and cranberry bushes, works its way below the shoulder of the little eminence; this creek grows broader and becomes a little stream, through which the hunters sometimes paddle their canoes, as a short cut to the lower part of the lake near Crook's Rapids.
The waters of the St. Lawrence are a pale sea-green, and so transparently clear that you see through them to a great depth. At sunrise and sunset they take all the hues of the opal. The Ottawa is a deep blue. The Otonabee looks black, from the dark limestone bed over which it foams and rushes.
Every variety of tint, from the brightest scarlet and deepest orange, yellow and green, with all the intermediate shades blended together, form one of the most beautiful natural pictures you can possibly conceive. I received a very pressing invitation from my wife's brother-in-law, who resided near the foot of Rice Lake, in the township of Otonabee, to come and spend a few days with him.
On my arrival at my father-in-law's house, I found that the information I had accidentally heard was unfortunately a sad reality. My brother- in-law had not left Darlington an hour on his journey to Otonabee before my wife breathed her last. I had not even the consolation of bidding her a last adieu.
I had also purchased one hundred acres more for 1 pound 10s. per acre, from a private individual; this also was considered cheap at the time. These lots, forming altogether a compact farm of three hundred and sixty acres, were situated on the sloping banks of a beautiful lake, or, rather, expansion of the river Otonabee, about half-a-mile wide, and studded with woody islets.
They were constant, and altered not their customs, as it was with their fathers, so it was with them. Louis had heard so much of the Otonabee river from Indiana that he was impatient to go and explore the entrance and the shores of the lake on that side, which hitherto they had not ventured to do for fear of being surprised by the Indians.
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