Canadian Transport Sourcebook

III

TO PENNSYLVANIA AND UPPER CANADA

I HAVE found no detailed account of Van Egmond's activities during the four years from his being wounded at Waterloo to his migration to America in 1819, nor from then until his arrival in Canada in 1827.

In 1819 he migrated with his family to America and settled in Indiana county in Pennsylvania. Here he prospered for eight years at farming, with store-keeping as a subsidiary occupation. His family of children, which began with a son in 1808, and totalled finally five sons and three daughters, was now well under way.

In 1827 he moved on to Canada. By this time the "Pennsylvania Dutch"—that is, descendants of the Germans whom Penn had persuaded to come to America—had purchased and begun to settle the county of Waterloo in Canada, and we are not surprised to And that that was Van Egmond's first objective. Enterprising and with an energetic family keen for action, after a year he moved on and took up 100 acres of land under John Galt and the Canada Company in the unbroken forest of the Huron Tract some 18 miles southeast of Goderich.

The Province of Ontario was particularly fortunate in having so many notable people among its pioneer settlers. Of these perhaps the most richly endowed was John Galt. Here is a man of genius who ranks high in a brilliant generation of English writers that includes Byron and Scott, with both of whom he had close contacts. Moreover—and this is what made it possible for him to play the distinguished role in Canadian life—in addition to his literary gifts John Galt was endowed with business and administrative ability of the highest order. He is a rare example of the union in one person of such divergent qualities.

At the age of twenty-five John Galt had set out from his native Ayrshire to try his fortune in the great metropolis of London. Business partnership, verse-writing, the study of law, were tried without satisfaction. In the years 1809-1811, as representative of an English firm, he made extensive journeys to establish commercial relations with the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean,—part of the national movement to counteract Napoleon's effort to stifle England by cutting off her trade with the continent. It was during these travels that Galt came closely into touch with Byron. Through literary pursuits, as author and critic in London, he came to the field where his true genius as a writer at last revealed itself: with Annals of the Parish, The Entail and a long list of novels of striking originality he reached high-level rank among the great writers of his day. All this was his before his restless energy switched him, at the age of forty-six, to Canada with its boundless opportunities for action of another kind.

Galt made his first contact with Canadian affairs when he was appointed, in 1820, legal agent for Canadians who claimed reparations for losses in the American war of 1812. The insight that he thus gained into conditions in the province convinced him that compensation for war losses was now only part of a much larger problem,—that of developing systematically its great resources, so that not only should funds be made available for meeting these war claims, but for the encouragement of immigration and the orderly settlement of the country. To him the surest way of doing this was to form a private company that should work in as close co-operation with the government as possible. With this double purpose in view he succeeded in getting the Canada Company launched in London. As Secretary of the new Company, and as one of five commissioners named jointly by the government and the Company, he came to Canada in 1825 to determine on the spot a fair price at which huge Crown Reserves and Clergy Reserves should be purchased and opened up for settlement. When the Church of England, with Archdeacon Strachan as spokesman, succeeded in having the Clergy Reserves withdrawn. from sale, a still larger block of 1,100,000 acres in the western part of the province was substituted. This was the Huron Tract, an immense area of still unsurveyed forest-land stretching (with the exclusion of Waterloo county) from the neighborhood of Guelph in fan-like shape over to the shore of Lake Huron.

As a directing pioneer in the transformation of this tract of unsurpassed primeval woodland into cultivated farms, John Galt, the already experienced ambidextrous man of word and work, found full scope for his genius. It is an ever memorable episode in our early Canadian annals, though Galt himself was too soon frustrated by interfering officialdom. It was a noble idealism that finds expression in these words to his friend Moir: "Profit to the Company, which I saw would come of course, was less my object than to build in the wilderness an asylum for the exiles of society,—a refuge for the fleers from the calamities of the old world and its systems foredoomed." The active management of the Canada Company under John Galt lasted only from December, 1826, to April, 1829. It was Galt who struck the axe into the first tree felled on the site of the city of Guelph that was to be. "I struck the first stroke .... and the silence of the woods that echoed to the sound was as the sigh of the solemn genius of the wilderness departing for ever .... The tree fell with a crash of accumulating thunder, as if ancient Nature were alarmed at the entrance of social man into her innocent solitude with his sorrows, his follies and his crimes."

Van Egmond, as we see, was not a needy immigrant settler, but a prosperous and cultured gentleman with private means interested in opening up the country for settlement. The benevolence of his nature shines beautifully in the first act recorded of him on entering Canada. Himself a man of means, equipped to meet all the demands of difficult travel, at Niagara he found a family of newcomers stranded and unable to make the last stretch of their journey inland. Van Egmond solved their difficulty by parking his own belongings for the moment and transporting them to their location. (It is reported that in the operation a portrait of him was misplaced and not found again.)

In time, Van Egmond became himself the greatest landowner and wealthiest man of the district. It is said that he came to own 13,000 acres. From this he donated most generously sites for churches and schools. Worthy newcomers in need of help found their way made easier even by the liberality of his purse. He organized protective measures against cholera. Such enlightened services as these won for him universal respect and admiration, as attested by the records of public meetings in the Huron district.

The advent of a man of Van Egmond's character and enterprise as a settler in the Huron Tract proved to be an event of the greatest importance. John Galt was not slow in recognizing his great potential value, and appointed him presently an "honorary agent" of the Canada Company. Growing intimacy made Van Egmond a great admirer of Galt. It was to his great regret that Galt's breach with the Directors of the Company led so soon to his departure from Canada. Under his successor Van Egmond saw the affairs of the Company going from bad to worse; and his praise of Galt, the founder and enlightened manager of the Company, finally took on the form of a regular campaign against those who, in his eyes, were working its ruin.