Thomas Osborne - Reluctant Pioneer: How I Survived Five Years in the Canadian Bush

Copyright 2013

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Osborne, Thomas, 18591948

Reluctant pioneer [Electronic Version] : how I survived five years in the Canadian bush / Thomas Osborne ; foreword by Roy MacGregor; introduction by J. Patrick Boyer ; sketches by George Harlow White.

Originally publ.: Toronto : Stoddart, 1995, under title: The night the mice danced the quadrille.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Electronic monograph.
Issued also in print format

ISBN 978-1-92657-716-6

1. Osborne, Thomas, 18591948. 2. Frontier and pioneer lifeOntarioMuskoka (District municipality). 3. Muskoka (Ont. : District municipality)History. 4. PioneersOntarioMuskoka (District municipality)Biography. i . Osborne, Thomas, 18591948. Night the mice danced the quadrille. ii . Title.

FC3095.M88Z49 2011 971.31603092 C2011-901285-5

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

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The Drawings

The thirty-seven George Harlow White pencil sketches reproduced in this book were drawn in pencil by the artist at the same time Thomas Osborne was pioneering in Muskoka. These sketches are part of the John Ross Robertson collection at the Toronto Reference Library (part of the Toronto Public Library system). Dates are those written on the back of the sketches by White. The sketch location/subjects preceding the date for each are based on Whites notations, but are not verbatim transcriptions. In a few instances the location was not given. Sketches are not cropped except for minor amounts on the edges to create a rectangle.

Before coming to Canada in 1871, White had been painting and drawing British Isles landscapes for some thirty years. He completed some seventy drawings in Muskoka depicting life and conditions around the time of Thomas Osbornes story. Among those reproduced in this book is one, on page 48, entitled Osborne boys and their lean-to at the Portage, which shows Thomas and his brother Arthur Osborne at the entrance to a crude shelter theyd built, away from their cabin, to avoid its heavy infestation of fleas. It was drawn by White when he stayed with the Osbornes at the Portage in July 1875.

During his six-year stay in Canada, White made an invaluable contribution to the historical record, leaving behind a large body of drawings and watercolours, although he romantically softened scenes in the manner of English landscape artists of that era. After returning to England in 1877, he continued to paint and exhibit his art.

Foreword

Discovering a Hidden Canadian Classic

Roy MacGregor

Thomas Osbornes tale of pioneer life in the Lake of Bays region of Muskoka was written more than half a century after the events described. And yet, it is written in an elegant style with both a sense of immediacy and remarkable clarity. He is a fine writer, an excellent storyteller, and the tales told herein are, at times, mind-boggling in their starkness.

Roy MacGregor

He is writing about my own stomping groundslakes I grew up on and, like Thomas, fished and hunted onand yet my experiences pale in comparison to the tales he tells of poverty, starvation, bravery, endurance, and survival. He speaks of a time so far in our past that we have largely lost the ability even to imagine it. Just reading about the fly dope of the 1870s makes todays reader wonder if perhaps the bugs themselves would be preferable.

Osborne writes with authority on fishing, trapping, fear, injuries, the dark side of isolation, and the truly remarkable resilience of these early dwellers in a land where, today, city dwellers go to lay back and relax. Imagine a fifty-six-year-old man, Osbornes father, walking from Toronto to Portage through thick snow simply because he had not the price of a train fare. You may never experience the actual journey, but you will certainly feel what it was like in the pages of this remarkable book.

The author came from Philadelphia and, ultimately, returns to Philadelphia. Yet he has written about his years in the Canadian wilderness with something that is worth noting above and beyond the mere reporting of what he did and what he saw. And that is his love of life and optimism. It comes through in every chapter, no matter how harrowing the tale being told, no matter how dire the circumstances at times appear.

Lovers of Canadian pioneer literature owe publisher and historian Patrick Boyer a debt for finding Thomas Osbornes 1934 out-of-print gem, first published under the trivializing title T he Night the Mice Danced the Q uadrille , and giving it a new one, Reluctant Pioneer , that at least suggests the promises to be delivered between covers. It may now find the readers it missed in its previous incarnation. And readers will discover a book that should never have been passed over just because of a misleading title.

I have long been of the opinion that early Canadian literature has been badly served by the twin gods of First ScribblingsSusanna Moodie and Northrop Frye, Moodie the reporter and Frye the analyst. Moodies spiteful Roughing It in the Bush stands, surely, as the most-quoted and most-studied of all early Canadian writings. She prayed that if her words were able to deter one family from sinking their property and shipwrecking all their hopes, by going to reside in the backwoods of Canada, I shall consider myself amply repaid for revealing the secrets of the prison-house and feel that I have not toiled and suffered in the wilderness in vain.

This, sadly, was very much a colonial attitude. She had hoped to see British culture transplanted to this vast winter outpost and spent a lifetime trying to set herself and hapless husband, John, up as gentry. She ended up hating the country and the savage side of nature as she found it.