Simcoe Elizabeth Posthuma - Mrs. Simcoes Diary

VOYAGEUR CLASSICS

BOOKS THAT EXPLORE CANADA

Michael Gnarowski Series Editor

The Dundurn Group presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.

This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.

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VOYAGEUR CLASSICS

BOOKS THAT EXPLORE CANADA

ELIZABETH POSTHUMA SIMCOE

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MARY QUAYLE INNIS

FOREWORD BY MICHAEL GNAROWSKI

DUNDURN PRESS
TORONTO

Copyright Dundurn Press, 2007
Originally published in 1965 by Macmillan of Canada

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Michael Carroll
Copy-editors: Marja Appleford and Allison Hirst
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Marquis

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Simcoe, Elizabeth, 1766-1850

Mrs. Simcoes diary / edited by Mary Quayle Innis.

Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-55002-768-6

1. Simcoe, Elizabeth, 1766-1850--Diaries. 2. Simcoe, John Graves, 1752-1806. 3. Ontario--Social life and customs--18th century. 4. Ontario--Politics and government--1791-1841. 5. Lieutenant governors--Ontario--Biography. 6. Lieutenant governors spouses--Ontario--Biography. I. Innis, Mary Quayle, 1899-1972. II. Title.

FC3071.1.S54A3 2007 971.302092 C2007-904678-9

1 2 3 4 5 11 10 09 08 07

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 Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, 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

Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on recycled paper.

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1 Journey to Canada
September 17 to November 10, 1791

2 A Winter in Quebec
November 11, 1791, to June 5, 1792

3 Journey to Niagara
June 8 to July 25, 1792

4 A Year at Niagara
July 26, 1792, to July 28, 1793

5 Life at York
July 29, 1793, to May 11, 1794

6 Life at Niagara
May 13 to September 12, 1794

7 Visit to Quebec
September 13, 1794, to June 16, 1795

8 Niagara
June 22 to November 4, 1795

9 York and Niagara
November 13, 1795, to July 20, 1796

10 Departure
July 21 to October 16, 1796

The present text of the diary/journal of Elizabeth Simcoe (17661850) documents her travel to and stay in Canada between 1791 and 1796 and varies only slightly from the modern edition prepared by Mary Quayle Innis (18991972) that was published by the Macmillan Company of Canada in 1965. That text departed considerably from the 1911 edition prepared with elaborate notes and a biography by John Ross Robertson (1841 1918) and published by William Briggs of Toronto. Robertson, an enthusiastic and energetic individual with an antiquarian collectors instincts (his entry in Henry James Morgans The Canadian Men and Women of the Time [1912] identifies him simply as a journalist and then goes on to list two and a half impressive columns of activities and achievements), crafted a volume of biographical information, extensive notes, and sundry historical addenda that all but obscured the actual diary or journal notes of Elizabeth Simcoe that he had secured from the familys keeping at the Gwillim-Simcoe estate of Wolford in Devon.

What would be, at its best, something just short of two hundred printed pages of Elizabeth Simcoes jottings were enriched and enlarged by Robertsons historically fascinating textual impedimenta. However, describing Robertsons apparatus as impedimenta is perhaps unfair, since it is really a remarkable collection of historical and biographical detail, some quite trivial, other materially useful and contributing significantly to the context of the Simcoe diary. This material included two hundred and thirty-seven illustrations of which ninety were reproductions The 1911 edition became, in turn, a facsimile reprint in 1973 as a title in the Coles Canadiana Collection.

While our primary interest in the diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe is its relevance to the very earliest days of Upper Canada and its connection to the activities of the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, we are rewarded by insights and observations collateral to the opening of new territory in Canada and the founding of what was to become the Province of Ontario, as well as the laying out of the first sketchy plans of Toronto, destined to become the largest city in the country. What is particularly striking about the diary is that it is not a studied or profound historical record of those days when the site of what is now Toronto was a few modest huts and the forest reached down to the shores of Lake Ontario and Native encampments registered more of a presence than the newly arrived Europeans.