Part of the Letter from William MacTavish to his Father

[Patrick Thompson]

Part of a Letter from William MacTavish (From York Factory, Canada) to his father Sheriff Dugald MacTavish, at Kilchrist, Knapdale.

Yorkfactory 8th Sept. 1845
My Dear Father,

I arrived on the 29th of June in the evening, fully a week sooner than I expected. I envied the people who came up with me, having a set of fresh men up above so as to enable me to push on to the Factory & reach it before any of the brigands left it which I barely did. The voyage up is by no means a xxxxxxxxxx. Here any blarney is Judge, he has never knocked about much in the fall or spring on this coast or he would have thought very little of it, it is certainly a very wet trip, there be often for days & nights together that you have not a dry shirt about you, blanket or anything else, but that is comfort companied with having your clothes a sheet of ice as is the case down here, as the sleet which falls immediately freezes on you, on the coast, but we had hardly a sole day that with the exception of about a week in Lake Superior on the voyage from Canada till we got close down here, when at night we were generally favoured with frost. Lake Superior is a splendid lake very much resembling the west coast, at least the north shore which we came along day so, the shore generally a bold rocky coast with the exception of here and there at the head of small bays a gravely beach, the stones in it which we are washed round & smooth by the incessant heave of the swell from seasands (seasons), the water is as clear and green, or rather blue as the water of the ocean although the scenery about it is wild and hxxxx in the extreme it is well worth seeing. The Yankees say that the south shore of the lake is a mine of wealth, they have already commense(d) to work some copper mines which are saw to be very rich, before the shafts were sunk some of the Yankee Merchants had contracted for hundreds of thousands of tons of copper ore. A species or two of mineral which shaft sunken (is) up in coming along is saw to contain lead. –

[Michael R Thompson]

I love old letters like that, it gives me time to think about what the times they lived in what they were looking for.

Mike

[AngryScotsman]

Nothing like history!


Stevenson, M.

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