[Illustration: THE OLD CONANT HOMESTEAD AT PORT OSHAWA, BUILT IN 1811.
Here United States prisoners from General Hull’s army, which surrendered at Detroit, were fed while proceeding on their way by boats under guard to Quebec. Here also domiciliary visits were paid on several occasions during the Canadian Revolution of 1837-38, the house being surrounded by troops at midnight, and my people turned out in the snow while the house was being searched. ]
diligent searches. Daniel Conant’s New England descent would very probably go far to account for Colonel Ferguson’s insane suspiciousness. In this part of Canada the inhabitants generally were in favor of the movement. Not to be so was to be singular. That is to say, they were in favor of having the wrongs committed by the Family Compact redressed, but not one in 10,000 asked for a change of the political connection of Canada. To effect such a sweeping change as that would be was not the object of the agitation, and at this day of writing it seems very hard that the inhabitants should have been persecuted simply because they loved their country; but so it was. It would be well to instance another case of the tyrannous misrule of the Family Compact and their persecution of unoffending persons. A farmer living near Oshawa, being the son of a United Empire Loyalist, seemed to have all the Compact’s hate and suspicion centred upon him, simply because his father came from Massachusetts. The suspected man had done absolutely no act to place him in the eye of the law. Like nearly all others, he sympathized with the patriots, not for a moment supposing it to be a crime to love his country and its people. But Colonel Ferguson thought differently, and made a sally to capture the farmer. Now, capture meant almost certain death, for it would mean being incarcerated during the very cold weather in unheated guardhouses and gaols here or in Toronto. Knowing this, he avoided capture by changing his quarters every few days and never sleeping in a house. Usually he slept in the granary of a barn, burrowing into the bin of grain until almost or quite concealed, with the grain effectually covering him. One may rightly conjecture the terrible hardships of this poor farmer, exposed as he was to the inclemency of a Canadian winter. Fires in a barn are, of course, out of the question, and therefore he had no comfort of a house and a fireside the whole winter long. Such ill-usage could possibly have only one ending, viz., death, which followed in the fall of 1838. Nor is this an isolated case, for there were many such, but purposely we follow its details in order to present a faithful picture of life in Canada during the Canadian Revolution of 1837-38.