In the fullness of an August heat wave in 1854, Frederick Douglass traveled across Canada West from Niagara Falls toward the town of Chatham on the Thames River. As he approached Chatham, Douglass marveled at the productivity of the land, finding promise everywhere (“We saw not an unthrifty corn field in Canada”) and elevating his praise of the black pioneers to spiritual terms. “They are leveling the forest,” Douglass wrote, “clearing the land, converting the wilderness into fertile fields and causing the very earth to rejoice in their presence.”

Such confidence in the land was well placed. The territory Douglass traversed was the southwesternmost corner of the vast Huron Tract, a promising region of Canada West and an area possessed of a privileged geological history. Glaciers here had met their southern limits and retreated, flattening everything as they left, but leaving the rich materials for forest and farmland. The travel notes of Joseph Bouchette, Surveyor General of the Canadas and author of The British Dominions in North America (1831), dealt less tactfully with the result than did Douglass's impassioned letters, which were intended to lift the antislavery hearts and hopes of his newspaper audience. Certain scenes of “rural and thriving industry,” in Bouchette's practical words, might hold “the most interesting charms of the picturesque,” but it was “not, in a country so little variegated by hill and dale, and so utterly a stranger to the towering grandeur of the mountain, that sublimity of scenery is to be sought.” For Bouchette, this was hardly the promised land; for Jennie Johnson, it would become a country well suited to the planting of churches and the harvesting of souls.