Catharine Parr Traill (born Strickland; 1802 - 1899) was an English-Canadian author and naturalist who wrote about life in Canada, particularly what is now Ontario (then the colony of Upper Canada). Traill began writing children's books in 1818 like Disobedience; or, Mind What Mama Says (1819). She described her new life in Canada in letters and journals, and collected these into The Backwoods of Canada (1836), which continues to be read as an important source of information about early Canada. Catharine spent her years in Belleville writing about the natural environment. She often sketched the plant life of Upper Canada, publishing Canadian Wild Flowers (1865) and Studies of Plant Life in Canada (1885). She died in Ontario in 1899.

"[...]his own Highlands, but softer in character, yet his heart yearned for the hill country. In those days there was no obstacle to taking possession of any tract of land in the unsurveyed forests; therefore Duncan agreed with his brother-in-law to pioneer the way with him, get a dwelling put up, and some ground prepared and "seeded down," and then to return for their wives, and settle as farmers. Others had succeeded, had formed little colonies, and become the heads of villages in due time; why should not they? And now behold our two backwoodsmen fairly commencing their arduous life: it was nothing, after all, to Pierre, by previous occupation a hardy lumberer, or the Scottish soldier, accustomed to brave all sorts of hardships in a wild country, himself a mountaineer, inured to a stormy climate and scanty fare from his earliest youth. But it is not my intention to dwell upon the trials and difficulties courageously met and battled with by our settlers and their young wives. There was in those days a spirit of resistance among the first settlers on the soil, a spirit to do and bear, that [...]".