Who Were The Arguers

Preparing this information about my Dickson family made me realize that perhaps the Caswell trait of arguing at the drop of a hat over insignificant points, more likely came from the Dickson side, not the Caswell's.  The Caswell's have been blamed for the “arguing gene” and hair trigger temper that has been passed down in the family. 

Although no one is alive to defend her, the comments that have been made about Mary Jane Caswell (nee Dickson) indicate she was the one with the temper, not Andrew.

Stories abound in the Caswell family about the arguments that regularly took place, often started from something so inconsequential it was hard to believe it should be argued about at all.  Siblings could be discussing an event 30 or 40 years before and then launch into a very heated argument about the weather on that particular day. 

Mary Jane Dickson Caswell (according a great granddaughter) was dictatorial and would lie in bed and make her daughters serve her breakfast in bed.  A daughter in law said that Mary Jane was an old “Tartar”.  I was told that my own great grandmother, Mary Jane Donnan, as well as her sisters, married as soon as they could to get away from the demands of their mother.

There was also the land claim in Biddulph where Mary Jane took a stick to her brother Thomas[i].  For this she was fined $5 by the courts.

And in Saskatchewan Mary Jane took a willow stick to an Indian that had taken a buggy whip.

“When the Rebellion first started two Indians came to our door and as was my custom, I went to get them some bread and butter, for as the old saying is “a full stomach makes a good child.” The younger of the two took the bread and put it in his coat and went off. The older one, a fellow about twenty, sat down in the house with his gun standing beside him. The gun had a piece of red flannel tied on the barrel. I gave him a piece of a loaf of bread and he threw it out on the snowbank. Pretty soon he came out with our buggy whip in his hand. Grandma Caswell said “I’ll not let him take that!” so out she went and told him to put it down and when he would not do it she went up to him and caught hold of the whip and hit him over the knuckles with a willow stick she picked up. He finally let go and went toward the river.”

     In my own Caswell family, the arguing of my grandmother and her sisters was legendary.  As young children, my sister and I often had to listen to the Donnan sisters visiting and the ensuing arguing - often about an obscure event many years previously.  Unfortunately, this arguing lead to the death of one of their sisters.  She was hit in the head with stick when she and her sister were arguing about who would get to use the iron.

      I have now shared all the information I have uncovered about this family.  As I said at the beginning of my Dickson posts, we are lucky to have pictures, stories and clues about someone born about 1766.  Unfortunately though, there are a number of unanswered questions, especially who James children were and how many lived near him in Biddulph.  I will continue to search for his obituary and hope some answers will be contained within it.

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[i] University of Western Ontario in the Regional History Collection, Juror Returns, a reference to a petty prosecution: Thomas Dickson v. Mary Caswell, assault with a stick, May 18^th, 1861, before John McLaughlin, JP, fine of $5.