Samuel Strickland is perhaps best known today as the younger brother of two of Canada's most important nineteenth-century writers, Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie. However, it is as one of the earliest settlers in the Peterborough and Lakefield areas, as a member of the Canada Company staff that helped to settle the Guelph and Goderich areas, and as author of his own settler's memoir, Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West; or, The Experience of an Early Settler (1853), that he most deserves attention.

The first son and seventh child of Thomas and Elizabeth Strickland, he was born on 6 November 1804 in Suffolk, England, raised at Reydon Hall near Southwold, and educated at Valpy's Grammar School in Norwich. In the wake of his father's financial reversals and death (1818), Strickland was called upon increasingly to help in the management of and farming at Reydon Hall. An active young man much given to...