Backyard History: The year of the mouse

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In 1815, Nova Scotia was overrun by an almost Biblical plague of mice.

Decades later, Dr. George Patterson went around the region personally interviewing its oldest residents to hear firsthand about what was known as “The Year of The Mice” for his book, The History of Pictou County.

He found that the events left a mark so deep that the mouse invasion was still used as an informal way to measure time. In “Sixty-two Years After The Mice,” Dr. Patterson wrote that these had been no ordinary mice.

“They were very destructive and actually fierce. If pursued, when hard pressed, they would stand at bay, rising up on their hind legs, setting their teeth and squealing fiercely. A farmer on whom I could rely told me that having, after planting, spread out some barley to dry in the sun before the door, in a little while he saw it covered with (mic). He let the cat out among them, but they actually turned upon her and fought her.”

Dr. Patterson learned that the mice had seemingly come out of nowhere.

“During the previous season, they did not appear in any unusual numbers. But at the end of winter, they were so numerous as to trouble the sugar makers by fouling their troughs for gathering sap, and before planting was over, the woods and fields alike swarmed with them,” he wrote. “They were of the large species of field mouse, still sometimes seen in the country, but which has never since been very numerous.”

He wrote: “This was a most destructive visitation, from which this portion of the country suffered from these seemingly insignificant animals. The rodent hordes infested Tatamagouche, Pictou, Colchester and Antigonish.”

Dr. Patterson noted: “These animals swarmed everywhere, and consumed everything edible, even the potatoes in the ground. In some houses at West River are still reserved books which the leather on the covers has been gnawed by them.”

Farmers were worst affected by the mice.

One of those books with the gnawed covers, the minutes of the West River Farming Society, contained a poem written by an unknown local man about the lives of farmers:

“Let this be held the farmers’ creed,

For stock seek out the choicest breed,

In peace and plenty let them feed.

Your lands sow with the best of seed,

Let it not for dung and dressing want,

And then provisions won’t be scant.”

Being ravaged by plagues of mice was certainly not common for most of the Maritimes, except, perhaps, Prince Edward Island.

In 1699, a traveller from France named Dièreville visited what was then called Ile St. Jean, and is now called P.E.I. He published his observations in a book called Relation du voyage du Port Royal de l’Acadie, writing that every seven years mice ravaged the island.

“The Island of St. John is stated to be visited every seven years by swarms of locusts or field mice, alternately – never together. After they ravage the land, they precipitate themselves into the sea.”

The name of P.E.I.’s town called Souris is thought to have been named for an especially devastating mouse invasion. Souris means mouse in French.

While it’s unlikely there is ever a good time for a rodent invasion, 1815 was a distinctly bad time.

The Maritimes had profited immensely in the previous three years as the British and Americans fought the War of 1812. Ships, forts, and barracks were constructed; the price of farmers’ produce shot up; workers’ wages rose; and there was a sharp and lucrative jump in prosperity.

When the War of 1812 ended in February of 1815, it brought with it a deep Maritimes-wide recession.

John Young’s Letters of Agricola noted that “peace came and at once dried up all the sources of this artificial prosperity. Real estate (prices) fell almost in an instant, trade declined, land produce was lowered … universal gloom settled over the province.”

Just as a sharp recession began to bite, the mice appeared.

In 1892 the Intercontinental Railway published a booklet called “Forest, Stream and Seashore” for tourists visiting the Maritimes. Perhaps startlingly – because tourists are not known for their fondness for mice infestations – it included a section dedicated to what it called “Anno Marium.”

“An army of mice marched over Colchester, Pictou and Antigonish Counties, eating everything before it as it advanced. It was a veritable plague, as serious for a time as that of the frogs sent upon the land of Egypt, and which has had nothing to compare with it in the provinces in more recent times, with the exception of the invasion of the army worm.”

Dr. Patterson wrote that in autumn the mice truly became a plague: “It was when the grain began to ripen that their destructiveness became especially manifest. They then attacked it in such numbers … Over acres and acres, they left not a stalk standing, nor a grain of wheat, to reward the labours of the farmer. They burrowed in the ground and consumed the potatoes. Cats, dogs, and martens gorged themselves to repletion upon them, but with little seeming diminution of their numbers.”

Crops failed, and starvation loomed.

Nova Scotia Gov. Sir John Coape Sherbrooke personally purchased and distributed food.

After Sherbrooke died the following year, farmer Nathaniel Symond penned a letter to the Acadian Reporter newspaper expressing gratitude. He wrote that before the governor’s help “upwards of five hundred souls … had nothing to subsist on but the very scanty allowance of milk their cows afforded them … brought into this distressed situation … by the mice.”

Much like Dièreville had written over 200 years earlier, in late autumn the mice went towards the sea.

Dr. Patterson wrote: “At Cape George, they went to the water, and there died, forming a ridge-like seaweed along the edge of the sea, and codfish were caught off the coast with carcasses in their maws.”

The Year of The Mice was over. Little did Maritimers know that things would soon get worse. The next year was The Year Without A Summer.

A longer version of this story appears in the Backyard History book. Order a signed copy at backyardhistory.ca/book