Born 1798 in Killishandra, Ireland, James Beaty emigrated to New York at the age of seventeen where for a while he practised his trade as a shoemaker. Though he made money quickly in New York Beaty, a loyal subject of the King, preferred to live where the Monarchy still reigned and this prompted him to move to Canada, where at first he settled in Kingston. In Kingston he began to hear good things of the new settlement of Muddy York, as Toronto was then known. Sometime later, in an interview with the Evening Telegram newspaper, Beaty recalled his arrival in Toronto on Saturday March 17, 1818. "I waited a long time for a chance to ride west, and at last the man who used to carry the mail agreed to take me in his rig. It was the month of March, but there was no snow in Kingston all that winter. A storm came on while we were on our journey, and when I reached York there was four feet of snow on the ground. "We put up at a hotel kept by a man named Jordan, near where the market (