Margaret Elphinstone

“This was where Rachel was last seen….the bay was just as Alan had described it: a mile-long half moon of white sand."

Mark is a young Quaker, who reluctantly leaves his native Cumberland to search for his sister, who eloped with a fur trader and disappeared into Michigan territory. He is inadvertently caught up in the 1812 War between Canada and the United States, which makes it hard for him to adhere to the Quaker Peace Testimony. (Only after I’d written the book did I fully realise I was also addressing a crisis in my own time, as I began to write soon after the First Gulf War broke out.) I grew very fond of Mark; as he narrates his own story, I really had to become him as best I could. He often seems out of his depth in both love and war, in a strange country, but I think ultimately he does very well.

Mark comes from familiar territory: my childhood holidays were spent in Borrowdale, in the Lake District. All my fictional characters belong in places I know well. I walk where they walked, and I look through the present to the past that they inhabited, and imagine what the place was like for them. Mosedale Quaker Meeting House where Mark worshiped (right) is little changed from his time. The research, in libraries and archives and on location, is all part of the adventure.

After my two Viking novels, the wealth of primary sources available in the C19 was a new experience. All but a few of the minor characters in Voyageurs were real people. Only the main characters are my invention. For Mark’s background, I had all the Quaker archives, Minutes of Meetings, letters and other documents, available in the archive at Carlisle Castle. For his brother-in-law Alan, who emigrates to Canada from the shores of Lochcarron in N.W. Scotland, I found the original estate deeds for Lochcarron, the lists of emigrant ships and their passengers, and lists of individuals who worked with Alan in the North West Company in Montreal. I followed Mark’s footsteps from Cumberland to Quebec, and across Lower Canada to Yonge Street, Newmarket, to the Sault and across to Mackinac Island, then far into Michigan Territory.

Everywhere I went I found local libraries and archives and helpful people. In particular, the Quaker Meetings at Yonge Street and Toronto gave me hospitality and access to fascinating archives. The archivist at Yonge Street was in fact a direct descendent of Doan, the Clerk whom Mark met in 1811. I sat on a bench in the Meeting House (left) and looked out of the same window as Mark.

Other minor characters along the way, like Ermatinger and the Johnson family at the Sault, or Madame la Framboise at Mackinac, emerged from unpublished archive material in each place. I encountered Madame La Framboise for the first time when I found myself staying in her house, now the Harbour View Inn, and discovered that she was an Ojibwa woman, who, after her French fur trader husband was murdered, became a successful fur trader in her own right. A forceful woman, she at once found her way into Mark’s story. I visited Mackinac often, and a friend took me across to stay on Bois Blanc Island, where Mark meets Loic and his family. There I was introduced to a local historian, who gave me vital details about Loic's island.

I went back to Central Michigan University for a further semester to write the novel. I made forays into Canada, to follow Mark’s journey, canoeing as much of it as I could. We paddled along the Ottawa in a replica canot du nord (as illustrated in the Frances Anne Hopkins picture below) - but luckily without two tons of beaver pelts on board - and camped on Gibralter Island (right) where Mark and the voyageurs stopped on their journey into the interior.

Returning to Mount Pleasant, I was welcomed back to the English Department and to Pine River Friends’ Meeting. Ojibwa former students of mine arranged for me to attend lectures in the Department of Native American Studies. My friend Jim, another tribal member, received permission for me to join a mentoring programme in which young Ojibwa people learn about their own culture. A colleague provided the few phrases in Ojibwa which appear in the novel.

I was concerned about representing a culture so unlike my own, on to which so many stereotypes have been projected. I asked for help at the Ziibiwiing Cultural Centre, where Charmaine Benz read my manuscript, and made some surprising comments. I had to think further about mis-representation, while sticking firmly to Mark’s point of view. Charmaine and her colleagues encouraged me to persist, “So long as you tell the truth,” one said. A tall order, that, for any writer. I did my best.

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