The Death of My Country Page 12
Miguen: feather
Toni kd’allowzin? or Tôni Kd’wôlôwzi?: Are you well? or How are you?
wigwedi or wikwti: lynx
(The alternate spellings are from the Odanak Abenaki, who live near what once was the St. Francis Mission.)
Acknowledgments
Every effort has been made to trace ownership of visual and written material used in this book. Errors and omissions will be corrected in subsequent updates or editions.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:
Cover Portrait: Detail, adapted, from Emergence by Karen Noles.
Cover background: Detail, lightened, from Mort de Montcalm by Desfontaines. Library and Archives Canada, C-003759, The Source: R.W. Reford Estate, Montreal, Quebec.
Image 1: First Ursuline Nuns with Indian Pupils at Quebec, Quebec by Lawrence R. Batchelor. Library and Archives Canada, C-010520.
Image 2: Ursuline Convent, Quebec, Québec by James Pattison Cockburn. Library and Archives Canada, C-150519, Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana.
Image 3: Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm by Antoine Louis Francois Sergent. Library and Archives Canada, C-014342.
Image 4: Portrait of James Wolfe, ca. 1749 by Joseph Highmore. Library and Archives Canada, C-003916.
Image 5: James Murray, ca. 1770. Library and Archives Canada, C-002834.
Image 6: The Defeat of the French Fireships Attacking the British Fleet at Anchor before Quebec, 28 June 1759, Quebec by Dominic Serres/Samuel Scott. Library and Archives Canada, C-004291.
Image 7: 78th Regiment of Foot Guards: Fraser’s Highlanders 1759 by Frederick M. Milner. Library and Archives Canada, C-005731, Bathurst and Milner Collection.
Image 8: A View of the Taking of Québec, September 13th, 1759, Québec, Québec. Library and Archives Canada, C-041757, W.H. Coverdale Collection of Canadiana.
Image 9: The Death of General Wolfe, Québec by Benjamin West; engraver William Woollett. Library and Archives Canada, C-041187, W. H. Coverdale Collection of Canadiana.
Image 10: Montcalm leading his troops at Plains of Abraham, Quebec, by C. W. Jefferys. Library and Archives Canada, C-073720.
Image 11: Mort de Montcalm by Desfontaines. Library and Archives Canada, C-003759, The Source: R.W. Reford Estate, Montreal, Quebec.
Image 12: Ruins of Quebec after the Siege of 1759, Quebec by C. W. Jefferys. Library and Archives Canada, C-070317.
Image 13: Ruins of Quebec after the Siege of 1759, Quebec by C. W. Jefferys. Library and Archives Canada, C-070318.
Images 14, 15 and 16: Abenaki corn husk doll, basket and bowl, courtesy of the Odanak Reserve Museum.
Images 17 and 18: Maps by Paul Heersink/Paperglyphs. Map data © 1999 Government of Canada with permission from Natural Resources Canada.
Acknowledgments: My thanks to Barbara Hehner for her careful checking of the manuscript, as well as Andrew Gallup, historian, writer and co-conspirator in re-enacting, for the same thoughtful work. My appreciation to Charlotte Picard and her husband John Ashley Sheltus, upon whom I based the characters of Mme Claire and Lieutenant Stewart. And as always, my thanks to my husband Bill for his endless patience and support.
For Jeanette Murray-Pastorius, who has stood at Culloden and who will never forget who has gone before her.
About the Author
Maxine Trottier is as much at home in eighteenth-century Louisbourg as she is in the twenty-first-century. Her mother’s family has been in Canada since the seventeenth century. It was while researching her Dear Canada book, Alone in an Untamed Land: The Filles du Roi Diary of Hélène St. Onge, that Maxine made an intriguing disovery: the wife of one of her own ancestors was actually a fille du roi herself. Another of Maxine’s ancestors married Marguerite Ouabankikove of the Miami nation, the sister of chief Le Pied Froid, so Maxine has both European and First Nations ancestry.
“My family fought in the French and Indian War,” she says, “and so this story has great personal meaning for me. As a former re-enactor, I have spent time at many of the sites mentioned in this book. To walk the dark hallways of Fort Niagara with a lantern in my hand, to look out from the King’s Bastion in Louisbourg and imagine the British Navy’s approach, to stand in the foggy meadow at Fort Necessity where the French and Indian War began … these are the sorts of experiences that fuel a writer’s imagination and, in doing so, keep history from seeming dry and dusty. Because it isn’t. Geneviève’s story, although a work of fiction, is the tale of people who stood bravely against tremendous odds for what they believed. And that has always been the story of Canada.”
Maxine says that researching the facts and details for The Death of My Country presented interesting and sometimes frustrating challenges. “Historians differed on such things as how many men were in each army or how many were aboard the Royal Navy vessels. Even the journals of Lieutenant John Knox, and the letters and papers of French and British officers, varied in terms of what was seen and what happened.” This made the research complicated, since it was often a case of deciding who was “most right.” When writing about a historical event, each writer would have had a different agenda. Some men were making reports to their superiors; some, like Knox, were writing memoirs that they planned to have published. “I gathered as much information as possible and then set about shaping it into what I felt was the most correct information. Believe me, it was one of those times when I wished time travel were possible, so that I could have seen the story first-hand.”
Maxine Trottier’s first Dear Canada, Alone in an Untamed Land, the Filles du Roi Diary of Hélène St. Onge, was nominated for both the Silver Birch Award and the Hackmatack Award. Maxine is an award-winning writer of numerous books for young people, including the entire Scholastic Biographies series (Canadian Artists, Canadian Explorers, Canadian Greats, Canadian Inventors, Canadian Leaders, Canadian Pioneers, Canadian Stars), as well as Claire’s Gift (winner of the Mr. Christie’s Book Award), Laura: A Childhood Tale of Laura Secord, the Circle of Silver Chronicles (whose initial book was nominated for the CLA Book of the Year Award), The Tiny Kite of Eddie Wing (winner of the CLA Book of the Year Award) and Terry Fox: A Story of Hope (nominated for the Red Cedar and Golden Oak awards). Her picture book Migrant was nominated for the Notable Books for a Global Society book award, sponsored by the IRA Children’s Literature and Reading Special Interest Group. It was a finalist for the ReadBoston book award, as well as for the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Award. The New York Times named it as one of its top 10 illustrated books.
She currently resides in Newfoundland, overlooking Bonavista Bay, with its amazing sights of surfacing whales and looming icebergs.
While the events described and some of the characters in this book may be based on actual historical events and real people, Geneviève Aubuchon is a fictional character created by the author, and her diary is a work of fiction.
Copyright © 2005 by Maxine Trottier.
Published by Scholastic Canada Ltd.
SCHOLASTIC and DEAR CANADA and logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan–American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read this e-book on-screen. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher, Scholastic Canada Ltd., 604 King Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5V 1E1, Canada.
ISBN: 978-1-4431-1999-3
First eBook edition: October 2012
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