Here's my March progress update plus ten books that have influenced my thinking.
Recent Work
Thank you to all the Gervais and Laurence descendants who came to the special event on February 22! It was wonderful to meet you and to see your enthusiasm for my research. If you missed it, I teased some of my most remarkable discoveries. (Ask someone who attended; there were lots of “wows” and “no ways!”)
On that note, the Gervais family has formally been invited to serve as grand marshals at the Canadian Days Parade in Little Canada in early August. I asked how many family members could join and the question was flipped back at me: how many descendants would want to do it? For now, just email me at Gervaisbook [at] gmail [dot] com if you’re interested and I’ll work with the Little Canada Historical Society to get a list going.
Other than that, I don’t have a lot to update this month. February was short and I spent last week on a family vacation.
What’s Next
My Winnipeg trip keeps getting pushed back. Initially scheduled for the middle of February, I pushed it to March to avoid a provincial holiday that closed the archives. I then rescheduled for mid-March, only to learn that the primary archive I need to visit, the Centre du Patrimioine, will be closed the whole week to replace the carpet. So it’s now happening at the end of the month. My next update will hopefully feature a few new revelations.
The rest of my travel, to St. Louis and Eastern Canada, is still moving forward as scheduled.
I never thought I would have to say I’m actually a bit nervous about traveling to Canada, but here we are. I hope the U.S. government doesn’t do something stupid and escalate the threat of annexation. I have no beef with our Canadian neighbors and no desire to be taken prisoner. The whole situation is absurd. Throw away 200 years of peaceful coexistence and mutual assistance for what?!
Ten Books to Know
Anyway, since this post is a bit short on new details, I thought I would change it up a bit. I want to share with you ten books that have changed my thinking about biography and history and/or influenced my approach to the book I am writing. They are arranged by date of publication, starting with the oldest.
Williams, J. Fletcher. A History of the City of Saint Paul to 1875. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1876.
This is the book that started me on my quest. J. Fletcher Williams was the first secretary of the Minnesota Historical Society. He was also, in my opinion, the best of Minnesota’s early historians. More than others, he was able to detach himself from common prejudices of the time. He treated each individual as a person with his or her own story. A History of the City of Saint Paul to 1875 contains five sentences about the lives of Benjamin and Genevieve before they came to Minnesota. I began my research with the goal of finding primary sources that could corroborate, augment, or correct the biographical information in those five sentences.
Gluek, Alvin C. Minnesota and the Manifest Destiny of the Canadian Northwest: A Study in Canadian-American Relations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965.
I rarely see Gluek’s book cited in later works. However, even sixty years later it remains the definitive source for understanding the complex relationships between the Red River Settlement, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the United States, and British North America (after 1867, Canada). Gluek examines the economic and political developments that shaped the history of the Canadian Northwest, as two expansionist empires sought to take control of the fertile Red River Valley from the Métis settlers who already lived there.
Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.
Great sources don’t have to be about the exact location or topic you’re interested in. Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, for example, was a landmark work of environmental history. In it, Cronon demonstrated how the concentration of power, wealth, ideas, and technology that emerged in the boomtown of Chicago sucked in natural resources from a vast, ever-expanding hinterland. Lumber from the north, grain and livestock from the west—these became commodities to be controlled, standardized, and sold for a profit. It is a model for how to think about the relationship between city and country.
In the case of my work, Little Canada was the very first agricultural hinterland for St. Paul. The Gervais mill was built not only so that locals could grind their own grain, but with the intention of exporting flour to feed lumberjacks on the St. Croix and newcomers to St. Paul. It is relevant in another way too. The railroad line that still runs SW-NE through Little Canada and White Bear (parallel to Owasso Blvd. and Centerville Rd.) was the first railroad in the vicinity. It was built in the early 1870s by owners of the huge Minneapolis flour mills as part of a network that would allow them to source wheat for their mills without having to pay surcharges on tracks owned by businessmen in Chicago or Milwaukee. That is, where the hinterlands of two metropolises met, there was competition for access to and control of local resources.
Podruchny, Carolyn. Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
Good primary sources about the lives of voyageurs are few and far between. Podruchny pulled together brief, disparate examples from across fur-trade literature to produce a comprehensive cultural history of voyageur lifeways. It is an essential source for anyone writing about the experience of travelers and traders in the Northwest.
Bumsted, J. M. Lord Selkirk: A Life. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009.
Lord Selkirk looms large over the history of the Gervais and Laurence families. Yet I included this work here not for the content of the book (which is very useful for my purposes), but as an example of a historian struggling with his subject. Bumsted, who passed away in 2020, was a historian of Canada. He was quite familiar with the Canadian parts of Lord Selirk’s endeavors, especially the Red River Settlement. However, in order to write a complete biography of Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, Bumsted had to dive into unfamiliar waters, reading and digesting histories of the Scottish Enlightenment, English politics, and the idea of emigration as a means of alleviating social pressures, as well as the activities and beliefs of Selkirk’s family and friends in Great Britain.
I’m in a similar position. I’ve read a lot about early Minnesota history and am getting the know the history of the Red River Settlement almost day by day. However, the lives of French-Canadian habitants in Quebec during the British period still feels somewhat foreign. I continue to gather books and articles and will eventually master the existing literature.
Hyde, Anne F. Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.
For many decades, the stories of ordinary individuals were deemed of secondary importance to the study of major events, big ideas, and “great men.” According to historians of the French Annales School, the most important historical changes—of geography, economy, culture—happen over long durations. Focusing on particular events or people is misguided; it risks mistaking ephemeral surface waves for the deeper undercurrents of history. Similarly, Marxist historians emphasize that the means of production and relations of production are more fundamental than elements of superstructure—law, culture, politics, religion, etc.
In these earlier periods, genealogy—the study of family groups and family history—was like an ugly step-child, a minefield of amateurs and charlatans with little to contribute to “real history.”However, in the last 50 years, new kinds of history emerged such as social history and microhistory. Social history, also called history from below, seeks to examine history from the perspectives of regular people. Microhistory takes a particular event and scrutinizes it from many angles, exploding a single moment to reveal hidden meanings that in turn inform our understanding of broader issues.
My goal is to combine social history and microhistory with biography. One of my main inspirations is Anne F. Hyde’s Empires, Nations, and Families. Hyde’s Bancroft-prize winning book is an epic social history that tells the story of the American West from the point of view of multi-ethnic families who lived and worked there before one or another derivative states of European empire (Canada, the U.S., Mexico) gained full control. Drawing extensively on literatures of the middle ground, métissage, and borderlands, Hyde shows how family relationships across time and space fostered business relationships and served as a means of survival in a rapidly changing world.
Bachman, Walt. Northern Slave, Black Dakota: The Life and Times of Joseph Godfrey. Bloomington, Minn.: Pond Dakota Press, 2013.
Brueggemann, Gary. Minnesota’s Oldest Murder Mystery: The Case of Edward Phalen, St. Paul’s Unsaintly Pioneer. Eden Prairie, Minn.: Beaver’s Pond Press, 2013.
Bachman and Brueggemann’s books, both published in 2013, explore local Minnesota history at a granular level.
Bachman’s book is framed as a biography, although there is precious little information about Joseph Godfrey’s early years. Rather, the book is valuable for two things. First, early chapters dig into the history of slavery in Minnesota, offering the first in-depth look at the pervasiveness of U.S. army officers bringing slaves into free territory (and getting extra pay to support these “servants”). Second, the latter half of the book is a thorough examination—again, the first of its kind—of Godfrey’s unique role in the Dakota War trials of 1862. Brueggemann’s book, meanwhile, is a microhistory of the death of John Hays and the murder trial of his roommate Edward Phalen. Because so many of the facts of the case are lost, and what remains is wildly contradictory, Brueggemann takes and unorthodox approach in how he organizes the information. Although it doesn’t always work, the novel format is more asset than detriment. Frankly, I found it refreshing to see an author take such a risk and a publisher allow it to pass.
The Gervaises were key players in the murder trial. While I believe I’ve found one or two additional wrinkles to the story of the trial, I cite Brueggemann extensively. Both books are models for the kind of hyper-detailed, on-the-ground narrative I am writing.
Villerbu, Tangi. Les Missions du Minnesota: Catholicisme et Colonisation Dans L’Ouest Américain 1830–1860. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017.
Not all secondary sources are in English! Unsurprisingly, I am reading a lot of books in French, plus quite a few that were originally published in French which have since been published in translation. Surprisingly, this one, about early Catholic missionary work in Minnesota, was written by a scholar in France rather than Quebec. I may never have discovered it if not for its being published online on an open-access platform.
Les Missions du Minnesota is a sophisticated work of scholarship that synthesizes studies of settler-colonialism and the frontier and analyzes them through the lens of Catholicism. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
“From the end of the 17th century to the 1840s, [Minnesota] was linked to a regional space, that of the Pays d'en Haut invented by the French, whose structures remained more or less the same for several decades after 1763 under British domination, then American—this is the space for which White had invented the middle ground. From the 1850s, the southern fringe of the Territory—created in 1849—then of the State—created in 1857—was concretely attached to the American national space in a real continuum of colonial settlement. So there was a moment, the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, when Minnesota literally tipped over to the American side. It is in this short period that we must look for the tormented birth of a fragmented American society. . . .
The choice that I make here is to scrutinize this transition in three decades by using an unprecedented observatory: Catholicism. . . . This choice may seem incongruous as Catholicism is still a marginal cult that is not very integrated into the global American narrative. However, in the Minnesota of the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s there existed a Catholicism which participated in a fundamental way in all the processes of the transition between the two colonial modes.”
As you can see, Villerbu hits the sweet spot for my subjects. The Gervaises were French and were connected by blood, marriage, and history to the old pays d'en haut. Yet they were also pioneer settler-colonists and founders of permanent White settlements like St. Paul and Little Canada. And they were Catholic; they participated in the changes Villerbu describes, going from influential leaders who (quite literally) helped to build the institution of a French-Catholic Church in Minnesota to ordinary parishioners in a diocese run mostly by Irish and Germans.
Laxer, Daniel Robert. Listening to the Fur Trade: Soundways and Music in the British North American Fur Trade, 1760–1840. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022.
The other major field of history that grew significantly in the last fifty years is cultural history. Where social history tends to focus on social and economic relationships, cultural history emphasizes the symbolic and interpretive dimensions of the human experience—the world of meaning. Laxer’s book dives into the acoustic symbolism of the fur trade. For example, depending on the context, the sound of a gunshot blasting through the forest might be interpreted an invitation, a celebration, a ritual honor, or a warning.
In certain parts of my book, where sources allow it, such as Genevieve’s harrowing 1818 journey from Montreal to Red River, I aim to thickly layer the narrative with cultural symbolism in order to re-create in the reader’s mind the meaning of specific events and situations as Genevieve herself likely understood them. Laxer’s book is an excellent resource for understanding the lost world of fifes and drums, fiddles and chansons, firearms and dances that my subjects once inhabited.
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