Summer view in the environs of Fort Douglas on the Red River, July 1822, by Peter Rindisbacher
The Story
Benjamin and Genevieve Gervais didn’t ask for trouble. But trouble always had a way of finding them.
In this joint biography of St. Paul, Minnesota’s founding couple, drama arrives on the very first page. When Benjamin was born in the summer of 1792 in the farming community of Ste-Genevieve-de-Batiscan, the area was in the midst of a severe drought which had, in turn, triggered a plague of locusts. At the same time, Benjamin's grandfather, family friends, and other villagers were nearing the end of a years-long battle against their parish priest, a haughty, pompous, vain man who sometimes used physical violence against his own parishioners.
The rest of The Long Road to Little Canada is similarly dramatic and equally detailed. While the Gervaises wanted nothing more than to be good, quiet farmers, fate had other ideas. Every time they found a hint of stability, a new crisis arose to wipe away their progress—debt, death, dispossession, prostitution, betrayal, and more.
If interpersonal drama weren't enough, Genevieve and Benjamin often found themselves involved in foundational events in the history of the American West. They became personally embroiled in trade wars, wars of empire, conflicts of colonial leadership, the development of new commercial corridors, a murder mystery, and the struggle between illicit whiskey dealers and crooked military officials that led to the creation of Minnesota’s famous Twin Cities. Resilient and courageous, the Gervaises—and their close friends and relatives—repeatedly challenged existing power structures.
Though they rarely won these battles, each contest reinforced their core values of faith, family, and community—values they would finally, and fully, express in Little Canada, a village they built in an idealized image of their childhood homes.
It would take a lifetime to understand whether those values were enough.
The Long Road to Little Canada is both a compelling human drama and an exceptional work of scholarship. Historians have long considered it impossible to recover the life of an illiterate voyageur in granular personal detail from birth to death—the sources simply do not support it. To recover the story of an illiterate woman like Genevieve to the same level of detail is without precedent and gives the book a powerful feminist dimension.
This is history told from the ground up, through the eyes of people who left no writings of their own.
Project Plan
Current as of June 2026
Research Phase
What began in the mid-2010s as casual curiosity gradually revealed a story of unexpected depth and originality. A handful of early discoveries attracted the interest of the Little Canada Historical Society (LCHS), which became the project's fiscal sponsor and institutional partner. In 2019, an initial presentation of research findings drew a standing-room-only crowd at Little Canada City Hall.
Then I found even more compelling stories. By 2022, it became apparent the research should be turned into a book, and I began writing in what little spare time I had available. In August 2024, I left my full-time job to devote myself to the project—spending the rest of that year building the organizational and financial foundations for the intensive research phase that followed in 2025. Funded by two grants from the French-American Heritage Foundation of Minnesota and by generous private donors, I conducted archival research in Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal, Trois-Rivières, and St. Louis, acquiring and translating dozens of original French-language documents. The research phase is now substantially complete.
Writing Phase
Two of the book's longest chapters are complete in polished draft form. A few other chapters are in various stages of progress. As currently outlined, the book will have seventeen chapters plus front and back matter, running approximately 170,000 words excluding footnotes.
Funding for the writing phase is actively being sought. In 2025, LCHS applied for a grant from the Minnesota Historical Society to support this work; the application was not funded. In 2026, LCHS submitted a new MNHS application, and I separately submitted an application to the Minnesota State Arts Board's Cultural Expression program. Both are under review, with decisions expected in late 2026 and funding to commence in early 2027 if awarded. Other grant opportunities are being sought and considered.
LCHS is also actively cultivating relationships with major donors who share a stake in this story. If you are interested in supporting the project at any level, please visit the Support page—or reach out directly. I welcome conversations with Gervais and Laurence family descendants, scholars, prospective donors, and anyone with a connection to this history.
Timeline
My target is publication in 2029. I am in early conversations with publishers and am pursuing interest from both major trade presses and distinguished academic publishers, reflecting the book's dual appeal to general readers and scholars.
A Note on Scope
This is not a narrow chronicle of two lives. Each chapter functions almost as an independent essay, using Benjamin and Genevieve's experiences to explore themes of gender, class, race, kinship, religion, economics, and politics as each became critical to their beliefs and the events around them. The result will be a work that reveals unexpected intersections between these categories—intersections that a more focused study of any one of them would miss. It is a study of agency and its limits: what it meant to be poor, illiterate, and working-class in 19th-century North America, and the limited but real ways such people could push back against the forces bearing down on them. A thin, tight chronicle could not achieve this vision.