Title
Early Candlelight
MAUD HART LOVELACE
Introduction by
Rhoda R. Gilman
Copyright
Borealis Books are high-quality paperback reprints of books chosen by the Minnesota Historical Society Press for their importance as enduring historical sources and their value as enjoyable accounts of life in the Upper Midwest.
Minnesota Historical Society Press
345 Kellogg Boulevard West
St. Paul, MN 55102-1906
www.mnhs.org/mhspress
First published 1929 by The John Day Company, New York
Copyright 1929 by Maud Hart Lovelace
New material copyright 1992 by the Minnesota Historical Society
International Standard Book Number 0-87351-269-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lovelace, Maud Hart, 1892-
Early Candlelight / Maud Hart Lovelace with a new introduction by Rhoda R. Gilman.
p. cm.—(Borealis)
ISBN 0-87351-269-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-87351-759-1
1. Minnesota—History—To 1858—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3523.08356E27 1992
813’.52-dc20 91-38314
NOTE
The author wishes to state that while she has been immeasurably helped in the creation of her characters by material left by pioneers of her state, she has not disguised those pioneers under fictitious names. Real names are used wherever real persons appear in the story. The poem which is quoted in the final chapter of the book was written by James M. Goodhue and printed in an early issue of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Introduction
Introduction
THIS romantic tale of early Fort Snelling has won a lasting place in the hearts of Minnesota readers. First published in 1929, it was reprinted twenty years later in connection with Minnesota’s Territorial Centennial. Since 1949 the restoration of Old Fort Snelling by the Minnesota Historical Society has brought extensive research into the history of the fort and its environs in the 1820s and 1830s. Even in the light of much new information, however, this book holds its own.
Early Candlelight is good historical fiction. It is the kind of work that throws open a window on the past and inspires more than a few readers to go on to a lifelong study of history. Such books are neither common nor easy to write. If the background of time and place is to be more than a thin, one-dimensional stage set, authors must be saturated in the subject. They must know how people lived, ate, dressed, spoke, and traveled and also how they viewed themselves and the world.
Maud Hart Lovelace did her research well. It was a labor of love. Born in Mankato, Minnesota, on April 25, 1892, she lived most of her life in Minnesota and was already familiar with its history when she decided to write a book about early Fort Snelling. “When I was ready to begin work on the novel,” she recalled, “my husband and I left our home at Lake Minnetonka and moved into a hotel in St. Paul for the winter. During that winter I worked every day at the Historical Society, reading all the material I could find relating to Minnesota in the early part of the nineteenth century. I read the Historical Society collections, the diaries and letters of missionaries and fur traders, of army men and Indian agents and travelers. I studied the Minnesota Indians and documents pertaining to the fur trade.” Clearly identifiable within the story are incidents drawn from the Henry H. Sibley Papers and from the reminiscences of the missionary brothers, Samuel and Gideon Pond.1
No less important than her knowledge of the written sources is her close acquaintance with the actual setting of the events described. She went often to Fort Snelling and said, “although I had long been familiar with this spot, I now saw it with new eyes. Mendota took on a charm impossible to describe.” She must also have rambled through the wooded bottomlands along the rivers and noted the view from various bluffs. She apparently cross-checked her own observations with early maps and drawings of the area. Accompanied by her family, she then traveled up the Minnesota River valley, visiting old fur posts and other sites as she went.
Her keen observation, added to evocative descriptions of the changing seasons as they pass across the land, conveys a sense of place that is accurate and compelling. With a sensitivity to material culture, which some reviewers have dismissed as a female indulgence in trivia, she also researched clothing and fashions and checked her description of the Sibley house against museum examples of period decor. “Of special help was the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum,” she recalled. “My husband used to go there with me and there, together, we furnished M’sieu Page’s house.”2
The story is laid in the 1830s and early 1840s, with no exact dates given and some minor telescoping of events to fit the needs of the plot. But in general the historical events that form the background of the tale unfold with accuracy. In addition to the ongoing seasonal routine of the fur trade in the Minnesota Valley, these include the coming of missionaries in 1834 and 1835, the disastrous results of the treaties of 1837 between the United States and the Ojibway and Dakota, the eviction of settlers from the Fort Snelling military reservation in 1838, the escalating conflict between Dakota and Ojibway in 1839, and the redefinition of the military reservation along with the founding of St. Paul in 1840.
A whole cast of historical personages makes appearances throughout the story, from “honest Lawrence Taliaferro” to Fort Snelling surgeon, Dr. John Emerson, and from St. Paul’s French-Canadian patriarch, Vital Guerin, to Edward Phalan, who gave Minnesota a notorious murder case and left his name (dubiously spelled) on Phalen Creek. They are depicted faithfully in light of the facts we know. If their presence often seems more a nod to the record than a need of the plot, they nevertheless strengthen the encompassing sense of place, time, and milieu. Like the restored Fort Snelling itself, they help to create the rich human texture of a world that once upon a time existed on this spot.
But the book is still fiction, and the main characters are imaginary —the DuGay family, Jacques and Indian Annie, Mowrie and Eva Boles, Light Between Clouds, Tomahawk Seen Disappearing, and Lieutenant Mountjoy. Only Jasper Page stands apart in an ambiguous historical/fictional role. He is clearly a stand-in for Henry Hastings Sibley, who was the chief American Fur Company trader at Mendota from 1834 to 1854. Sibley went on to be one of the leading politicians of Minnesota Territory, first governor of the state, and general of the army that crushed the Dakota Indians in the War of 1862.
In a way it is fitting that Henry Sibley should be the focus of such a novel. He himself was a reader of Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances, and, consciously or unconsciously, he tended to view his own life story against