The Legends of Lake on the Mountain (15 page)

Author VISITS

Roderick is available to speak to your class or service club on any of Canada's prime ministers and Canadian history topics in general. In the classroom, he has a strong understanding of curricular and cross-curricular priorities and can work with teachers to cover the angles needed in presentations.

For your service club, Roderick focuses on Citizenship, Leadership and Canada's Prime Ministers.

Fiction or FACT?

The Legends of Lake on the Mountain:
An Early Adventure of John A. Macdonald

Don't read on if you haven't read the book yet!

Spoiler Alert!

This is a book which imagines an adventure about our greatest founding father, Sir John A. Macdonald.

However, there is ample historical truth in here as well.

While all ages will hopefully enjoy the adventure, it should also provide a suitable launch point for rich discussions about early Canada, the War of 1812, the Rebellions of 1837, the Seven Years War, responsible government, citizenship, perseverance, and, of course, the destiny and life's work of Sir John A. Macdonald.

Macdonald was instrumental in bringing Canada West (Ontario) and Canada East (Quebec), as well as Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick together in 1867 to form Canada. He would soon after also negotiate British Columbia, PEI, and the vast North West Territories into the national fold. Macdonald was also the driving force behind the Trans-Canadian railway (the longest in the world). He was adept at handling relations with the United States during its expansionist phase and his ability to balance French and English interests was formidable. Macdonald also had to confront the challenge of the Northwest rebellion and created the North West Mounted Police, forerunner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Events and truths within this book
I have attempted to render Macdonald's personality in youth from various anecdotes gathered over the years, while also keeping in mind the adult personality for which there is more of a public record. It is my hope you will have found the fun-loving, ambitious, emotionally-intelligent man we know from history within these pages.

The opening scene of this book was borrowed and adapted from a story E.B. Biggar tells about a young John A., who “aroused the displeasure of one of his companions.”

“The aggrieved boy, who was larger than he, caught Johnny in the flour mill, and having laid him prostrate, proceeded to rub flour into the jet locks of his hair until it was quite white.”

This formed the basis for the Owen Boggart flour incident which opened the first scene.

John A.'s dreams about being in a Kingston tavern with his little brother were true, overall. We know that John's younger brother, James, was struck by a man named Kennedy, who was an employee of Hugh Macdonald's at the time. James died from this incident while John watched helplessly.

George Cloutier was meant to symbolically represent George Étienne-Cartier, one of our most important fathers of Confederation, along with Macdonald. He became a close friend of Macdonald's later in life. Since they didn't actually grow up together, I could not include the real Cartier. However, I thought it was important to hint at the importance of the man who had helped Macdonald guide Quebec into Confederation.

The idea that a French admiral hid his treasure somewhere in the Glenora (Stone Mills) area in a cave is a famous local legend from Prince Edward County. I took liberties to explain how this French admiral may have come to the area and what his intent for his treasure was. I weaved the storyline to hint at a vision of a united Canada.

The lake serpent of Lake on the Mountain is also culled from local myth. For more information on these and many other legends in Prince Edward County, the author recommends
The Legendary Guide to Prince Edward County
by Janet Kellough.

Everything about John's family was rendered as truthfully as possible based on available research, including Lieutenant Colonel Donald Macpherson. The reader may wonder why Lieutenant Colonel Donald Macpherson's name was sometimes written as ‘Colonel Macpherson' and sometimes ‘Lieutenant Colonel Macpherson.' In military tradition, a lieutenant colonel can be “Colonel” in conversation. In dialogue, everyone spoke of him as Colonel Macpherson or ‘the colonel.'

But in attribution, his full rank must be spelled out.

In real life, the colonel would become increasingly ill and then die just one year after the events of this book.

The colonel's son, Allan Macpherson, was an entrepreneur who really did live in Napanee. Today, the same Georgian-style mansion exists as a museum called Macpherson House.

The author took liberties with the size of Stone Mills at this time for dramatic effect, rendering it a bit larger then it likely was at this time.

Virtually all names in this book were created through birth and marriage records of the time in Prince Edward County. Instead of using the actual names, the author mixed and matched first and last names to retain the true flavour of the time period and locale without actually using real names, other than historical figures, such as Macdonald and his family.

An exception to this rule was Pastor Macdowell, who was a real pastor in the Hallowell (Picton) area. He came across from the U.S. at the invitation of Peter Van Alstine, who had led many United Empire Loyalists to the Adolphustown area. One other exception was ferryman Jacob Adams, who really did operate the ferry during 1828.

The story of the great drowning in Prince Edward County is true, including the verse from the actual song which many people memorized and sang, including school children.

History tells us that Kingston actually was in the middle of a typhoid outbreak when the colonel visits the Macdonald's.

The author found several conflicting sources on just when Hugh Macdonald, John's father, moved from Hay Bay to Stone Mills (or present-day Glenora). The age in which John A was said to have moved to Stone Mills ranged from 10 to 14. The author chose the age 13 for the storyline and references John having lived in the Stone Mills area “for a couple of years” to reflect the vagueness surrounding this move from Hay Bay.

More well documented is the fact that John A.

Macdonald was articled to a young Scottish lawyer, George Mackenzie, of Kingston, in 1830. Later that same year he went to York (Toronto) to appear before the Law Society. Following the exam, he was given his law certificate and formally admitted to the society as a student at law. He opened his own law office in Kingston on August 24, 1835.

– Roderick Benns

Bellevue House National Historic Site is located in Kingston, Ontario, and is a short drive from Sir John A.'s childhood home in Glenora.

Now owned and operated by Parks Canada, Bellevue House was home to John A. Macdonald and his young family in 1848-49. Already a successful lawyer, Macdonald lived at Bellevue House while balancing his law practice, political ambitions and the needs of his ill wife and young son.

Today, Bellevue House National Historic site welcomes thousands of visitors every year. The house has been restored to the 1840's time period, so you can experience what life was like for John A. The site also includes enlightening exhibits, a multi-lingual video, historic gardens and knowledgeable staff who delight in sharing their favourite stories about Sir John A. Macdonald.

For more information including rates, hours of operation, curriculum based learning programs and special events, visit us on the web:
www.pc.gc.ca/bellevue

Areas for Further STUDY

The Family Compact

The Family Compact was the unofficial name of the small group of individuals in Upper Canadian political life who were more properly called Tories. They were the local elite and occupied positions such as administrators, businessmen, judiciary, clergy, landowners and lawyers in the 1820s and 1830s.

The fact that the commercial and personal interests of the Family Compact were put ahead of the interests of the people of the colony was a key reason for the Rebellions of 1837.

The Loyalists

When the U.S. decisively severed its ties with Britain through a bloody revolution, this had a cascade effect in many ways. For pre-Confederation Canada, it literally meant rewriting our very boundaries for the great influx of people who wanted to continue living under the British umbrella.

By 1783, thousands of Loyalists left the newly-created United States. Most set their course for Nova Scotia, as well as the unused lands above the St. Lawrence rapids and north of Lake Ontario. Such a massive influx of settlers was effectively the first real wave of immigrants by English-speaking settlers. It was so large, in fact, that their arrival had immediate consequences for the British colonies.

Nova Scotia and the inland colony of Quebec had to be reorganized to reflect these new realities. At this time, Nova Scotia included the wild forests to the west of the Bay of Fundy. In 1784, this area was established as a separate colony known as New Brunswick. In total, about 35,000 Loyalist immigrants settled in Canada's Maritimes.

Another sizable group of about 5,000 United Empire Loyalists chose land north and west of Lake Ontario and along the north shore of the upper St. Lawrence. This included the watery inlets and reaches of Prince Edward County, where a young John A. Macdonald once lived with his family.

The Durham Report

One of the most important reports ever written in British history occurred less than ten years after the timeline of this book. Queen Victoria, new to the throne in 1837, was worried that her North American colonies would crumble without British intervention. The Rebellions of 1837 had just occurred, in large part because of Family Compact policies. She soon requested that John Lambton, the earl of Durham, analyze what was wrong in Upper and Lower Canada. Upper and Lower Canada had many challenges during the early 19th century. Both colonies contained political cliques, like the Family Compact, and both existed under anti-democratic conditions.

Lord Durham arrived in the spring of 1838 and after much investigation he made three key recommendations. They were:

• responsible government should be granted to the British North American colonies
  
• Upper and Lower Canada should be amalgamated to form a united Province of Canada
  
• French Canadians should be assimilated
  

The last of his recommendations was obviously the most controversial. It was the ‘fatal flaw' in terms of gaining widespread acceptance and political support. The report was certainly reviled by French Canadians and even to this day, it is this last recommendation that continues to be remembered the most.

Yet the Durham Report's first two important recommendations would come to pass and were important evolutionary milestones in the nation's development. Durham recommended that Upper and Lower Canada be united with a single parliament. He noted that freer colonies would create more loyalty to the Mother country, not less. They just had to be given the freedom to do so. Lord Durham even went so far as to predict the notion of a union, one day, of all the British colonies in North America.

The people of Lower Canada resisted so strongly that in 1848, seven years after the Act of Union was passed, England was forced to formally recognize and accept the use of French.

Lord Durham, in missing the mark so clearly with his recommendation to assimilate the French, had made a fatal error. It was an error that the country's future founder – and subject of this book – would never have made. Throughout his entire life, John A. Macdonald urged English-speaking Conservatives to work in partnership with French Canadians.

“Treat them as a nation and they will act as a free people generally do – generously. Call them a faction, and they become factious.”

– John A. Macdonald

Manifest Destiny

This was an unofficial government policy in 1800's America. Manifest destiny referred to a widely-held belief by many Americans at the time that the U.S. was destined to rule over the entire North American continent.

Technically, this term was not yet around during the events of this book. However, the idea of ‘continentalism' was, which was a precursor to manifest destiny. The term manifest destiny did actually not get used until the 1840s. An early proponent of continentalism was President John Quincy Adams, to whom the character Darius Marshall refers to in this book.