Waking Nanabijou. Jim Poling, Sr.
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A diffident French bureaucracy and wars with the British and Natives stunted Port Royal’s growth. The French spent little effort learning about their new territory. They were too busy basking in their own glory to develop a good understanding of North America. The Port Royal mission languished and Pinel moved to the Cap-Rouge River area near what later became Quebec City, but settlement also was difficult because of regular attacks by the Iroquois. He moved to Sillery, where more people offered more protection from the Native attacks and where the Jesuits established their first North American mission.
The Iroquois hated the French for siding with traditional Iroquois enemies, and their travelling war parties continued to make life difficult for the settlers even at Sillery. Nicholas Pinel joined a group organized to fight off their attacks, but his ten-year lucky run in the New World ran out in September 1655 when he was killed in a fight with a war party. His family carried on, later adopting the name Pinel dit LaFrance in the French custom, common in New France, of refining the identification of families. A Pinel dit LaFrance was one of the family of Pinels who originally came from France. Eventually the name became LaFrance, or Lafrance, meaning “of France” or “from France”. That history of the LaFrance family founding in North America is a mile off from Veronica’s rescued-by-an-Indian-princess tale. However, I discovered later there was a reason for introducing an Indian princess into the family.
The promise of opportunity tugged Lambert LaFrance west from the comforts of the south shore to the bug-infested forests along the Chapleau River. The CPR became the doorway to thousands of miles of unsettled territory in a massive effort at nation building and would lead to jobs and business prospects. Lambert and his wife of four years, Adele Roy, arrived when the town was a muddy slash line with seven or eight log cabins, some tents, and a boxcar converted to a telegraph office. The trains stopped seven miles to the east because that’s as far as rail construction had gone, so they made their grand entry into Chapleau on a rail handcart. They opened a boarding house for railroaders near the Chapleau tracks, and it became known as the best place to get an excellent meal in Chapleau.
The LaFrances had ten children, three of whom died young in the wild Chapleau bush country. For those who survived to adulthood, it was inevitable that they would become railroaders or marry railroaders. Isidore was mesmerised by the comings and goings of the black locomotive giants and was riding them as a CPR employee before his sixteenth birthday. His brother Adelard had more interest in the bush and the Ojibwe communities at Missanabie and Biscotasing, home for several years of the Englishman Archie Belaney, also known as Grey Owl. The railway settlements attracted the Natives looking for trade and Adelard, two years younger than Isidore, discovered trading could be profitable. He opened a trading post at Missanabie in 1908 and began buying furs from the Natives. He later moved the operation to Chapleau, then Sudbury, where it continues to operate today as the furrier Lafrance Richmond Furs.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Chapleau was a human anthill, a brushed-out busy speck in hundreds of square miles of threatening northern forest. It offered little in terms of natural beauty, plopped down on the lowlands beside the slow-moving Chapleau River, surrounded by swamps and tracts of funereal black spruce and emaciated jack pine. There were few of the granite outcroppings, hardwood hills, or patches of majestic white pine that made the bush country west, south, and east of Chapleau so richly picturesque. It was about as isolated as you could be in the lower half of Ontario. The closest towns of any consequence were Sault Ste. Marie, 180 kilometres south-southwest the way the crow flies, and Sudbury, 250 kilometres south-southeast in a straight line. There was no highway connecting the town to the outside until after the First World War.
The town went up in too much of a hurry to allow for any thoughtful planning or significant architecture. Most of the houses were wood-frame, two-storey boxes the shape of the hotels in a Monopoly game. Buildings usually were clad in clapboard because sawn lumber from the bush was more readily available than manufactured brick. Houses and businesses spilled along either side of the tracks, which were numerous because Chapleau was a divisional point where crews and equipment were changed. This required sidings for maintenance and repair facilities, supply depots, and auxiliary equipment. Aside from the bustle of railroading, it was a bleak place, especially during the long winters of snowdrifts, icy winds, and freezing temperatures that could kill anyone without heated shelter.
Time out from railroading focussed on home and church. Many Chapleau townsfolk were Roman Catholic, French and English alike, and built themselves what probably was the finest building in the town — Sacred Heart of Jesus Church, or Sacre-Coeur. They built it in 1885 the same year the CPR established Chapleau, but the church rapidly became too small for the growing population and a new one went up in 1891. It burned in 1918 and the brick structure with two bell towers, still active on Lansdowne Street, replaced it.
Church gatherings were a main entertainment outside the home, bringing together families such as the LaFrances, the Aquins, the Tremblays, and the Burnses. Sacred Heart Church developed a unique experiment in Canadian culture in Chapleau’s early days. The town was so small and so isolated that it was difficult for different ethnic groups to remain apart. Sacred Heart became a truly bilingual and bicultural parish out of necessity and still is, right down to the stained glass sacristy windows — St. Patrick on one side, St. Jean-Baptiste on the other. The church became even more a centre of town life in the years following 1911 when a young, energetic, and personable priest named Father Romeo Gasçon arrived. A born organizer, he threw himself into the community’s affairs and became friends with many of the townspeople, including the LaFrances. Their lives became part of his life.
The LaFrances met the Aquins when the latter moved into town in 1902. The meeting was inevitable — two large families in one village could not avoid each other. Besides, no one could miss Isidore LaFrance on the street. He seemed as tall as the trees, a kind-looking giant with a perpetual half grin and large and dark friendly eyes. He dressed sharply and always was well-groomed even when crossing the tracks in greasesmeared striped overalls and a big lunch pail under his arm.
Louise Aquin turned heads as well. She was tall, unusually so for a woman of her times, not far from six feet in her shoes. She had piercing eyes. They were clear, knowing, and persistent, and certainly in later life could quickly search out fibs that might float from the lips of a grandchild. She was talented in music and remarkably articulate for a young woman with little formal schooling. She was bilingual, speaking French and English equally well. She often sang solo at Sacred Heart, her soprano voice soaring to the ceiling and beyond. Anyone who ever heard her hit the high soprano notes of “O Holy Night” on Christmas Eve would never forget it.
They dated, mainly attending family and church and sporting events. Before long, Isidore and Louise were married in the old church in 1904. Sacred Heart was the scene of many such family weddings. The Burnses, Francophones despite the Scottish name, also met the Aquins, but the Burns boys found the LaFrance girls more interesting. Three Burns brothers ended up marrying three LaFrances, all sisters of Isidore. These were remarkable times of large family gatherings celebrating engagements, marriages, and births. Talk and food were the centres of the celebrations. If a piano was handy, there was singing and often the main voice was Louise Aquin LaFrance, principal soloist at Sacred Heart.
Louise and Isidore LaFrance in their thirties and childless after a dozen or so years of marriage. Both were tall for people of the times, Isidore well over six feet and Louise close to it.
Booze, not often openly used in conservative families, made an occasional appearance. One memorable appearance was during Christmas holidays when family celebrations were breaking out all over town. These