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 that pattern. He had a keen sense of history and was well aware of the dramatic moment in which he had been an actor. His writings, especially an autobiography he started but soon abandoned, suggest an almost wistful desire to see himself as an unblemished hero. But life is not romance, and Sibley was in the end unable to claim the role of a Jasper Page. Others, however, were not slow to claim it for him.3
The most important differences are, of course, in Sibley’s personal life. Unlike his fictional counterpart, he was human and lonely. He did “take an Indian woman” for a brief time, and around 1840 he became the father of a Dakota daughter. The child was christened Helen Hastings Sibley. There is reason to think that his lapse from New England Calvinist virtue gave Sibley regret and a sense of guilt. To make amends he took the child and placed her with a settler’s family to be raised as a white woman and a Christian. His legal descendants clearly found Helen’s existence an embarrassment, for they did their utmost to deny and cloak it. So little has it been mentioned in historical sources that Lovelace herself may not have been aware of the facts.4
When Sibley took a wife, he sought out one of his own social class, marrying the sister of Fort Snelling sutler Franklin Steele. Sibley met Sarah Jane Steele when he attended the wedding of her brother in Baltimore during the early spring of 1842. The trader was at the time in Washington for several months lobbying Congress to ratify an Indian treaty. Their courtship continued the following year, when Sarah made an extended visit to Fort Snelling. It concluded with a wedding at the fort in May 1843. Sarah’s only resemblance to the fictional Delia DuGay is age: she was twelve years younger than Sibley.
In lesser respects Jasper Page is a bewildering mixture of accurate details from Sibley’s life and deliberate fictional elements. There is a pattern, however. To dramatize the contrast between the Yankee trader and the daughter of a French voyageur, Lovelace brings Page directly from Boston. Sibley himself was a midwestern Yankee, born and raised in the frontier town of Detroit. She also describes Page as blond and blue-eyed, whereas portraits show Sibley with deep-set dark eyes and lank, dark hair. Both, however, were six feet tall, arrived in Minnesota at age twenty-three, kept large dogs, were social favorites among the officers at the fort, gave hospitality to many well-known visitors, and supported missionary efforts among the Indians. Both also were avid hunters and went on long expeditions with the Dakota.
If Sibley’s benevolent, paternal relationship with employees, Indians, and squatters is exaggerated in the portrait of Page, the fiction did not begin with Lovelace. The tradition started early, perhaps in Sibley’s own nostalgia for the world of the respected bourgeois, the hearty, singing voyageur, and the Great White Father. Nevertheless, there are hints in his early letters and those of his contemporaries that suggest the portrait is not wholly false. He was always aware that his own economic and social status carried with it responsibility for the community around him.
The house that so awed Deedee DuGay is more an artifact of Sibley’s married years than of his bachelorhood. Here again, Lovelace may have intentionally emphasized contrast. Jasper Page built his house on an island—a gesture that set him apart from the squalid world of the “Entry” and required a crew of boatmen always at the ready to ferry him to shore. He then furnished it with eastern comfort. The actual Sibley house stood at the heart of a small but busy commercial settlement. It was built of stone and was impressive for the time and place, but in earlier years the basement kitchen also served as a dining room, and the room that later became a front parlor was used as an office and store. The piano (not a harpsichord) arrived only with the coming of Sarah. Her presence also brought the addition of the formal dining room with its stylish wallpaper and other refinements to the building and decor.
Like all other historical fiction, Early Candlelight is a double mirror. It reflects not only the period in which it is set, but also the times in which it was written. For an unaware reader, this can distort the image with conclusions about people and events of the past that today are seen from a wholly different angle. Moreover, in the late twentieth century, revolutionary changes in social attitudes and mores make this or any book that speaks with the language of an earlier era seem offensive in certain instances. References to Indians as “squaws” and “braves” and to the “black boy” Dred Scott and his wife, the “yellow girl” Harriet, grate on the reader despite the context of the characters’ nineteenth-century viewpoint.
Although the picture of life in and around Fort Snelling in the 1830s is faithful to the sources we have, it seems painfully one-sided when viewed from the 1990s. That is because the letters, diaries, reports, and reminiscences that have survived were written entirely by the white men and women who invaded the upper Mississippi country and took it from Indian people. True to human nature, white Americans justified their conquest as the course of destiny and celebrated it in the name of bringing progress and civilization to an untamed wilderness. The generation in which Lovelace lived and wrote had not yet come to question those rationalizations. Nor did she have more than a superficial knowledge of Dakota Indian customs and beliefs.
Nevertheless, one of the book’s strengths is the straightforward way in which it deals with the mixing of peoples and cultures. The many-layered multicultural community around the walls of the fort is shown in all its color and vitality. There is joy in the diversity and a note of regret that it will be swept away by the oncoming flood of white settlers. Alcoholism is an important element in the story, but whites and Indians struggle and suffer with it equally. The dramatic climax rests in part on the agonizing choice made by one who feels himself caught between two worlds and finds his salvation in the independence and integrity of traditional Dakota life.
The role of women in the story presents yet another complex mosaic of changing times and attitudes. Lovelace herself came to maturity in the Progressive era of the early 1900s. As a high school and college student, her course in life was shaped by the wave of reform that brought voting rights, expanded education, and jobs for women in the 1920s. The attitudes of her generation are echoed in tart comments like “the ladies . . . hushed their voices that they might not, with their chatter, disturb the weighty speech of their lords,” and are seen in the heroine’s easy disregard for social status and strict convention.
Yet present-day feminists may feel let down at the conclusion, when strong, courageous, self-confident Delia DuGay, a woman capable of handling almost any crisis in the turbulent community around Fort Snelling, finds her destiny in the arms of rich and handsome Jasper Page. Thenceforth, we are asked to believe, she is content with domestic duties and the new role of “lady bountiful.” She smiles benignly while bustling men from the East give a nod to her beauty and take over management of the country.
We are left feeling that the passing of the frontier, with its hardships and its rough democracy, is all a part of progress. Pig’s Eye will, of course, become St. Paul. One could not wish it otherwise. For Lovelace, like many of her generation, America was still the great exception to history. The frontier itself, according to the influential Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner, had shaped this nation differently from others. Although one looked back with a certain amount of sadness for the fate of Indians and buffalo, prairies and forests, their destruction seemed necessary, and one could still believe in a better future. Even
