had been a short and triumphant conflict for the United States. It concluded with flag-waving, victory parades, and declarations of renewed optimism.
The publication of Early Candlelight evoked in Minnesota a wave of approval, nostalgia, and congratulations for the author. On September 27, 1929, the first American military review in honor of a woman in private life (according to the St. Paul Dispatch) was given by the Third United States Infantry at Fort Snelling. It was followed by a gala reception for Lovelace “in recognition of her splendid portrayal of early pioneer life in the Northwest and especially the first days of Fort Snelling.” Next day the front page of the Dispatch carried a full-length photo of her standing beside Colonel W. C. Sweeney, the fort’s commandant, as the troops marched past.5
Within a few months the Great Depression had engulfed the country and the public mood was changing. During the 1930s Lovelace wrote four more novels, two of them in collaboration with her husband, Delos, a writer for various newspapers. None was as popular as Early Candlelight, and in 1940 she tried a story for children, based on her warm recollections of life in turn-of-the-century Mankato. Betsy-Tacy and the nine books that followed in the series established her as a major children’s writer and the center of an enthusiastic fan club that is still active.6 It was clear that she had found her stride in writing for young people about a simpler, more joyous world. Today’s reader of Early Candlelight may sense that this had always been her real calling.
Rhoda R. Gilman
NOTES
1. The quotations here and below are from Lovelace’s contribution to Carmen Nelson Richards and Genevieve Rose Breen, eds., Minnesota Writes: A Collection of Autobiographical Stories by Minnesota Prose Writers (Minneapolis: Lund Press, 1945), 45, 46.
2. Reviewing the reprint edition of Early Candlelight in the September 1949 issue of Minnesota History, John T. Flanagan wrote: “Many a reader will object to the excessively feminine realism of the book, to the endless details about cookery and costume, to the rather tedious enumeration of fabrics, gowns, and uniforms, particularly when similar documentation is not provided for modes of travel, hunting, diplomacy, and warfare” (p. 246-47).
3. See Henry H. Sibley, The Unfinished Autobiography of Henry Hastings Sibley, ed. Theodore C. Blegen (Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 1932). Sibley’s familiarity with Scott’s novels is implied by items in his correspondence. The adulatory view put forward by others is reflected in Nathaniel West, The Ancestry, Life, and Times of Hon. Henry Hastings Sibley (St. Paul: Pioneer Press Publishing Co., 1889).
4. The little-known life of Helen Hastings Sibley has recently become a subject of investigation by several researchers. Nearly all references to her were apparently removed from her father’s papers before the Sibley heirs donated them to the Minnesota Historical Society. She was placed with the family of William Brown, a settler on Gray Cloud Island. The William Brown Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, and oral tradition are the source for most of what is known about her.
5. St. Paul Dispatch, September 28,192.9, p. 1; St. Paul Pioneer Press, September 28,1929, p. 1 (quotation), 12. An article also appeared on the women’s page and contained a description of the tea table decor and the clothes worn by the ladies in the receiving line.
6. Maud Hart Lovelace died March 11,1980, in Claremont, California; she is buried in Glenwood Cemetery in Mankato. For more on Lovelace, see Jo Anne Ray, “Maud Hart Lovelace and Mankato,” in Women of Minnesota: Selected Biographical Essays, ed. Barbara Stuhler and Gretchen Kreuter (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1977), 155-72, and Carlienne A. Frisch, Betsy-Tacy in Deep Valley (Mankato: Friends of the Minnesota Valley Regional Library, 1985).
Book 1
Book 1-Chapter 1
I
THE Ojibways called it Oskibugi Sipi, the Young Leaf River, for on its banks the trees bud early. But the Ojibways came from the north country, from that somber land of pines and lakes; they were enemies to the valley; it was not their river. The Dakotas called it Minisota, the Sky-tinted Water, for it has a look like a sky made opaline by clouds; and that was the name to which, years later, it was to return. The Frenchmen called it the St. Pierre. They had come for furs and adventure. They were a wild, singing, lawless crew. Perhaps they thought it might remit them their sins to name a river for a saint. The Americans who arrived with tape and yardstick, with blankets and vermilion for the Indians and treaties to be signed, called it for a time the St. Peters.
It was called the St. Peters when young Jasper Page built his stone house upon the island. He found it a lovely river from the moment when his long birch bark canoe, manned by six voyageurs with high red plumes and gaudy sashes, singing in lusty unison, slipped from the Mississippi into its waters. It flows into the Mississippi, a proud end for any stream.
For days the seven had paddled beneath the shadow of majesty; the Mississippi in these upper reaches runs between grim cliffs. It was pleasant to see the St. Peters in its broad and sunny valley. It advanced in pretty twists and turns, faithfully followed by twin lines of cottonwood and willow, flanked by slopes which drifted gently back to the rolling prairies and the arching sky. This was an early June morning, and the slopes were pale green plush, tufted with tree clumps. Wild roses sprawled over the banks. The river sparkled in the sunshine as it fanned out about that great flat island at its mouth, where Lieutenant Zebulon Pike once made negotiations with the Indians.
It was not that island which caught Jasper Page’s eye. It was another, a round, trim, shapely little land rising far out of reach of the spring freshets, looking like a cupcake.
“Dat island, she lak nice leetle galette,” offered Gamelle the steersman, having the same thought.
“That’s it, Gamelle, exactly. I think,” said Jasper Page, “that I shall build my house there.”
He said it casually, but Gamelle had learned to know him in their month-long trip up the Fox and down the Wisconsin and up the Mississippi.
“Oui, Bourgeois,” he said, and began to visualize upon the island a house like a house of dear memory in Quebec.
The island could not detain them, for they had come but shortly before within sight of the settlement. It was the first sign of civilized habitation since Prairie du Chien, if one except a lone trader’s cabin at the lower end of Lake Pepin. Here, on one bank of the St. Peters, mud roofs appeared among the bark canopies of Sioux summer houses, and on the other, on the bluff which rises boldly where the two rivers meet, gleamed the white towers of Fort Snelling.
The very young nation, pushing its way westward in bulging Conestoga wagons
