Shadowbrook (94 page)

In 1763 the Treaty of Paris was signed and only Louisiana was left to the French. The Jesuits were well established there by then, but one, Louis Roget, went for a walk one day and was found a week later, scalped and missing his heart. So Vaudreuil’s curse had borne fruit: Roget had escaped Canada, but he had died a Canadian death.

Vaudreuil himself was imprisoned in the Bastille for a time, but later exonerated.

Bigot was found guilty of fraud and banished from France.

Mère Marie Rose and her four daughters from France, returned to the monastery in Montargis. History forgot them and the Poor Clares dated their origins in Canada to the founding of a monastery in Québec more than fifty year’s later.

Pontiac was killed in 1769 by Peoria
Anishinabeg.

In the big house at Shadowbrook there was laughter and birth and death and hope, and bonfires that burned in thanksgiving when word came in high summer of 1776 of the glorious Declaration of Independency pronounced in Philadelphia. In July of 1788, confident that the Bill of Rights for which they had so long argued would be added to the proposed document establishing a union of all the former colonies, the delegates to the Assembly in Poughkeepsie agreed that New York State would ratify the Constitution. The people who tilled the earth, on small farms as well as the huge patents of the north and plantations of the south, would join with the people of the merchant cities from Boston to Savannah. Together they would set out on a great and daring experiment made possible in part by the terrible war they had fought and won twenty-five years before.

The mists of dawn still hung over the Patent when Quentin Hale and Cormac Shea Hale, at twenty-two his eldest son, climbed to the top of Big Two, but by the time they had erected a pole and run up the flag with thirteen stars that Nicole had stitched with such care, the sun had risen on a new and glorious day.

Haya, haya, jayek.
So, so, all of us together.

Like every author, I stand on the shoulders of those who have preceded me. I could not have written this book without the assistance of a great many others, and an abbreviated list appears below. Two, however, were truly stars to navigate by:
1759 The Battle for Canada
by Laurier L. Lapierre, McClelland & Stewart, Inc., which provided a wealth of insight and information about Québec of the time, including the story of a secret Jesuit map of
La Traverse
in the hands of and ignored by the great Montcalm; and
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766
by Fred Anderson, Knopf, which introduced me to the tale of Washington in Jumonville’s Glen and which brilliantly told the war’s story from the other side of the border. Others were
The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815
by Richard White, Cambridge University Press;
Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America
by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Cornell University Press;
Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier
by James H. Merrell, W.W. Norton & Company (where I learned about bridge persons);
Montcalm and Wolfe: The French and Indian War
by Francis Parkman, DeCapo Press;
A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War
by Fred Anderson, University of North Carolina Press,
Empire of the Bay: The Company of Adventurers That Seized a Continent
by Peter C. Newman, Penguin USA;
A Few Acres of Snow: The Saga of the French and Indian Wars
by Robert Leckie, John Wiley & Sons;
The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes: As Described by Nicolas Perrot, French Commandant in the Northwest,
University of Nebraska Press;
Redcoats Along the Hudson: The Struggle for North America 1754-63
by Noel St. John Williams, Brassey’s, Inc.;
The Founders of America: How Indians Discovered the Land, Pioneered in It, and Created Great Civilizations
by Francis Jennings, W. W. Norton;
The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization: British Military Sites from Albany to Crown Point
by Daniel K. Richter, University of North Carolina Press;
The Great Warpath
by David R. Starbuck, University Press of New England;
Redcoats, Yankees and Allies: A History of Uniforms
by Brenton C. Kemmer, illustrated by Joe Lee, Heritage Books;
Sons of a Trackless Forest
by Mark A. Baker, Baker’s Trace Publishing. (Mark Baker is the re-enactor and student of the period who taught Daniel Day-Lewis how to fire a long gun for the Twentieth Century Fox film,
Last of the Mohicans.
)

The Internet was an indispensable resource. I found there dictionaries of Native American languages, reproductions of maps and documents, the wisdom of the nation’s many re-enactors of the colonial period (surely one of the great underutilized resources for those seeking authenticity in historical film and fiction), histories of numerous Native American tribes, and countless accounts of the time of the story without which the world within these pages could not have come into being. It would be impossible to list every website I visited, many over and over again, but anyone interested in retracing this path need only put subject headings and keywords into the major search engines and follow the links. Bravo.

Finally, in keeping with the biblical promise that the last shall be first, warmest thanks to my agents, Henry Morrison and Danny Baror, my superb editor, Sydny Miner—who once again has given me back a better book than I gave her—and a special note of thanks to Andrée Pagès for that rarest of treasures, sensitive and enlightening copyediting.

I am indebted to you all.

Beverly Swerling is the author of the critically acclaimed
City of Dreams.
A writer, consultant, and an avid amateur historian, she lives in New York City with her husband.