Waking Nanabijou. Jim Poling, Sr.

      2 — LaFRANCE

      All I knew about my mother was what I had observed growing up as her son and what she had told me. What she told people did not always match reality. Her storytelling often mixed fact and fiction. Who she said she was and where she came from turned out to be “faction,” a blend of fact and fiction.

      Veronica enhanced real-life situations with dramatic imagery. One day she hauled me to an upstairs bedroom of the home we shared with her parents and balanced me on the windowsill. An inmate at the Port Arthur jail was to hang that morning. When they hanged someone back then, they lowered the flag atop the jail building as a signal that the deed was done. We had no hope of seeing anything — the jail was a good two miles away — but Veronica was a storyteller and by placing me in the window, she could tell a story of crime and punishment with more impact by urging me to look hard to see the flag being lowered. The hanging was real, but seeing the jailhouse flag was fantasy.

      She had a flair for drama. Many years after the hanging, she presented me with a wrapped gift. I undid the wrapping to reveal a plastic Indian doll, a chief with removable headdress. She told me that this was the last toy she would ever give me because I was a man now and it was time to put away the toys of childhood.

      Another time she took me by the hand and led me into the basement to her cherished cedar hope chest. She sat me down on it and said she was going to tell me the story of her family. The story stayed with me the rest of my life and became an important clue in my search to discover who she really was. She told it slowly and with the flair and expressions of a great actress.

      Not long after Europeans first occupied Canada, a dashing young man in Normandy shot another man in a duel over a woman. He fled to the New World. The ship carrying him to Quebec City foundered in a storm and crashed onto the rocks. The young man was tossed overboard and washed onto a riverbank. He opened his eyes to see a beautiful Indian princess nursing him. She healed his injuries and restored his health and they married. So began the LaFrance family in Canada.

      As with most of her stories, parts resembled the genuine history of the LaFrance family. Other parts were sheer fantasy. She took some facts and blended them with her fantasy, and the reason she did so became evident only long after her death, when I discovered who she was.

      Her parents were the LaFrances, Joseph Isidore and Louise LaFrance, both railway people. Both grew up beside railway tracks, where the shrieks of steam locomotives and thumps of shunted cars were the sounds of life itself. Most people they knew had lived and died within earshot of the tracks, spending their lives devoted to ensuring that the trains ran on time. Their days were tied to arrivals and departures, frequent separations, and worry about accidents. Despite that, railway life was a good life that brought special privileges, respect, and good pay for a locomotive engineer.

      Railway life brought Louise and Isidore together when the new century turned. Both their families had migrated to Chapleau, a frontier town carved out of the northern Ontario bush in 1885 as the Canadian Pacific Railway moved west to fulfil the national dream of a rail line from Atlantic to Pacific. Louise grew up in the rail camps along the Ottawa Valley and beyond — as construction crews pushed the rails relentlessly west. She and her sisters and brothers lived wherever their father Oliver Aquin, an immigrant from France, could find work building the railway as it moved along through places such as Black Donald Creek, Chalk River, Mattawa, and Nosbonsing. When the rails stretched west beyond Chapleau, Oliver stayed behind in the North Bay-Sudbury-Chapleau region with crews tending the track beds and switches and watering and fuelling stations.

      Marie Aquin, Oliver’s wife, bore all her children in the rail country bush, and they grew up playing beside the tracks, sometimes finding their home was a converted rail car. There were nine of them, seven girls and two boys, and they built good lives by sticking together and helping each other. Their lives developed some permanency as Oliver advanced in the track gangs and became a section foreman. The family settled in Chapleau about 1902 and stayed there, Oliver dedicating his life to railway work until one evening one of the kids went to fetch him for supper and found him keeled over dead at sixty in his foreman’s shed.

      Lambert LaFrance was a different piece of history. His ancestors were among the first to settle in New France. They had left France more than two centuries earlier, eventually settling at Bic, Quebec on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River where it begins to join the Atlantic Ocean. Life was good there, after the initial horrors of cold, starvation, and Native attacks. The land had been broken and settled to provide all the pastoral comforts of farm country plus the attractions of seaside living. Why Lambert would uproot himself is a mystery, considering the pain his ancestors suffered to create a little paradise there.

      His Canadian family history did not begin with an Indian princess, as my mother told me, although Natives played large roles in the lives of the LaFrances. It began when Nicholas Pinel signed a contract on April 5,1645, to help colonize France’s settlement at Port Royal in Acadia, now part of Nova Scotia. He agreed to live in the new country for three years, working as a village carpenter. When the contract expired, he found himself still alive, unlike many others who succumbed to the weather, disease, or Native attacks. He decided to stay on in the New World and sent for his family.

      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