John and I stood for a moment, gently swaying, then, as Garret picked up the tempo, John put his great arms around me and I had a clear vision of our shared future together. Leaning on each other for support, we whirled about the veranda, our steps easy and unhalting.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Simon & Schuster Canada for understanding that the story of the brideship women is an important and relatively unknown chapter of Canadian history that needed to be told. I would particularly like to thank my editors, Sarah St. Pierre and Laurie Grassi, for taking a chance with a new author. Sarah St. Pierre showed great patience and offered endless encouragement while we painstakingly worked through the editing process.
Thank you to my first agent, David Haviland, formerly with the Andrew Lownie Agency, who thrilled me by picking my manuscript out of the slush pile, and to my current agent, Andrew Lownie, for taking me on.
Heartfelt thanks to Jesse Thistle, teacher, historian, and bestselling author of From the Ashes. Jesse helped me develop a greater understanding of the harsh reality of life for Indigenous people in 1860s British Columbia, and I’m grateful for his insights into the role of Métis women.
I wish to acknowledge the Humber College graduate program in creative writing, where I received encouragement and guidance.
A special thanks to the founding members of my writing group, Jessica Chan, Petra Mach, Frances Fee, and Felicity Schweizer, and to my reader and editor Rowena Rae. Thank you to Allyson Latta for her structural editing advice on the first draft.
Thank you to my family: my husband, Austin; my daughter, Katherine; her partner, Colin; my son, Tom; his wife, Kat; and, of course, little Ellie.
And finally thank you to my chocolate Lab, August, who, as a puppy, chewed on my toes while I wrote the first draft and now sleeps curled up under my desk, keeping me focused and those same toes warm.
The Women of the
Tynemouth
Abington, Catherine A.
Adington, Emily B.
Barnett, Hariett
Baylis, Sarah
Berry, Emily
Butten, Mary
Chase, Mary L.
Coates, Matilda E.
Cooper, Emily H.
Crawle, Margaret
Curtes, Isabel
Devilly, Mary
Duren, S. Maria
Egginton, Amelia
Evans, Eliza Jane
Evans, Mary
Faussett, Margaret
Fisher, Jane
Gilan, Minnie
Growing, Sophia
Hack, Mary Ann
Hales, Mary
Hirsch, Theresa
Hodges, Mary
Holmes, Georgina J.
Holmes, Helen
Hurst, Julia L.
Jones, Mary Ann
Joyce, Ann
King, Florence
King, Mary
Knapp, Ann
Lane, Fancy
Lovegrove, Sarah
Macdonald, Georgina
Macdonald, Jane
Macdonald, Janet
Macdonald, Mary
McGowen, Ella
McGowen, Kate
Morris, Emily A.
Ogilvie, Jane E.
Passmore, Florenece
Passmore, Welhelmina
Picken, Sophia
Pickles, Mary Ann
Quinn, Emma
Rendich, Catherine A.
Renea, Mary
Reynolds, Eliza
Robb, Jane
Saunders, Jane Ann
Sentzenich, Jane
Shaw, Sophia
Simpson, Elizabeth
Townsend, Charlotte
Townsend, Louisa
Tummage, Emma Helen
Wilson, Bertha R.
Wilson, Florence M. B.
Thank you to Tracy McMenemy for finding this manifest, reproduced here with its original spelling, in the British Columbia Archives and kindly sharing it with me. Tracy’s art installation The Girls Are Coming! was featured at the Vancouver Maritime Museum in 2019.
Author’s Note
When I was ten my parents took me for a summer vacation to Barkerville, which has been restored to its former gold rush glory by the British Columbia government in an effort to preserve its history. Touring the heritage buildings set in an isolated northern location and interacting with the actors portraying characters of the time was an experience I have obviously never forgotten.
After a white-knuckle drive through Fraser Canyon we arrived in time for supper at the Wake Up Jake Restaurant followed by a performance at the Theatre Royal, which advertised the famous Hurdy-Gurdy dancers. As we settled into our seats we heard the howl of the wind and rain outside, and the electricity went out. We sat in darkness while the oil lanterns that skirted the stage were lit and a single upright piano was wheeled out of the wings to replace the prerecorded music. Once the show began we were transported back to the earliest days of Barkerville, as though we had slipped back in time to the gold rush and life as it was then.
A few years later I developed a friendship with a girl named Judy, whose father spent weekends visiting ghost towns in the British Columbia interior, and I was occasionally invited to accompany them on their adventures. Judy and I dug through abandoned buildings and old garbage dumps looking for antique bottles, jars, and anything else we could find. That’s where I first saw the tiny blue-green glass fingerlings that had once held opium, the same vials that I describe in these very pages.
These memories stayed with me and became quite useful when I decided to write my novel and began to research in earnest. I made my way to various museums to gather information on the voyage of the Tynemouth and the gold rush. While visiting the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, I took in an excellent presentation on gold and its history in British Columbia. With extra time to kill, I wandered upstairs until I found myself in an exhibit that took my breath away, but not in a good way. It was the story of the smallpox epidemic and how it had decimated the Indigenous peoples in the region. I had been ignorant of this terrible chapter in the history of my province and learning of it had a profound effect on me. I knew I couldn’t write a novel about the 1800s without including this part of the story.
The smallpox epidemic was just part of the story, I later learned. With colonization came coal mines to feed burgeoning industry and pollution that destroyed salmon spawning grounds in a shockingly short period of time. The Indigenous peoples, left with decimated communities, turned to paid jobs where they were taken advantage of and forced to work in terrible conditions that fostered the spread of disease. Because of all these factors many women had no choice but to turn to prostitution in order to survive.
I visited other museums, including ones in Yale and Lillooet, looking for pictures and information that would help me paint vivid scenes
