Our History Isn’t So Dull, Especially With Some Added Deception
By Linda McQuaig
Longtime journalist and non-fiction author, including most recently The Sport & Prey of Capitalists, and now author of her debut novel The Road to Goderich
There were reports that some people reacted with great excitement but, for most Canadians, the recent visit of King Charles III was little more than a reminder of our safe — but rather dull — history.
However, that history isn’t as dull as it’s purported to be. It’s true that, unlike the Americans, we didn’t fight a full-fledged revolution to achieve democracy. But we did have an armed rebellion in Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1837. That rebellion failed and some of the traitors were hung in the bitter aftermath. However, it set in motion a series of events that led to us becoming a democracy less than five years later – a democracy that is still strong today, indeed stronger than the sorry anti-democratic mess Donald Trump has created south of the border.
My novel, The Road to Goderich, is by no means a history book, but its characters and their complicated relationships are interwoven with the story of the 1837 rebellion.
The tale begins in Glasgow, where a mean-spirited Presbyterian minister tries to escape his unhappy life by accepting a post in the remote town of Goderich in faraway Upper Canada. Dragging his reluctant wife, daughter, and servants with him on the long ocean-crossing and difficult trek through the Canadian forest, the minister ends up drowning when their carriage plunges into a river. The bedraggled survivors make it on foot to Goderich, where the male servant is mistaken for the minister.
Thus begins a saga of deception. The new “minister” proves convincing in his role. He quickly becomes a town hero as he stands up to bullying officials from the Canada Company, the land development firm that controls Goderich and the surrounding territory. The popular new “minister” becomes leader of a secret local group supporting plans for a rebellion against the hated company and the colonial authorities with which it is allied. But an unforeseen visit from a Toronto clergyman threatens to expose the deception – and, in the process, to destroy the happiness that the drowned minister’s wife has unexpectedly found with the man posing as her husband.
Perhaps it sounds like I’ve given away too much. But I assure you there are many more twists and turns as the panicking characters struggle to evade detection, just as the rebellion begins. The characters are mostly fictional, although they are mixed in with real historical figures, including Thomas Mercer Jones, the despotic head of the Canada Company who lived with his family in a lavishly-furnished Goderich mansion which still stands on a bluff overlooking Lake Huron.
The home of Thomas Mercer Jones in Goderich, now known as Park House