From the Inside Flap
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
In a land occupied by foreign powers and torn by confusion and conflict, a mother seeks to weave her family and her past into a fabric that will not tear.
Their Lives Were Woven by Wars and Wilderness Places, and Tied by the Peace of Family and Faith.
As the 1840s bring conflict to the Pacific Northwest?s rugged Columbia Country, new challenges face Marie Dorion Venier Toupin: the wife, mother, and Ioway Indian woman who crossed the Rocky Mountains with the Astor Expedition, the first big fur trapping expedition after Lewis and Clark?s. On French Prairie in the newly forming Oregon Territory, Marie strives to meet the needs of her conflict-ridden neighbors: British settlers and Americans, missionaries and disease-stricken natives, fur trappers and French Canadian farming families, and the surviving natives of the region.
At the same time, as a mother, Marie must weave together the threads of an unraveling family. One daughter compares and judges as she seeks to find her place; another reaches for elusive evidence of her mother?s love. Marie?s memories are threatened with the emergence of a figure from the past. In the midst of this turmoil, Marie discovers an empowering spiritual truth: Unconditional love can shed light on even the darkest places in the heart.
From the Back Cover
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
"In a land occupied by foreign powers and torn by confusion and conflict, a mother seeks to weave her family and her past into a fabric that will not tear.
Their Lives Were Woven by Wars and Wilderness Places, and Tied by the Peace of Family and Faith.
As the 1840s bring conflict to the Pacific Northwest's rugged Columbia Country, new challenges face Marie Dorion Venier Toupin: the wife, mother, and Ioway Indian woman who crossed the Rocky Mountains with the Astor Expedition, the first big fur trapping expedition after Lewis and Clark's. On French Prairie in the newly forming Oregon Territory, Marie strives to meet the needs of her conflict-ridden neighbors: British settlers and Americans, missionaries and disease-stricken natives, fur trappers and French Canadian farming families, and the surviving natives of the region.
At the same time, as a mother, Marie must weave together the threads of an unraveling family. One daughter compares and judges as she seeks to find her place; another reaches for elusive evidence of her mother's love. Marie's memories are threatened with the emergence of a figure from the past. In the midst of this turmoil, Marie discovers an empowering spiritual truth: Unconditional love can shed light on even the darkest places in the heart.
About the Author
Jane Kirkpatrick is a best-selling author whose novels include the BookSense 76 Selection A Name of Her Own, Every Fixed Star, and the acclaimed Kinship and Courage series: All Together in One Place, No Eye Can See, and What Once We Loved. Jane is a winner of the Wrangler Award from the Western Heritage Center and National Cowboy Hall of Fame.She is also a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, inspirational retreat leader, and speaker.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Bright Shining Light
August 1841, French Prairie, Oregon Country
Marie let loose her daughter’s hand, then stepped behind her, gently guiding her into the darkness. “Maintenant,” she said in French. “We go now.” She placed her hands on the young woman’s cedar-caped shoulders, inhaled the wood scent of her hair. They were nearly the same height, one of the few things they shared in common–that and a worry over whether they’d be enough.
“We don’t have time for this, Mother,” Marguerite protested. But
she allowed Marie to prod her to an area of prairie grass where Marie
motioned her daughter to sit.
“We need to make time for this,” Marie said. “Lie down.” She patted
the grass.
A vast darkness arched over her and her oldest daughter. The women’s
heads touched, as though they were two logs reaching out from a center
post. The air felt moist. The moon would rise late tonight. The dry
grasses tickled her ankles. She should have put on leggings before convincing
her oldest daughter to walk a distance from their log home to
feel the night air breathe in the dark sky. Getting Marguerite to come
with her at all had taken convincing. Dozens of tasks waited finishing
before the big event tomorrow. “There will never be another night like
this one, not ever,” Marie told her daughter. Marie meant to savor it.
She’d begun to cherish these feathers of peaceful moments floating into
her life, even when it took effort. It still took such effort to name the
good in her days. Learning new ways, she found, both stimulated and
strained her. This was a happy occasion. She refused to let worry scar it,
and so she controlled her troublesome thoughts, even now, when they
pushed like a bullish child elbowing his way in uninvited.
“Did you see that?” Marie asked. She pointed. “That light? There’s
a special prize for the one who sees the first star.”
Marguerite shook her head, rubbing Marie’s hair as she did. “Papa
Jean’s spectacles must let you see something I can’t. It’s still just dark sky
to me, Mother. Where did you see it?”
“East,” Marie said. She adjusted the lenses given her as a gift by her
husband just weeks before. “Toward Hood’s Mountain. An arc of light.
There’s another.”
“I don’t see them. Maybe they’re coming to find us with the
lanterns.” Marguerite said. “Maybe they think I’ve changed my mind
and have run away.”
Did her daughter warn her of worries? The man was twenty years
her daughter’s senior. He had sons already. Maybe Marguerite wished
more time before she committed to this man Jean Baptiste Gobin.
Does a mother encourage her daughter to walk through the uncertainty
of marriage, promising her that peace will come, or does she make a
safe place for a daughter to turn around, to reconsider her heart’s
future?
What was right for a mother to do? was always Marie’s question.
Ripe gooseberries scented the August air. An owl hooted in the big
cedar tree in the center of the timbered section that marked the border
of their land. Prairie wolves howled in the distance, a sound distinct
from the larger wolves that roamed in packs. Marie took in a deep
breath. There were more blessings here than dangers; that’s what she
must concentrate on, encourage her daughter to think this too. New
ways took time. Her friend Sarah had told her that long years before,
and Sarah was seldom wrong. Unlike Marie, who was a mother named
by her errors.
She took another deep breath. She would count her blessings like
the beads of her rosary, designed, orderly, and obvious, the way the
priests said God revealed himself in the created world. Hadn’t her husband
of many years become her friend, someone with whom she preferred
to spend her time? That must have been part of a grand design.
Wasn’t this prairie land they’d found to live in ripe with promise, predictable
with seasons of planting and harvest? Hadn’t she found a quiet
way to ease the ache of a lost and troubled son, soothe the disappointment
of rarely seeing distant friends, survive the deaths of a child and
two husbands? The landscape, her newly forming faith, and her family
promised peace. These were the life threads that she wove into a healing
robe of comfort.
Memory, too, served her. It brought the conversations she’d had
with her friend Sacagawea to mind whenever she wished. Memory
reminded her of what she had endured in her fifty summers. Even
Kilakotah she called neighbor now, though to touch her fingers to her
friend’s cheeks meant a three-day ride to the horse ranch of Tom McKay.
Still, the two would see each other more now, when they gathered at the
parish church on the Willamette River when the priests traveled south
for Mass. And in between, she had the memories of those who brushed
against her and changed her life forever.
She had troubling memories too, but surely she deserved now a
time to set those aside, cut those ties. Her friend Sacagawea would tell
her to expect kindness in life. This she would do, especially tonight.
After all, she was a mother whose children told her their secrets and
honored her with their questions. What mother didn’t want to be
known for her careful tongue and modest wisdom? Her husband, Jean,
tolerated her many wonderings over varying views of faith of native
people, of Presbyterians, Catholics, and Methodists who populated this
prairie area. Perhaps he understood that her baptism was a beginning of
another questioning journey and not one simply ending with acceptance
as it had been for him.
Marie questioned. It was part of who she was.
Marie blinked again. She’d seen the pinpricks sometimes even in the
daylight, when she stood too quickly or when she first awoke. Their
presence interrupted her sleep, too, and she’d awake with a start, a gasp
that would wake her husband and stir the household trying to sleep in
the upper loft.
Perhaps her eyes were learning new things even while she slept. She
had spectacles to wear during the day, to stop the squinting that had
been a part of her life for as long as she could remember. Yes, that was
probably all it was, her eyes adjusting to the dark and daylight, seeing
clearly with spectacles.
This piercing light tonight was likely just the first sign of the stars
filling the night sky. Nothing to be alarmed about.
“Will this always be my home?” Marguerite asked then. Her voice
had changed to wistfulness.
“You’ll always have a place with us, but you’ll have your own home
after tomorrow.” Her daughter took in a sharp breath, and her breathing
quickened. Marie heard discomfort in the sound. “This is your
choice, oui? ” Marie asked. “To marry this man?”
“I’m glad we moved here with Papa Jean,” Marguerite said.
Hadn’t her daughter heard her? Or did she deliberately avoid?
“You might not have met your JB if we hadn’t.”
“There are more French Canadians here,” Marguerite said.
“More people like your papa.”
“There’s one,” Marguerite said, lifting her hand quickly to point.
Marie felt rather than saw her daughter’s arm reach up. “In the northern
sky.”
“I see it too. Bon. You receive the treasure. You have the first star in
your basket,” Marie told her.
“What’s my prize?”
“It comes to you later.”
“You made that up, Mother. There’s no ‘first prize’ for seeing the first
star of a night sky.”
“You’ll see,” she said and smiled.
Marie had coaxed her daughter away from the cheek bread pans,
those rounded tins that resembled a baby’s bottom when the dough
rose. She drew her from the chatter of Marguerite’s younger brother
and sister so she could rest a bit before taking on the role of a bride. A
peaceful moment was her daughter’s treasure. A new wife had few of
them after the wedding, and Marie wanted her daughter to have the
memory of a special evening before the days filled up with the work of
living.
Marie would have a prize too: a memory of a last quiet time with
her oldest daughter alone, a moment of hanging on to a daughter before
Marguerite became a wife.
Marie thought to offer sage advice, to say something to sustain her
daughter in this time of transformation when a woman became a bride.
Words failed her at times, even French words, her first language. Marie
thought of her mother. What might her own mother have spoken if she
had lived to see Marie’s marriage day when, as a young girl, she had
committed herself to Pierre Dorion? Would she have been proud that
her daughter chose a man affiliated, however briefly, with the Corps of
Discovery? Or might she have stepped in to intervene, suggested that she
was too young to wed?
No way to know. Her mother had died before Marie spoke marriage
vows.
Marie was pleased her daughter had waited until she was twentytwo
to marry. And her youngest girl, Marianne, while fifteen, showed
little interest in boys. A blessing. Marie touched the beads around her
neck, ran her hand over the smooth metal cross that her friend Sarah
had given her. Blessings. Count the blessings.
“What are you thinking about, Mother?” Marguerite asked. The
girl had a gravelly voice, husky almost, her thr...
The final book of the Tender Ties Historical Series finishes Marie Dorion Venier Toupin's story. Although the story is fictional, the backdrop is true to history and involves the conflict among the different cultural groups on the French Prairie in the newly formed Oregon Territory. Marie, an Ioway Indian, was the first woman to settle in the Oregon territory. Now in the last decade of her life, she's trying to make peace in a conflict-ridden time. Narrator Barbara Rosenblat tells this saga with her usual award-winning skills. Her voice conveys Marie's fortitude as she weaves her family into a strong, bold tapestry of love. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
