My November Project: A book-length draft of Lisette's Journey for #NaNoWriMo!

I did it! Thanks to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month),  I have a very rough draft of a book-length manuscript of Lisette's Journey. Here's the synopsis and excerpt.

Lisette's Journey

Author: Lynn Noel

Genre: Historical

Synopsis

The biographical memoir Lisette's Journey tells a cross-cultural love and adventure story of the Northwest Company fur trade. The true tale of Lisette Laval Harmon (1798-1863) and her husband Daniel Williams Harmon (1778-1843) is based on Daniel's journal Sixteen Years in the Indian Country 1800-1816. Their epic transcontinental voyage together is brought to vivid life by Lynn's thirty years of experience, following in the Harmons' footsteps, with an award-winning living history roleplay of Lisette originally developed for the Canadian Heritage Rivers System. Featured by the Vermont Humanities Council, at fur trade reenactments from Ontario's Old Fort William and Manitoba's Festival du Voyageur to Fort de Chartres in Illinois, and most recently at a maritime festival in the Netherlands, Lisette's Journey brings the spirit of the voyageur to life with a woman's voice and a paddler's passion.

Excerpt

 Any modern canoeist longs for the era of the voyageurs. The landscape itself evokes them. When the mist rises on Saganaga Lake, you can almost see the stern of the great canoes vanishing ahead of you in the fog. In the silent dip of the paddle, there is an echo of the rhythm of a song long vanished, yet recognizable as a heartbeat. In the call of wolf and loon, you can hear the voyageurs singing.

We all talk to the past. Women who value the voyageur mystique have a particular and dual challenge in seeking to reenact it. Modern, culturally European "woodswomen" identify with both halves of the fur trade split: we are white like the men and women like the natives. When we succeed in achieving this dual vision, it pops the fur trade into stereo.

The story of Daniel and Lisette Harmon has a unique ability to fuse the dualities that have been used for so long to define not only the fur trade era, but North American history itself. Strong, adventurous women long to put ourselves in the picture, to feel personally connected to a history in which we have long been taught we are invisible-or identified as male. When both men and women can identify with both Lewis and Clark and with Sacajawea, with both Lisette and Daniel Harmon, we will have gained new dimensions to the history of our continent and our place upon it.

We choose living history as a means to walk a mile in another's moccasins. I began Lisette's journey in 1988 with a passion for paddling and singing, those twin loves of the voyageur. Lisette has since given me a second language, a second country, three national awards, a major book and a CD, a passport to the past, some hoped-for insight into those not of my race or gender, and an enduring fascination with our great continent and its history of adventurous women. Lisette Duval has become my hero, and I am proud to walk in her moccasins.

Detailed StoryMap: 1806 to 1808 Saskatchewan to Ontario

Lisette's first journey with Daniel started when she was only fourteen, given to him as a "country wife" at South Branch House. They were soon posted to Cumberland House, one of a string of NWC forts on the Saskatchewan River under Daniel's management. From there they traveled down Lake Winnipeg, up the Winnipeg River, and through today's Boundary Waters to Fort William on Lake Superior. There Daniel fell sick with a mysterious illness at a turning point in his career.

Daniel was the NWC's first choice to lead an "expedition of discovery" to the Mandans on the Missouri River to meet Lewis and Clark. Instead of meeting her counterpart Sacajawea, the young wife of interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau, Lisette would find herself in the company of the fierce-looking and formidable Doctor John McLoughlin, who took Daniel into the Nipigon District with him for a cure. The doctor would deliver her first child when she was but sixteen. George Harmon came into the world in December 1808, at a desolate post in the wilderness of North Ontario that McLoughlin and Daniel had built with their own hands earlier that summer. With a babe in arms, Lisette would retrace her steps come spring, journeying over 1500 miles back to Cumberland House for Daniel's new posting to the Athabasca District. An even longer journey lay ahead.