Many years ago, the mother of a friend showed me an old photo of her great-great-grandmother who was full-blooded Cherokee. I was fascinated and wanted to know more, but she knew little about her. I gathered that there had been some shame in having a native mother and grandmother and that in her later years, the native woman had been kept hidden.
Her name was Moon Song.
That name has haunted me for years. Such a beautiful, hopeful name to give a baby girl.
When a Native American was needed as a minor character in my first book of the Michigan historical series, The Measure of Katie Calloway, I asked for permission from the family to use Moon Song’s name. Little did I know that her story would eventually take over an entire book.
I had one idea in mind for her story, but my Moon Song character had another. Moon Song had some things to tell me, and I listened. The more I researched, the more the book changed from the simple, sweet love story I had planned of Moon Song and Skypilot traveling north together to her home. Things cried out to be included that I had not known when I began her story.
The forced boarding schools were a dark time in our country’s history and ended, to my shock, within my own lifetime. “Kill the Indian, Save the Child” was a famous rallying call.
The scene of Moon Song’s father hiring men to hold her mother back as he boarded the ship with their child happened in real life. White fathers did wrest their children away from native mothers. “Country marriages” between white men and native women were common and had little to no legal weight. One real-life heroine I discovered in my research was a white “legal” wife who insisted on supporting her husband’s native “country wife” and his children long after his death. I enjoyed redeeming Isabella by giving her that choice.
Other heroes in my eyes were those many white men who honored their “country marriages” and stayed the course, living out their lives where their native wives would be accepted and happy.
Reading about the slow dissolution in the 1700s and 1800s of the Native Americans’ ability to support themselves because of their increasing dependence on foreign goods, and their eventual dependence on government subsidies, was extremely disturbing and forced me to draw a parallel with our society’s similar modern-day dependence.
One bright spot in my research was my discovery of a Jesuit priest named Father Baraga, otherwise known as the “Snowshoe Priest,” who traveled hundreds of miles each winter throughout the Upper Peninsula. He was a welcome guest in every wigwam, longhouse, or cabin. He was revered by Native Americans and whites alike and died the year my story begins. Father Slovic is a thinly disguised representation of the man I imagined Father Baraga to be.
Although I personally entered the depths of an 1800s-era Keweenaw copper mine, I did not, in the end, have the heart to force Skypilot to work down there, although that had been my initial intent. I thought his time would be better spent trying to take control of an unruly, divided classroom of American, Cornish, and Irish children.
Steamships did blow up, catch fire, collide with one another, and sink at an alarming rate on the Great Lakes. Skypilot, Moon Song, and Isabella’s plight at Painted Rocks Lakeshore is based on a story I heard while sailing along that coast, of a man and woman being the only survivors in that area after a similar accident.
Also, even though there have never been any truly productive gold mines in Michigan (the Ropers Mine did produce for a short while, and there are rumors of others opening in the future), I was surprised to learn that there have been at least two purported discoveries of gold mines in the Huron Mountains that have been lost and never again found. I like to think that Moon Song and her little boy had a wonderful life playing in the streams of the Huron Mountains, panning for gold, quietly surface-mining one of those lost discoveries.