January 2018
Independence is a mid-size town in the northeast quadrant of the state of Iowa. The Mississippi, which forms the border between Iowa and Illinois, flows about fifty miles to the east. A river of much more modest proportions, the Wapsipinicon, runs right through town. In fact, because the Wapsie (as it’s affectionately known by the locals) takes a sharp, almost ninety-degree bend, as you drive through Independence you cross it twice, once on the outskirts and again in the center of town.
Wapsipinicon. The name is pronounced exactly as it’s spelled. I can still hear my dad saying the word. As a kid, I thought it sounded very funny. But I know now that it’s an Indigenous place-name, and simply unfamiliar to my ears. The local histories like to tell a legend of dubious provenance, a Romeo-and-Juliet story of star-crossed lovers from different tribes:
“Wapsi, a young warrior, and Pinicon, the daughter of an Indian chief, eloped, but were found by Pinicon’s father and the other chiefs. The couple decided they would rather die than be taken back and separated. They raced to the river, clasped each other, leaped into the stream, and drowned in the swirling waters. The sorrowful Indian chief later named the stream Wapsipinicon.”
The “legend” is, of course, a sentimental fabrication, cooked up by white people who settled here nearly 200 years ago. In fact, the name comes from wapasi’ piniaki, the name in the Meskwaki language for the swan potato, an arrowhead plant that once grew in abundance along the riverbank. Meskwaki women and children periodically came here to harvest the swan potato for its large, edible root. At least they did until the mid-nineteenth century, when the Meskwaki Nation was forced to leave their ancestral lands and move west.
Mind you, Iowa isn’t exactly a prime destination for Canadians, certainly not in January, in the middle of the fiercest cold snap in recent memory. Partly I was here for research, on a quest to learn more about a woman born more than three centuries ago, who may have been one of those children gathering swan potatoes. But the main reason my spouse Alec and I were here was to attend the funeral of my Aunt Virginia, the last of my late father’s twelve siblings.
We drove along First Street, past the Iowa State Bank, past the public library, past the Pizza Hut and the Subway and the McDonald’s. We turned onto Golf Course Blvd., where a bakery called Kathy’s Kakes provided special-occasion pastries for the locals. We were driving a bit north and west of town, in search of the farmhouse where my father grew up. I had visited there a few times as a child, but the farm had passed out of family hands many years ago. We had only a vague idea where we were headed, but my cousin Jay had said to keep an eye out for a large, white house with six front windows and a wraparound porch. We stopped at one that fit the description, where a fellow in the driveway was transferring grain from a big tank into a truck. We asked if he knew anything about the history of the house and its former inhabitants.
“What’s the name?” he asked, and when I replied, “McDonnell,” he broke into a wide grin.
“Yep, that’s it. Gertie McDonnell. I used to clear the drainpipes for her.”
So, he remembered my Aunt Gert, who had lived in the house until the late seventies. It turned out he owned the land on one side of the driveway, which used to be part of the farm. He urged me to go knock on the door and introduce myself to the current occupant, whose name was Leslie. Leslie, though, was less welcoming than Grain Guy had been. I think she was afraid I was going to ask to come in and look around the house, which I would have liked to do. But I reassured her that we just wanted to walk around the grounds and take a few photos. She looked visibly relieved as we drove off a few minutes later.
Back in Independence, as we walked around town, I noticed a somewhat forlorn-looking sign saying, “Buchanan County Genealogical Society,” which pointed to the rear door of a municipal building. We entered and found ourselves in a cavernous garage with several parked fire trucks and a sign indicating that the Genealogical Society was in the basement. We went downstairs, fully expecting to find it closed, but we lucked out; Thursday was one of two afternoons in the week the Society was open. Inside was a large, single room lined with cabinets containing drawers full of three-by-five-inch file cards, the kind libraries used in the days before everything was digitized. Truly, the place looked like the Land that Time (and the Internet) Forgot.
The proprietor, whose name was Bob, clearly wasn’t expecting any visitors, much less a couple from Canada. But he was pleased to be of service and set right to work, opening drawer after drawer and pulling out file cards. In a matter of minutes, he managed to locate the obituaries of my father and all but two of his siblings, plus a copy of their parents’ – my grandparents – certificate of marriage. From a separate cabinet with wide, flat drawers for oversize documents, he pulled out a map of Buchanan County in the late 1800s, indicating the owners of the various farm plots.
I took out my phone to start taking photos of the documents, but Bob shook his head. “We prefer photocopies. I’ll do them for you.”
I took it as further evidence of the time-warp this place seemed to inhabit. But he hastened to add that charging for photocopying was one of the only ways the volunteer-run group could bring in revenue. He added that he was very proud of the Society’s vintage photocopier, which he judged superior to the newer digital models.
“Been running for years without any problem.”
We watched the sheets tumble into the receiving tray with smooth efficiency. Yes, we had to admit that this machine looked like it could soldier on for years to come.
Bob slid the stack of photocopies into an oversized envelope and handed it to me. The total charge came to the princely sum of seven dollars. We gave him a twenty-dollar bill and told him the rest was a donation to the Society.
In the car I laid out the map and took a closer look. There, in the lower-left quadrant, were two adjacent plots, one marked “J. Burns,” the other “J. McDonnell.” The Wapsipinicon River snaked right across both of them, just as my dad had said. At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate the significance of what I was looking at. Only gradually did I come to understand what the map was showing me; that I had a more direct connection to Marie-Angelique Memmie LeBlanc, the Wild Girl of Champagne, than I ever imagined.1
For more than ten years I had been obsessed with this woman and her extraordinary life. This book is an account of an odyssey full of twists and turns, one that’s taken me from the cornfields of Iowa to a centuries-old chateau on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Marie-Angelique, the girl who spent ten years surviving in the wild, who socialized with royalty and became a fine lady, who was an object of fascination for the major intellectuals of her day. What writer wouldn’t get caught in the grip of such a story? I’d spent a good part of the past decade writing a play about her, into which I poured many of my own fears and preoccupations – especially my love of swimming. Until I got stuck, not from writer’s block, but from a growing sense that this woman’s life wasn’t mine to create.
In the beginning, though, it was all about stories about feral children, and my fascination with them.
1 In France the Wild Girl is invariably referred to as Marie-Angelique. Writers in English, myself included, have mistakenly assumed that Memmie was a diminutive or nickname, when in fact it was the name of the first bishop of Chalons in the third century CE. Throughout this book I will use both names, depending on context, etc. though I now generally defer to the French usage and favor Marie-Angelique. Of course, both are versions of her European name. Her birth name is lost to history.