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Mewassin: The Good Land - A Canadian Historical Novel

by Lillian Ross

426 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); contains black and white maps; catalogue #06-1848; ISBN 1-4251-0091-0; US$27.78, C$31.95, EUR22.82, £15.98

Two men, one a fur trader, refugee from the Scottish highland clearances, and one a sixteen-year-old ship-board stow-away from France, travel to western Canada to a cultural collision.

Hudson Bay Company fur trader, John Lenny, rides the North Saskatchewan River Highway upriver in the clumsy York boats to the land that won't let him go. Mewassin, a Cree word meaning 'The Good Land' causes him to return again and again. It is here he meets a young Métis girl and falls in love.

In the mid-1800's the land is in transition. The fur trade is dwindling and Louis Riel has been trying to petition the government to declare the Métis a distinct culture, a special people and a separate government. When Riel fails John and Lucy get caught up in the fall-out. They accept the offered 'scrip' with disastrous results.

Adolphe Perrault comes west to Ste. Albert with a group of missionaries believing he has a calling to the priesthood. When he meets and falls in love with beautiful Métis girl he is faced with a heart-breaking choice.

The transition in the west finds these two men along with all of those who are important to them in a struggle to cope with a rapidly changing world. The Métis no longer can be wanderers of the wilderness as they see settlers moving in claiming the land, loggers cutting down the trees, and the building of missionaries, schools, barley mills, houses and sawmills sprouting up around them.

John and Adolphe in their uniquely different situations learn to straddle two cultures, to grow and prosper.

Lillian Ross, a retired schoolteacher, wife, mother, community volunteer and singer/musician writes historical novels but her characters are real. They lived most of the events in the book. She attempts to open the door to the past so that you can meet the people who lived those early years when the Canadian west was young - the characters who did not get a chance to tell their unusual story. That is why she calls her writing 'Creative Non-Fiction.'

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