Wiki-ing

I love Wikipedia. Most of my non-book and non-magazine reading time is spent there. I especially enjoy the linked articles. I will often start off at one place (such as a feature article on California) and end up somewhere else entirely (land organizational systems). It's so easy - you just click on the next link and off you go. The random daily article generator teaches me about things I never knew I didn't know! Also, it makes it following generations of royalty a lot easier.

The other day, I was reading about Anthony Henday (an explorer with the Hudson's Bay Company [HBC] in the Alberta-Saskatchewan area of Canada) and decided to click on the Explorers of Canada link and review my elementary school history lessons. This click led me to an alphabetical link of the mostly male and European explorers who first discovered Canada for the Europeans. The sole woman on that list is Marie-Anne Gaboury. So, of course, I clicked on that link.

For the record, Marie-Anne Gaboury (Aug.2, 1780 - Dec.14, 1875) was a French-Canadian woman who was the first woman of European descent to travel and live in Western Canada. She is also the grandmother of Louis Riel. Marie-Anne traveled and lived in what would be the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Along the way she had 7 children. She seemed like a very interesting woman.

At the bottom of the article, under the See Also section, I came across this intriguing sentence: "See also Isobel Gunn, an HBC labourer who travelled to Rupert's Land disguised as a man." That sentence just smacks of story - I clicked on Isobel Gunn immediately. And, sure enough, Isobel was a young Scottish woman who came to Canada to work for the HBC in 1806 under the pseudonym John Fubbister. She managed to get away with it for quite awhile too, until December 1807 when she gave birth to a baby boy. Isobel remained in Canada and worked as a washerwoman until 1809, when she returned to Scotland with her son.

How was it that I had never heard of Isobel before? I wanted to know more. A work of fiction was listed and I immediately put the book on hold at the library. Isobel's very life demanded to be fictionalized. What an amazing story! An author would have great scope here.

The book I took out is Isobel Gunn, by Audrey Thomas. And, sadly, I found it to be quite a disappointment. The book is about Isobel, to be sure, but it is not told from her point of view. Instead, it is told from the point of view of a minister who grew up with Isobel on the island of Orkney; one Magnus Inkster. In fact, the book is almost more about Magnus's life than Isobel's. I am not interested in Magnus - Isobel is the person with the interesting and true life story. I wanted to hear her story - even fictionalized. The tale was rambling and the dialect thick. I understand trying to show the reader that the people are not speaking the "Queen's English", but I often find dialect writing to be difficult to read. It stops the reader's flow and sometimes a reader will just skip the dialect because it is too difficult to understand.

The book seemed to focus more on Scotland and Magnus's life than on Isobel's extraordinary adventures in Canada. Isobel had such a fascinating life and the historical study seems to be minimal. I was really hoping for a story in Isobel's voice - a tale of her experience, or what a writer would imagine to be her experience and what her thoughts and feelings may have been. The tale is still waiting to be told.