Summer view in the environs of Fort Douglas on the Red River, July 1822, by Peter Rindisbacher
An Epic Tale of Resilience and Survival on the American Frontier
Benjamin and Genevieve Gervais faced a lifetime of adversity. From humble beginnings in rural Quebec, they persevered through countless hardships. Their resilience and unwavering faith led them to the Red River Settlement and then the Upper Mississippi Valley, where they became accidental founders of Minnesota's future capital city Saint Paul and then intentional founders of Little Canada, a model Canadian village a few miles to the north. This historical biography not only tells their captivating story but also sheds light on significant yet often overlooked aspects of North American history.
The Story
Benjamin and Genevieve Gervais didn’t ask for trouble. But trouble always had a way of finding them.
In this joint biography of St. Paul, Minnesota’s founding couple, drama is the guiding element from the very first pages. For example, when Benjamin was born in the summer of 1792 in the farming community of Ste-Genevieve-de-Batiscan, the area was in the midst of a severe drought which had, in turn, triggered a plague of locusts. At the same time, Benjamin's grandfather, family friends, and other villagers were nearing the end of a years-long battle against their parish priest, a haughty, pompous, vain man who sometimes used physical violence against his own parishioners.
The rest of A Cup of Disaster is similarly dramatic and equally detailed. While the Gervaises wanted nothing more than to be good, quiet farmers, fate had other ideas. Every time they found a hint of stability, a new crisis arose to wipe away their progress—death, debt, prostitution, betrayal, and more.
If interpersonal drama wasn't enough, Genevieve and Benjamin often found themselves involved in foundational events in the history of the American West. They became personally embroiled in trade wars, wars of empire, conflicts of colonial leadership, the development of new commercial corridors, a murder mystery, and the struggle between illicit whiskey dealers and crooked military officials that led to the creation of Minnesota’s famous Twin Cities. Resilient and courageous, the Gervaises—and their close friends and relatives—repeatedly challenged existing power structures. Though they rarely won these battles, each contest reinforced their core values of faith, family, and community.
Built atop mountains of original research, A Cup of Disaster is both a compelling story full of fascinating characters and an exceptional work of scholarship. Never before was it thought possible to recover the life of an illiterate voyageur in all its complexity from birth to death. To recover the story of an obscure woman like Genevieve to the same level of detail is utterly unique and gives the book a significant feminist tilt. A Cup of Disaster is the epitome of history from the bottom up, an account of ordinary individuals who lived extraordinary lives.
Scholarly Contributions
While the main narrative reads like fiction, full of personal details and driven forward by dramatic tension, each chapter also examines one or more important historical concepts. Some key ideas become threads that appear and reappear several times throughout the book. Historical events and ideas discussed at some length include:
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The early influence of industrialization on a rural community in Lower Canada in the form of an iron forge, which provided new job opportunities but also caused environmental pollution and may have been social disruptive
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The role of debt in shaping habitant lives in the 1800s and 1810s
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The beginnings of the Canadian timber industry; not just along the Ottawa River but on the shores of Lake Ontario
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Militia service in the War of 1812 and its possible impacts in the development of an anti-war ideology
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Kinship networks that linked Lower Canada to the fur trade west, including rural villages, port-side inns in Montreal, and rendezvous locations such as Grand Portage and Fort William
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How the explosion of people and ideas from the French Revolution shaped the lives of lower class people in North America
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How the frequent deaths of voyageurs impacted surviving families
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On that note, the sheer commonness of death—childhood mortality and death from diseases and accidents
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The diverse ways the fur trade war between the Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company played out on the streets of Montreal, including rising wages, new benefits, and even in a romantic relationship that had the outward appearance of prostitution
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The interplay of race, class, and gender and its impacts on Red River colony leadership in the late 1810s and 1820s
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The first full interpretation of the tragicomic career of Red River colony leader Frederick Matthey
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Impacts of the Mount Tambora eruption on rural and urban populations in Canada and in the Red River colony
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Canadien-nationalist origins of the free trade movement at Red River
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Development of a distinctively French-Canadian community on and around Point Douglas in the Red River Settlement—a community that only later merged with the Métis
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The most detailed and personal account of the origins of the Red River cart trails between Red River and the Upper Mississippi
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A complete, revised interpretation of the eviction of squatters from the Fort Snelling military reservation, the event which directly led to the development of two urban centers nine miles apart on the Upper Mississippi—Minnesota’s famous Twin Cities
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The role of lay parishioners in the development of Catholicism in Minnesota
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The changing nature of citizenship in frontier settlements
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Temperance among French Catholics
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The development of democratic (and Democratic) political ideology among French-Canadian immigrants in the Midwest, including the influence of the Catholic Church, fur traders, and leading Anglo-Protestant citizens
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The place of French-Canadians and Métis as community founders and land developers
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How the U.S.-Dakota War, Civil War, and Riel Resistance were linked through families like the Gervaises
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How French-Canadian illiteracy, class distinctions, and Anglo-Protestant self-righteousness shaped how history was recorded and remembered
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A classic immigrant story: a balance of cultural persistence and assimilation
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A transnational story of the U.S.-British borderlands
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French-Canadians as part of a global movement of people both within and without the British Empire; this is a story with unexpectedly relevant touchpoints in Scotland, India, Switzerland, the Caribbean, and even the island of Java
Project Progess
November 2024 - I spent the last ten years casually conducting research (on top of a full-time job, kids, and the rest of life). In 2019, I presented some initial findings to a packed house at the Little Canada Historical Society. Then I found even more compelling stories. By 2022, it became apparent the research should be turned into a book, and I started writing in what little spare time I had available. I left my full-time job at the end of August 2024 and have spent the last few months getting organized to get the book project fully off the ground.
As currently outlined, the book will have sixteen chapters plus a preface, introduction, prologue, and afterward—20 segments in total. Though my future publisher may try to trim it, my estimated word count is around 250,000. If that seems long, understand that I do not intend this to be a tight, narrow chronicle of Ben and Gen's lives. Each chapter will function almost as an independent essay, using the stories of Genevieve and Benjamin to explore historical themes of gender, class, race, kinship, religion, economics, and politics as each issue became important to the main characters' beliefs and actions or to the events happening around them. The advantage of writing a biography is that it can reveal interesting and unexpected intersections between these historical categories that might be missed in a focused study of any one of them.
At present, two of the longest chapters are complete in polished draft form. The prologue is done but may need to be revised if I can get ahold of better sources from Quebec (which I believe exist; I just need to get my hands on the complete originals). Two other chapters are close to being finished with another sketched in outline. In my mind, the key stories and core historical arguments are clear for all but one or two chapters.
As far as research, I've gathered, say, 70% of what I think I need to review. That includes most digitized records at major archives in Minnesota, Quebec, and Manitoba. I visited the Hudson Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg in the summer of 2023 to review and scan dozens of undigitized records there. Remaining research falls mostly into three categories: 1) low-hanging fruit, 2) undigitized records in Quebec, and 3) additional secondary reading.
The low-hanging fruit includes things like the Sibley Papers at the Minnesota Historical Society and Ramsey County tax and property records, which I sat on because they're close at hand; I knew I could view them whenever I got around to those chapters. Undigitized records in Quebec obviously require time and money for travel and in-person research. A trip to Quebec City, Montreal, and the villages where Benjamin and Genevieve grew up is tentatively scheduled for late spring / summer 2025 and will be supported by funds raised right now. I included the third category, secondary-source reading, because while I have purchased or scanned a lot of relevant books and skimmed most of them, I previously did not have the time to read them all thoroughly. The reality is I still need to do that. Finally, I've also begun talking to other leading scholars in the field to ensure that before I publish anything, my work is reviewed and critiqued by minds more knowledgeable than my own.
The main push in the first two-thirds of 2025 is to finish as much of the research as I can, taking detailed notes that will make the writing process clean and efficient. Then the project will shift to writing. LCHS plans to apply for a Legacy Grant to fund that portion, although matching funds will be gratefully accepted and will improve our odds of being awarded the grant.