Join my great-grandfather as he tells his story about searching for fulfillment in life, faith, work and adventure.
Charles Napoleon Morin's memoir starts in 1865, in Deschambault, Quebec. Charles is the oldest of what will become fifteen children in his family. Four years earlier he left school to begin working on the family farm. Now he is sixteen, and it is time for him to leave home.
He starts with nothing. Nineteen years later, he has earned recognition as a contractor, carpenter and architect and is raising his family in Argyle, Minnesota. How did he do it?
Charles's memoir, now available in an English translation, chronicles his odyssey in an extraordinary first person account of life over one hundred and fifty years ago.
Charles traveled extensively, to towns in Upper Canada, around Montreal, to major United States cities, and to frontier areas surrounding Victoria, British Columbia. Along the way he had many adventures:
- some on the edge of disaster, like falling off a church scaffolding and almost dying from multiple leg fractures,
- some exhilarating, like traveling on the immigrant train across America in 1877,
- some chancy, as when he needed the threat of his revolver to safely get out of a San Francisco saloon,
- and some very moving, like serving as the altar boy for the missionary priest, Father Brabant, at Christmas Mass with the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations people, in the church he built on Vancouver Island with their help.
Charles Napoleon Morin, Memories of My Travels and Adventures, will be enjoyed by a broad spectrum of readers. Many will be interested in the story of how key life experiences transform a common man, penniless at the start, to a mature, successful man.
People with French-Canadian ancestry will be interested in this example of diaspora into North America by a man who could trace his roots back six generations to the first Morin French immigrant to New France (Canada) in 1672.
The historical memoir reader will experience Charles's unfiltered first-person account of life for a wide variety of people living in the 1865 to 1884 timeframe. Charles's account of his ten-day cross-country trip from Montreal to California in 1877, much of it on the immigrant train, is an intimate account of the adventures and hardships of travel.
Readers interested in the history of British Columbia and the work of its missionary priests will gain some understanding of just how wild and precarious life was in that time.
