While The Lightkeeper’s Daughters was inspired by the Canadian men and women who served as Great Lakes lighthouse keepers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is above all else, a work of fiction. As such, I have taken some liberties to tell the story of the Livingstone family.
Porphyry Island is the last in a chain of islands that stretches beyond the Black Bay Peninsula on the Canadian shore of Lake Superior. The light station serves to mark the shipping channel north of Isle Royale, leading to the former communities of Port Arthur and Fort William, now Thunder Bay. It was the second lighthouse constructed on the Canadian side of Lake Superior, and first illuminated the waters near Black Bay in 1873. Andrew Dick, who served as keeper from 1880 to 1910, left behind several personal journals that captured reflections of his time at the light with his Indigenous wife Caroline and their ten children. The journals were discovered years later in the attic of one of the summer homes at Silver Islet, and two volumes are now housed at the Thunder Bay Museum. These journals were inspiration for The Lightkeepeer’s Daughters. The original lighthouse no longer remains, having been replaced around the middle of the century, and while it served as a guideline, I have made some modifications on paper, most significantly from the light being fixed to flashing.
During the early part of the twentieth century, shipping on Lake Superior was lucrative, with cargos of iron ore, lumber, and grain heading down the lakes, passing sister ships loaded with equipment and shoes and tea coming up. These were the days before technology found its way onto the bridges of ships, before GPS and satellites and marine radio. Captains plotted their course on charts, taking bearings on landmarks, using compasses to steer by, and their logs to calculate distance traveled. Their tools were sextants and slide rules and they posted watches whose job it was to scan the horizon for lighthouses and beacons and other vessels.
As much as a lighthouse was there to shine a signal across the darkened waters, it was the sound of the foghorn that most often defined safe passage for unseen vessels creeping along the shoal-filled waters under the shroud of Lake Superior’s infamous fog. Here again, I have taken some liberties with the Porphyry Point Light Station since the original diaphone foghorn was commissioned in 1908, not in 1918 as I have indicated.
The nearby community of Silver Islet features significantly in the story, and is itself rich with history, tragedy, and fascinating characters. It was established in the 1870s to serve the needs of the Silver Islet mine, which operated until 1884 when the winter shipment of coal failed to arrive before the end of the shipping season. Eventually, the stockpile of fuel ran out, the pumps that kept Superior’s water from flooding the shafts grew silent, and the Lake reclaimed the mine. With declining silver prices, the mine was never reopened. A few years later, the homes and company buildings that clustered along the waterfront were purchased and converted into summer cottages.
There are many shipwrecks littering the cold depths of Lake Superior and the Kelowna and the Hartnell appear as compilations of several incidents and have been located near Porphyry Island for the sake of the story.
Lake Superior appears in full iconic truth; temperamental, beautiful, vast, magnificent, and moody. While it has been said she seldom gives up her dead, I am grateful she has been willing to share her stories.
Acknowledgments
No book is created in isolation in spite of the time writers spend in a dark room with only their characters to keep them company. I am grateful for all the support I received while working on The Lightkeeper’s Daughters.
My thanks to the Ontario Arts Council who supported my creative endeavors through the Writers’ Works in Progress and Writers’ Reserve grants.
To Jenny Bent, my fabulous agent, (who only laughed when I asked if she was sure she had the right phone number when she called to offer representation) and all her incredible staff at The Bent Agency.
To my dynamic editing team at HarperCollins: Iris Tupholme, Emily Griffin, and Laura Dosky, who worked to pull out my strengths and to help shape my words so that the best possible story emerged, and to Miranda Ottewell for her attention to detail.
To my fellow vixens of Laughing Fox Writers, and all its earlier incarnations, who share a common journey with the written word, for pouring wine, for eating pizza, for reading drafts, for sharing retreats, and mostly for making me take the giant leap to send my work out there, especially Heather Dickson, Donna White, Marion Agnew, Cathi Grandfield, and Holly Haggarty. (As you can see, the manuscript is no longer in my sock drawer.)
To my early readers, Lucy Laframboise, Kristine Dalzall, Darrel Makin, Susan Visser, and Emma Tranter, thank you for your feedback. To my reference sources who helped with everything from lighthouse keeping on the Great Lakes, to graffiti tags, to the types of orchids found on Porphyry Island; Larry and Patricia Wright, Ted Armstrong, Rob Foster, Kim Armstrong, Dave Poisson, John O’Meara, Michelle Beck, Sarah Mason, and Lora Northway—this book is richer because of you.
To my husband, Richard, and my amazing “kids,” Erin, Colin, and Ryan, who believed in me even when my confidence faltered, who gave honest feedback, and who reminded me to eat lunch.
To my dad, Craig McDonald, and in memory of my mother, Sue, who took me sailing every weekend and summer holiday of my youth, and instilled in me a love of, and respect for, Lake Superior, and to my sisters, Barbara Mitchell and the late Theresa Flatt, who shared those trips and encouraged me on this journey. To Mary Ann Beckwith, for sailing with me again.
And finally, to the lightkeepers whose stories influenced this work, most especially the McKay family who served for generations as lighthouse keepers at various stations on Lake Superior. I had the incredible, incredible good fortune to be able to spend time with Bob McKay, former senator with the Métis Nation of Ontario, who was the assistant lightkeeper at Porphyry Point Light Station from 1960 to 1965, serving with his cousin Cliff McKay. Having spent his youth at his family’s fishing camp in Walker’s Channel, Bob was able to share with me his early knowledge of Porphyry Island, his personal experiences, his love of lighthouse keeping, his many photographs, his sense of humor, and the respect he holds for his Indigenous heritage and the history of his family. I was also fortunate enough to connect with Cliff McKay’s wife, Frances. Cliff was lightkeeper from 1959 to 1979 at Porphyry, and Frances spent many wonderful summers on the island. At the age of ninety-four, Frances read an early draft of The Lightkeeper’s Daughters, and paid me the greatest compliment any writer could ever receive by saying, wistfully, that it made her feel like she was back on Porphyry again.