Fellow Canadian author Elinor Florence has written a new novel Finding Flora which releases April 1, 2025. If it’s anything like Bird’s Eye View, we’re all in for a great read. PRE-ORDER NOW!!!
Elinor is here today with the inspiration for this new story. Over to you, Elinor.
~~~
The idea for my new novel struck me like a bolt of prairie lightning when I discovered, to my shock and dismay, that single women in Canada were never allowed to claim a free homestead. That was unlike the United States, where the government allowed thousands of single women to claim homesteads and earn title to their own land.
To refresh your memory, the Canadian government granted 160 acres of free land to anyone who met their stringent conditions: living on the property for three years, building a habitable dwelling, and cultivating a required number of acres. Millions of new immigrants flooded the west to take advantage of this offer. The process was extremely challenging, even for single men who had greater physical stamina, and couples working together — let alone a single woman.
Immediately I decided my heroine would be a single woman who gets her hands on a homestead. I created an opening chapter in which Flora, a newcomer from Scotland, leaps from a moving train in 1905 to avoid her abusive husband and finds herself alone on the prairie. But how could she acquire a homestead?
I wracked my brains and perused many books and articles about homesteading before I discovered a loophole: Canadian veterans of the Boer War in South Africa were granted a 320-acre homestead by a grateful government (twice the usual number of acres) and there was no law against selling their claims.
Happily, Flora is able to buy her claim from a veteran, who also just happens to be female — one of twelve Canadian nurses who served in the Boer War and were therefore considered war veterans. (Don’t you just love it when your research hits pay dirt?)
From there, it was clear sailing. I read forty memoirs written by homesteaders. My own Scottish great-grandparents homesteaded in Balmoral, Manitoba in 1872, just five years after Canada was founded, and three years after the Dominion Lands Act was passed.
Their son George grew up and married a young woman with Indigenous blood named Mary Margaret from St. Andrews, Manitoba, and they moved to Saskatchewan and homesteaded there in 1905.
I KNEW my own grandparents, and there are many tales in our family of the hardships experienced by homesteaders, so this is (almost) living history. My nephew is the fifth generation of farmers in our family, and I own farmland in Saskatchewan myself.
Flora endures many tribulations including the animosity of the local Homestead Inspector, but she is assisted in her quest (as so many homesteaders were) by her neighbours. She finds herself farming near four other women, an American couple from Boston, a Welsh widow with three children, and a Métis woman who breaks wild horses for a living. Together they form a small community termed by the locals as “Ladyville.”
To honor my Half-Breed great-grandmother (a legal term used by the Dominion of Canada until 1982, when it was changed to Métis), I not only dedicated the novel to her, but I named my Métis character after her, Jessie McDonald.
I would have set the novel elsewhere on the prairies, had I not unearthed a little-known story behind the naming of the village of Alix, Alberta. When the Canadian Pacific Railway built a branch line to the community of Toddsville, back in 1907, the village was renamed Alix after the first white woman in the area, a rancher’s wife from England named Alix Westhead.
Spoiler alert: Rumor has it, and the volunteers at the Alix Wagon Wheel Museum swear it is true, that Alix Westhead had an affair with William Van Horne himself, CPR president and architect of Canada’s transcontinental railway, and that’s why he changed the name.
That story was simply too good to pass up! I managed to weave it into my overall plot and had so much fun fictionalizing these real people. Although this is common practice among historical fiction authors, I was careful to address the facts in my Author Notes, since there is no real evidence to conclude that Alix and Van Horne had an affair.
The homesteading experience itself presented so many challenges, whether it was the frigid winters (many homesteaders did freeze to death), prairie fires and hailstorms in summer, the difficulties of growing and killing enough food to avoid starvation, and the incredible loneliness and isolation of life far from the nearest settlement, that I didn’t need to manufacture any fictional demands on Flora and the other women of Ladyville.
In fact, I was filled with admiration for all those homesteaders who managed to stick it out and earn their land title after three years of barely surviving. Homesteading had a failure rate of fifty percent, so Little House on the Prairie this was not!
Finally, single women on the prairies didn’t stay single very long. Since they were so few of them, they were practically beating off the men with their wooden spoons. I included a thrilling romance in the novel as well — although Flora is not rescued by a man. She is very much the author of her own destiny.
Finding Flora by Elinor Florence
PRE-ORDER NOW! Scottish newcomer Flora Craigie jumps from a moving train in 1905 to escape her abusive husband. Desperate to disappear, she claims a homestead on the beautiful but wild Alberta prairie, determined to create a new life for herself. She is astonished to find that her nearest neighbours are also female: a Welsh widow with three children; two American women raising chickens; and a Métis woman who supports herself by training wild horses.
While battling both the brutal environment and the local cynicism toward female farmers, the five women with their very different backgrounds struggle to find common ground. But when their homes are threatened with expropriation by a hostile government, they join forces to “fire the heather,” a Scottish term meaning to raise a ruckus. To complicate matters, there are signs that Flora’s violent husband is still hunting for her. And as the competition for free land along the new Canadian Pacific Railway line heats up, an unscrupulous land agent threatens not only Flora’s livelihood, but her very existence.
Finding Flora will be released by Simon & Schuster Canada on April 1, 2025. Read more about Finding Flora, including the First Chapter and links to preorder the book, here. You can also read an earlier post featuring Bird’s Eye View by Elinor Florence.
Elinor Florence grew up on a Saskatchewan farm and earned degrees in English and journalism. She worked for newspapers in all four Western provinces, spent eight years writing for Reader’s Digest Canada, and even published her own award-winning community newspaper. Her first novel, Bird’s Eye View, was a national bestseller, while the second, Wildwood, was named one of Kobo’s Hundred Most Popular Canadian Books of All Time. Finding Flora was inspired by her own Scottish homesteading and Indigenous ancestors. She is a member of the Métis Nation of British Columbia and makes her home in the mountain resort of Invermere, B.C.
FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION FOLLOW A WRITER OF HISTORY. There’s a SUBSCRIBE function on the right hand side of the page.
M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel THAT WAS THEN is a contemporary thriller. Mary’s other novels, THE ADMIRAL’S WIFE, PARIS IN RUINS, TIME AND REGRET, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook or on her website www.mktod.com.
