Home - Thora Kerr Illing

Canada seems to me the most hopeful country in the world.

Problems exist but I always have the belief that they can be surmounted with tolerance and good sense. Long before us the Indigenous Peoples lived in this land and then came the French and then the Scots and English and today the country is surely richer for a mingling of peoples from many lands.

Why have I chosen, living in Victoria, to write about the early settlers of New France?

A few years ago I was intrigued to learn that two-thirds of the roughly seven million Canadians who today speak French as their mother tongue can claim they are descendants of the roughly 3,300 French immigrants who settled the town of Quebec and the St. Lawrence valley before 1680. Of huge importance among those immigrants were the 770 women sent from France as brides-to-be. The filles du roi (daughters of the King) program lasted barely ten years (1663-1672) but it changed the history of this country.

I came to love Canada.

Today it is home and I have been a proud citizen for many years. I love the space, the fiords and forests of the west, and I enjoy revisiting vibrant Toronto and Montreal, cities where I worked.

BC BOOKLOOK

Gold Rush Queen is short, lively, and highly readable. The author offers good insight into the life and work of a fascinating working class, single, Irish immigrant woman who chose a life of adventure and business under harsh and unusual conditions.

CBC Books

At a time when well-bred women wore tight corsets and entertained each other at tea, Nellie Cashman (1845-1925) was trekking for hundreds of miles through blizzard conditions to deliver food and supplies to trapped miners in northern B.C.

Great Historicals

The novel is authentic, well-written, and accurately researched, with real secondary characters, and political experiences of the time. I continued reading it with interest to the very end because Adele was such an intriguing heroine.

Times Colonist

Victoria can claim Nellie Cashman as one of its own, and this biography will make her accomplishments known to a wider range of readers. Her life is one we should celebrate. Gold Rush Queen helps to make that possible.

Reviews

Times Colonist: Victoria can claim Nellie Cashman, a great pioneer

Nellie Cashman was a century ahead of her time, a woman determined to make a success of herself in business, and without a man by her side.She was str

Gold Rush Queen recalls a beautiful, Irish-born entrepreneur, philanthropist and champion dog musher who is buried in Victoria’s Ross Bay C

Great Historicals:

Writer’s Digest:

. . . a literate, impressively researched world that the narrator conjures up, a little bit like Jane Austen transported to the cold north of the new world.

Amazon:

For anyone fascinated with France and the history of their role in the new world that came to be known as Quebec Canada, this is a wonderful novel to begin with. Adele, the illegitimate daughter of a high ranking nobleman, is offered as a Filles du Roi (a Daughter of the King) whereby young single women were given a small dowry in exchange for their promise to travel to Colonial Canada to wed and raise a family and children in an effort to populate the new world.

The Midwest Book Review:

Trying to find love when life twists, ADELE is a fine pick for fans of romance in history, very much recommended reading.

Thora Kerr Illing Thora Kerr Illing is a former journalist and librarian. She immigrated to Canada as a young woman and fell in love with the space, the fjords, and the forests of the west. Now retired, she lives in Sidney, BC, and loves travel, books, nature and animals.