The Calixa Files

Burnished Rows of Steel sees a series of strange disappearances, none of which is stranger than the disappearance of nuance and context from the back story of one Calixa Lavallée.


Lavallée, who starts the story as first cornet in the band of the 4th Rhode Island, is plucked from the ranks to serve as an officer in a unit of Canadian turncoats fighting for the Union. He ultimately ends up as a major, slaying a VC-decorated Light Brigade veteran using a distinctly non-regulation double-barrelled shotgun, but not before he somehow manages to acquire a copy of the score of Les Misérables and managing to run it through Google Translate to inspire the French-Canadians in their fight against the effete, aristocratic British.

It is unclear how much research TFSmith did into the background of Lavallée, but presumably it stopped shortly after he learned from Wikipedia that his subject fought for the Union and that 'In his later life he promoted the idea of union between Canada and the U.S.A.' In reality, Lavallée's supposed US sympathies rapidly melt away under the pressure of any sustained research:

• He fought for the Union!...as a bandsman, for wages between $17 and $34 dollars a month, at a time when his only alternative was blackface minstrelsy on a tour of Newfoundland
• He organised a concert to raise money for a memorial to 'the victims of 1837-38'!... in 1864, after he had moved back to Montreal and was in regular contact with former schoolmate Médéric Lanctot. 
• He promoted union between Canada and the US!... According to obituaries, which said that he had started to advocate the idea in the late 1880s, after he had lived in Boston for almost a decade, after the hanging of Louis Riel had caused a wave of anger among French Canadians on both sides of the border; however, there are neither newspaper reports nor records among Lavallée's personal papers to support this statement. 

Unfortunately, TFSmith has used his own fictional characterisation of Lavallée as a case study for French Canadian loyalty in the period. This is particularly unfortunate because digging a little further into Lavallée's life story would have shown serious cracks in his understanding of the period. His mentor Charles Wugk [sic] Sabatier was a great admirer of the British, to the extent that he composed La Montréalaise to encourage French Canadians to get behind the imperial project:

Le Canada, terre cherie
Doit pour tous, Anglais et Francais,
Devenir la seule Patrie,
Qui pour nos fils ait des attraits.
Travaillons pour que notre histoire
Burine cette oeuvre de gloire!

(Canada, that dear land
Must for all, English and French,
Become the only homeland,
Which for our sons has any attractions.
Let's work so that our history
Engraves this work of glory!)

As for Lavallée's brother, Charles, he spent many years as the conductor of the band of the Victoria Rifles (3rd Battalion, Volunteer Militia Rifles).