Matriarchs of the Hoople Creek Loyalists
by John Sliter

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“Matriarchs of the Hoople Creek Loyalists” is a series of historical fiction stories about seventeen women and their families who helped to settle Upper Canada along a small creek in eastern Ontario. Their stories reflect their struggle to survive hunger, disease, and even war as they married and raised their children in a new, heavily forested and seeming impenetrable land. The first people to live along Hoople Creek were United Empire Loyalists forced to travel hundreds of miles under harsh conditions to escape the patriots of the United States in order to remain loyal to the United Kingdom. They began their new lives north of the Saint Lawrence River and along Hoople Creek, and somehow managed to survive. Many of their descendants remain in the area and have gone from a people fighting for mere survival, to an environmentally conscious, empathetic, and fair society striving to be inclusive while maintaining equality for all. It was refugees like the Hoople Creek matriarchs and their families who helped make Canadians who they are today.

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John Sliter was born in Cornwall, Ontario and spent much of his childhood time at his grandparents’ farm in Pleasant Valley, north of Osnabruck Centre in Ingleside, Ontario. The Beaudette farm benefited from the proximity of Hoople Creek which was a significant draw for a young boy searching for fish, turtles or frogs and nearby wildlife. After John completed his high school education at CCVS in Cornwall, he went on to Saint Lawrence College to study Business Finance. After college, John joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and enjoyed a 36-year career that began in a small town in the interior of British Columbia. John was commended in each community he served for his work ranging from initiatives dealing with First Nations Peoples to chairing a local Crisis and Counselling Centre Board of Directors. John also adhered to a strong mantra of continuous learning and kept up his academic studies throughout his career eventually culminating in a Masters Degree in Business Administration degree from Simon Fraser University. John spent most of his working career conducting, and later leading, financial crime investigations and his unwavering dedication to this field led to him being promoted to senior management positions within the RCMP. He retired in 2014 and enjoyed an international reputation as a strong leader and visionary with respect to complex financial crime investigations. Upon his transfer to RCMP Headquarters in 1986, John moved back to the Ingleside area. He brought his young family to a new home close to his beloved Hoople Creek so they might develop a similar appreciation of the history of Ontario. An avid angler, John developed an interest in the environmental protection of this small creek. He went on to form a not-for-profit corporation – “The Friends of Hoople Creek Society” with a mission to develop programs to help protect the environment around the creek. This in turn led to some tenacious research of the history of the creek and the people who lived along its route over the past two hundred years. The role of several women began to immediately stand out, and the idea blossomed to write about some key women who struggled to help develop, settle, and colonize Upper Canada.

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Contributors

Author

John Sliter

Illustrator

Jillian Sliter