Finally, in June of 1905, I found a speech by the Roman Catholic Archbishop Howley. I found my barrel maker. His last name was Pender. His first name began with the letter W.

That was the only vital statistic I ever found out about him. But something exciting had happened to me along the way.

When you read newspapers from the past, day after day, you catch a thrill from those days. Those days in the winter of 1904 and 1905 were not like ours. The first part of my story tells all about what I found. I called it "The Golden Dream." Golden, because people were caught up in an age of discovery and hope in a new land. Dream, because in the end, that's all the hope really was. A dream that Newfoundland woke up from, to face a grim time.

I looked in old newspapers for a long time. They gave me a lot of details about W. Pender's world. By now I had started to call him William.

But newspapers only gave me certain kinds of information. There were other things I needed to know. Like how coopers made barrels. And details about the scarlet fever and other diseases the papers reported. And the kinds of clothes people wore. And the dishes and furniture they had in their houses. And what they ate. And where William Pender would have lived. What other working people worked at. Details of the strike. The names and plans of the streets he walked. Where the cooperages were, and the tanneries, and the cod oil factories, and the boot making factory.

What did a barrel maker or cooper do when there was no work? What did he feel? Where did he go? Who was around him, and what were they saying?

What were the children playing in the streets? What kind of candy did they eat?

What was a cooper's wife like?

What was going on inside his head?

When I started to ask these questions, two things happened.

First, I started looking in new places for the answers.

Second, when I found the answers, I had to find a way to shape them into a story.

Looking in New Places

Once I got to know more about William's world, 1904 did not seem as long ago as it had. It was less than a hundred years ago. William Pender was not the last cooper that ever was. Maybe there was a cooper who was still alive. Someone who could tell me what it was like. What kind of tools he used. What a cooper's shop smelled like. What a cooper was like when he was a little boy.