From Montréal to Bay View in
the summer of 1871.

When la fievre aux Etats-Unis infected Narcisse and Edesse as it had hundreds of thousands of other canadiens they too left behind the nation their ancestors helped forge. Their pastoral lifestyle was challenged by the Second Industrial Revolution sweeping the country to the south in a way that had not yet captured the Dominion. Though some called the emigrants deserters, cowards, loafers, and delinquents, it did not deter them from streaming into the United States in search of a better life. The bond with family and friends was so strong that sometimes entire villages were emptied as they headed en masse to work in the textile factories in New England or to homestead lands in the Midwest.

Yet Edesse's older brother Paul Mondou went to Milwaukee. Other relatives, including the Goyettes and Gervais, made the same move. And so it was that Narcisse and Edesse left Montréal, passing through Detroit in July 1871, to bring their children to Bay View.

Their timing was dangerous. An epidemic of small pox afflicted over 700 people in the city. The Peshtigo Fire engulfed the state in the fall destroying families, farms and forests. Though it burned in counties to the north it blackened the skies of Milwaukee with smoke and covered its streets with soot. Less famous than the fire on the same day in Chicago, it covered a much larger region and resulted in far more deaths.

The Petelles came despite these perils, perhaps enticed by the job opportunities the new rolling mill offered their sons. Although in 1873 it too, suffered a setback.