1

Being and Becoming Metis

IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND both how Marie Rose and Isabella transitioned in a changing world, and how Canadian society has accessed some of its historical knowledge about Metis people, it is important to speak briefly about the changing focus for historians. It was only in the 1980s that scholars acknowledged that the Metis had survived the end of the fur trade era as a “people” with their own identifiable culture and distinct history. Early histories of the Metis were largely subsumed within the history of the fur trade, and most scholars saw them as an ethnic group unable to thrive beyond the fur trade. While this chapter cannot undertake a complete annotated bibliography of the rapidly changing field of Metis historiography, there are pivotal works that help explain the trends that contributed to the historical process that has enabled and assisted close case studies of Metis women such as this one, and provide opportunity for continuing this type of study.

Beginning in the 1930s with the work of Harold Innis,1 through to Arthur Ray’s work in the 1970s,2 the economy of the fur trade was the primary focus for historians. In the transitional period of Metis historiography that began in the 1970s, scholars such as Sylvia Van Kirk,3 Jennifer Brown,4 and Jacqueline Peterson5 expanded Indigenous history to focus on the role of Metis women who lived during the fur trade era. John Foster’s work on the emergence of the Metis as a distinct cultural group was also published during this period.6

The focus on fur trade company corporate cultures evolved to examinations of kinship links for Metis people, with work by scholars such as Lucy Eldersveld Murphy,7 Tanis Thorne,8 and Susan Sleeper-Smith, who also expanded the geographic focus from Red River to the Great Lakes area of what is now northwestern Indiana and southwest Michigan.9 Sleeper-Smith explored the thesis that Indigenous women who married French men actually assumed a role as cultural mediators and negotiators of change when they established elaborate trading networks through Roman Catholic kinship connections that paralleled those of Indigenous societies.10 It was evident that these women did not “marry out,” but rather that they incorporated their French husbands into a society structured by Indigenous custom and tradition.11 Thus, these Metis women did not reinvent themselves as French but rather enhanced their distinct Metis identity. Van Kirk also argued that, from an Indigenous perspective, the process of women marrying fur traders was never regarded as marrying out.12 Rather, these marriages were important means of incorporating traders into existing kinship networks, and traders often had to abide by Indigenous marital customs, including the payment of bride price.13 These scholars were able to demonstrate that Metis women made significant contributions to the fur trade. However, there has yet to be a significant number of studies that examine the important roles Metis women played in the transition from the fur trade economy to the industrialized sedentary economy that replaced it.14

More recently, scholars of Indigenous ancestry, such as Heather Devine15 and Brenda Macdougall,16 used geneaological reconstruction and biographical methodologies to examine Metis identity formation in geographic areas that expanded beyond the Red River area. Martha Harroun Foster, whose research also expanded beyond the traditional fur trade era that had previously been studied by many historians, noted that some Metis women in the Spring Creek community of Montana used kinship networks (and practices such as godparenting) as a way to consolidate more recent trade relationships to ensure their families’ prosperity, and in essence reaffirm existing Metis networks.17 The Spring Creek Metis, former fur traders, became business people in the new economy, and tended to extend their kinship networks through such practices as asking non-Metis associates and neighbours to serve as godparents for their children.18

Harroun Foster notes that as the kinship network of the Spring Creek Metis expanded, and came to include more non-Metis members, the terms the Metis used to identify themselves became more complex. Thus, terms like “breed,” once common, became more private, so that few Metis people remembered using the terms “half-breed” or “Metis” outside of the family. Yet self-identification as Euro-North American could, but did not necessarily, represent a rejection of a Metis identity or Metis kin group.19 For this group of Montana Metis, although a private Metis identity survived, that identity became increasingly complex, multilayered, and situational, but nonetheless remained rooted in the kinship networks first established as part of fur trade culture.20

In reality, for families of the Canadian fur trade that might have various “tribal relatives,” as well as Euro-Canadian family members, Metis ethnicity was often inclusive enough to encompass and accept all members of the family. Kinship links between culturally distinct groups enabled accommodation and subsequently influenced tribal politics in many geographic areas when settlement by Euro-North Americans occurred.21 Because there was very little opportunity between the late 1890s and the 1920s to publicly identify as Metis, it was not unusual for most Metis during that time to identify as either “Indian or white,” while privately nurturing a Metis identity. History confirms that it has always been an integral aspect of the Metis culture to allow a web of kinship ties to enrich rather than to destroy a sense of unique ethnicity.22 Kinship systems often allowed the Metis to sustain their identity in a safe, supportive atmosphere, even if those identities had to be enjoyed only in the private realm.

In Canada, the Metis were often forced to enjoy their identity in the private realm due, in part, to the fact that Metis identity has not always been open to individual choice. At various times in Canadian history, by way of the Indian Act, treaty negotiations and enforcement, and scrip regulations, the government determined who was “status Indian” and who was Metis. It is entirely possible that some Metis in Canada, as in the United States, found they could be “white and Métis or Métis and Indian with sincerity and apparent ease.”23 In a study of her own “French-Indian” ancestors who settled in the Willamette Valley, Melinda Jetté concluded that

they were not exclusively American, Indian, French-Canadian, or métis, but were all of these things at different times and in different places…there was a process of negotiation that went on throughout their lives…the family navigated a place for itself amidst a unique set of cultural traditions.24

Despite observations such as those by Harroun Foster and Jetté in regard to the continuity of Metis culture and identity, some scholars had previously argued that fur trade society was abruptly replaced by a new economy. The first scholar to conduct an in-depth study of Canada’s Metis people, Marcel Giraud, helped to create (in historiography) a stereotypical Metis character unsuited to function in the new economy,25 and a belief that deficiencies in Metis culture were a result of miscegenation.26 In the same way, W.L. Morton, often seen as the first regional historian of the Canadian Prairies, believed that

when the agricultural frontier advanced into the Red River Valley in the 1870s, the last buffalo herds were destroyed in the 1880s, the half-breed community of the West, la nation métisse, was doomed, and made its last ineffectual protest against extinction in the Saskatchewan Rebellion of 1885.27

Despite viewing the Metis as doomed people, Morton saw what he believed to be the “two strongly defined currents” emanating from unions between HBC men and Indigenous women, and those between the French traders and Indigenous women. However, he also acknowledged a sense of unified identity, in that “the children of both streams of admixture had bonds of union in a common maternal ancestry and a common dependence on the fur trade.”28 Nonetheless, for Morton, there was a clear break between fur trade society and that which replaced it, and there was really no place for the Metis in the new economy.

In reality, the research that forms the basis of this book confirms that there was distinct and identifiable continuity from the fur trade economy with the new sedentary agricultural and commercial economy. Furthermore, the view that Red River was unstable exaggerates the weaknesses of the community and thus underestimates the abilities of its residents and the kinship webs that extended from that community into the transitional era. By the late 1850s and into the 1860s, Red River was already becoming integrated into the wider world, and many of the Metis had adjusted to new economic opportunities and adopted characteristics of an entrepreneurial class. These entrepreneurs were found among both French- and English-speaking Metis.29 The idea that the Metis were a people “in between” two cultures, which still persists for some today, ignores the reality that the fur trade engendered its own diverse people with their own unique and diverse culture. The view that the Metis were not equipped to survive in the new economy that emerged after the end of the fur trade ignores the fact that Metis culture thrived in the capitalist institution of the Hudson’s Bay Company,30 a company that had absorbed the North West Company and established the foundations of the new order. In reality, the lessons that fur trade children learned from their Metis culture could have facilitated the transition for the majority of them had there not been other mitigating factors.31

One of the most visible early examples of continuity between the fur trade economy and the new economy was John Norquay, the Metis man who served as premier of Manitoba between 1879 and 1887.32 The main priority for Norquay’s government was to foster economic development by building railway lines, public works, and municipal institutions, as well as assuming debt for construction activity.33 While some may have seen Norquay’s defeat in 1888 as the end of the old order in Red River, Norquay was, in fact, a “creature of the new age,” given his dedication to economic development according to the principles of industrial capitalism.34 In reality, the primary reason Norquay clashed with John A. Macdonald, Conservative prime minister at the time, was not because he was a Metis of the old order, or even because he was Liberal, but because he attempted to establish a competing rail line to the Canadian Pacific Railway in order to satisfy the growing concerns of a broad cross-section of Manitoba’s population.

By 1886, near the end of Norquay’s time as premier, and just one year after the conflict in 1885, the population of Manitoba had grown substantially, from 60,000 in 1881, to 109,000.35 It is true that, by this time, many Metis had moved further west and north, where rapid settlement by newcomers only occurred after 1896. However, the reason for this exodus by the Metis had less to do with economy than with the influx of Euro-North American settlers who were less than tolerant of racial equality. In addition, the long-distance supervision by the federal government over the vast North-West Territories (and the imposition of its new land use regulations) presented challenges for all residents. Despite the challenges, many of the Metis who were forced away from Red River were able to re-establish themselves on prosperous farms along the South Saskatchewan River and in permanent settlements that featured merchants, mills, farms, and churches. This is further evidence of Metis adaptation to economic changes.36

In reality, both incoming settlers and the Metis were forced to negotiate new economic challenges, including recessions, such as that in 1882, which saw many new immigrants leave Canada. The emigrants included some Metis who went to Dakota and Montana. Out-migration continued to be a cause for concern on the prairies until the 1900s. Also, not unlike the new settlers in their struggles with the changing economy, the Metis had concerns regarding Ottawa’s policies addressing territorial rights. Widespread concern about property rights by the majority living in the area was one of the motivating factors in the political agitation that led to the armed conflicts in 1885. Although this conflict came to be viewed as a Metis uprising, in reality, Frank Oliver, editor of the Edmonton Bulletin, had argued in 1884 that “rebellion alone” would force the central government to heed concerns in the North West.37 As many have since noted, government inefficiency led many new settlers to join the initial protests that eventually culminated in the fighting in 1885.

Because the fighting in 1885 has come to be seen as an Indigenous action that arose only out of Indigenous concerns, the view that Indigenous people were unable to adjust to new economic and environmental realities persisted for some time in historiography. However, in a broadly based macro study published in 1996, Frank Tough provided solid evidence that Indigenous people were prepared to alter tradition by participating in the Euro-North American economy when mercantilism gave way to industrialism. For example, in the late 1800s, the export of new staples, such as fish, lumber, and cordwood from northern Manitoba, represented a diversification of activity for Indigneous people.38 History demonstrates over and over that, when allowed, Indigenous people were able to maintain viable economies by incorporating their labour into new resource industries and responding to new markets.39 It was because Indigenous people did not have control of the land that they remained dependent on the needs of the metropolis and on the decisions of government agents and Euro-North American business interests.40 Some historians have demonstrated that, even when Indigenous people were successful workmen, they were still not masters of their own destiny in ways that they had been when traditional territorial boundaries were respected, and in ways that Euro-North American settlers were.41

Territorial boundaries were an important component of Metis history in the North West. It is also true that Central Canadians increasingly saw land as the West’s best resource. Eventually, the practice of informal land occupancy that had been enjoyed by the Metis over vast areas of the North West gave way to a formalized system managed by the Dominion Land Survey and the free hold tenure system. Land for settlement space and resource wealth was so important to the annexationist plans of Central Canada that it remained in the control of the Department of the Interior (which also controlled immigration and administered Metis scrip)42 when the territory, and later the western provinces, were formed.

The threat to traditional territorial land was an integral issue that united many Anglo- and French Metis when they challenged the incoming annexationists in 1869–1870. The man who emerged as the leader of that resistance, Louis Riel, was not opposed to diversifying the economy, but he correctly saw that land ownership was integral for the future survival of the Metis. For Riel, it was more a question of who would determine and benefit from diversification of the Metis economy and land. The issue of land became even more complicated for the Metis than for those Indigenous people, now defined as First Nation,43 given the ad hoc administration of government policy with regard to extinguishing Metis title in comparison to the numbered treaty process. As Metis territorial lands were increasingly threatened during the transitional era, so, too, was their freedom to identify as distinctly Metis people.

Given that so much of the early studies of the Metis focused on the Red River area, scholars of the fur trade had long argued (and some still do) that the formation of a distinct Metis ethnicity occurred primarily among the predominantly French Metis of Red River who supported Louis Riel. While this book disputes this argument, it is important to explore Red River society in order to understand that, within that settlement, Metis identity was complex and diverse. For example, the fact that more and more HBC men retired to the Red River from posts throughout fur trade country, rather than return to their “home country,” suggests that they were beginning to see themselves not as a mixed people but as distinct Indigenous people, with families that would not be welcome in the home territories of their fathers. Even if they had never lived in Red River, many HBC men (like Isabella’s father) sent their children to Red River so they could be educated alongside other Indigenous children. As more company men chose to stay in fur trade country, and more of them married British women who came to fur trade country after the 1840s, Anglo-Metis women were increasingly less likely to view themselves as English. Thus, by the mid-nineteenth century, the term “half-breed” had come to encompass people of Indigenous ancestry from both fur trade traditions.

The distinctions that some have identified based on two fur trade traditions could be blurred. For example, there was a noted trend in census documents for the Red River area that indicated intermarriage in the community between the various groups of Metis people was “guided by social and economic factors [and] integrated one partner, more often the ‘Native English,’ into the parent Metis society.”44 Thus, despite the complexity and diversity of the Red River Metis settlement, the common bonds of culture and kinship ensured some solidarity.45

While there were common bonds of culture among the Metis in Red River, there were increasingly many newcomers to the region. One of those newcomers was a trader named Alexander Begg, who arrived in 1867 and who left written documents that have become useful sources to help understand the diversity of Red River society. As historian W.L. Morton concluded, Begg’s text, which relied to a large degree on the records of Roman Catholic priest Father Pierre Picton, demonstrates that there was a “web of blood relationship which not only held the métis together, but bound the two halves of the Red River Settlement with ties that were not to be disregarded.”46

Although there is evidence of a web of blood relationships during the fur trade era, some scholars argued that there were variances in Metis identity based on class. There were certainly class distinctions and conflict in the Red River community prior to the fighting that erupted in 1869–1870 and 1885. Irene Spry argued that conflict was based less on ethnicity than on economic class.47 On the other hand, Fritz Pannekoek argued that much of the conflict and class distinctions in Red River society existed because of, and were exacerbated, by the clergy. Recent scholarship has expanded the study of the Metis far beyond Red River and has argued that “groups variously termed classes, tribes, people, and nations endured and adapted by transcending these national and state identifications.”48

Whereas many believe that class is not the most appropriate comparative factor to help us understand Metis identity, it is still important to note that, when they were children growing up during the fur trade era, both Marie Rose and Isabella could be considered to be of the higher class of Metis, who either had ties to the Roman Catholic Church in Marie Rose’s case, or to the Hudson’s Bay Company in Isabella’s case. Both were from families who could afford European-style education. As married women, both continued to rely on “webs of real and imagined kin” that could be “fashioned and refashioned” in order to succeed, and even to thrive, so they were able to maintain their status in the transitional period after the fur trade. In fact, the survival strategies that worked for Marie Rose and Isabella were not unlike the “enduring form of organizing one’s larger social, economic, and political world” that the Metis relied upon at the height of the fur trade era.49

Although Marie Rose and Isabella were able to maintain a semblance of the class status they enjoyed during the fur trade, one of the complicating factors in relying on class to understand the Metis identity is that class distinctions in fur trade society could blur, depending on political, geographical, and external forces. For Marie Rose, her family members chose to support Louis Riel’s challenge to the incoming political control imposed from Central Canada. This led to a decline in status for most of the Delorme men and their families, but no less conviction for them of Metis identity. For Isabella, it is true that her father was a chief factor in the Hudson’s Bay Company. However, his entire service was in the northern Mackenzie district. While there were certainly class distinctions between HBC officers and their staff, conditions at the northern posts were often harsh, and privations many. A child of the fur trade at northern posts would not often understand themselves to be of higher status when all were expected to contribute to the provision of food and shelter, all experienced periods of severe hardship, and all classes of Indigenous people were often in close proximity for periods of time throughout the year.

Yet class distinctions were still evident and, as the fur trade progressed, class distinctions affected not only the children of HBC men but Indigenous women and their ability to maintain the positions that some had enjoyed. Unions between First Nations women and fur traders were more commonly accepted by free traders and the North West Company early in the fur trade era. However, partly to secure trade relationships and partly to ensure their own survival, the HBC officers also forged relationships with Indigenous women, and positions of status were soon reserved for Metis women over First Nations women. Class distinctions intensified further when George Simpson cast aside his country relationships for the cousin he married and then brought back from a European trip. It was after this change in Simpson’s marriage partner that Isabella’s father felt the need to explain his own choice of a wife who was of a lower social status.

For most Metis, more important than class were the familial links that allowed them to navigate changing opportunities. Although the more northern and western Metis people had Dene rather than Cree origins, with distinct economies and lifestyles, they had familial links with the Red River area and shared some cultural traditions.50 The Metis of the North West also had work connections with Red River through the Portage La Loche brigades and often travelled south to trade and socialize.51 They would have had contact with Isabella’s kin. Many Metis were eventually dispersed from Red River to points further north and west, and the common bonds of culture and kin survived for many of them. Given the diverse webs of connection, the fluctuation in fortune, and the conditions at northern fur trade posts, it is plausible that people from both fur trading traditions, such as Marie Rose and Isabella, were exposed to similar aspects of Metis culture and history.

In fact, it is possible that, as historian Brenda Macdougall argues, the Hudson’s Bay Company inadvertently fostered a Metis identity, and that HBC men incorporated Indigenous kinship models into the corporate model. Even though the HBC had originally forbid country unions between its employees and Indigenous women, Macdougall argued that the HBC often and increasingly assumed a role as benefactor for the Metis, and that

local chief factors and chief traders asserted a relationship that firmly encapsulated it [the relationship] within the reciprocal family model by assuming a position that cultivated and harnessed the loyalty of its servants through support of their family life.52

It appears that Metis women often continued to rely on the HBC for supplies, support, and employment even after their company partners were no longer in the picture, suggesting that some Metis believed the HBC was a component of the reciprocal family model.53 As early as 1824, the HBC was insisting that families of employees residing at posts in the Mackenzie district pay for their board.54 While this suggests that the company may still have been trying to discourage country unions at the managerial level, it also suggests that company officials were very aware that country unions with Indigenous women were common and, indeed, necessary.

Even though these unions were necessary and common, by the early nineteenth century, the company was finding that the family life of its officers was becoming burdensome, and interpersonal relations difficult to manage. Although the wives and children of HBC servants had provided invaluable assistance as an informal but necessary labour pool, they could also have a negative impact on company profits by draining local resources and serving as conduits for illegal trade networks through their family networks.55 These were some of the very reasons that the governor of the HBC, George Simpson, had originally opposed the relationships. However, it is also why his policies changed after 1821, when there was an increasing need to care for abandoned and distressed families. Thus it was that the Red River Colony became a designated retirement community for company men and their families.

The kinship webs established and maintained by many HBC men suggest that they came to view themselves as family men first and company men second, while their children increasingly self-identified as Metis. Susan Armitage’s research determined that, although some HBC men did retire to Montreal and England, leaving behind their country families, as early as 1845, a

surprising number [chose to] retire where they were…John McLoughlin, who retired in 1845, was following the example of a number of former HBC employees who, with their Indian wives, were the first settlers in the agriculturally rich Willamette Valley of Oregon in the 1820s. Here, then, was a multiracial social network of men, linked by kinship and common work histories, who chose in retirement to become settlers—subsistence farmers.56

It is plausible that many who have in the past been referred to as the “country-born,” Isabella included, increasingly internalized a distinctly Metis identity.

Although HBC culture engendered a distinct ethnicity, that culture was not static and the history of people of Metis ancestry in the North West was diverse due to the different origins of their ancestors, as well as the many geographic areas in which they lived.57 Yet, one recent scholar argues that the term “Métis” should be used to refer specifically to those Indigenous people who can trace their history to the “buffalo hunting and trading Métis of the northern Plains, in particular during the period between the beginning of the Métis buffalo brigades in the early nineteenth century and the 1885 North West Uprising.”58

However, to use this narrow categorization disregards the connection of many Metis to the earlier fur trade. More importantly, it relegates an analysis of Metis people who do not fit neatly into the events-based (the Northwest Uprising or the Battle of Seven Oaks) perspective to a discussion of race and degrees of mixedness. Such categorization positions them as people “in between” rather than as rightful members of the “nation” of Metis. Indeed, as Nicole St-Onge and Carolyn Podruchny argue, “[d]efinitions of Metis that rely on the ingredients of buffalo hunting, practicing Roman Catholicism, speaking French, and wearing woven sashes imply that Metis cultural traits are static, exclusive, and singular, thus precluding cultural change and the creation of diverse ranges of Metis cultural expression.”59 According to the Manitoba Métis Federation in 1983, Metis culture and identity were formulated by way of a wide variety of commercial and domestic forms of living, such as those listed by St-Onge and Podruchny, as well as through “socials, music, jigging, country food, art, religious beliefs.” This organization also lists one component of Metis culture and identity as “historical knowledge.”60

Yet historical knowledge, most often connected to the fur trade, may be very different for a Metis person born in Red River, like Marie Rose (who acknowledged listening to the oral history of her Metis mother), than for one born at a fort in the northern Mackenzie district, like Isabella (who spent her formative years with a northern Metis mother). Neither instance may be more or less indicative of the retention of Metis culture and identity. When we restrict ourselves to categorizing the Metis as only rightfully “Métis” if they can demonstrate a connection to the historic “Métis Nation” that emerged in Red River, we risk perpetuating the idea that Indigenous people are homogenous. It is helpful at this point to acknowledge what Theda Perdue has argued, specifically that “biographies can, in fact, serve as sifters that both separate individual women’s lives and distinguish women’s experiences from those of men.”61 In the same way, biographies and comparative analysis of Metis people serve to “humanize” them and confirm that retention of culture and identity occurs equally on an individual basis as it might on a collective “nationhood” basis.

While the retention of culture and identity can be difficult to assess, for women during the transitional period after the fur trade, their contributions to the family economy were often based on their cultural knowledge. Yet, for economic studies in general, many seem to have accepted the idea that what is “socially and politically valuable has to be something done within the institutional structure of the polity and done for money.”62 However, we really cannot understand economic history without understanding the contributions made by the unpaid labour of women, even if we must understand the labor for its social capital rather than for its monetary value. This is especially so for pre-industrial Canada, which functioned through a subsistence economy.63

Although it can be difficult to assess the monetary value of Metis women’s work, which began during the fur trade era but extended into the transitional period, many Euro-North American documents reveal a vibrant trade during the fur trade era in the items produced by Metis women.64 In addition, while post journals can provide no specifics on the unpaid labour of women and children, the company did pay a price for family labour in that it became a benefactor by administrating wills and pensions, operating a transportation system, providing retirement advice, and dispensing rations.65

In terms of the economic roles of Metis women, their detailed family stories reveal that those roles allowed them a sense of continuity with their past.66 Not only did the practical skills of Metis women afford them that continuity but their skills also helped their families to transition to the new economy. Further, when Metis women participated in the shifting economy in ways such as providing traditional clothing to newcomers, they assumed roles as cultural brokers, as they had during the height of the fur trade.67 The roles of Metis women, their skills, and their elaborative kinship networks that facilitated trade in the earlier period later served to transform the impersonal exchange process characteristic of capitalism into a socially accountable process.68 Yet few women who contributed the unpaid labour vital to the success of both the fur trade and the transitional economies of the North West, such as Marie Rose and Isabella, viewed their own roles as significant enough to record details of their lives with the intention of passing them on to a public archive.

To understand the value of Marie Rose’s and Isabella’s unpaid labour, and how they underwrote the costs of establishing the joint estates they maintained with their husbands, it is important to understand the value of both of their Metis families in establishing a sound base for beginning married life to Euro-North American husbands. While Isabella was born at a northern fur trade post and she spent her formative years there, she had the benefit of formal education at Wesleyan Ladies’ College in Hamilton, Ontario. After leaving that eastern school and returning to the North, Isabella spent another number of years in fur trade country before moving to Lachine, Quebec, when her father retired. After her father’s death in 1881, Isabella returned to the North West to live with her uncle, Chief Factor and Senator Richard Hardisty, who helped facilitate her marriage to James Lougheed, a man without important family connections of his own and little understanding of survival in the early Prairie West. In fact, until his marriage, James’s fledgling law practice experienced difficulties in securing funds from outside sources for investment and expansion. Shortly after his marriage, James joined Isabella’s uncle as a partner in various business ventures and, soon after this partnership, James and Isabella began to amass large land holdings in Calgary.

In regard to Isabella Hardisty Lougheed’s stature, the young Thomas Hardisty remembered that the first time he saw his aunt, Isabella, a woman of Anglo-Scot Metis descent (i.e., “country-born”), she had the aura of royalty.69 Despite periods of real privation in the northern fur trade, Isabella’s family was part of fur trade aristocracy and she later assumed the aristocratic title “Lady Belle Lougheed” of Beaulieu (Lougheed) House, bestowed upon her when her husband, Senator James Lougheed, was knighted. Like Jughandle Ranch, where Marie Rose and Charlie Smith settled, Beaulieu House was also built on the open prairie, but, as one of Calgary’s first sandstone homes, it was elaborately furnished to reflect the growing wealth and prestige of the Lougheeds. An ambitious young lawyer from a working-class family of Irish immigrants based in Toronto, James had every reason to believe he would benefit from his marriage into Isabella’s kinship network, which included Richard Hardisty and Donald A. Smith (Lord Strathcona), two of the wealthiest men in the North West. Not long after his marriage, James found himself in the fortuitous position of assuming the Senate post previously held by Richard Hardisty, who had died suddenly.

Although he was an outsider to the transitional economy after the fur trade, James Lougheed’s Senate post and his acceptance into the Hardisty web of kinship enabled the couple to amass that large estate. They served as community leaders and were involved in all aspects of community-building activities. Isabella’s father, William Hardisty, had left an estate, which was eventually managed by James. For all intents and purposes, James had indeed become a “company man.”

Like James, Charlie Smith, Marie Rose’s husband, was an outsider to fur trade country. It was Marie Rose who had kinship links to Metis society and thus to the fur trade economy. Marie Rose was born in Saint François Xavier, Red River, to Urbain Delorme Jr. and Marie Desmarais,70 both of Metis ancestry. Marie Rose’s early culture was as the daughter of a free trader and part-time farmer who set out regularly on hunting and trading brigades. As a young girl, Marie Rose spent a large part of her life either traversing the plains with her family or living on the small plot of land in the Red River area. She was then enrolled in the convent in Saint Boniface, where she learned to read and write in French and English. Shortly after her time in the convent, when she returned to a more traditional Metis lifestyle on the plains, Marie Rose’s mother arranged a marriage for her. The financial agreement reached between her mother and robe and whiskey trader Charlie Smith saw Marie Rose become his wife and ranching partner in exchange for fifty dollars.71

Not long after they were married, Marie Rose and Charlie became among the first to transition from trade in buffalo robes to cattle ranching. They began their new life together by driving cattle from Montana to what would become the district of Macleod in southern Alberta. Eventually, British and Canadian investors followed, establishing ranches in the foothills, so that by 1886 there were over 100,000 cattle in the region.72 Writing in the early twentieth century, Marie Rose referred to herself at various times throughout her manuscripts, when she spoke of those early days of her marriage, as the “Queen of the Jughandle.” As an adult somewhat removed from fur trade society, she earned that title after she and Charlie staked a homestead they named Jughandle Ranch.

While it is clear that Marie Rose continued, out of necessity, to rely on the skill set she learned as a child, and on her Metis Delorme family, it is also evident that she desired a role as an important member of the changing West. Thus, it was necessary to build a community of connections that would allow Marie Rose to create a new persona as a homesteading pioneer. In fact, it was her community of connections that clearly came to her aid when Charlie died without having mastered the skills necessary to succeed (and to help his children succeed) in a society increasingly reliant on paper transactions.

The last half of the nineteenth century, when Marie Rose and Isabella were negotiating their identies as married women, was critical to the history of North America. It was a time when both Canada and the United States were attempting to establish separate and distinct countries and linear boundaries, in part by encouraging Euro-North American settlers into the border areas. In addition to these geographic boundaries, there was an increasing desire to erect racial boundaries.

However, despite a desire to erect racial boundaries, those boundaries remained fluid for some time, given that settlement of the prairies was not immediate or consistent.73 For example, on the one hand, one newly arrived settler to southern Alberta, Mary Inderwick, was “pleased to note” in 1883 that “squaws were not allowed” to attend the ball at the North West Mounted Police barracks at Fort Macleod. On the other hand, Inderwick noted that “half-breeds” were allowed to attend,74 suggesting that the class distinctions that emerged in the latter part of the fur trade persisted.75 It is of note that Inderwick’s often racist comments in regard to Indigneous people were made in documents that were intended for her audience of family members and acquaintances in the east. In the privacy of her own diary, Inderwick revealed little of either racism or admiration; she simply recorded the fact that she shared her space with Indigenous people.76

The presence of so many people of Metis ancestry made it difficult to maintain the boundaries that newcomers in the emerging society of the North West might have sought to establish. It may be that, for many newcomers, ethnic boundaries had to be maintained in other ways, perhaps by reinforcing the social distance, and by coming to view Indigenous people as “other.” Maintaining boundaries may have been seen to be increasingly important—the arrival of more Euro-North American women in the North West coincided with treaties and the growth of ranching, which led to the establishment of more Euro-Canadian institutions.77

Yet, until the late nineteenth century, the Euro-North American women who arrived in the North West were, for the most part, “spatially isolated on ranches.” Given this isolation, and that it was it was “rare to see two or three together at one time,”78 the degree of social change that Euro-North Americans could effect during the late 1800s is debatable. In 1882, former Red River resident Alexander Begg (by then a southern Alberta rancher) reported that he had seen “scarcely a house between Fort McLeod and Fort Calgary.”79 When Mary Inderwick arrived in Calgary in 1883, she wrote that the town was “very nice but it is a village of tents framed in Indians and squaws in plenty.”80 It was not until the 1890s, a time when there were few Euro-North American women in the West, that federal officials started actively encouraging agricultural settlers to southern Alberta in order to replace the large land lease companies.81

It was in the 1880s, before the arrival of the large numbers of settlers, that Marie Rose and Charlie Smith settled in the Pincher Creek district and Isabella married James Lougheed in Calgary, and thus a time when Indigenous people outnumbered new settlers, and when those new settlers were spatially isolated. The slow settlement was no doubt due to the fact that the region seemed farther from “civilization” and remained difficult to access until the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed.82 Yet, while the last spike that connected Canada “from sea to sea” was driven in in 1885, and boosterism promoted the West’s wide open spaces and limitless land,83 the fighting in Duck Lake between the Metis and government troops still gave the impression the North West was a harsh and inhospitable place.

By the time that Euro-North American women had established a permanent and more visible presence in the larger centres of Alberta in the early twentieth century, Isabella and Marie Rose had already established themselves as matriarchs of their own extended families. Their roles as matriarchs represented an important aspect of the construction of the Prairie West, as did the roles of other Metis women. Researchers Judith Hudson Beattie and Helen M. Buss use the example of Isabella’s mother, Mary Allen Hardisty, to argue that her situation “illustrates an important part of Canada’s settlement. The line of succession from Indigenous and European grandparents to Canadian prairie dweller is not an unusual one.”84 In this regard, Beattie and Buss astutely identify the continuity from fur trade to sedentary industrialized agriculture and commerce. While Mary Allen was an orphaned daughter of a Euro-North American man and his Indigenous wife, and she spent the bulk of her life at northern posts living one of the traditional fur trade lifestyles, her daughter went on to become one of the most influential women in the new society of the North West. Indeed, Beattie and Buss could just as easily have included Marie Rose in their assessment of succession to prairie dweller. Despite her lack of monetary wealth, Marie Rose gained some recognition as an important pioneer of the plains and a “first lady” of her community, who by the time of her death attracted the attention of local media in the new West.

While Marie Rose’s and Isabella’s adult lives followed somewhat different economic and social trajectories, and they occupied different segments of the new society’s class groups, at another transitional time in their lives, when both became widows, their financial situations again had some similarity. Marie Rose Smith and Isabella Lougheed were widowed in 1914 and 1925, respectively, when the West was experiencing very difficult economic times. Both had to bury a number of their children, Marie Rose twelve of seventeen and Isabella three of six. As a widow, Marie Rose became an independent property owner and gained a reputation as an amateur author/historian, and she continued to mingle with southern Alberta’s community leaders. In fact, she had taken over the management of family finances well before Charlie’s death in 1914. While she was able to survive (sometimes in real poverty) through a number of activities, such as taking in boarders and working as a midwife, Marie Rose did eventually have to live with members of her extended family, both in Lethbridge and in Edmonton, until she died.

After James died in 1925 and his sons were left to manage his and Isabella’s vast estate, the greatest global economic downturn ever experienced wreaked havoc on Prairie real estate values. Because the bulk of the Lougheed estate was in real estate, Isabella and her sons faced financial ruin, and Isabella died virtually penniless. It was only out of respect for her long-standing contributions to the new western economy and society that the municipality of Calgary allowed Isabella to remain in her stately home until her death. This meant that, even after she lost all of her material wealth, Isabella was able to carry on as Lady Lougheed of Beaulieu House, continuing to entertain high-ranking dignitaries who visited Alberta, and continuing in her commitment to various philanthropic and social groups.

It is interesting that both Isabella and Marie Rose were interviewed not long before their deaths and both were described using similar adjectives. To their contemporaries, Isabella and Marie Rose were both pioneers and colourful characters. Indeed, circumstances had brought Isabella and Marie Rose to southern Alberta and enabled both of them to create personae as homesteading pioneers. This experience was very likely common among many other Metis women and men at the time. For many Metis, while the move to southern Alberta after the fighting of 1885 was partly motivated by economic factors, it was also motivated by social factors.

Two of the social factors that led to the exodus from Red River, and contributed to Marie Rose’s and Isabella’s success, were Metis customs whereby families traditionally lived close to kin groups and also incorporated outsiders in a way that would enrich the web of kinship. For many Metis, the period after 1885 afforded them the opportunity to stake homesteads in southern Alberta because that district was slow to attract newcomers. Diane Payment concludes that, when the Metis established communities in new geographic areas at the turn of the twentieth century, “family, culture, and lifestyle” continued to “shape and distinguish Metis society.” Relying on current interviews with Batoche Elders, Payment identifies what she calls an “enduring hidden pride in their Métis heritage.”85 Using a degree of reasoned speculation, we can see that, although there was a need to supress their Metis identities, both Marie Rose and Isabella felt that enduring hidden pride.

The fact that a pride in Metis ancestry remains “hidden” in the private realm for many Metis even today gives some sense of the need for Marie Rose and Isabella to obscure their own ethnicity those many years ago. Their ability to obscure that ethnicity gave Marie Rose and Isabella not only a sense of power but a heightened sense of their own uniqueness as they helped to construct the new Prairie West. It is clear also that both always recognized the value of their early culture, regardless of the level of their material wealth. This is particularly so later in life as the wealth each had acquired sank to desperate lows, but it is also evident at the beginning of their married lives, when they lived in areas that were slow to attract newcomers and when they relied out of necessity on their early fur trade culture and kin connections. These two Metis women served as agents of transition as the fur trade gave way to a new economy. Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed were important contributors to the construction of the Prairie West in the same way that many other Metis women surely were, but whose lives have yet to be studied.