“The Timely Arrival of This Poor Unfortunate Woman”
On the morning of April 17, 1814, seventy-six well-armed men in ten canoes fought their way up what William Clark called “the great Columbia River,” contending with the “strong and rapid” current as they ventured into the Rocky Mountains from the Pacific coast. They had embarked two weeks earlier from Astoria, a trading post at the mouth of the Columbia named after the renowned fur magnate John Jacob Astor, America’s first millionaire, who had funded the enterprise—but who would never see the settlement. The War of 1812 and the sale of Astoria to Canada’s North West Company had compelled these voyagers, some accompanied by Indian wives and children, to return to their home base in Montreal. They faced the daunting task of ascending the Columbia north into present British Columbia and then winding their way east across the continent, enduring cold, illness, injury, and hunger while infrequently replenishing their supplies at a smattering of trading houses as they paddled the Canoe, Athabasca, North Saskatchewan, Winnipeg, French, and Ottawa Rivers and a host of lakes, including Lake Superior. They would reach their homes early in September, but only after they had made an endless series of troublesome portages—one in neck-high icy water—scaled a series of snowy mountain passes, and lost two of their number to the white water of the Athabasca.[1]
The Astorians were well underway by 8:00 a.m. as they journeyed through the “Great Plains of the Columbia,” in present-day southeastern Washington, an area quite unlike the region of lush forests near the coast. They could see “nothing but bare hills” in the distance, with hardly a shrub or a patch of grass visible. Steep cliffs, some two hundred feet high, rose on both sides of the tremendous river, nearly a thousand yards wide at this point. The barren plains had yielded no game, and the group was subsisting on “extremely lean” horses and dogs purchased from Indians. Then, near the mouth of the “meandering Walla Walla, a beautiful little river, lined with weeping willows,” they saw “three canoes, the [Indians] in which were struggling with their paddles to overtake” them. Determined to be on their way—and concluding their pursuers were simply curiosity-seekers—the Astorians “paid little heed,” not breaking their resolute rhythm as they plied their oars. But then a child’s voice cried out, “Arretez donc, arretez donc!” (“Stop, stop!”) and the men promptly put ashore and waited. Most of them were French-Canadian, and the sound of a child calling to them in French had sparked their concern.[2]
The landing of the fleet made for a noisy, chaotic scene, with bearded, buckskin-clad boatmen yelling instructions as the oversized canoes—five of birch bark and five of cedar wood, all ten brimming with people and supplies—crowded the rocky shoreline, their sails lowered. The armada totaled ninety passengers, and most of them glanced back for a glimpse of the enfant who had called out to them. Then, as the Indians manning the three smaller canoes approached, the Astorians were shocked to see Marie Dorion, the Iowa Indian wife of the well-traveled hunter and interpreter Pierre Dorion Jr., and her two young boys.[3] Seven months earlier, in July of 1813, Marie and her husband and sons had departed Astoria with a small group of trappers bound for Idaho’s Snake River country to “join there the hunters left by Messrs. Hunt and Crooks, near Fort Henry, and to secure horses and provisions for [the] journey” back to St. Louis.[4] The hunters they were seeking included three men Marie knew well—John Hoback, Jacob Reznor, and Edward Robinson, three Kentuckians now in the seventh year of their Western sojourn.
As for Dorion and his family, they had plunged westward in 1811 with five score men under the command of twenty-eight-year-old Wilson Price Hunt, a St. Louis merchant singled out by Astor to lead his western fur enterprise. Hunt had been assisted by two of the most fascinating personalities in the history of the early fur trade—Ramsay Crooks and Robert McClellan, unlikely partners whose names will forever be spoken in tandem: Crooks & McClellan. With Hunt’s rag-tag collection of savvy North West Company veterans; hard-drinking and hard-driving guides, interpreters, boatmen, and hunters (some French-Canadian, some American, and others Anglo-Indian); and one woman and two children, Crooks and McClellan had made the unforgettable and unforgiving odyssey from the Missouri Territory to the Pacific coast, the second group of Americans to cross from east to west, preceded only by Lewis and Clark. During that journey, Marie had earned a reputation for her impressive stamina, but now she looked wan and feeble.
Several voyagers disembarked to secure a landing spot and check for rattlesnakes among the rocks and wormwood, for they had seen many snakes the previous day. A familiar stench filled the air, both from the “great quantities” of salmon, steelhead trout, and sturgeon drying on Indian scaffolds and from dead fish littering the shore. Marie Dorion’s escorts guided their craft to the edge of the water—these were the friendly Walla Walla Indians, described by one Astorian as “tall, raw-boned” men with “strong and masculine” voices, “well dressed; having all buffalo-robes, deer-skin leggings, very white, . . . garnished with porcupine quills.”[5]
Someone helped Marie ashore, and her two boys scrambled out of the canoe after her. She undoubtedly hoped to see friends in the group, and she was not disappointed, spotting one man after another who had traveled in Hunt’s group, with each familiar face bringing vivid memories of the interminable trek.[6]
Taking full—and normal—advantage of his status as a partner in Astor’s Pacific Fur Company, Donald McKenzie sat in the lead canoe as a passenger, not an oarsman. Marie likely remembered him as a strong-willed man who had argued with Hunt as often as he supported him. But perhaps her most memorable image of McKenzie had nothing to do with commerce or status.
Weeks after striking out overland from the upper Missouri River, the caravan had followed a Crow Indian trail that “led them over rough hills, and through broken gullies, during which time they suffered great fatigue from the ruggedness of the country.” Traveling in the extreme northeast corner of modern Wyoming, the group found themselves in the badlands lying between the Little Powder and Powder Rivers, their water supply suddenly vanished, the heretofore cool weather suddenly “oppressively warm.”[7] Hunt wrote that “the great heat, the bad road and the lack of water caused much suffering,” adding that “several persons were on the verge of losing courage.”[8] McKenzie’s faithful dog, which had struggled so hard to keep up, grew weaker and weaker, its eyes sunken, looking to McKenzie for help, but he had no water to give. Then the dog finally gave out, collapsing on the rocky trail, its heavy panting ceased.
Louis St. Michel, one of a host of French-Canadian oarsmen, sat in another canoe, wielding a paddle and looking right at home. But Marie knew something of what he had endured. Barely a month after forging a tortuous path across the barren ravines, the overlanders fought cold and frostbite as they followed a swift river through a steep, snow-covered canyon. “One of our horses fell with his pack into the river from a height of nearly two hundred feet, but was uninjured,” Hunt wrote. The river flowed into a larger, rapid body of water they called “Mad River because of its swiftness. On its banks, and a little above the confluence, [were] situated the three peaks which we had seen [twelve days earlier].”[9] There were signs of beaver everywhere, and Marie and Pierre Dorion had watched as St. Michel and three others prepared to stay behind and trap. Enthusiastic to a man, they checked their Kentucky long rifles and made sure they had sufficient powder and balls. They spread their scalping knives, long English axes, tomahawks, and two-and-a-half-pound steel beaver traps out on the ground and counted them. They packed their buffalo robes and bedrolls, their fishhooks and moccasin awls.[10] They bade farewell to their friends. As Irving wrote, trapping “the upper part of Mad River, and . . . the neighboring streams of the mountains . . . would probably occupy them for some months; and, when they should have collected a sufficient quantity of peltries, they were to pack them upon their horses and make the best of their way to the mouth of the Columbia River, or to any intermediate post which might be established of the company.” St. Michel and his companions set out with “stout hearts,” determined to strike it rich, but their “lonely cruisings into a wild and hostile wilderness” were like “being cast adrift in the ship’s yawl in the midst of the ocean.”[11] After being robbed by Crow Indians, they strayed through the Snake River country for more than a year. Three of them somehow survived—they were rescued more than a year later and brought to Astoria.
Marie saw familiar faces in most of the canoes. Joseph Delaunay had barely escaped drowning during the group’s winter in the wild, a few weeks before Marie gave birth to her third child. Pierre Brugier had worked with Pierre Dorion for weeks near Astoria, constructing some of the cedar canoes now on the scene. But Marie was likely most relieved to see the Iroquois Indian Ignace Shonowane and his wife and especially their children, the only friends her boys had ever known. Assigned to hunt together, Shonowane and Dorion had grown virtually inseparable, and their families formed their own community at a camp a mile or two from Astoria, along Young’s Bay.
Now, as Shonowane and his family, Delaunay, McKenzie, and the others gathered around Marie and her sons, they asked what had become of her husband and his nine companions, knowing full well that whatever his faults, Dorion was not the kind of man who would abandon his wife and children. “This woman informed us, to our no small dismay,” reported Gabriel Franchere, “of the tragical fate of all those who composed that party.”[12]
When she reached the Pacific Ocean in 1812, Marie Dorion became the second woman known to have crossed the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains to reach the western coast. The first was Sacagawea, the only member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition destined to become as famous as the captains themselves. Each of these two extraordinary Indian women had been born around 1788, had married a French-Canadian interpreter who would find himself in the employ of Lewis and Clark, had been the sole female member of a historic band of explorers, and had traveled with a young son named Baptiste (Marie with son Paul as well). Not only that, but each woman’s final days would be shrouded in controversy. Adding serendipity to coincidence, the two possibly struck up a friendship between 1809 and 1811. Their paths then forever diverged because the noble Sacagawea, praised by Lewis and Clark for her “fortitude and resolution” during the “long, dangerous, and fatiguing route to the Pacific Ocean,” fell ill and died of typhus in December of 1812, thirteen months before Marie faced the test of a lifetime.[13]
Given the similarities between Sacagawea and Marie, they had experienced surprisingly different journeys into the West. The former had taken a route sanctioned by Thomas Jefferson and carefully planned by officers under his command. Lewis and Clark had heeded Jefferson’s instructions with exactness, exploring the Missouri River as the president requested and even reaching its source at the edge of the Rocky Mountains. They had scaled those mountains and followed the Columbia—one of the western rivers specifically suggested by Jefferson—to the Pacific. The dutiful captains had returned with a remarkable record of the expedition—journals of seven different men comprising close to one million words rife with “careful observations of latitude & longitude”; extensive notes on the “language, traditions, . . . food, clothing, & domestic accomodations” of the Indians; facts and figures on “vegetable productions, . . . animals of the country, . . . mineral productions of every kind, . . . the proportion of rainy, cloudy, & clear days, . . . lightning, hail, snow, [and] ice”; and a host of other details on just about any topic imaginable.[14] Moreover, the expert cartographer Clark, who had sketched a multitude of maps along the way, soon produced a grand map of the West that would prove hugely influential and amazingly accurate. And perhaps most notably, in the year and a half that Sacagawea had “proceeded on” with Lewis and Clark, not a single member of the group had perished. By every indication, this course would guide the next collection of pioneers, and the next.
Marie, by contrast, had traversed the continent with a company of traders forging westward in haphazard fashion. Chancing to meet three vagabonds paddling canoes down the Missouri, they scuttled their plans to retrace Lewis and Clark’s eastward course and convinced the trio—who lacked the maps, compasses, sextants, quadrants, and telescopes so carefully transported and used by the Corps of Discovery—to guide them across unchartered territory. They soon lost their bearings in rugged Wyoming mountains never seen by Lewis and Clark. Reaching the Idaho plain just as an early winter set in, the overland Astorians contended with the unforgiving Snake River for three interminable months, forgetting visions of wealth in the face of their harrowing ordeal. Finally defeated—almost destroyed—by the “Mad River,” they slaughtered their few remaining horses to stay alive, fragmented into desultory groups, and hobbled across Oregon’s Blue Mountains on foot, not reaching the coast until the early months of 1812. By then five men had drowned or disappeared. As the historian Alvin M. Josephy has noted, Marie and her fellow travelers suffered “perhaps the most extreme privations and hardships of any westering expedition in American history.”[15] Two diarists kept scant records, understandably concentrating on the privations and hardships, drafting not a single weather log, point of latitude and longitude, or map. This course looked likely to be followed by no one.
The irony was that Sacagawea had taken a path westward that grew obsolete almost immediately, going untrod by the pilgrims who followed her and having little direct impact on the settlement of the West, while Marie’s route laid the foundation of the Oregon Trail, a byway destined to link Atlantic and Pacific, spurring national expansion as it carried tens of thousands of explorers, beaver trappers, buffalo hunters, Indian fighters, cowpokes, mule skinners, sheep herders, homesteaders, families of three or four generations, ranchers, schoolmarms, seamstresses, shop owners, blacksmiths, itinerant preachers, missionaries, miners, gold-seekers, snake-oil salesmen, gamblers, hired hands and hired guns, bushwhackers, bartenders, and prostitutes to the Promised Land.
Wars, treaties, trade pacts, explorations, and get-rich-quick schemes were all part of the current that pushed Marie westward, with everyone from Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson to Lewis and Clark and John Jacob Astor taking a role. But the key influence—the brute force—that dictated Marie’s future was of course Pierre Dorion Jr., the enigmatic interpreter par excellence, who around 1806 took her as a “wife” through barter or wager. Nothing is known about Marie’s life prior to that, but Dorion and his father had traded among Iowa Indians near the mouth of the Des Moines River around 1800, and perhaps the son had returned there in search of a second wife. (He had earlier taken a Yankton Sioux wife.)[16]
Born in the late 1770s, and thus a decade older than Marie, Dorion was the son of Pierre Dorion Sr., a French-Canadian from a prominent Quebec family who had abandoned life in the white settlements, learned Indian languages and Indian ways, taken a young Yankton Sioux woman as a wife, and fathered several sons. With their base in the Yankton Sioux country of modern southeast South Dakota, the Dorions became famous—and infamous—up and down the Missouri River. “Father and sons would occasionally get drunk together,” wrote Washington Irving, “and then the cabin was a scene of ruffian brawl and fighting, in the course of which the old Frenchman was apt to get soundly belabored by his mongrel offspring.” Such widespread rumors hardly deterred traders, explorers, and government officials from hiring the Dorions because Pierre Sr. and his sons were such fluent speakers of Siouan and such skilled negotiators. Gordon Speck hardly exaggerated when he wrote that “three generations of Dorions served the American West. They guided civilization from the Missouri to the Pacific and their lives spanned history from an unexplored wilderness to the State House on the Willamette.”[17]
Dorion expertise was not lost on Lewis and Clark, who had hired Dorion the Elder less than a month into the expedition. On June 12, 1804, as they made their way up the Missouri, they met a group of French-Canadian traders transporting trade goods to St. Louis. Several of Lewis and Clark’s men bartered for buffalo robes and moccasins, and Lewis purchased three hundred pounds’ worth of buffalo fat, useful as both cooking oil and insect repellent. But the captains were most interested in the leader of the group, an “old Frenchman” who spoke several Indian languages—Pierre Dorion Sr., apparently at least in his mid-fifties by this time.
Whether Clark learned or already knew that Dorion had been an associate of his brother George Rogers Clark during the Revolutionary War is uncertain, but he described old Dorion as a “verry Confidential friend” of the Sioux Indians, “he having resided with the nation 20 odd years.” The dialogue with Dorion and his fellows was so good that Lewis and Clark, normally quite punctual about getting up the river, spent the rest of the day questioning the traders and no doubt sharing some of the whiskey they had onboard the keelboat. When the Corps of Discovery departed the next morning, Dorion went with them. “Colcluded to take old Durioun back as fur as the Soux nation,” wrote Clark, “with a view to get some of their Chiefs to Visit the Presdt. of the United S.”[18]
Two and a half months after Dorion signed on, in late August, when the Corps had reached Yankton Sioux country and wanted to council with the chiefs, Lewis and Clark met another member of Dorion’s family—Pierre Jr. “At 4 oClock P M. Sergt. Pryor & Mr. Dorion [Sr.] with 5 Chiefs and about 70 men &c. arrived on the opposite Side[.] We Sent over a Perogue & Mr. Dorion & his Son [Pierre Jr.] who was tradeing with the Indians Came over with Sergt. Pryer, and in formed us that the Chiefs were there.”[19]
During the key negotiations that followed over the next several days, Pierre Jr. assisted with interpreting and also helped educate Lewis and Clark in Yankton culture as the Indians celebrated the captains’ visit with music and dance, demonstrations of the boys’ bow-and-arrow skills, and delicacies that included roasted dog. Pierre Jr.’s brief stint with the Corps enhanced his already impressive resumé and also started him on a historic journey: he would be the only person to join in all three of the monumental passages marking the opening of the West—those of Lewis and Clark, Manuel Lisa, and the overland Astorians.
Grateful they had halted their canoes when they did, the voyagers thanked the Indians who had rescued Marie and her boys. “We made them some presents to repay their care and pains,” wrote Franchere, “and they returned well satisfied.”[20]
The presents, probably wampum—small seashell beads strung together—and tobacco and powder and balls, would all be put to good use. “These Indians are passionately fond of horse racing,” noted Franchere. “The bets they make on these occasions sometimes strip them of all that they possess.”[21]
Marie’s sons, Baptiste, six, and Paul, four, clung to her as the voyagers offered food and consolation. Some in the party likely proffered clothing to replace the tatters now worn by Marie and her boys. The seating arrangement in the ten canoes—up to this point each canoe had transported six or seven boatmen and two or three passengers—was reorganized to make room for the three new passengers, who were to be taken to a trading post at the mouth of the Okanogan River (in north central Washington).
Before resuming their voyage up the Columbia, however, the Astorians, who had seen their share of hardship and death, had to know the details of what had become of their compatriots and how Marie, Baptiste, and Paul had survived. Marie took up her narrative again and they sat enraptured. As Washington Irving would so aptly put it, “she had a story to tell.”[22]
1. Ross, First Settlers, 116. See Franchere, Narrative, 137–80, for a description of the journey from Astoria to Montreal. One of Astor’s clerks, Gabriel Franchere, was with the party and writes of his homecoming: “I hastened to the paternal roof, where the family were not less surprised than overjoyed at beholding me. Not having heard of me, since I sailed from New York [in 1810], they had believed, in accordance with the common report, that I had been murdered by the savages, with Mr. M’Kay and the crew of the Tonquin: and certainly, it was by the goodness of Providence that I found myself thus safe and sound, in the midst of my relations and friends, at the end of a voyage accompanied by so many perils, and in which so many of my companions had met with untimely death” (Narrative, 180, bracketed insertion added). The durable Franchere, who lived until 1863 and was the last surviving Astorian, identifies the two men who drowned in rapids of the Athabasca River as André Bélanger and Olivier Roy Lapensée. The latter was likely the brother of Basile and Ignace Lapensée, who both drowned at the mouth of the Columbia in March of 1811 (as related in chapter 6, herein). They were from Montreal, so one of Franchere’s companions presumably delivered the sad news to their parents (Narrative, 55).
2. Franchere, Narrative, 138; Ross, First Settlers, 136; Franchere, Narrative, 142, bracketed insertion added. Ross and Cox both report that the Astorians met Marie near the mouth of the Walla Walla River; Franchere, however, says it was farther upstream, beyond the mouth of the Snake River. Thus, the two eyewitnesses who recorded Marie’s rescue, Franchere and Ross, disagree on this point. (Ross, First Settlers, 265; Cox, Adventures, 94; Franchere, Narrative, 138–42.)
3. Although Pierre Dorion Jr.’s widow eventually became widely known as Marie, the earliest extant document mentioning that name was created on July 19, 1841, when she was baptized and accepted into the fellowship of the Roman Catholic Church, with a record at Oregon’s Willamette Mission listing her as “Marie Laguivoise.” Laguivoise was apparently a variation of Aiaouez—also spelled Aieway or Ayauwa—the name of her native nation, later simplified as Iowa. Whether Dorion or anyone else called her Marie is simply unknown because record keepers on the scene always called her “Dorion’s wife” or “Dorion’s squaw,” never mentioning a first name. (Barry, “Madame Dorion,” 275; web site http://museum.bmi.net/MARIE%20DORION%20PEOPLE/marie_laguisvoise.htm, accessed June 15, 2011.)
4. Franchere, Narrative, 140.
5. Franchere, Narrative, 139; William Clark’s journal entry, October 19, 1805, Moulton, Journals, 5:306; Ross, First Settlers, 137.
6. Alexander Henry made a list of the men in the group, and Elliott Coues offered valuable annotation. See Coues, New Light, 870–75. Every primary source on Astoria (and secondary source, for that matter) seems to have a unique way of spelling Astorian names, most of which have several variants. I have largely followed the conventions of Robert F. Jones in Annals of Astoria and Kenneth W. Porter in “Rolls of Overland Astorians.”
7. Irving, Astoria, 239.
8. Hunt, “Diary,” 283, bracketed insertion added.
9. Hunt, “Diary,” 288, bracketed insertions added. “Mad River” was the Snake River, and the three peaks were the Tetons.
10. See Russell, Firearms, Traps, and Tools, 55, 125, 182, 403–6, for details on the weapons and tools possessed by the Astorians.
11. Irving, Astoria, 265–66.
12. Franchere, Narrative, 142.
13. Lewis’s journal entry, May 16, 1805, Moulton, Journals, 4:157; William Clark to Toussaint Charbonneau, August 20, 1806, Jackson, Letters, 1:315. On December 20, 1812, at a fort south of present Mobridge, South Dakota, a clerk by the name of John Luttig recorded that “this Evening the Wife of Charbonneau a Snake Squaw, died of a putrid fever she was a good and the best Women in the fort, aged about 25 years she left a fine infant girl” (Drumm, Journal, 106). This description fits Sacagawea to a T, but by not identifying her by name, Luttig left the door open for the argument that inevitably ensued. In the early 1900s, two researchers studied a collection of letters and affidavits, independently concluding that an elderly Indian woman called Porivo, who had died on Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation in 1884, was actually Sacagawea. But the documents had all been created at least twenty years after Porivo’s death, and no researcher had interviewed the woman herself. (Nor did any document written while Porivo was still alive claim she was Sacagawea.) Then, in the mid-1950s, Dale Morgan discovered a William Clark document written between 1825 and 1828 clearly stating that Sacagawea was dead, convincing most Lewis and Clark scholars they had been correct in their assumption that Luttig’s note referred to Sacagawea. Not everyone was convinced, however, and the debate continues to this day, with maps of Wyoming often listing “Grave of Sacajawea” near Fort Washakie. See Morris, Fate, 210–13, and Howard, Sacajawea, 175–92, for more on this fascinating controversy. As detailed in the biographical directory, there are also two incompatible versions of what happened to Marie Dorion in her later years.
14. Jefferson to Lewis, June 20, 1803, Jackson, Letters, 1:61–63.
15. Josephy, “Ordeal in Hell’s Canyon,” 73.
16. Speck, Breeds, 151; Clark’s journal entry, September 1, 1806, Moulton, Journals, 338.
17. Irving, Astoria, 141; Speck, Breeds, 151.
18. Clark’s journal entry, June 12, 1804, Moulton, Journals, 2:294–5.
19. Clark’s journal entry, August 29, 1804, Moulton, Journals, 3:22; bracketed insertions added.
20. Franchere, Narrative, 143.
21. Franchere, Narrative, 140.
22. Irving, Astoria, 498.