The last two days in the archives have furnished me with several treasures. One of them is a book published in 1930 called Red Heroines of the Northwest by Byron Defenbach. The second of three parts is dedicated to “The Dorion Woman.” Otherwise known as Marie Dorion, she was a 25 year old woman that traveled with 2 children from Oklahoma  to Missouri to northern Wyoming all the way to the Pacific. Along the way she had another child – he died 2 days into his life. Madame Dorion ended up near Salem Oregon where she died in 1850 at the age of about 67.

If you read about this woman on the net and in the texts produced about her, what you get is often the bones of the Astoria trek to the mouth of the Columbia, and a lot about her apparently abusive husband, and the stuff about her bearing her third son on the trail, but mostly what you get is the author’s view of what all this means. “Marie” makes a perfect canvas for our views about women and the qualities we assign them because so little is known about who she, in fact, was. I mean we don’t even know her actual name. She is called Dorion Woman because her husband’s paternal name was “Dorion” and she was his woman.

We know this, at least in part, because of Washington Irving and his “Tragical Story Told by the Squaw of Pierre Dorion.” Much emphasis is given in Irving’s account to her “presence of mind and force of character” and certainly her survival seems, from the story, due in part to her attention to her household duties. This is why, for example, she had all the supplies that she would need in the near future if she and her children were to survive the winter. The story she tells, and that Irving would relay, about the fate of the Astoria party is what made her memorable to the public but no one, it seems, thought to ask her name.

Time tells much about women’s interpreters. Irving published his story in 1836. Defenbach published his in 1929 0r 30.  Both accounts pay attention to Pierre Dorion, Irving calling him the “hybrid interpreter” as a way of describing his bi-racial heritage. Irving doesn’t mention the drunkenness as far as I know. There is a section when he is describing the French boatmen and how they lift their flagging spirits – by song, nary a drop of spirit is mentioned. But at that time alcohol might have been seen as a problem with respect to trading with Indians (their abode being the destination of the boatmen, trade goods being the cargo) and granted as a necessity to those water-haulers whose spirits needed lifting, but no one had come up with the idea of denying it to civilized white folk yet.

But by Defenbach’s time prohibition and its ideas had taken its toll on the interpretive mind of writers. In his story much attention is paid to Pierre Dorion’s use of alcohol.  However, there is still a touch of admiration: “When sober,” Defenbach says “the stalwart young half-breed was a fellow of recognized ability as a trapper and trader. He had worked for Choteau and other Americans who were beginning to resist the monopoly of the fur trade by the Hudson’s Bay and other British concerns.”  A drunk, yes, but he could hunt, trap, shoot and, on top of that, was on the right side politically. But when it comes to Marie…

(Pierre’s) proved himself faithful and serviceable. His occupation called for almost constant travel up and down the Big River, and in these journeyings he usually dragged the squaw with him. Nor was this his only encumbrance. The couple’s first son, the sturdy Baptiste, was born in 1806, and two or thee years later another lad arrived at the tepee. This latter was a frailer type of boy, with snake-like eyes and a mouth that extended from ear to ear; they named him “Paul.”

To these two children the Woman clung with the savage devotion of a mother-wolf, bringing them up after the Indian fashion. There was no discipline, the few instructions given having to do only with the children’s physical requirements. The only virtues inculcated were those of fortitude and courage, and even these traits were warped into ferocity and thirst for blood. Such ideals as those of morality, gratitude, truthfulness, unselfishness and honesty were not sought to be conveyed by the Woman to her children, primarily because she had no such ideals herself or any conception of them. The first precepts she instilled into those young hearts were those of cruelty, murder, and rapine.

Jeez.

Shortly after this little exploration of the Woman’s character and moral rectitude (compare Irving’s and Defenbach’s ideas about the ideal woman), he talks about Pierre’s accidental fall into the trip to the Pacific, which he would not survive but his wife and children would. This fall, the story leads us to believe, came because of alcohol.

The processes of evolution have never produced anything more averse to solitude than is whiskey, even a quart of it…Pierre found himself surrounded by, or perhaps one might better say surrounding, a whole flock of quarts. He passed through alternating stages of hilarity, amiability, deep melancholy, and extreme irritability. Several days and nights passed in the enjoyment or suffering of these various emotions.

(Aside: the use of the word “evolution” adds a nice little sparkle from the conceptual bounty that is Social Darwinism – also something alive and well during Defenbach’s time. I wonder if he was a eugenicist?)

What follows is a rendition of what Defenbach thinks happened when a drunk, angry and now without the salary due him by the Spaniard, Manuel Lisa, and includes an almost jovial boxing match between husband and wife. The outcome is that Pierre Dorion finds himself working for Lisa and having to cart his wife and two sons along for the ride.

Ultimately, Defenbach (nor Irving for that matter) doesn’t say much about Marie Dorion but what he inadvertently says about how he sees the world is enormous. Apart from the idea of what women are, there is the purchase place for blame. It’s not surprising that in the late 1920s when Defenbach was probably writing this text, that alcohol got much of it. Poor old Pierre, a noble sort with his rustic trade, but reduced to dragging his baggage around, getting hobbled by a treacherous Spaniard, a snake-eyed son and by that morally bankrupt Woman. Think what he could have made of himself if wasn’t for that demon rum!

meh

Would that there was someone who would haunt Oregon’s historical archives for a more accurate view of the woman. I haven’t had time for that yet, so perhaps it already exists. I’ll have to check into it.