Marie Dorion and The Astoria Expedition

 | Wild West  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

After camp was established, Hunt went back to St. Louis, as he still needed to hire additional men, one being a Sioux interpreter. For that position he obtained the services of Pierre Dorion Junior. Dorion’s mother was a Yankton Sioux and his father, Pierre Dorion Senior was an Indian trader from Quebec, whom Lewis and Clark had engaged as an interpreter to the Yankton Sioux. The elder Dorion remained with the Yanktons to promote Lewis and Clark’s Indian policy, which was to end intertribal wars, encourage some chiefs to go as ambassadors to Washington, and for the tribes to accept trade with Americans, rather than with their usual Spanish and French traders. When Lewis and Clark continued up the Missouri River, Pierre Dorion Senior was to gather a delegation of Sioux chiefs and escort them to Washington.

Pierre Dorion Junior had been hired the previous year by the Missouri Fur Company, based in St. Louis. That company, formed in 1808 by Manuel Lisa, Andrew Henry, Pierre Chouteau and others, sent its first fur trapping expedition up the Missouri River the next year. Lisa was the most prominent Indian trader in St. Louis, as the Spanish had granted him a monopoly of trade with the nearby Osage Indians. He had been the principal supplier for Lewis and Clark. As Lisa’s employee, Dorion had gotten in debt for liquor at the Fort Mandan trading post and was looking for a way to avoid paying. Hence, Hunt’s offer of employment was a welcome outlet. Lisa was eager to keep Dorion away from Hunt, because Astor’s new Pacific Fur Company, chartered in 1810 as a subsidiary of the American Fur Company, would be in direct competition with his company.

Dorion’s wife, Marie, and their two sons ages 2 and 4 were with him in St. Louis and all four left with Hunt in the spring. It is believed that Dorion had taken the young Iowa Indian woman for a wife about 1806, after abandoning a Yankton woman named Holy Rainbow. En route up the Missouri River Dorion learned that Lisa intended to have him arrested at the frontier town of St. Charles, in western Missouri. That news prompted Dorion and family to leave the boat. After Hunt had departed from St. Charles, Dorion rejoined him, but without his family. All were not contented in the Dorion family. Pierre and Marie had quarreled; he had beat her, causing her to flee into the woods. Not wanting to delay, Hunt shoved off without her. The next morning, though, Marie and the children voluntarily rejoined them.

The party continued upriver to Fort Osage, where they stayed three days. Again the Dorions quarreled. Marie wanted to stay with new-found friends, so Pierre had to physically place her in one of the boats. Marie’s desire to not undertake the journey may have been influenced by the fact that she was then about three months pregnant. There is no record that she ever again rebelled and the couple remained together until Pierre’s violent death.

Nine days after the Tonquin party established Astoria, Hunt’s party left their winter camp on April 21, 1811. At that time, the expedition was composed of 60 persons, five of whom were partners of Astor’s Pacific Fur Company. With Hunt were two English naturalists, John Bradbury and Thomas Nuthall. The employees were not mountain men but were mostly French-Canadian river-men, similar to those that Astor’s American Fur Company employed in the Great Lakes region. The armament on their four boats consisted of two howitzers and a swivel gun. They were not the only expedition on the river. Behind and gaining on them was Lisa’s party, which had left St. Louis on April 2.

Lisa was going up the Missouri to collect the furs his trappers and traders had obtained during the winter and to search for his partner Andrew Henry, who had not been heard from for two years. Blackfoot Indians had dislodged Henry from a post that he had tried to establish at the Forks of the Missouri River in what would become western Montana. That was at the junction of the three rivers that Lewis and Clark had named the Jefferson, the Madison, and the Gallatin, with the Jefferson leading them southwest toward the Lemhi Pass and across the Continental Divide. Most of Henry’s men had returned to St. Louis, but Henry and a few others had crossed the Continental Divide and built Fort Henry near the headwaters of the Snake River (in present-day southeast Idaho).

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: Adventurers & Trail Blazers, Expeditions, People, The Wild West, Wild West, Women's History

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.