Marie Dorion

Marie Dorion was an Ioway or Métis woman, probably born around 1786, who travelled west with the Pacific Fur Company’s overland expedition to the Pacific Northwest. She was the expedition’s only adult woman and travelled with her husband Pierre Dorion Jr. and their children across an exceptionally demanding route.

After the expedition fragmented, Dorion survived severe winter conditions and the deaths of members of her party, using her knowledge and endurance to keep herself and her children alive. She later settled in the Oregon Country, remarried and raised a family, and is remembered as one of the best-documented women associated with the early overland fur-trade era.

In Jane Kirkpatrick’s A Name of Her Own, Marie Dorion refuses to remain in St Louis when her husband joins the 1811 Pacific Fur Company expedition, taking two young sons across the continent through unfamiliar country and unstable leadership. Along the route she meets Sacagawea, another Indigenous mother whose experience gives Marie friendship and warning. In Jane Kirkpatrick’s Every Fixed Star, in 1814 Marie Dorion brings her surviving family to the Okanogan settlement, where fur-trade instability and the disappearance or failure of loved ones make ordinary security difficult to sustain. In Jane Kirkpatrick’s Hold Tight the Thread, by the 1840s Marie Dorion Venier Toupin is established on French Prairie as British and American settlers, missionaries, French Canadian families and disease-stricken Indigenous communities compete within a rapidly changing Oregon Country.