4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL JULY 19, 2017
O PINION
Offbeat Oregon History: Survival ninja
The history of
Oregon sometimes
resembles an old
manuscript from which every other
page has been ripped out. Throughout
the 1800s and much of the 1900s, most
people only deemed stories worth pre-
serving if they featured wealthy men of
northern-European extraction.
But there are one or two individuals who
have overcome this handicap through
sheer colorfulness or competence.Case
in point: Marie Aioe Dorion, the Ioway
woman who accompanied the Astorian
Party on its ill-starred overland journey
from St. Louis to Astoria in 1810.
Portland Oregonian writer Joseph Rose
recently compared Marie Dorion to
Hugh Glass, the character played by
Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2016 mov-
ie The Revenant. The comparison is
spot-on. If anything, Glass’s story isn’t
extreme enough to measure up.
The legendary part of Marie’s story
starts relatively late in her life, several
years after she got married in 1806 to a
French-Canadian translator named Pierre
Dorion. Pierre seems to have been some-
thing of a rough-and-ready hard-drink-
ing saloon-brawling tough guy. By 1810
when the Astorian party was preparing
to journey to the West Coast, she and
Pierre had two children, both boys: Paul,
who was 1 or 2; and Baptiste, who was
4 or 5.
The Astorian party was a project of
wealthy investor John Jacob Astor.
His plan was to equip an expedition to
follow in the footsteps of the Lewis and
Clark expedition, establish a trading post
at the mouth of the Columbia River, and
use it to leverage a great worldwide trad-
ing empire. And he was in a hurry to do
this, because certain British rivals were
making similar plans via Canada.
To establish his outpost, Astor equipped
a sailing ship, the Tonquin, and sent it
“around the horn” to Astoria to set things
up. Meanwhile, he also outfi tted a large
overland expedition which would blaze a
trail that others could follow, to establish
trading posts along the way as part of his
planned worldwide network.
It was this overland expedition that Ma-
rie Dorian was, reluctantly, dragooned
into.
And that happened in an unusual way.
Her husband, Pierre, was approached by
the leader of the overland Astorian expe-
dition, Wilson Price Hunt. Hunt offered
Pierre a good salary and a $200 cash
bonus to sign up with the Astorian party.
This might have represented a problem,
because Pierre was already making plans
to accompany another trading expedi-
tion under the direction of New Orleans
native Manuel Lisa. But Pierre didn’t see
it that way. He saw it as a golden oppor-
tunity to cadge $200 from this Eastern
sucker and disappear in the night with
Lisa’s expedition, doubling his money.
Home he went to tell his wife, Marie,
all about it, and to have her get the two
boys ready for a surreptitious nighttime
departure. He stopped at a watering hole
along the way to celebrate his scheme,
and by the time he made it home, the
$200 had been somewhat depleted.
But upon arrival, he found a buzz-harsh-
ing welcome from his wife. Marie was
dead set against his scheme. Absolutely
not, she told him; we will do nothing of
the sort.
If Pierre had engaged the family’s word
of honor to work for the As-
torians, and accepted $200
to secure it, she told him,
Wheel City
they would follow through
Given the tree come before the ire, but an additional slogan for on it. Stealing $200 and
Cottage Grove could be "Wheel City."
sneaking off into the woods
Residents see and hear new, used, vintage, restored and remod-
eled cars, race cars, and pick-ups plus vans, RVs, SUVs, humvees, was not an option.
busses, limosines, funeral coaches, horsedrawn coaches, rickshaws, Pierre, emboldened per-
bikes, trickes, work trucks, fi re trucks, graders, street sweepers, haps by the liquor, reacted
food trucks, food carts, tractors, trailers, walkers, scooters, motor- poorly to this unexpected
cycles, unicycles, strollers, rolling suitcases, ambulances and the
resistance, and apparently
power chair. Roll on Grovers.
decided that the best way to
Bob Hardy
make his point would be to
Cottage Grove.
rough her up. Accordingly,
he hit her — whether it was
By Finn JD John
a punch or a slap is not clear.
For The Sentinel
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Marie responded to it by picking up a
club and laying her husband out cold.
While he was unconscious, Marie
gathered all her necessaries, collected
the two boys, seized for safekeeping the
remainder of the $200, and slipped out
the door.
When Pierre woke up, in a cold and
empty house, he found his options con-
siderably reduced.
So, presumably with some reluctance, he
presented himself as agreed a few days
later, ready to embark on the expedition.
During this time Marie had been hid-
ing out in the nearby woodlands with
the two boys. When she saw that Pierre
was going to honor his obligations, she
strolled out of the woods and resumed
her place at his side as if nothing had
happened.
One thing, though, would never be the
same. As author Bill Gulick puts it,
“There is no record that Pierre Dorion
ever attempted to beat his wife again.”
There is, by the way, another version
of this story. In it, Pierre beats Marie
to punish her for reluctance to join the
expedition, and she, after fl eeing into
the woods for a day or two, returns
chastened and ready to obey him. This
version may be accurate, but given what
we know of Marie’s temperament and
character, it seems most likely that it’s
just a cover story that Pierre told to ex-
plain her extended absence.
On the other hand, Marie may have had
good reason not to want to go on this
journey. Living in St. Louis as the Native
American wife of a French-Canadian
interpreter, she almost certainly moved
in the same circles as the Shoshone wife
of a French-Canadian interpreter living
in St. Louis at the time — none other
than Sacagawea, who had just returned
from a similar expedition a few years
before. And Sacagawea may have known
about a thing Meriwether Lewis did on
the journey back — a deed that was like
a modern echo of Odysseus’ taunting of
the blinded cyclops in The Odyssey.
While the Lewis and Clark party had
been traveling through the lands of the
Blackfeet tribe in northern Montana, a
group of young Blackfeet had slipped up
and tried to steal a horse and some rifl es.
They were spotted, and combat was
engaged, and one Blackfeet man was
stabbed and another shot and gravely
wounded.
The brazenness of the incident put Lewis
into a paroxysm of how-dare-they wrath-
fulness. So he hung a Jefferson Peace
Medal around the corpse’s neck, so that
when it was found, the Blackfeet would
know who had killed him.
This was a terrible idea. Theft, by the
moral code of the Blackfeet, was more
or less a lark. The tribe viewed its
members’ attempt to steal horses and
guns from another group the way mod-
ern Americans would view a group of
local high-school kids climbing the town
water tower in the night to paint it John
Deere green.
But the moral code of the Blackfeet
treated killing much more seriously.
They were a warlike tribe. Blood was
answered with blood. And the extra little
touch of decorating the corpse with a
medal made them furious.
Since that time, Blackfeet had been
sworn enemies of the European-Amer-
icans from down the river. That meant
the turf was burned, and the Astor party
would not be able to follow in the foot-
steps of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
They would have to fi nd another way.
Hunt, the expedition’s leader, did not
know this yet. But he would soon fi nd
out. And if Marie knew about it, possibly
from talking to Sacagawea, she certainly
would have had good reason not to want
to go.
Nonetheless, when the time came, she
and the two boys were there with Pierre,
ready to do their part.
We’ll talk about the journey that lay
before them in next week’s column.
Editor's note: Part III
of the current Off-
beat Oregon History
series was not readily
available as of press
time. It is scheduled
to run in the July 26
edition.
C ottage G rove
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