The Dorion Woman (1786-1850) — her adventure outdid Sacajawea’s

 

      

      

 

 

 

Uintah Springs Press

Fiction and nonfiction from the Intermountain West

Lost Heroines

Lost Heroines: Little-Known Women Who Changed Their World (1997) was our first book. Another 200 copies and it will be out of print. Thirteen years after publication we’re still proud of it, and for good reasons:

 

1) The women’s stories are extraordinary. Neither time nor our editing errors can diminish them.

2) When Lost was released, little or less had been published about many of these women. Even now, some of these stories can be found in no other work in print.

3) Lost helped redress the deficiency in women’s history coverage in standard reference works. This isn’t a feminist statement so much as a simple observation. When women don’t know who won them the right to vote— to get an education— to buy a car, own a house, or get a credit card without a father or brother’s signature— they remain, at heart, illiterate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

From a print of John Clymer’s oil painting, “Marie Dorion—Escape 1814.” Clymer’s wife did the research for many of Clymer’s later paintings.

© 2011 Rebecca Bartholomew / Uintah Springs Press

Last updated 6/5/11

 Molly Seawell, Anti-Suffragette

 

 

      

 

 

Why would a working woman supporting her mother and household resist the political and economic equality of women? Journalist and novelist Molly Seawell is a conundrum.

       Molly (1860-1916) enjoyed a secluded childhood in rural Virginia. She spent most of her time reading in the library of her parents’ old Southern home. It is not known how much schooling she did or did not obtain, but she confided that her surroundings resembled the 1700s more than the 1800s.

       While still a teen, Molly tried her hand at writing. By age 21 she had earned $700 by freelancing, a considerable sum for the time. This encouraged her to pursue writing as a fulltime occupation. Her father had died, and it fell to her to provide for her mother and siblings.

       She wrote, “Thus I became a householder, a property-owner, a taxpayer, and the regular employer of five persons.” Though unmarried and childless, she felt this gave her more varied experience than most women of her day. “I can say with positiveness that there never was a moment when the possession of a vote would not have been a hindrance and a burden to me.”

       In 1911, at age 51, Molly wrote a treatise against women’s suffrage. The New York firm MacMillan published The Ladies Battle, which helped set back women’s citizenship another decade. In a few nutshells, here were Molly’s justifications for contributing to the stifling of her own sex:

¨ Voting is a privilege, not a right, according to Molly’s reading of the Preamble to the Constitution. Governments, she posited, have an obligation to grant or withhold the vote as necessary to insure good government.

¨ Women lack the ability to defend their right to vote. “A dozen ruffians could prevent a hundred women from depositing a single ballot,” Molly argued. With less than half the electorate able to defend its laws, a standing national army would have to be created. Freedom depends on not having a large professional army that can turn against the people.

¨ Women are not involved in military, shipping, navigation, railway or mining affairs, she wrote. Lacking this experience in “the more complex aspects” of public life, they cannot vote as intelligently as men.

¨ “The women who stay at home do not suffer as much as the men who go to war,” Molly wrote. Since women are not subject to conscription, in times of war they will be casting “an utterly irresponsible ballot.”

 

 

 

 

 

¨ Common law provides that no citizen should have to support anyone who could vote against him in a way that impairs his ability “to maintain the beneficiary.” If a woman were to vote, Molly worried, she might do so in a way that hurts her husband’s ability to support her.

¨ Suffrage would cost women many special legal protections supposedly accrued over the centuries, among them special property rights, a husband’s support, and limited working hours. “The withholding of the ballot is, in itself, a protective measure for the wife and mother. The law does not allow her to be burdened with a ballot which would drive her out of the fortress which legislation and custom have built around her.”

¨ Citizens with the right to maintenance from other citizens have always been deprived of the vote, according to Molly, including children, paupers, prisoners, lunatics— and women.

¨ Fighting for suffrage is undignified. Women should always maintain their dignity, charm and decorum. Suffragists, Molly said, lack “that sixth subtle sense” that tells them people are laughing at them.

¨ A parallel evil to women’s suffrage was Negro suffrage. Molly wrote that giving free Negroes the vote was a terrible mistake since many Black voters were illiterate and uninformed.

¨ Most American women didn’t want the vote, she claimed. Why should 400,000 suffragists be allowed to change the status of 45 million women and girls?

 

           Molly’s arguments strike today’s reader as anachronistic, at points scurrilous, and a good example of how we humans are often driven by prejudice rather than simple, self-evident truths. As for her motivation, that’s easy:  she did it for the money. She was a writer; her family needed support; she took what commissions she could get, pandering to whatever editors had money to spend.

           Survival is the great equalizer.

To read more about Molly Seawell, you can look here:

“Molly Eliot Seawell,” in Encyclopedia Virginia. http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Seawell_Molly_Elliot_1860-1916.

Thomas L. Long, “A Profile of Virginia’s Molly Elliot Seawell.” http://community.tncc.edu/faculty/longt/Seawell/Molly_Elliot_Seawell_Profile.html

 

 

Sources on Annie Wood Besant

Nethercot, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant. London, 1960.

“Annie Besant, teacher, lecturer, secularist and theosophist.” http://www.squidoo.com/besant. Site has photos and choice quotations from Annie’s writings and speeches.

YouTube documentary about the Match Girl Strike. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVe3iaf8RYA. Part 1 of 3.

“Annie Besant.” Web site of the Theosophical Publishing House. http://www.questbooks.net/author.cfm?authornum=21. . Offers 40+ books and pamphlets by Annie available for purchase.

lost heroines, marie dorion, molly seawell, annie besant, aphra behn, gertrude bell, louise bethune, antoinette blackwell, antoinette bourignon, myra bradwell, jessie redmon fauset, vigdis finnbogadottir, sophie germain, marie goeppert-mayer, barbara hepworth, caroline herschel, dorothy hodgkin, anna ivanovna, amy johnson, julie ann krone, queen liliuokalani, ada byron lovelace, lozen, nettie stevens, elisabeth vigee-lebrun, phillis wheatley, emma hart Willard, womens history, womens suffrage, woman suffrage

Other Subjects of Lost Heroines

Madame Dorion’s story is one of the more amazing episodes in Northwest and women’s history.

       Marie Aioe L’Aguivoise married Pierre Dorion, manager of a trading post on Arkansas’ Red River. She and their two toddlers sometimes joined his commutes between St. Louis and North Dakota on fur trading missions. But Pierre soured on the low wages, poor treatment, and long absences demanded by the St. Louis Fur Company.

       John Jacob Astor had determined to expand his trading empire beyond the Great Lakes. His sea company founded Fort Astoria, the first U.S. settlement on the West coast. In 1811 Astor outfitted an overland company to scout trading post sites along Lewis and Clark’s route to the Pacific.

       Ambitious young merchant Wilson Price Hunt led the overland expedition. Hunt’s orders were to get the best scouts and translators by paying more than the Canadian companies. Half Yankton-Sioux, Pierre knew several Indian dialects plus English, French and some Spanish. At one point he and his father had interpreted for Lewis and Clark. When Hunt offered Pierre a $150 advance, Pierre grabbed it.

       But Marie put her foot down: “You go no more without me!” Reluctantly Hunt agreed, but when Pierre said his boys, 2 and 4, would becoming, too, Hunt refused. Pierre insisted. Hunt backed down, but Marie knew she must prove herself to 58 dubious men. Besides pulling her own weight and her sons, she was pregnant.

       The journey west was more difficult than they’d hoped. True, the Hunt party discovered South Pass, the corridor that shepherded a later generation of nearly one million immigrants to California, Oregon, and Utah. But in Idaho hostile Indians and bad luck cost the company their supplies. Blundering or lured into a box canyon, two men drowned in its rapids. The company resorted to slaughtering most of their horses for meat.

       Marie and her little boys walked most of the Snake River Valley. She traveled “without a murmur and keeping pace with the rest of the expedition.” As her time neared, she was given a horse. After an arduous 27-mile ride past present-day Baker City, Ore., Marie went into labor. Capt. Hunt ordered the company to strike camp, but Pierre said, “No, no, the woman will be offended.” The next day Marie, her family, and newborn son caught up with the party. A vote was taken on whether to kill Marie’s horse for dinner. The men voted to go hungry instead.

       A week later, they found an encampment of friendly Umatillas in the Grande Ronde Valley. The women nursed Marie and her baby, but deprivation took its toll and the infant died. New horses were rounded up and by March the first of Hunt’s party straggled into Fort Astoria.

       By now, however, the War of 1812 had broken out. The British had already captured many of Astor's eastern trading stations. His agents sold Ft. Astoria to a Canadian company and then dispersed. Two parties headed east, the Dorions joining John Reid’s contingent which traveled slowly to trap along the way, Pierre hunting, Marie serving as cook and peltier. They were to rendezvous with the other group, presumably near the Tetons.

 

Disaster

       In January 1814 the Dorions were wintering in a cabin six miles west of Parma, Ida. and 12 miles south of present-day Ontario, Ore., when Marie was visited by friendly Indians warning that the Bannocks were on the warpath. Pierre was tending his trap lines; it took Marie three days to find him. By the time she did, the massacre was over. He was dead and his partner, LeClerc, mortally wounded.

       Marie tied LeClerc to the underbelly of her horse and hurried back to her cabin where dried salmon was all that remained for food. According to one source, she hid LeClerc and her sons in the willows on the other side of the Boise River, then waited for nightfall to steal back to Reid’s encampment. Dead bodies lay everywhere. She rounded up some remaining horses and as many supplies as she could carry and returned to her charges. In the interim LeClerc had died. She buried him in the snow.

 

The Ordeal

       Marie was already exhausted. She must have been frightened at her situation— 1,500 miles from her people, 300 miles from the nearest Walla Walla village on the other side of the Blue Mountains. Marie decided to return west.

       Only the knowledge that wintering in Parma was even riskier could have persuaded her to attempt the trip. After nine days, deep snows stopped her and the boys. They built a teepee of boughs and skins. When their food ran out Marie killed their horses, probably bloodying her fingers cutting up the flesh before it froze. Horsemeat was their diet for 53 days.

       Sometime in March the first spring bird appeared and they started out again. The going got harder on the western slopes, and at one point Marie went snow blind. She taught Baptiste to pick out a hill or tree each evening and orient himself with that object all the next day. She told him, “Keep the sun at your back in the mornings, at midday shining on your left shoulder, and at sunset in your eyes.”

       When they could go no further, the children’s feet bleeding, Marie burrowed a hole in the snow, lined it with furs, and stashed Paul and Baptiste inside. It took her three days to crawl 30 miles from Meacham Creek down the precarious slopes onto the Columbia plateau to a bluff above a Walla Walla camp. Its residents saw her stumbling down the hill. Braves were immediately sent for her sons, who were brought into camp that night. Marie stayed with the Walla Walla for many weeks. When a party of former Hunt men came through, she related the fate of Reid’s party.

Marie made lifelong friends with the Walla Walla. Later that year she moved to Ft. Okanogan, a former Astorian trading post in Colville-Okanagan tribal territory. Some years later she remarried, to a trapper named Venier who gave her a daughter, but the marriage ended. About 1821 she married interpreter Jean Baptiste Toupin and bore him two sons. Toupin insisted a priest marry them and legitimize her marriage to Pierre as well.

       In 1841 the Toupins and Paul and Baptiste’s families moved to Oregon. By 1853 Marie was living quietly in the community of St. Louis in the beautiful Willamette Valley. Her neighbors dignified her with the title Madame Dorion. An occasional newsman dropped by to ask her how it was having been the first immigrant to give birth on the Oregon Trail and the first female immigrant to settle Oregon Territory.

 

 

 

 

Is it just us, or does this drawing by Alma Parsons, published in Red Heroines of the Northwest by Byron Defenbach, 1930, come not even close to communicating Marie Dorion’s intelligence,  inventiveness, adaptability, and amazing endurance? But then Europeans didn’t accept her Ioway wedding either, labeling her “the Dorion woman” until a white priest sanctioned her marriage.

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