01Biography
Marie Dorion was an Iowa (Ioway) woman. In 1811 she and her husband, Pierre Dorion, joined Wilson Price Hunt's overland party for John Jacob Astor's fur company, bringing their two little boys. She was the only woman on the trip. Pregnant, she kept up on foot across the Snake River country, and near present-day North Powder, Oregon, she gave birth to a baby who died a few days later.
The party reached Astoria early in 1812. In the winter of 1813 to 1814 Pierre and the trappers with him were killed in an attack on the Boise River. Marie escaped with her sons and kept them alive through the winter in the Blue Mountains. In April, on the Columbia, fur traders paddling upriver heard a child calling to them in French and found the three of them.
02Why they matter
Crossed much of the country the Oregon Trail later followed, with two small children, decades before the first wagons.
03How they died
She later made her home in the Walla Walla country, first with a trapper, Louis Joseph Vagnier, and then with Jean Toupin, an interpreter, whom she married in a Catholic ceremony in 1841. The family settled on French Prairie in the Willamette Valley, where she died on September 3, 1850, aged about 60.
04Legacy
An Oregon historical marker near North Powder tells her story, and Milton-Freewater, Oregon, opened Marie Dorion Park in her memory in 1969.