The community that Marie and Jean Baptiste Toupin joined in the Willamette Valley was a pre-existing community of retired fur-trade workers and their mixed-heritage families.

These families had been in the valley for years before the American settlers arrived.

They had cleared some land, established farms, and built the kind of lives available to people with their specific combination of skills and backgrounds.

The arrival of increasing numbers of American settlers from the East created a complex social landscape in which this mixed-heritage fur-trade community occupied an ambiguous position.

They were not entirely Indigenous — they had been part of the fur-trade enterprise, many of them spoke European languages, most had adopted at least some European cultural practices.