They were not entirely Euro-American — their Indigenous partners and mixed-heritage children and the cultural worlds they had inhabited for decades marked them as different from the incoming settlers.

Marie’s children married into the established families of the valley.

The Oregon historical record traces some of these marriages and their descendants, who became part of the complex mix of peoples that constitutes the actual human history of the region.

The formal Catholic marriage between Marie and Toupin in July 1841 was an accommodation to the legal and religious frameworks of the settler society that was arriving.

By 1841, Catholic priests were sufficiently present in the Pacific Northwest to make such ceremonies possible.