She was applying accurate knowledge of how the trade worked.

The Children Who Called In French

The most vivid moment in the documentary record of Marie Dorion’s survival — the child’s voice calling “Stop, stop” in French on the Columbia River — deserves one more consideration.

The boys who called out were somewhere between two and five years old when they left on the Hunt expedition in 1811.

They would have been between five and eight in spring 1814.

They had lived, for as long as they could clearly remember, in the multilingual world of the fur trade.