The life it describes is not.

She lived in a world that was transforming around her faster than most worlds transform, and she adapted to each transformation: from the Ioway world of the Missouri River to the fur-trade frontier, from the frontier to the Columbia Plateau trade network, from the trade network to the settled Willamette Valley community.

Each adaptation required specific knowledge, specific relationships, and specific capacities.

The capacities that are most visible in the documentary record are the capacities she demonstrated in January through April of 1814: navigational knowledge, cold-climate survival skills, the ability to make strategic decisions under severe pressure, and the determination to keep two children alive through conditions that most accounts would have treated as fatal.