His description of the encounter with Marie Dorion is characteristically brief and characteristically precise.

The brigade saw canoes approaching.

A child’s voice called out in French.

They stopped.

They recognized her.

Franchère wrote, as recorded in the Oregon Encyclopedia’s account of the event: she and her sons had survived the winter “owing to her skills as an Indigenous woman,” and had come to the river because she “awaited the arrival of the canoes that she knew would be coming up-river in the spring.”

The phrasing “owing to her skills as an Indigenous woman” is Franchère’s own attribution.