The sources tell us the boys survived.

The inference from that fact to the specific knowledge and practices that made it possible is not speculation.

It is the recognition of what survival in those conditions actually required.

The Second Opening: What This Journey Actually Means

By the time Franchère’s brigade encountered Marie on the Columbia River in spring 1814, the survival journey was over.

She had done it.

But the story is not finished at that point, either for Marie or for the larger question of what her winter survival reveals about her, about the world she inhabited, and about the history she has been written into and out of.