Marie Dorion Found Her Husband Dead In The Snow — Then Crossed 250 Miles Of Frozen Wilderness With Her Two Children
The National Park Service account gives us a paragraph or two.
The Oregon Encyclopedia gives us a few hundred words.
The mismatch between the scale of what she did and the quantity of text that documents it is not accidental.
It reflects the fundamental asymmetry of the historical record that the fur-trade era produced: copious documentation of the experiences of literate men, sparse documentation of the experiences of Indigenous women who were essential to the enterprise but were not expected to be its primary narrators.
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