The relationship persisted through the following decades.

They were formally married in a Catholic ceremony in 1841, when Catholic priests were finally present in sufficient numbers in the Pacific Northwest to make such ceremonies possible.

The couple and their combined family — Marie’s sons from her relationship with Pierre Dorion, her daughter by Venier, and additional children with Toupin — eventually settled in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, in the community of retired fur traders and their families that was taking shape in the mid-valley by the late 1830s and 1840s.

The Willamette Valley was not yet Oregon Territory in the formal American political sense, though it was rapidly becoming a destination for American settlers traveling the Oregon Trail.