The community of former fur-trade workers and their mixed-heritage families occupied an unusual position in this changing landscape: neither fully American in the expansionist cultural sense nor fully Indigenous in the territorial-rights sense, these families were building lives in a country that was being rapidly transformed around them.

Marie died on September 3, 1850.

The church where she was buried later burned, and her burial location is now unknown.

She was approximately 64 years old.

She had been born in the country of the Ioway, in the period before the Louisiana Purchase transformed the political map of the continent.

She had traveled as the only woman in a major American overland expedition.

She had survived a winter journey through the Blue Mountains with two children after finding her husband dead in the snow.