Marie Anne: The Frontier Adventures of Marie Anne Lagimodière

Gene Olson was Reference Librarian at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, University of Alberta, Edmonton.

This latest biography from Grant MacEwan is another exploration of his favorite subject type — the heroic pioneering figure in the West. In the case of Marie Anne Lagimodière, the author admits he was forced to “fictionalize history” and “apply the brush of imagination where informational gaps” had to be filled in presenting her story as a full-length book. As the unacknowledged “Mother of Manitoba,” she has been the subject of a number of earlier accounts: Abbé George Dugas’s La Premiere Canadienne au Nord-Ouest, ou, biographie de Marie-Anne Gaboury (1st ed., Cadieux et Derome, 1883; 2nd ed. Thevenot, 1907); J.M. Morice’s translation of Dugas’s first edition, The First Canadian Woman in the Northwest (Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba. Transaction 62, 1902); a chapter in Hector Coutu’s genealogy-cum-history, Lagimodière and Their Descendants, 1635-1885 (Co-op Press, 1980); Mary V. Jordan’s romance, “My Name it Marie Anne Gaboury”: A Love Story (Prairie Pub., 1983); and the 1978 Canadian feature film, Marie Anne. Of these renditions, MacEwan’s is by far the most colorful and comprehensive work on this legendary frontier woman.

As a 26-year-old bride, Marie Anne arrived in the West with her fur-trader husband in 1806. She died the 96-year-old matriarch of a number of Manitoba’s founding families in 1875. During her life time she experienced the nomadic life of a fur trader and bore the first white children in each of the areas that were to become the prairie provinces. She and her husband eventually settled in the Red River area, where they were instrumental in the survival of the Selkirk Colonists. Her determination and courage prompted Lord Selkirk to remark that, had she been a man, he would have made her Governor of Red River. She proved the area could support agriculture and the permanent settlements that it implies. She agitated for missionary priests from Quebec to set up religious and educational institutions. Before her death she saw the establishment of the province of Manitoba — in no small part due to the political initiatives of her grandson, Louis Riel.

There are a few problems with this book. The lack of any maps accompanying the text is irritating to anyone wanting to relate early locales to con-temporary place names and landmarks. The author perpetuates the misspelling of the surname of one of his sources, Abbé Dugas, and seems to have ignored the second edition of his work on Marie Anne, which contains additional personal names associated with her early experiences in the fur trade. A major concern is whether Marie Anne should be considered a work of history or an historical novel. In either case, it espouses MacEwan’s views of the early West — a view that should not be taken lightly. Given the slim chance of new documentary evidence coming to light, and the presumed death or extreme old age of the descendants MacEwan interviewed in the early 1950s, there may never be a more historically based account of Marie Anne. How much of this biography is fact and how much is fancy (and how to distinguish the two) is sure to gall historians, but the general reader will still delight in MacEwan’s celebration of the legendary “first white woman in the Northwest.”