A True Canadian Hero

Over the years Maggie Siggins has been digging deeper and deeper into the West’s lesser-known history. Starting with Revenge of the Land, about one quarter section of land near Moose Jaw whose owners begin in theft and end in murder, through Riel, a thorough history of the most famous man the West has so far produced, she now gives us Marie-Anne: The Extraordinary Story of Louis Riel’s Grandmother, the awe-inspiring story of the first white woman to live in the West. This is a pedigree of which any writer should be very proud. Given that Maggie Siggins grew up a Torontonian, I might add that this list of books should also give western writers pause, a pause in which to consider how, with our eyes firmly fixed on more distant horizons, we have been, for the most part, neglecting or ignoring our own best stories.

Most even moderately educated westerners know the name Marie-Anne Lagimodière; they know the “first white woman” designation, and the fact that she was Louis Riel’s grandmother. But that is pretty much all they know. There have been several works about Marie-Anne, the one closest to her time written in French, full of praise for her, but also, apparently, full of mistakes, so this book is what we’ve been needing—a full-length biography of a woman whose name deserves to be added to the list of Canadian heroes.

We are a nation that up until lately had carved in stone the notion that our national heroes are men, that the settlement of the West in particular was an all-male venture. Of course, we say, there were women there, too, and they were … uh … tough and brave and high-minded, upholding the virtues of church, school and the family hearth, keeping their husbands, by example, from descending completely into creatures of the wild.

No doubt Simone de Beauvoir could make sense of the tumult of feeling that this notion gives rise to in the breasts of today’s western women whose mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers homesteaded with their husbands on the “bald prair-ee,” or up in the bush, and who may have walked West beside the oxen from what became Winnipeg all the way to near Prince Albert, who put every wit and some they did not know they had to the simple survival of themselves and their children through blizzards and droughts, dust storms and accidents, illnesses and sometimes deaths. My memory of my mother’s and grandmother’s stories about those days is that they were not about embroidery or how to roast a turkey, but about how they saved lives by quick thinking, devising instruments of salvation from trees and water and the flour barrel in the corner, from walking ten miles to get a few eggs to make a cake for a wedding celebration, to fending off bears and wolves and egg-stealing skunks, to giving birth often without even the help of a neighbour woman, never mind doctors, hospitals and home care nurses. And they call the men the heroes! But emotion overcomes me. Deep breath.

Marie-Anne Lagimodière, born in 1782 near the village of Maskinongé, Lower Canada, under-took such an arduous life that the mind boggles contemplating it. She had been brought up in an era when women were the “angel of the house,” devout, chaste, silent. Unusually, she was literate and, it is said, beautiful, and might have had a more conventional life. She did not have to move West with her freeman-hunter-trapper husband after their marriage in 1807; she chose to, and having made that choice, she went West with him into the wilderness and did not go back, ever. She lived to 96, having been a part of the fur trade, the fort era, the Seven Oaks deaths and the agitation leading up to this event, living even to see her grandson, Louis, “lead Manitoba into Confederation.” She had escaped death at the hands of a jealous “country wife” of her husband’s, and from the many attacks and skirmishes of various aboriginal bands against the white traders. She escaped often in the night, on horseback, with her babies on her back or hanging from cradleboards tied to her saddle or seated behind her and tied onto her with a blanket. She planted fields of corn, lived nearly a year without even her husband to help her with her then five children, and even fended off an aboriginal woman trying to steal one of her babies and—doubtless also, given her beauty—many a drunken trader or trapper. Not only did she survive the impossible trip West; she then lived in conditions from tipis to brush shelters in the bush, to filthy and over-crowded forts, and faced near starvation many a time, while eventually producing eight apparently healthy children. (The remarkable fact, given conditions in “civilized” areas, is that they all lived to adulthood.) But she did not go back East; she stayed and lived to tell her stories, ending her life in a proper house in St. Boniface, where she had lived, finally in prosperity, for many years after her husband’s death in 1850.

What did I miss in this book? Better maps, for one, and a more detailed account of what happened to her children for another. (Her daughter Julie became Riel’s mother.) A discussion of why none of her children became literate interests me, too. Perhaps she no longer believed, after her thrilling life, that literacy mattered. As well, in Siggins’s attempt to tell a complete and detailed story of the situation in which Marie-Anne lived, occasionally our heroine disappears from the narrative for too many pages. In fact, the problem with trying to develop a character for someone far back in history is that there seems simply not to be enough information. The writer must walk the tightrope with such few facts as are known on one side, and with solid fiction on the other, staying safely in the middle, making educated guesses and indulging in reasonable speculation, as Siggins has done. Even though I sometimes wished she had written a novel instead, I am glad, in the end, that she did not.

What we get in place of a detailed biography is a thorough history of the period in the West. We get it often in minute detail down to the rank-signifying colours of the feathers in the hats of various voyageurs, and the various and seemingly endless skirmishes among the North West Company men, those of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the area’s governors, Lord Selkirk’s managers and the many First Nations people, in which, finally, I simply got lost. I wondered myself if, given her intrepidity, Marie- Anne did not sometimes simply want to leap on the nearest table, fire a musket in the air and shout, “Enough, boys! Quit your bloody squabbling! I’m taking over!” I’ve no doubt she’d have set things to right in minutes, and that bloody and in some ways faintly ridiculous history—all those drunken or ignorant or simply stupid or downright malevolent or insane male leaders who never put the peoples’ needs first (other than the remarkable Chief Peguis)—might have had an entirely different tone. Important as it is to recognize the “Famous Five” (all women of privilege), as we have done, Marie-Anne deserves to have in central Winnipeg, and replicated throughout the country, statues to commemorate her, all of them larger than life, as she was.