Madame Dorion: Her Journey to the Oregon Country

In 1811 Marie, her husband Pierre, and their two sons, Jean Baptiste and Paul, joined the Wilson Price Hunt expedition to travel from Saint Louis, Missouri to Fort Astoria, in the Oregon Country. The party originally planned to follow the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition seven years earlier but at roughly present-day Mobridge, South Dakota; they turned west to go overland through uncharted territory to avoid trouble with the Sioux farther upriver. The Astorians, as the group was called, survived a harrowing cross-country journey suffering deadly thirst, starvation, extreme weather, loss of supplies and life. Marie Dorion was an incredibly strong and brave woman who not only witnessed history and the opening of the Oregon Country to trappers and immigrants, but she played an active and vital role in the making of that history. Unlike her contemporary, Sacajawea who returned with Lewis and Clark, Marie and her family became early settlers in the Oregon Country. Although this journal, Madame Dorion – Her Journey to the Oregon Country, is fiction, it is based on the history and journals of the men who made the journey and lived to write about it.