Métis teenager Marie Rose Delorme was married off to a passing whiskey trader who paid her mother $50 on the Western Prairie.
Isabella Clark Hardisty made a more advantageous match. The Métis daughter of a Hudson Bay Company chief factor wed Calgary lawyer and, later senator, James Lougheed. They settled in a Calgary mansion and became the grandparents of former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed.
The lives of these two indigenous women of different social stations play out in Metis Pioneers, a new book by Red Deer College history instructor Doris Jeanne MacKinnon.
MacKinnon researched the early histories of Métis women in Alberta to see how their cultures survived the end of the fur trade and transitioned into Victorian-era society.
One strategy was they often made beneficial marriages. For this reason, MacKinnon doesn’t blame Marie Rose’s mother for taking $50 from the whiskey trader.
By marrying a non-indigenous man, 17 years her senior, Marie Rose and her predominantly French-speaking Métis family established an important connection to the European culture that was to predominate in this province, said MacKinnon.
Marie Rose’s husband, Charles Smith, became a pioneer rancher in Pincher Creek. The family was wealthy enough to buy some cattle from Montana, although fortunes later declined.
Marie Rose Delorme Smith, who’d been educated in a convent, held down the ranch while her husband travelled on business. She gave birth to 17 children, met many colourful characters, including Col. James Macleod of the North West Mounted Police. After being widowed, she established a boarding house and became a respected medicine woman.
There’s no record that Marie Rose ever met Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed, who travelled in more elite circles.
Isabella was born into a English-speaking Métis family of high social standing and was educated at a private women’s college in Ontario. After her marriage to the Ontario-born lawyer of Irish descent, Isabella could afford to have domestic help — which she put down in one published interview by using then-common racial slurs against indigenous women.
This distancing from her own roots could have been another survival strategy for Isabella in her elevated social sphere, or as MacKinnon suggested in her book — “a management of her public image.”
Whatever we might think now of her motivation, the author believes both Métis women were important community builders in this fledgling province.
Both Isabella and Marie Rose were educated by their fur-trading families to succeed in a changing world. MacKinnon found they made an invaluable contribution to early schools, hospitals and other Alberta institutions. How instrumental Métis women were “to the early history of this province will take a lot more of these stories to uncover,” said MacKinnon.
Her book, published by the University of Alberta Press, is available at Amazon or Chapters.
lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter