Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson - Ressources

Women helped build Canada

Winnipeg Free Press
Sat Oct 10 2009
Page: A16
Section: Columns
Byline: Catherine Mitchell

The remarkable crossing by Lewis and Clark of the Continental Divide to reach the Pacific Ocean has been justifiably mythologized by Americans, who also know that they were ably accompanied by a Shoshone guide, Sakakawea. The guide, at about 16 years of age, worked, walked and paddled alongside, but did so carrying a two-month-old son.

The teen, taken once as a captive by the Hidatsa and then as a second wife by a French Canadian trapper, was living near Fort Mandan, North Dakota, when the expedition came looking for guides in 1805. She has been immortalized in bronze in that state since 1910 -- a replica was later erected in Washington D. C. -- a beautiful statue of a native woman with a baby on her back looking to the horizon.

I mention Sakakawea in the context of renewed complaints that we have not yet found a spot to plunk a fitting monument at the Manitoba legislature to a great Canadian, Nellie McClung.

I want to bring to the discussion some broader context and push the campaign back centuries before the fight for the vote began, to the time when Hudson Bay Company trade in the north with the Dene people was being opened.

At the centre of the story is Thanadelthur a Chipewyan teenager whose life, coincidentally, mirrors that of Sakakawea.

At about the age of 16, she was kidnapped by the Cree, escaped and a year later, in late 1714, made her way near death to York Fort, where her value to the HBC mission was recognized by Chief Factor James Knight. She died only a few years later, reportedly nursed by Knight himself, but in that brief time, she was pivotal to setting the ground for trade with the Dene.

Thanadelthur was sent on an expedition to strike peace between the Cree and the Dene. Her persuasive oratorical powers impressed the Cree in her party, and overcame the Dene's abject fear of the Cree -- the first to obtain guns -- bringing the two tribes together to negotiate.

That peace triggered the founding of the HBC's first fort on the Churchill River, where Prince of Wales Fort would stand. William Stuart, who led the HBC expedition to the barrens, said if the Dene had 50 men of Thanadelthur's fibre they would have had nothing to fear of the Cree, Sylvia Van Kirk wrote in The Beaver in 1974.

At her death in 1717, Knight wrote of her courage, spirit and tenacity, bemoaning "a very considerable loss to the company..."

Thanadelthur pre-dated not just Lewis and Clark, but Samuel Hearne, David Thompson -- who led this country's map-making expedition to the Pacific Ocean in 1807 -- and John Rae. All adventurous men, whose lives are lauded and mythologized on their respective sides of the border. Americans have done right by Sakakawea; Canadians have all but forgotten about Thanadelthur, except for the efforts of a handful of playwrights, novelists and historians.

One historian is my friend Judith Hudson Beattie, who compiled a radio program on the woman for CBC years ago. Beattie says that Canadians come up short, generally, in erecting monuments, statues and memorials to their historical figures. In her mind, Canadian history is equal to the drama of the United States.

Thanadelthur's history, Hudson Beattie suspects, remained largely untold (the tale has appeared a few times over the years in The Beaver and in 2003 in Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History) for so long because Knight's record was held within the stash of HBC archives.

The archives, the reservoir of how Canada's west was "won," remained unorganized until the 1920s and then was restricted to academic research. The HBC archives were transferred on loan to the Archives of Manitoba in the mid- 1970s and finally donated in 1994.

As the former Keeper of the HBC trove, Hudson Beattie delved deeply into the stories of the fur trade and exploration periods. As co-author of Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57, she is well-acquainted with the contributions of "country wives" to the opening of the Canadian west. None, however, has been given her due.

The exception, perhaps, is Charlotte Small, born of a Cree mother and Scottish fur trader.

Small was all of 14 in 1799 when she married David Thompson, known as the world's greatest land geographer. Thompson was limp and half-blind when they met. The marriage lasted 57 years and produced 13 children.

It is calculated that her travels with Thompson as he charted the West covered three to four times the distance, on foot and in a canoe, racked up by Lewis and Clark. Small travelled with babies and young children, providing her husband with survival and interpretation skills.

A statue of Small, aside Thompson, has been erected in Invermere, British Columbia. A humble token of appreciation for her part in the history of the nation and a rare victory in the protracted battle to get some deserved recognition for the women who helped build a country.