Rivet of the Rivers: The Extraordinary Life of François Rivet, Voyageur, Mountain Man, and Patriarch of the Pacific Northwest

 

Overview

This is the true story of François Rivet (1754–1852), a second cousin seven times removed to the author, whose life traced the great river systems of North America from the St. Lawrence to the Missouri, the Columbia, and the Willamette. Born into a multi-generational family of Quebec voyageurs, Rivet crossed into the Mississippi drainage as a young man, survived near-death encounters on the Upper Missouri, paddled for Lewis and Clark as far as the Mandan villages, wintered beside Fort Mandan, and then plunged into the free trapper’s life in the Bitterroot and Flathead country. 

He survived the deadly 1807–08 clash that killed John McClellan and most of their party, traded with David Thompson, formed a lasting country marriage with the Salish widow Therese Tête Platte, raised a mixed-blood family (including the stepdaughter Julia who became the wife of Peter Skene Ogden), served as interpreter and freeman for the North West Company and later the Hudson’s Bay Company, rode the Snake Country brigades under Alexander Ross and Ogden, and at age seventy-five was placed in charge of Fort Colvile. In 1838 he retired to French Prairie, formalized his marriage before the newly arrived Catholic priests, became a respected elder and community figure, and died at nearly one hundred—the last living link between the Corps of Discovery and the Oregon settlements. 

Written as a historically rigorous yet novelistic saga in ten chapters, the book aims for the vividness and narrative drive that could attract a screenwriter seeking a sweeping frontier epic grounded in real events, real characters, and the complex meeting of French-Canadian, Métis, Salish, and American worlds.

Chapter One: Blood of the Voyageurs, (1754–1790s)

The bells of Saint-Sulpice rang across the flat river parish on the morning of 7 June 1754. Their sound carried over the long narrow fields that ran back from the Saint Lawrence like the keys of a great green piano, over the rail fences and the low stone houses with their steep cedar-shingled roofs, over the wooden wayside crosses that marked every concession road. Inside the little church the air was cool and smelled of beeswax, damp wool, and the faint sweetness of last year’s apples still stored in the sacristy. Father whatever-his-name-was that year poured the baptismal water three times over the red, squalling infant and named him François, son of Nicolas-Pierre Rivet and Marie-Madeleine Gauthier dit Landreville.

The godparents held him firmly while the Latin words washed over the stone walls. Outside, the great river kept moving the way it always had—brown and powerful in the June flood, carrying the melt of a thousand northern streams toward the sea. New France still flew the white flag with the golden lilies that summer. No one standing in the churchyard that morning could know how few years remained to it.

François Rivet was born into a family that measured time by the height of the water and the length of a man’s contract. His great-grandfather Maurice had stepped ashore from La Rochelle in 1664, a young man with a strong back and the hope of land. He had married Marie Cusson, whose own people were already putting down roots in the colony, and together they raised children in the shadow of Cap-de-la-Madeleine. Their son Pierre—François’s grandfather—had signed his first voyageur engagement for Detroit in 1703. Thirty-three years later he was still paddling, hired once more for the Poste de la Rivière Saint-Joseph. The notarial records still carry the careful script of Claude-Cyprien-Jacques Porlier: Gatineau et Hamelin embauché Pierre Rivet aller à Poste de la Riviere St-Joseph.

Nicolas-Pierre, François’s father, had followed the same current. In 1738 he signed with Marin Hurtebize for the Illinois country. The men of the Rivet line did not speak of these journeys as adventures. They spoke of them the way farmers speak of harvests—necessary, exhausting, sometimes fatal, always measured in livres and in the hope of returning before the ice closed the rivers.

The boy grew up inside that inheritance. Before he was tall enough to see over the gunwale of a canoe he knew the smell of spruce gum and bear grease, the weight of a paddle blade cutting water, the particular silence that falls when a brigade is working hard against the current. In the long winter evenings the old men gathered around the stove in the Rivet house or in the taverns of L’Assomption and sang the old songs. They sang of the rose that blooms in the springtime, of the girl left behind at Lachine, of the devil who waits at the worst portages to claim the souls of men who curse too freely. Between the verses they told stories of the pays d’en haut as if it were a second parish: the soft light on the prairies beyond the Mississippi, the way the stars looked bigger at Michilimackinac, the taste of buffalo hump roasted over a fire of dry willow.

François listened. He watched his father’s hands—scarred across the knuckles from poling, the nails permanently rimmed with black from gum and grease—and understood that those hands had held the same paddle his grandfather had held, and that one day they would place it in his own.

The Conquest came when he was six. In September 1760 the white flag came down over Montreal and the Union Jack rose in its place. For most of the habitants the change meant new officials, the same tithes, and the slow realization that the world had shifted under their feet. For the voyageur families the rivers remained open. The British merchants needed experienced paddlers as badly as the French bourgeois had. The contracts continued, written now in a mixture of French and the new language of power, but the work was the same: leave in the spring with a sash around the waist and a pipe in the teeth, return in the autumn (if the rivers and the tribes and the fevers allowed) with wages or with stories or with both.

By the time François was old enough to sign his own name—or more often simply to make his mark—the old French world had already become memory. Yet the blood remembered. In the 1780s and into the 1790s the notarial archives of Montreal and the surrounding parishes recorded the engagements of a young man from L’Assomption named François Rivet. The clearest that survives is dated 8 November 1791. Jacques Giasson hired him for three years to go “chaque fois que nécessaire”—wherever required—the Far North excluded. Three years of hard paddling, of portages where a man carried two pièces of ninety pounds each plus his own gear, of winters spent in country where the only law was the law a man carried in his own two hands.

He was already in his late thirties by then. No longer a boy chasing the romance of the trade, but a seasoned engagé who knew the difference between a good bourgeois and a skinflint, between a brigade that sang to keep the rhythm and a brigade that worked in surly silence. The records call him voyageur de L’Assomption. The older men still sometimes used the older, more dangerous phrase: coureur de bois. The distinction mattered less on the water than in the offices of the merchants who preferred their labor regulated and their accounts tidy.

What the contracts do not record is the look of the river at first light when the mist still lay on the water like a second skin and the only sound was the soft dip of paddles and the occasional grunt of a man settling into the day’s work. They do not record the taste of sagamité cooked with a little grease and a great deal of hunger, or the way a man’s shoulders and lower back felt after eighteen hours of upstream labor against the spring flood. They do not mention the nights when the northern lights moved like silent green and violet curtains above the black spruce, and a man lying on the cold ground wondered whether he would ever again hear the bells of Saint-Sulpice or taste his mother’s tourtière.

François Rivet carried all of that with him. He carried the blood of Maurice Rivet, the man from La Rochelle who had gambled everything on a colony at the edge of the world, and of Marie Cusson, whose people had already begun to turn the forest into farms. He carried the memory of his grandfather’s thirty-year career on the western lakes and his father’s journeys to the Illinois. And he carried something harder to name—a restlessness that the settled, fertile farms of L’Assomption could not quiet.

By the final decade of the century the great canoes were still leaving the warehouses at Lachine every spring, bright with new paint and heavy with trade goods. But the richest returns now lay farther west, beyond the old French posts, up the broad dangerous Missouri and into country that no Canadian brigade had yet fully mapped or claimed. Men who had grown up on the Saint Lawrence began to drift south and west, following credit, rumor, and the promise of better packs.

François Rivet was one of them.

When he finally turned his face toward the Mississippi drainage he did not go as a green hand seeking adventure. He went as a man already formed by three generations of river work—a man who knew how to thread a canoe through white water, how to read a sky for weather that could kill, how to bargain with strangers who might become either trading partners or enemies before the day was out, and how to keep moving when every muscle in his body begged him to stop and lie down.

The parish registers of Saint-Sulpice would continue without him. Children would still be baptized, couples married, the dead buried in the sandy soil near the church. The great river that had received the baptismal water from his forehead would keep flowing past the long lots and the steeple. But the deeper story that began with a splash of water on a June morning in 1754 was about to leave the Saint Lawrence behind. It would find its true current in rivers that still carried no French names on any map the merchants of Montreal possessed—rivers that ran through country where a man could still invent his own life, or lose it, according to the strength of his arms and the sharpness of his judgment.

François Rivet shouldered his pack, checked the set of his sash one last time, and stepped into the current that would carry him west.

NEXT

Chapter Two: The Missouri Beckons, (Late 1790s–1803)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-two-missouri-beckons-late.html

Rivet of the Rivers: The Extraordinary Life of François Rivet, Voyageur, Mountain Man, and Patriarch of the Pacific Northwest

Chapter One: Blood of the Voyageurs, (1754–1790s)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/rivet-of-rivers-extraordinary-life-of.html

Chapter Two: The Missouri Beckons, (Late 1790s–1803)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-two-missouri-beckons-late.html

Chapter Three: Engagé of the Corps, (1804–Spring 1805)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-three-engage-of-corps.html

Chapter Four: Free Trapper on the Missouri, (1805–1808)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-four-free-trapper-on-missouri.html

Chapter Five: Salish Country and a New Family, (1808–1813)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-five-salish-country-and-new.html

Chapter Six: Freeman Between Empires, (1813–1821)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-six-freeman-between-empires.html

Chapter Seven: Snake Country and “Old Rivet”, (1822–1829)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-seven-snake-country-and-old.html

Chapter Eight: Master of Fort Colvile, (1829–1837)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-eight-master-of-fort-colvile.html

Chapter Nine: French Prairie and the Big Wedding, (1838–1845)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-nine-french-prairie-and-big.html

Chapter Ten: The Long Portage Ends, (1846–1852)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-ten-long-portage-ends-18461852.html

Chapter Two: The Missouri Beckons, (Late 1790s–1803)

 

The Saint Lawrence had been a wide brown highway with steeples and seigneuries along its banks. The Missouri was something else entirely.

François Rivet first felt the difference in the water itself. Where the Canadian rivers ran cold and clear from the northern forests, the Missouri came down out of the western plains thick with silt, the color of weak coffee with too much milk. It carried whole trees in its spring flood, rolled sandbars from one side of the channel to the other overnight, and possessed a current that could exhaust a fresh brigade in a single upstream day. The old voyageurs who had come down from Michilimackinac or the Illinois country spoke of it with a mixture of respect and quiet profanity. They called it the Big Muddy, or simply la rivière, as if no further name were required.

By the late 1790s François had left the familiar parishes behind. The exact year he crossed from the Great Lakes drainage into the Mississippi system is not written in any surviving contract, but the pattern was common enough. A man finished an engagement, heard that the Spanish officials in St. Louis were still granting licenses, or that the independent traders were paying better for experienced paddlers, and simply kept going south and west. He was in his forties now—old enough to be called le vieux by the younger engages, still strong enough to pull a paddle from dawn until the light failed. The restlessness that the farms of L’Assomption could not quiet had found a larger stage.

He fell in with the mixed community of French, French-Canadian, and Métis traders who worked the lower and middle Missouri. These were not the disciplined brigades of the North West Company. They were smaller parties—six men, ten men, sometimes only three or four—moving in pirogues or battered canoes, carrying kegs of powder, bales of cloth, guns, and the endless small items that could be traded for packs of buffalo robes or the occasional beaver. They wintered in rough cabins or in the earth lodges of the river tribes. They learned the languages in fragments: a little Kansa, a little Omaha, the Sioux dialects that changed as one moved upstream, the more formal speech of the Arikara and the Mandan.

François learned the country the way he had once learned the Ottawa and the French rivers—by the feel of the current against the paddle blade, by the shape of the bluffs, by the smell of the prairie when the wind came from the west. He watched the Kansa villages with their neat earth lodges and extensive cornfields. He saw the Omaha and the Ponca, the Yankton Sioux who came to the river to trade, and farther up the more formidable Teton bands whose horsemen could appear on the ridges without warning. He listened to the older traders talk of the Arikara towns that controlled the channel like toll gates, and of the Mandan and Hidatsa villages still farther north where the river bent in great loops and the winters were said to freeze the thoughts inside a man’s head.

The work was harder than the Canadian trade and often more dangerous. There were no fixed depots stocked by the company. A party lived on what it carried, what it hunted, and what it could persuade the tribes to sell. Relations shifted with the season and the memory of the last quarrel. A man who smiled and traded fairly one year might find the same village closed against him the next because some other party had cheated or killed. François adapted. He had always been practical. He spoke softly, watched carefully, and kept his weapons close without making a show of them.

In 1802 the St. Louis merchant Régis Loisel mounted a more ambitious venture. Loisel was one of the sharper traders operating under Spanish license, a man with connections and credit. He pushed farther upriver than most, aiming for the powerful Teton Lakota bands who controlled much of the trade on the middle Missouri. Among the engages who went with him was a man the records call simply “La Riviere.”

The identification is not written in copperplate certainty, yet the pieces fit too cleanly to ignore. François Rivet was in the country. He was experienced. He was French-Canadian. And the incident that followed has the feel of a story that would cling to a man for the rest of his life.

They were deep in Teton territory when the trouble came. The Bois Brulé band—hard men on good horses—surrounded the trading party. Accusations flew: short measure, bad powder, some earlier slight that no one in Loisel’s group could remember. Voices rose. Guns were half-lifted. In the center of the shouting, one of the warriors drew a bead on the engagé called La Riviere and came within a breath of firing. Whether it was Loisel’s quick talking, a timely gift, or simple chance that stayed the trigger, the records do not say. The moment passed. The trade, such as it was, continued in a climate of cold watchfulness. When the party finally turned downstream in the spring of 1803, they carried fewer packs than they had hoped for and a sharper understanding of how quickly the Missouri could turn.

François Rivet came back to St. Louis with the taste of that near-death still in his mouth. The town itself was changing. In the months he had been upstream, word had arrived that the vast western territory claimed by Spain had been ceded back to France, and that France in turn was selling it to the young United States. The Louisiana Purchase was not yet a settled fact in every tavern, but the air was full of rumor. American officers were said to be coming. A great expedition was whispered about—an expedition that would go up the Missouri farther than any trader had yet gone and perhaps reach the western ocean.

St. Louis in 1803 was still a French town in speech and habit. The streets near the river were dusty or muddy according to the weather. Stone and log houses stood behind high walls. The riverfront smelled of fish, woodsmoke, tobacco, and the sweet rot of the occasional dead animal washed up on the bank. Merchants argued in French and Spanish and the rough English of the American newcomers. Free men and engages and enslaved laborers moved along the levee. Above it all the church of St. Louis still rang its bells as if the world had not changed.

François found lodgings and waited. He was nearly fifty. His hair was going gray at the temples; the lines around his eyes were cut deep by sun and wind. He had no wife waiting in any parish, no farm to reclaim. What he possessed was a reputation among the Missouri traders as a man who could handle a boat, keep his head, and come back alive. That reputation, and the restlessness that had carried him this far, were enough.

In the taverns and warehouses he listened to the talk of the American captains who would soon arrive—Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. They would need boatmen. They would need men who already knew the lower river, the moods of the tribes, the difference between a sandbar that would hold and one that would swallow a keelboat. They would need, whether they fully understood it yet or not, the skills that three generations of Rivet voyageurs had perfected on other waters.

François Rivet sat in the spring sunlight on the St. Louis waterfront, felt the pull of the Missouri still running in his blood, and understood that the next current was already forming. The near-death among the Bois Brulé had not cured him of the river. If anything, it had clarified the terms. The Missouri did not forgive carelessness, but it still offered something the settled parishes never could: the chance to disappear into distance and return—if one returned at all—with a story no one else could tell.

He would be ready when the Americans came looking for men who knew how to pull an oar against the current.

NEXT

Chapter Three: Engagé of the Corps, (1804–Spring 1805)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-three-engage-of-corps.html

Rivet of the Rivers: The Extraordinary Life of François Rivet, Voyageur, Mountain Man, and Patriarch of the Pacific Northwest

Chapter One: Blood of the Voyageurs, (1754–1790s)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/rivet-of-rivers-extraordinary-life-of.html

Chapter Two: The Missouri Beckons, (Late 1790s–1803)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-two-missouri-beckons-late.html

Chapter Three: Engagé of the Corps, (1804–Spring 1805)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-three-engage-of-corps.html

Chapter Four: Free Trapper on the Missouri, (1805–1808)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-four-free-trapper-on-missouri.html

Chapter Five: Salish Country and a New Family, (1808–1813)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-five-salish-country-and-new.html

Chapter Six: Freeman Between Empires, (1813–1821)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-six-freeman-between-empires.html

Chapter Seven: Snake Country and “Old Rivet”, (1822–1829)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-seven-snake-country-and-old.html

Chapter Eight: Master of Fort Colvile, (1829–1837)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-eight-master-of-fort-colvile.html

Chapter Nine: French Prairie and the Big Wedding, (1838–1845)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-nine-french-prairie-and-big.html

Chapter Ten: The Long Portage Ends, (1846–1852)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-ten-long-portage-ends-18461852.html

Chapter Three: Engagé of the Corps, (1804–Spring 1805)

 

St. Louis smelled of river mud, woodsmoke, and ambition that spring of 1804. The Louisiana Purchase was no longer rumor; it was fact. American officers walked the streets with a new proprietorial air, and the French merchants who had dominated the Missouri trade for a generation calculated how best to profit from the change. Among the men they calculated with were the experienced boatmen who already knew the river’s moods.

François Rivet was one of them.

When Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began assembling their Corps of Discovery, they understood that soldiers alone could not force heavily laden boats against the Missouri’s current. They needed men who had spent years reading water, poling through shallows, and dragging vessels over sandbars that shifted overnight. St. Louis entrepreneur Auguste Chouteau and others helped supply those men. Eight French-Canadian engagés were hired to man a cargo pirogue. Three more were engaged to assist the soldiers with the big keelboat. Pierre Cruzatte, the one-eyed fiddler and bowman, would take his place at the prow. François Labiche would set the stroke. And among the hired paddlers who joined at St. Charles was François Rivet, then just short of his fiftieth birthday.

He did not sign on for the entire journey to the western ocean. The agreement was clear: he would go as far as the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, where the river made its great bend in what would one day be North Dakota. Beyond that point the captains would be on their own. Rivet was a free man making a limited contract, not a soldier under orders. That distinction would matter.

The expedition left the mouth of the Missouri in May and fought its way upstream through the summer. The work was brutal even for men accustomed to the paddle. The keelboat and pirogues had to be dragged, poled, and rowed against a current that never rested. Sandbars appeared where open channel had been the day before. Entire banks calved into the river with a sound like distant thunder. The men sweated in the heat, cursed the mosquitoes, and watched the prairies roll away on either side under a sky so wide it seemed to mock their slow progress.

Rivet took his turn at the oars and the poles. He was older than most of the enlisted men and many of the other engagés, but the years on the river had hardened rather than softened him. He knew how to settle into the long rhythm that conserved strength, how to read the subtle lines on the water that betrayed a hidden bar, how to keep his mouth shut when the captains’ decisions seemed foolish to a man who had already wintered among the tribes. At night, when the boats were tied to the bank and the men sprawled around the fires, he listened more than he spoke. The soldiers talked of the glory of reaching the Pacific. The French boatmen talked of wages, of the tribes ahead, and of the practical problem of getting back downriver alive.

By late autumn the Corps reached the cluster of Mandan and Hidatsa villages near the mouth of the Knife River. There they built Fort Mandan and prepared to spend the winter. Rivet’s contract was complete. In November he and three other engagés—Baptiste Deschamps, Étienne Malboeuf, and Alexander Carson—were formally discharged. They did not, however, simply turn around and head for St. Louis. Instead they built a small hut of their own a short distance from the fort walls and settled in for the winter under the expedition’s protection. It was a practical arrangement. The villages were crowded, the weather was turning deadly, and the presence of the American soldiers offered a measure of safety that independent traders did not always enjoy.

That winter François Rivet became, briefly, a figure of entertainment and curiosity. The Mandan and Hidatsa hosted dances and gatherings, and the Americans and Frenchmen were invited. One night, whether from high spirits, a desire to amuse their hosts, or simple bravado, Rivet performed a feat that entered the journals and the oral memory of the expedition: he danced on his head. In the flickering light of the fire, the stocky, graying Frenchman planted his hands on the packed earth and lifted his body into a handstand, moving his legs in some approximation of a dance while the Mandan spectators laughed and shouted approval. It was a small moment, comic and human, yet it fixed him in the record as more than just another hired paddle.

Spring came late and hard. In April 1805 the Corps of Discovery prepared to continue westward. Rivet and the other discharged men had their own plans. Together with Philippe Degie (sometimes written Degrais or Degie), who had attached himself to the party the previous autumn, Rivet built a canoe. When Corporal Richard Warfington started back downriver with the return party and the keelboat, Rivet and Degie went with them—but only as far as the Arikara villages. There they left the Americans and returned to the independent life of the upper Missouri.

The captains continued west without him. Rivet remained in the country he had come to know, a free trader and trapper once more, floating between the villages and the temporary camps of men like himself. When Lewis and Clark finally came back down the Missouri in August 1806, they found him living among the Mandans. The meeting was brief, almost casual in the journals, yet it carried a quiet weight. The great expedition had gone to the Pacific and returned. The engagé who had danced on his head had simply stayed, continuing the older pattern of the French river men who moved through the country according to their own seasons and necessities.

François Rivet watched the Corps pass downriver toward St. Louis and the fame that awaited them. Then he turned back to the work at hand—trapping, trading, reading the moods of the tribes and the river. The Missouri had not finished with him. In many ways it was only beginning.

NEXT

Chapter Four: Free Trapper on the Missouri, (1805–1808)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-four-free-trapper-on-missouri.html

Rivet of the Rivers: The Extraordinary Life of François Rivet, Voyageur, Mountain Man, and Patriarch of the Pacific Northwest

Chapter One: Blood of the Voyageurs, (1754–1790s)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/rivet-of-rivers-extraordinary-life-of.html

Chapter Two: The Missouri Beckons, (Late 1790s–1803)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-two-missouri-beckons-late.html

Chapter Three: Engagé of the Corps, (1804–Spring 1805)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-three-engage-of-corps.html

Chapter Four: Free Trapper on the Missouri, (1805–1808)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-four-free-trapper-on-missouri.html

Chapter Five: Salish Country and a New Family, (1808–1813)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-five-salish-country-and-new.html

Chapter Six: Freeman Between Empires, (1813–1821)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-six-freeman-between-empires.html

Chapter Seven: Snake Country and “Old Rivet”, (1822–1829)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-seven-snake-country-and-old.html

Chapter Eight: Master of Fort Colvile, (1829–1837)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-eight-master-of-fort-colvile.html

Chapter Nine: French Prairie and the Big Wedding, (1838–1845)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-nine-french-prairie-and-big.html

Chapter Ten: The Long Portage Ends, (1846–1852)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-ten-long-portage-ends-18461852.html