On Some White Women in the Wilds of Northern North America

"Great God! This is an awful place!" were words used by Scott at the South Pole (Pound 1967), but they could have come just as well from the lips of a white woman on finding herself in the proximity of either Pole. Although some Viking woman undoubtedly preceded her onto the North American continent, Natalya Shelekhov became the first European female in Alaska when she and her merchant husband spent four years (1783-1787) on Kodiak Island. (He later founded the Russian-American Company.) Natalya's visit did not precipitate a female invasion, however, and Russian merchants largely kept to native "wives" in North America (Chevigny 1942). In Canada, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Indian women likewise became the "country" (common law) wives of fur traders and trappers of both the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company; they were known as petticoat politicians because of their unofficial, though pronounced, influence on their mates' decisions. By the 1820's men started bringing European women to Indian country, but by 1825 one, Captain R. P. Pelley, Governor of Red River, was forced to return to England with his wife, whose health had given out after she had braved the wilds for two years. The Bay Company's Overseas Governor, George Simpson, nevertheless decided to bring out his 18-old English wife, Frances, in 1830. A delicate constitution and sheltered upbringing hardly fitted her for the role of governor's lady in the wilds of Rupert's Land, however, and she returned to England for good in 1833 (Van Kirk 1972). J. G. McTavish brought out his Catherine in 1830 also. They made a home on the shores of Hudson Bay at Moose Factory and remained there until even Catherine's stout Scottish temperament had had enough; they moved to a farm on the Ottawa River in the settled part of Canada in 1835. Although very few white women lived in Indian country during this period (and the Simpson, McKenzie, Jones and Cochrane wives were the only ones living at Red River during the spring of 1831), more were steadily arriving, as it now became fashionable for Company officers to have European wives. Their coming brought an end to the earlier and freer social customs of the fur trade. Indeed, "country" marriages with Indian and mixed-blood women became unacceptable; the native skills of such partners were no longer needed in settled areas. By this time the area known as Rupert's Land was very largely populated by partially- white individuals, most of whom had no place in an all-white ruling society. A small number of men lived with, or were married to, mixed-blood women, and their offspring educated in Canada or England, but for the most part such relation- ships were abandoned with the coming of white women (Van Kirk 1972). The European wife, in her turn, was often a misfit in the new world, terrified to look about her for fear of seeing some of the results of her husband's earlier liaisons.