The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

More Than a Colourful Character

Circa 2008, I read about a mysterious Métis woman in a prose-poem recounting historical women's lives by the late Sharron Proulx-Turner, she walks for days inside a thousand eyes. This mysterious woman was identified as "Madame Houle," who despite standing out in various colonial records, still had next to no information about her. For one thing, it seemed she had no name of her own, which is genuinely not a Métis thing. How does a person get famous enough to turn up in fur trade records, yet somehow remain all but a cipher, easily mixed up with the male François Houle, who worked from time to time as a fur trade interpreter and steersman. The whole thing seemed to be a mysterious and unfortunate dead end, until I stumbled upon a 2003 article by historian Diane Payment focussed on the Marie Fisher Gaudet, "Madame Houle's" daughter, though it is not strictly clear whether she was a biological daughter or an adopted daughter of this prominent Métis woman of the mackenzie basin region.

As it turns out, "Madame Houle" was in fact Élise Taupier, likely born in the mid 1810s at the earliest, apparently daughter of a Montréal-origin fur trader and a Dene Za' woman from a region roughly defined by the norther peace river watershed and the southern deh cho river watershed. Most people repeat the same description of Élise Taupier, whether in french or translated into english: "Madame François Houle was a colourful Métis characyer of the time, a strong woman dressed in deerskins with a knife at her belt, bossing the rough-tough scowmen on the Liard River." It appears most historians have found tracking down the men in Taupier's life more interesting, or else recounting the specific missionizing history of Marie Fisher Gaudet, which is fair enough I suppose, but disappointing. The little more information easy to find is itself fixated on Taupier's decision to take the long trip to st. boniface, manitoba around 1845, where she was baptized. What comes across loud and clear is that some authors dealing with what little information readily available to them about Taupier's life were not at all sure how to talk about her, and could not understand that her knowledge of catholicism among many other topics could and very likely did come from other Indigenous people. There is a more interesting story here, albeit much of it circumstantial rather than directly written by Taupier herself or someone who knew her.

1912 photograph of york boats on the saskatchewan river, item PA-017395 at library and archives canada.

So, let's go back to the beginning, so to speak. Élise Taupier was likely born in the mid 1810s at the earliest, to a montréal fur trader father and a Dene woman in the area of what the english call the liard river. Métis communities independent of the Red River Métis grew up there, though they soon intermarried with their more southeastern cousins as they encountered one another through the fur trade and other travel. Compared to the various europeans showing up in the comparatively far northwest, Dene peoples customarily did not insist upo extreme differentiation in clothing and work between men and women. There may still be trees and warm weather for part of the year in the subarctic, but it is still a difficult place to live if people misplaced their priorities. It was more important for everyone to contribute their work to the community to help everyone survive and live well, and if that meant people ended up doing more of one thing or another than a foreigner thought a man or woman should be good at, too bad. Both Dene and Métis customarily take steps to ensure children have appropriate parents to raise them whether it be by adoption or helping children to join the families of aunts or uncles or healthy grandparents. In the Métis case, especially those who developed catholic connections, additional family ties could be created by godparenting, which might lead to adults undergoing baptism in order to take up this social role. It is striking that Marie Fisher Gaudet's year of birth is identified as 1843, and that Taupier was baptised in 1845. Whether this was because she had undertaken the responsibility of raising the daughter of fur trader Alexander Fisher by another woman, or she did so as part of winning ongoing support from Fisher and his family for her own natural daughter by him, this does not seem coincidental.

In any case, Taupier was not one to specialize in the trade-post centred tasks many M&ecute;tis women of the period focussed on. The sparse record indicates she was a skilled interpreter and language instructor, known to the various missionaries making their way in and out of her homeland. She also became a skilled york boat crew leader, a position often referred to as a "bully," leading crews on the liard river section. This was no trivial job. The repeated mentions of Taupier's dagger or knife indicate she had to be ready to deal with less than respectful men, though her crews were behaved. York boats moved massive cargos down into the 1920s, their crews expected to load and unload them at speed, row them, portage them if necessary, and undertake such ordeals as literally dragging them upriver or through slow sections with ropes. A "bully" in this context then would be a person who coordinates the crew's work to avoid loss of time due to bunching up at portages or ladings, and helping them push through to get ahead of bad weather. Such people couldn't depend upon physical force to keep york boat crews working effectively, even if they were as big and effective a fighter as the famous Paulet Paul. It didn't hurt to be able to box, but it was more important to work up from being a tripman to a guide and/or "bully." It is probable that Taupier could cover guide duty on her trips, as she was born and raised in the liard region.

Taupier flits in and out of sight in the fur trade records, including an engagement with the hudson's bay company to run york boats in 1857. Diane Payment found evidence that Taupier, now in a longterm relationship with François Houle, remained a part of her daughter's life after Marie fisher Gaudet's marriage and that they lived in and around fort good hope later in their lives. Houle died in 1885, and it seems Taupier may have outlived him, as was not uncommon for Métis women who did not have numerous pregnancies and managed to avoid or survive smallpox and other infectious diseases travellers of all kinds faced in nineteenth century northern north america.

Despite how much information about Taupier's life is undocumented or otherwise unknown outside of her descendants today, it is nevertheless clear she was not an anomalous character. She was a highly skilled, hard-working Métis woman who took active part in the fur trade and the wider social and economic networks of the northwest Métis. In later life Taupier was known as a devout catholic, and her daughter Marie Fisher Gaudet went on to become a prominent religious leader. Nevertheless, it appears Taupier continued working on the york boats as long as she was physically able to do so, making multiple trips as far as red river. Evidently she was a spiritual leader in her own right, as well as a skilled york boat captain. The last eastern york boat brigades sailed in the 1870s, so Taupier likely saw the york boats retreat from the liard river, replaced by steamboats.