Adrienne LaChapelle

Adrienne LaChapelle in 1919.

The Oregon Daily

Quick Facts

Significance:

Resident of Fort Vancouver and Champoeg, Oregon

Place of Birth:

Fort Vancouver, Vancouver, Washington

Date of Birth:

1824

Place of Death:

Saint Louis, Oregon

Date of Death:

June 6, 1919

Place of Burial:

Saint Louis, Oregon

Cemetery Name:

Saint Louis Cemetery

Adrienne Lucier was born in late 1824 at Fort Vancouver. Over the course of her long life, she saw the rise and decline of the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, both from the vantage point of the British Hudson's Bay Company and from the perspective of the settlers who farmed the Willamette Valley. She was a Métis woman, who called upon the traditional knowledge of her Indigenous ancestors to work as a community physician, and predominantly spoke the language of her French Canadian father. Like so many others, Adrienne was a child of the fur trade. In some ways, she was caught between worlds - American and British, British and French Canadian, settler and Indigenous. But in her own way, she was able to carve out a place for herself that allowed her to be remembered as a vital part of her community.

Adrienne's mother was Josephte Nouite, an Indigenous woman who may have been from the Kwakiutl, or Kwakwaka'wakw, people of British Columbia. She is believed to have been born around 1799. Sometime between 1812 and 1813, Josephte met Adrienne's father, Etienne Lucier.

Etienne Lucier was a French Canadian fur trapper who joined Wilson Price Hunt's Astorian Overland Expedition in 1810. This expedition crossed North America with the intention of establishing a trading post for the American Pacific Fur Company at a place that would become known as Astoria, Oregon. The expedition arrived at Astoria in 1812. Etienne spent some time on the Pacific Coast, which may have been when he met Josephte. The Luciers spent the winter of 1813-1814 at one of two trading posts in the Willamette Valley: at the Pacific Fur Company's Wallace House, near present-day Salem, Oregon, or at the North West Company's Willamette Post, near present-day Newburg, Oregon. Their first child, daughter Felicite, was born in the Willamette Valley in 1814.

Etienne then left the Northwest for the North West Company's Fort William in Eastern Canada, but by 1822, he was back in the Willamette Valley, hoping to settle and farm in the area. Just one year earlier, the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) had merged; the HBC had taken over management of the North West Company's posts (and personnel) in the Pacific Northwest, and begun to make plans to centralize their influence in the region at a new fort: Fort Vancouver. In an interview given in 1919 when she was 94 years old, Adrienne described witnessing "the coming of Dr. John McLoughlin to Fort Vancouver in 1824," the year the fort was founded. Of course, Adrienne was an infant in 1824, but in any case, the Luciers were already becoming established in the Northwest when the McLoughlins - and the Hudson's Bay Company - were just arriving.

After the establishment of Fort Vancouver, Etienne Lucier was periodically employed by the HBC, both at the fort and on fur trapping expeditions. Ties between the Luciers and the fort were also created when Adrienne's older sister Felicite married one of the fort's clerks, Donald Manson, in 1828. At the Lucier home, another daughter, Pelage, was born in 1827.

Fort Vancouver's Chief Factor Dr. John McLoughlin disapproved of Etienne Lucier's attempts to farm in the Willamette Valley as an HBC employee, and the Luciers were forced to travel to Eastern Canada so that he could formally end his employment with the HBC. This attempt failed, and the Luciers returned to the Willamette by 1830. McLoughlin conceded, and sold Lucier the equipment he needed to start his farm. The location the Luciers chose for their farm was an area that would later become the eastern part of the city of Portland, Oregon. Around 1831 or 1832, Lucier relocated to Champoeg, Oregon. In the 1830s, three more children were added to the Lucier family: Louison, b. 1831, Michel, b. 1835, and Joseph, b. 1838.

Adrienne reported that the Luciers "returned often to Fort Vancouver to trade, and to visit their friend, Dr. McLoughlin. She says that when she was a little girl she used to sit on the good old doctor's lap, and sing 'Protestant hymns' for him." Adrienne spent a considerable amount of her childhood at the fort, and attended the fort's school. The Fort Vancouver school was established in 1832 and was host to several teachers over the years, both visitors to Fort Vancouver and HBC employees. There, students were taught to read and write, and received religious instruction. 

On January 23, 1839, Etienne and Josephte, who had previously been engaged in a "country marriage" or marriage à la façon du pays - a common fur trade-era marriage agreement made without church or government involvement - were formally married, likely by Catholic missionaries Modeste Demers and François Norbert Blanchet, who had recently arrived in the Willamette Valley. Not quite a year later, on January 10, 1840, Josephte died. Just eight months after her death, on August 10, Adrienne's father remarried. His second wife, Adrienne's stepmother, was a Chinook woman named Marie Marguerite. Etienne and Marie Marguerite Lucier had two children: Pierre, b. 1842, and Etienne, b. 1844.

Shortly after the death of her mother and the remarriage of her father, Adrienne Lucier left her family home to be married to André LaChapelle. LaChapelle had worked in the Northwest fur trade since 1817; like his father-in-law Etienne Lucier, he had been in the Northwest since before Fort Vancouver was established and HBC power was consolidated in the region. LaChapelle had held many jobs at Fort Vancouver in the 1820s and 1830s, often working as a blacksmith in the fort's Blacksmith Shop or as a middleman (a term that suggests either working as a rower in a canoe on fur brigades, or engaging in general labor). LaChapelle retired from HBC service in 1841 and moved to the Willamette Valley, hoping to settle and start his own farm. On May 17, 1841, André LaChapelle married Adrienne Lucier at the St. Paul Catholic Church,located in the Willamette Valley's French Prairie. She was seventeen years old (though in her 1919 interview, Adrienne recalled her age at the time of her wedding as "about 21"); he was thirty-nine.

Adrienne and André LaChapelle had a large family - between 1842 and 1865, Adrienne gave birth to sixteen children. The family lived on a farm near Champoeg, Oregon.

By 1843, the influx of Americans coming to Oregon over the Oregon Trail inspired a proposal to create a provisional government in the territory. Retired HBC employees in Oregon, like LaChapelle and Lucier, were compelled to either vote for the formation of a new government that would favor American interests or vote against it, a statement in favor of the British HBC. While André LaChapelle and the majority of HBC retirees present at the vote at Champoeg on May 2, 1843, voted against the formation of the provisional government, Etienne Lucier supported it. The defection of Lucier and fellow French Canadian François Xavier Matthieu decided the vote at 52-50 in favor of the creation of the provisional government.This was an important step for the Americans who wanted to increase their control over the Oregon Territory while it was still jointly occupied by Great Britain and the United States. In 1919, Adrienne was described as "very proud of her father's stand at Champoeg on the memorable second day of May, 1843."

For her part, Adrienne remembered the arrival of the American emigrants over the Oregon Trail at least somewhat favorably. The francophone Adrienne was quoted in 1919 as saying, "Ils me donnaient du café, et je l'aimais" ("They gave me coffee and I liked it").

As a resident of the Willamette Valley, Adrienne gained a reputation as a healer and physician for the people in her community. Her 1919 profile in The Oregon Daily Journal included the following description:

"...her most valuable knowledge had been obtained from her mother's people, who had entrusted to her the secrets of the medicinal qualities of all the wonderful varieties of herbs and roots. Her skill in preparing and administering these remedies gave her renown far and wide, and her professional services were in demand for miles and miles around. She never refused to go, day or night, rain or shine. For this purpose she always kept a swift, well trained horse, and she was known as an expert horsewoman, as well as swimmer."

In the same article, Adrienne's mother is described as a "Chinook princess," and it may be that the mother she learned her medical skills from was either Josephte Nouite or her stepmother, Marie Marguerite, who was Chinook, or perhaps both women had an influence on Adrienne's medical knowledge.

During the 1840s, Adrienne likely came into contact with employees from Fort Vancouver fairly often. Employees from the fort sometimes passed through the area, like Fort Vancouver clerk Thomas Lowe, who visited Etienne Lucier's farm in September 1845 and wrote in his journal that he and his traveling companions from the fort ate many apples from Lucier's orchards.

In 1858, Adrienne's sister Felicite, having spent the intervening years following her husband's career from HBC post to HBC post, returned to Champoeg. Felicite and now-retired HBC employee Donald Manson lived and farmed near Champoeg. Felicite died in 1867.

André LaChapelle died in June 1881 in Saint Louis, Oregon. He was buried at the Saint Louis Cemetery in present-day Gervais, Oregon. At the time of his death, Adrienne and André LaChapelle had been living and working on their farm with their three youngest children: son Amadie and his wife, and teenage daughters Marie Adele and Helena. Amadie was also working on the farm.

For the last 30 years of her life, Adrienne lived with Amadie and his family on their farm in Gervais, Oregon, not far from André LaChapelle's French Prairie farm. She died on June 6, 1919 and was also buried at the Saint Louis Cemetery. The 1919 profile of her in The Oregon Daily Journal, which declared her "Oregon's oldest woman," was published just five days before her death. The article closed with the following lines:

"About a year ago, she was partially paralyzed on one side. But her eyes are still remarkably bright, reflecting a keen, well preserved intellect. Nothing pleases her more than to gather her children's children about her, and to relate to them in her quaint French dialect the thrilling adventures of long ago."

Tracing Her Steps

At Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, visit the area where Adrienne was born and visited many times over the course of her childhood. At the fort's Chief Factor's House, see where the Luciers would have met Chief Factor Dr. John McLoughlin. At the Blacksmith Shop, see a reconstruction of the building where her husband, André LaChapelle, worked as a blacksmith for the Hudson's Bay Company.

Visit the Champoeg Heritage Area, managed by Oregon State Parks, to see where the Luciers and LaChapelles farmed in the early 1800s.
 

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Bibliography

Berquist, Timothy, PhD. "St. Paul." The Oregon Encyclopedia.Access online here.

Lowe, Thomas. Journals kept at Fort Vancouver - 1843-1850. E/A/L95 Royal BC Museum, BC Archives.

McAleer, Carolyn Patricia. Patterns from the Past: Exploring Gender and Ethnicity through Historical Archaeology among Fur Trade Families in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. M.A. Thesis, Oregon State University, 2004.

McIntyre Watson, Bruce. Lives Lived West of the Divide: A Biographical Dictionary of Fur Traders Working West of the Rockies, 1793-1858. Kelowna, BC: The Centre for Social, Spatial, and Economic Justice, the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, 2010.

Pollard, Juliet Thelma. The Making of the Métis in the Pacific Northwest, Fur Trade Children: Race, Class, and Gender. Ph.D. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1990.

"School at Fort Vancouver." Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Access online here.

Thomason, Caroline Wasson. "Oregon Woman Recalls Events of Early History." The Oregon Daily (Portland, Oregon) June 1, 1919. p. 11.

Year: 1880; Census Place: Gervais, Marion, Oregon; Roll: 1082; Page: 107A; Enumeration District: 084.