The Story of Madame Montour

Somewhere in the place called Three Rivers, in the French-Canadian colonies, a little girl named Isabel Couc was born in 1667. She was the daughter of a frenchman, a man who went by the name of Pierre Couc dit LaFleur, and an Algonquin woman named Marie Miteoamegoukoue. The children of couples such as these were known as the Metis, a group of people who today honor their heritage. As a Metis, Isabel understood several native languages and French, and gained proficiency in other languages as well.

According to the historian Dr. Paul Wallace, young Isabel spent several years in the early 1700s at Fort Michilmackinac & Detroit in the Michigan province area. Her relatives here were likely engaged in the fur trade, but her illiteracy left her signing documents with an ‘x’, so there are scarce proved records for her.

Its said she allowed people to believe that both her parents were french, her father a governor of Canada and her myth also included a fabricated story about her abduction as a young child and being raised among natives. She was able to speak English, German, Algonquin, Iroquois and French.

In 1709, while in Albany with her brother, he was murdered while on job as an interpretor. Out of honor, Isabel finished his job, and assumed his role, taking on the name “Madame Montour”. While in New York, Madame Montour married an Oneida Chief named Cardowana who took on the name Robert Hunter later in life, and they bore several children (stay tuned for them).

In 1727, her family followed Chief Swatana to Pennsylvania, where she once again served as an interpreter until her husbands death in 1729 following a raid, where her oldest son Andrew Montour then took over her duties. They lived in a native village called Otstonwakin (or Ostuagy, Ostonwacken) which was a thriving village settled between Loyalsock Creek & the Susquehannah River.

Madame Montour left Otstonwakin sometime prior to 1745, when the town was decimated by a Smallpox epidemic and famine, the town was written about as abandoned in 1870. She was reported as living in Philadelphia in 1744, and she passed around 1753.

Madame Montour is the matriarch to several influential native figures throughout the southern area of New York, and the northern area of Pennsylvania, and several of her children were chiefs and leaders in their own rights, like Queen Catherine of the Senecas, the leader of Catharinestown at todays Montour Falls, and the prohibitionist Queen Esther of Williamsport! Stay tuned(:

-Valkyrie