Marie-Anne Lagimodière is an excellent subject for a biography: she was the first white woman to follow her coureur de bois husband into the bush, she witnessed the war between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North Western Company, and she was the grandmother of Louis Riel. No wonder, then, that Maggie Siggins, the author of eight books, including the wonderful Riel: A Life of Revolution, has written Marie-Anne. Despite very little existing written material about her subject, Siggins uses primary sources from contemporaries to paint a picture of what Marie-Anne’s life may have been like.
    The hypothesis of the book seems to be that Marie-Anne, like her famous descendant, was a rule-breaker, based mainly on the fact that she was unmarried until age 25, and then decided to go west. However, while her adventures were thrilling (her family was taken hostage and narrowly escaped a scalping), there really isn’t much evidence that she chafed against society; rather, she more often seems powerless as she gets swept up in the events around her.
    In fact, what Siggins has actually written here is a history of the fur trade in Canada. The most engrossing parts of the book are the descriptions of portaging; the tracing of how local native alliances formed, evolved, and then deteriorated; and the buildup of tension that culminated in 1816 at Seven Oaks, where an HBC Governor and 20 men were killed by a group of Métis. The fact that Marie-Anne happened to be living nearby is incidental, and it’s easy to forget upon whom the focus is supposed to be.
    In addition, the book ends abruptly in 1818 when Marie-Anne is 36, and thus barely even mentions her relationship with her grandson. Given that she lived to be 96, the epilogue that summarizes the last 60 years of her life is unsatisfying. The reader is left wishing that Siggins had concentrated solely on writing a history of Manitoba prior to the Métis Rebellion, because those parts of the book are ultimately the most appealing.