Marie Thérèsa Lasselle

by Dennis M. Au

The distaff side of historical biography is often ignored. This is especially true of Michigan’s fur trade era in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Certainly many women lived in the settlements at Mackinac, Detroit, St. Joseph and the River Raisin (present-day Monroe, Michigan). Since most women during this time were illiterate, however, our knowledge of them is largely confined to entries in church registers. Marie Thérèsa Lasselle is one exception. She was both literate and artistic, and she left a legacy—the products of her own hand—which gives contemporary society a rare glimpse of women in the fur trade.

Madame Lasselle’s life spanned an exciting and colorful era that witnessed the rise and fall of empires and a new nation born and challenged in war. She lived at a time and place when Indian and European cultures clashed and mingled. While she did not change history, her life reflected the influences, events and people of her day.

Born on 1 May 1735, the third child to François Berthelet dit Savoyard and Anne Boullard, Marie Thérèsa grew up in Montreal. As members of the upper class, her parents evidently sent her off to school, a rare privilege for a girl in French Canada. At that time religious orders operated the only schools in the colony for women. Under the nuns’ tutelage, these institutions were actually finishing schools where the girls learned sewing, embroidery and drawing, in addition to rudimentary academic subjects. Education set Marie Thérèsa apart from her contemporaries.

On 18 February 1765 she married Jacques Lasselle III at Lachine, a small hamlet just west of Montreal. Since at least 1755, Jacques, a merchant fur trader, plied his business between Detroit and Montreal. His trading licenses show his canoes were usually filled with rum, wine and gunpowder. Where Jacques first took his new bride to live is unknown. There is reason to believe that she gave birth to their first child Jacques IV, “among the Indians” in 1767. By 20 May 1770 when she gave birth to her second child, François, she again resided at Lachine. Two years later on June 14, her namesake, Marie Thérèsa II, was born.

Madame Lasselle did not remain at Lachine. The fall of 1776 found her at a place the Indians called Kekionga (present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana) where her husband had received an appointment as the British Indian agent. Kekionga was an important post in the fur trade and presumably the British conferred this commission on Lasselle because of his familiarity with the native people there. Central Indiana was then the territory of the influential Miami Indians. Kekionga straddled the portage between the Maumee and Wabash rivers. Merchants and traders, as well as Detroit’s military commander, all considered this a vital link in the trade and communication routes tying Detroit to the Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi river valleys.

No doubt Jacques’s tenure at Kekionga helped establish his family’s association with a place that lasted into the nineteenth century. Indeed, when Marie Thérèsa gave birth there to their fourth child, Hyacinthe, on 25 February 1777, the Indians gave him the sobriquet “Kekionga,” which he retained throughout his life. While Jacques held his post there, his brothers Antoine and Hyacinthe also cemented their trade at Kekionga. Like most Canadian traders, the Lasselles operated their business as a family operation.

Events took a turn for the worse for the Lasselles. The turmoil of the American Revolution reached Kekionga. After George Rogers Clark captured Vincennes on the Wabash from the British in 1778 and then recaptured it in 1779, Kekionga became strategically vital for the defense or conquest of Detroit, the anchor of British power in the Northwest. During the summer of 1780, in one ill-fated attempt to march on Detroit, Frenchman Augustin de la Balme, a compatriot of the Marquis de Lafayette, gathered a French-Canadian force from the Illinois Country and Vincennes and headed north toward Detroit. As they moved up the Wabash in October, their lofty goal of conquest was supplanted by a desire for plunder. They still appeared a formidable force and on their approach to Kekionga, the inhabitants—and especially those with known connections to the British like the Lasselles—hastily fled down the Maumee with little more than the clothes on their backs. Madame Lasselle suffered the consequences. Not only did she lose her home and all of her possessions, but during the chaos of their flight down the Maumee her only daughter fell out of the boat and drowned.

The Lasselles eventually reached Detroit. Jacques tried to rebuild his trading business, but demoralized by his recent personal losses and failing health and hampered by the disruption the American Revolution wrought on the Indian trade, he failed in all his endeavors and sank deeply into debt. On 1 July 1781, less than nine months after fleeing Kekionga, Marie Thérèsa gave birth to their fifth and last child, Antoine. Shortly thereafter, she took her two youngest children and left to live with relatives in Montreal. Her husband and the two eldest boys remained in Detroit; Jacques died there in August 1791.

Lacking means to support herself, Marie Thérèsa lived in poverty in Montreal until 1802 when she received the first dividend from her brother’s estate. Three years later, her brother’s estate awarded her a half-interest in his house. As her sons established their business, they also financially supported their mother. Some time before 1807 her son Jacques, known as “Coco”—the French diminutive for egg, which best translates as “eggie pooh”—even sent her a black slave to serve her needs.

In the year their father died Marie Thérèsa’s oldest sons, Coco and François, became partners, an association that lasted until 1809. Like their father and uncles, they concentrated on the Indian trade in the upper Maumee and Wabash river valleys. Coco was especially shrewd. Already a seasoned fur trader, he wintered many years in Indian villages collecting furs. He was fluent in many native languages and was well acquainted with their customs. He knew native people greatly respected marriage alliances, and realized that his marriage to Marie Bluejacket—daughter of the famous Shawnee chief George Bluejacket—gave him an important edge in the trade.

Though the fur trade was their main business, the brothers also invested in and built mills and distilleries, dabbled in the import business and speculated in land. By 1808 they owned and rented nearly two dozen farms along the River Raisin. As their younger brothers matured, they were included in the firm. Thus, when Hyacinthe came in 1793, he clerked for Coco and François before starting off on his own. When Antoine arrived in 1803, his two older brothers outfitted him and sent him off into the Indian country to learn native languages and trading customs.

The fur trade was an unstable business; traders frequently amassed fortunes one year and fell into debt the next. While the older Lasselle brothers did well into the early years of the nineteenth century, when the fur market declined, their Montreal suppliers clamored for the ninety-six thousand dollars the brothers owed them.

Although the Lasselles had accounts due totaling over $138,000, trade was so bad they had no hope of collecting. In desperation they sought their mother’s aid. Between 1806 and 1816, she settled over $80,000 of her sons’ debts, negotiating portions of some away while paying others. In return, Coco and François mortgaged nearly all of their real and personal property to her and signed several promissory notes. This situation quickly became a financial morass. Coco and François could not repay all their obligations to their mother on time; Madame Lasselle eventually discovered that her sons had obligated her for more than she realized. In 1807, Madame Lasselle, accompanied by Coco’s daughter Nanette, left Montreal to live with her son Jacques in Detroit. During the years Nanette lived with her grandmother in Montreal, Madame Lasselle required her to receive a proper convent education.

Sometime before 1811, Coco moved his family and mother from Detroit to the River Raisin, where, with the exception of Hyacinthe, all of Madame Lasselle’s family now lived. By the spring of 1812 war loomed on the horizon and Marie Thérèsa returned to Detroit to be near a church with a priest. It is fortunate she moved, for the war left her children’s home plundered and pillaged. After the ware she returned to Coco’s house on the Raisin. Her time with him was brief; Jacques died in 1815. Antoine took possession of his brother’s household while Madame Lasselle continued boarding there.

On 29 September 1819, at seventy-four years of age, Marie Thérèsa Lasselle died; she was buried in St. Antoine of the River Raisin’s churchyard. An inventory of her estate revealed her as a woman of considerable wealth. The appraisers valued her personal estate, exclusive of real property, at $15,616. She did not live in rugged frontier simplicity—among her possessions was a complete silver tea service, silver goblets and candlesticks and two caléchés [two-wheeled carriages]. The division of Madame Laselle’s property gave François and the heirs of Coco’s estate each only one dollar—they still owed her a considerable debt. Antoine’s allotment included her personal property and the half-interest in her brother’s Montreal house. Hyacinthe, a prosperous Vincennes merchant and an Indiana militia general, received one thousand dollars.

 Marie Thérèsa Lasselle’s biography makes a fascinating story by itself. The real exceptional portion of her legacy, however, is her self portrait. According to a note written by one of her granddaughters, Madame Lasselle painted and embroidered the picture while residing in Detroit in 1780-81, just after fleeing Kekionga. The work is an extremely rare glimpse of a southeastern Michigan eighteenth century pioneer and ranks among the oldest surviving portraits completed in Michigan.

The sky and face of this extraordinary piece are executed in watercolor on silk, the remainder worked with silk embroidery thread. This art genre, both in media and composition, is typical of the style found during the last decades of the eighteenth and the first years of the nineteenth centuries. Madame Lasselle probably learned painting and embroidery techniques while attending convent school.

The family held onto this portrait until 1989, when a descendant donated it to the Monroe County Historical Museum. It is one of the more significant artifacts from our early French settlers. More importantly, it is a beautiful work of art from a remarkable woman of Michigan’s fur trade era.

Dennis M. Au, a historical consultant living in Evansville, Indiana, is president of the Center for French Colonial Studies.