Colonial Encounters and the Changing Contours of Ethnicity: Pierre-Louis de Lorimier and Métissage at the Edges of Empire

On November 23, 1803, Capt. Meriwether Lewis and his men voyaged up the Mississippi from its confluence with the Ohio River to the village of Cape Girardeau. Upon his arrival at the small frontier village, Lewis sought out its commandant, Pierre-Louis de Lorimier, only to discover that he and his family were off at the horse races. Lewis proceeded to the racetrack and waited on Lorimier as he settled a number of disputed bets. Lewis noted that the races were reminiscent of those frequented by "uncivilized backwoodsmen" in Kentucky and disapprovingly opined that these "men of desperate fortunes" were far too eager to speculate their meager wealth on games of chance.¹

Birds-eye view of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (1862).

filson historical society

Despite initial reservations, Merriweather Lewis dined with the commandant and his family that evening. Referring to Lorimier as a "Canadian by birth of French extraction," Lewis recounted the man's history of trading with Shawnees and Lenapes in the Ohio Valley. He went on to note that George Rogers Clark and Virginian soldiers had destroyed Lorimier's trading post during the American Revolution but Lorimier had recovered from that setback to establish himself as a person of wealth in Upper Louisiana. Equally, Lorimier's family captivated the American. Lewis commented at length about the man's French-Shawnee wife, Charlotte Pemanpieh Bougainville, and their children. He noted that Lorimier, like "many of the Canadian Traders [had] taken to himself a wife from among the aborigines of the country." He observed with great interest the fashion of Lorimier's wife and daughter; the former sported a combination of Shawnee and Canadien styles, while the latter dressed in "a plain yet fashionable stile…Common in the Atlantic States among the respectable people of the middle class."²

Costume of domiciliated North American Natives (1804). Painted by George Heriot.

toronto public library

This short episode provides a window onto a rapidly changing colonial landscape, full of new peoples and settlements. The burgeoning village of Cape Girardeau and surrounding area replete with disparate peoples—French, Canadiens, Louisiana Creoles, Americans, Shawnees, Lenapes, and Osages, to name only a few—epitomized a borderland contact zone. Lewis's depiction of Lorimier and his family evokes a colonial culture in which social mores were tied to the processes of hybridity that emerged from relationships at the edges of empire. Lorimier's marriage and his family's mixed sartorial expressions exemplify the fluid ethnic boundaries of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century borderlands.³

During the mid-eighteenth century, shifting imperial governance ushered in a new era of rampant Anglo-American settler expansion and Native resistance, dispersal, and dislocation. Like their Indigenous neighbors, French-speaking peoples in North America found themselves adjusting to new imperial realities—governments, policies, laws, officials—under British, Spanish, and American regimes. A fluid geopolitical, social, and cultural context resulted. The introduction of complex ethnic categories enabled North Americans to alter their ethnic identities.

Louis Lorimier spent his life navigating the flexible and fluid ethnic boundaries in North America during the latter half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From his youth in a French mission community near Montreal to his adulthood in the Ohio Valley and later years in Spanish Upper Louisiana, multiple colonial contact zones influenced Lorimier. At the edges of empire, the very contours of ethnicity resulted in a spectrum of experiences and a definitive contact perspective reliant on relationships.

Métissage (cultural hybridity) was thus contingent on variable kinship relations, personal experiences, circumstances, opportunities, and constraints. Geopolitical conditions too, informed processes of community membership. Just as cultural interactions transformed distinct geopolitical milieus, the geopolitical circumstances of individual contact zones shaped and reshaped the contours of culture, community, and ethnicity. Lorimier's life story offers insights into this dialogical process. More than the creation of some sort of static mixed identity or the imbrication of distinct ones, métissage was a process whereby...