Madame Montour
Hunter tentatively identified Madame Montour as Elizabeth Couc, a mixed born in 1667 near Trois-Rivières, New France, in what is now Quebec, Canada.
Hirsch and Sivertsen have explained the discrepancies by suggesting that Montour was deliberately vague about her past; this allowed her to present a different account of herself in Pennsylvania as a genteel French woman, albeit one in Indian dress.
[9] According to this interpretation, Montour was born in an Indian village near modern Sorel, Quebec, around 1685, a year consistent with the story that she told Marshe.
[12] As pieced together by Hirsch, Madame Montour was Isabelle Couc and led an eventful life before beginning her career in New York as an interpreter for the British.
Cadillac would later claim that Isabelle led a "dissolute life", and had more than one hundred male lovers; some historians attribute his vitriol to some personal bias.
In 1709, during Queen Anne's War, Louis-Thomas Chabert de Joncaire and his men assassinated Louis Montour on orders from Governor Vaudreuil.
Although she evidently could not read or write, she was valuable as an interpreter, able to speak French, English, and several languages in both the Algonquian and Iroquoian families.
According to historian Jon Parmenter, Madame Montour's role as a "behind the scenes" consultant was even more important than her work as an interpreter.
[27] He became "king" of the Algonquian-speaking Shawnee in Pennsylvania in 1714, and traveled between there and New York with Madame Montour for years, strengthening connections between them and the Iroquois.
According to historian Alison Duncan Hirsch, the wording of an official recommendation about Montour's salary "has been misread to mean that she was asking to be paid the same as a man"; rather, she wanted the pay of an interpreter, which was higher than that of a common soldier.
[31] Because of her cultural knowledge of Native American affairs and facility with both the Iroquoian and Algonquian language families, Montour was sought as an adviser by Pennsylvania officials and private traders.
She first appears in the Pennsylvania historical record in July 1727 as an interpreter at a council in Philadelphia between Governor Patrick Gordon and an Iroquois group.
[32] Madame Montour and Carondawana had a close relationship with Shikellamy, a noted Oneida diplomat who benefited from the couple's cultural and linguistic expertise.
[34] After her husband's death, Montour was gradually excluded from Pennsylvania diplomacy by Shikellamy and his colonial associate Conrad Weiser, who wanted to keep tight control of the province's relationship with the Iroquois.
[35] She retired to her village, where she operated a trading post and supply depot, and raised her son Andrew Montour to be an interpreter and diplomat.
Count Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf, bishop of the Moravian Church, visited Otstonwakin in 1742 on his journey to Onondaga, the Iroquois capital in western New York.
[36] Montour asked Zinzendorf to baptize two Indian children, but he declined, explaining that the Moravians did not perform baptisms in a village without first establishing a mission there.
Historian Alison Duncan Hirsch has argued that the captivity story Montour told to Marshe was a fiction she created to reinvent herself in Pennsylvania, claiming her father had been a governor of New France.
[38] By 1745, she had left Otstonwakin and was living with her son Andrew on an island in the Susquehanna River near the Native village of Shamokin, which was settled by Delaware, Oneida and Siouan-speaking Tutelo.
This was her last appearance in the historical record, aside from a brief statement made by trader John Harris in January 1753: "Madame Montour is dead.
Andrew Montour was appointed as a captain in George Washington's regiment at Fort Necessity during the French and Indian War.
He left Montoursville at some point and moved to what now is Juniata County before finally settling on Montour's Island in the Ohio River near Pittsburgh.
