“[A]n Unpleasant Transaction on this Frontier”

This chapter focuses on few native women who held positions of authority and autonomy because of their access to furs through indigenous kin networks and to trade goods through their fur-trader husbands. It examines how the transition in sovereignty from France, to Britain, to the United States compromised the autonomy and authority that had accrued to three female fur traders: Elizabeth Mitchell, Magdelaine Marcot La Framboise, and Therese Marcot Lasaliere Schindler. French defeat in the Seven Years’ War threatened to undermine the existing system of interpersonal relationships that structured the exchange process. British traders accompanied the military west to the former French forts and trading communities. The chapter concludes by examining the published memoirs of Elizabeth Baird, Therese Marcot Lasaliere Schindler’s granddaughter, to show how the heterogeneous fur trade community of Michilimackinac was reimagined as a “white pioneer settlement”.