28 Facts About Madame Montour

Madame Montour was an interpreter, diplomat, and local leader of Algonquin and French Canadian ancestry.

In 1711, Madame Montour began working as an interpreter and diplomatic consultant for the province of New York.

Madame Montour's village, known as Otstonwakin, was at the mouth of Loy ck Creek on the West Branch Susquehanna River.

Madame Montour has often been confounded with her female relatives, particularly Catharine Montour, who was prominent in western New York.

Madame Montour had been adopted and raised by the Iroquois, she said.

Madame Montour eventually married Carondawana, an Oneida war chief, with whom she had several children before his death in battle in 1729.

In 1974, historian William A Hunter tentatively identified Madame Montour as Elizabeth Couc, a mixed born in 1667 near Trois-Rivieres, New France, in what is Quebec, Canada.

Madame Montour accepted that Montour had been captured by an Iroquois war party around 1695, but if she was Elizabeth Couc, she was much older than ten at the time.

Hirsch and Sivertsen have explained the discrepancies by suggesting that Madame 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.

Parmenter and Hagedorn are among contemporary historian who have argued that Madame Montour was not Isabelle Couc, but rather her niece.

Madame Montour's parents were Louis Couc Montour, who was the brother of Isabelle Couc, and Madeleine, a Sokoki woman.

Madame Montour became involved with Etienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont; when he deserted the fort in 1706, she fled with him.

Andrew Madame Montour is connected on the chart to both of his potential mothers.

Louis Madame Montour relocated to Michilimakinac in the 1690s, where he worked as a fur trader.

When Robert Hunter became governor of New York in 1710, Madame Montour became his personal interpreter and one of his most trusted advisers.

Madame Montour 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.

Madame Montour 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.

Madame Montour delivered a sermon in French, during which Montour reportedly wept.

Madame 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.

In 1744, Madame Montour attended the conference for the treaty of Lancaster, where she told her story to Witham Marshe, as described above.

Marshe, like others, thought that Madame Montour was a French woman captured by and raised among the Indians, rather than a metis of partial French ancestry.

Historian Alison Duncan Hirsch has argued that the captivity story Madame Montour told to Marshe was a fiction she created to reinvent herself in Pennsylvania, claiming her father had been a governor of New France.

Madame Montour has numerous descendants, and many Iroquois people still carry the Montour name.

Madame Montour worked as an interpreter for Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Sir William Johnson's Indian Department.

Andrew Madame Montour was appointed as a captain in George Washington's regiment at Fort Necessity during the French and Indian War.

Madame Montour was granted 880 acres of land by Pennsylvania in the Montoursville area.

Madame Montour 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.

Madame Montour served as a messenger, and was reportedly killed in the French and Indian War.