Frenchtown

Frenchtown began being settled by Métis (mixed blood fur traders) a few years after the trading post Fort Nez Percés (later called Fort Walla Walla) was built on the Columbia River in 1818.

By 1836 when Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa built their mission here, there were perhaps a dozen Metis cabins amongst Cayuse and Walla Walla Indian lodges.

Trouble began in 1847 when the Whitmans and others were murdered — the Whitman Massacre.   By this time there were perhaps four dozen retired Metis and their families in the area.

Fighting between the Cayuse and whites from Oregon began.   A treaty was signed in 1855.   Among the French Metis interpreters at the treaty councils was Mathieu Dauphin, grandfather of Marcel Gagnon Jr.

Mathieu Dauphin had married Suzanne of the Cayuse tribe in 1840.

Mathieu’s and Suzanne’s daughter Rosalie was Marcel Gagnon’s mother.

Suzanne and Rosalie

Fighting renewed after the treaty signing, this time involving many more tribes.  This time it was unsafe for the Frenchtown settlers, so they moved out.  A major battle in this war was fought in Frenchtown itself.

The treaty was ratified in 1859 and the hostilities ended.  A land rush began as the Indians moved to the reservation.  Some of the original settlers returned, but many Americans moved in too.

Among those new settlers was Marcel Gagnon Sr., a French Canadian California gold miner, who married Rosalie.

  Marcel Gagnon Sr.

Frenchtown continued as a mostly French-speaking, Catholic community up into the 1880s.   However, many of the families moved out with the adoption of the Dawes Act of 1887, when many mixed blood families moved to claim allotments in the Umatilla Reservation.