Metis Matriarchs
Lady Lougheed and Buckskin Mary were at the forefront of rapid changes in late-nineteenth century Western Canada.
Lady Lougheed and Buckskin Mary were important community builders of Canada’s pioneer West.
“Miss Bella Hardisty, is passing the winter at this place,” said the 1872 letter to Hudson’s Bay Company chief factor Richard Hardisty in reference to his niece Isabella. The writer was probably Ross MacFarlane, an HBC employee at Fort Chipewyan who was concerned about the young woman’s future. “It is to be regretted that she was removed so soon from the Canadian Institution where she was being educated — two or three years longer would have turned out a highly accomplished and charming young lady.”
It’s uncertain why Isabella Hardisty was removed from the school in Ontario, but it is known that the Metis girl wasn’t happy there and that she stood out as different — some of her classmates thought she was the daughter of an “Indian chief.”
Despite the letter writer’s misgivings, Isabella went on to continue her education and to become a “lady.” She would eventually move to the muddy hamlet of Calgary, where she would meet and marry James Lougheed — a future senator whose knighthood in 1916 transformed her into Lady Lougheed.
Indeed, long after the death of her husband, she remained on the guest lists of community and political leaders as well as of royalty. By the time of her own death in 1936, Isabella Hardisty Lougheed was recognized as the “First Lady” of the prairie West.
Isabella was not the only Metis pioneer woman to make a name for herself in the region. Marie Rose Delorme Smith was one of the first homesteaders in the Pincher Creek area of southern Alberta. She worked alongside her husband, former robe and whisky trader Charlie Smith, to establish a successful ranch. Known to many as “Buckskin Mary,” Marie Rose established a cottage industry to help support her family and formed longstanding relationships with community leaders. By the time of her death in 1960 at the age of ninetyeight, she was recognized as an important pioneer.
While one was known as Lady Lougheed and the other as Buckskin Mary, the life stories of the two women have many similarities. Both were born in 1861 to prominent fur-trading families, both attended European-style boarding schools — Wesleyan Ladies College in Ontario for Isabella and a convent operated by the Grey Nuns in St. Boniface, Manitoba, for Marie Rose — and both were encouraged to marry suitable husbands of European origin. Most significantly, they were Metis women who were actively involved in the economy and achieved success during a difficult time for their people. They were alive when the fur trade era was ending and non-Indigenous settlement was beginning. This transitional period — rocked by the short-lived 1885 Northwest Resistance — left many Metis without land.
But both women rose above their challenges and proved themselves to be of strong character as they contributed to the
construction of the prairie West.
Isabella Hardisty was born in 1861 at Fort Resolution, an HBC post on the shore of Great Slave Lake in what is now the Northwest Territories. Her father, like generations of Hardisty men before him, was an HBC man. At the time of Isabella’s birth, William Hardisty was chief trader (later promoted to chief factor) in charge of the sprawling Mackenzie River district. Hardisty’s mother was Indigenous, as was his wife, Mary Ann Allen (Isabella’s mother).
Despite the Hardisty family’s privileged position, they faced the same hardships as everyone else in the region when game was scarce. In a Saturday Night magazine interview published September 16, 1922, Isabella said the family had to move to Great Slave Lake one winter to avoid starvation. “We were given fifty pounds of flour as our share of available provisions. For seven months we lived on that and white fish from Great Slave Lake…. It was lovely fish. My mother boiled it, fried it and baked it but it was always fish!”
Isabella’s mother’s practical skills included driving a dogsled and setting rabbit snares but she had little formal education. William Hardisty wanted something better for his daughter. At the age of six or seven, he decided to send her thousands of kilometres south