Here, then, came Marie Gaboury, in 1808, to live at Edmonton for four years. Ba’tiste, as of old, hunted as freeman, and strange to say, he was often accompanied by his dauntless wife to the hunting field. Once, when she was alone in her tepee on the prairie, the tent was suddenly surrounded by a band of Cree warriors. When the leader lifted the tent flap, Marie was in the middle of the floor on her knees making what she thought was her last prayer. A white renegrade wandering with the Crees called out to her not to be afraid--they were after Blackfeet. Ba’tiste’s horror may be guessed when he came dashing breathless across the prairie and found his wife’s tent surrounded by raiders. “Marie! Marie!” he shouted, hair streaming to the wind, and unable to wait till he reached the tepee, “Marie--are you alive?” “Yes,” her voice called back, “but I--am--dying--of fright.” Ba’tiste then persuaded the Crees that white women were not used to warriors camping so near, and they withdrew. Then he lost no time in shifting camp inside the palisades of Edmonton. The Abbé Dugas tells of another occasion when Marie was riding a buffalo pony--one of the horses used as a swift runner on the chase--her baby dangling in a moss bag from one of the saddle pommels. Turning a bluff, the riders came on an enormous herd of buffalo. The sudden appearance of the hunters startled the vast herd. With a snort that sent clouds of dust to the air, there was a mad stampede, and true to his life-long training, Marie’s pony took the bit in his mouth and bolted, wheeling and nipping and kicking and cutting out the biggest of buffaloes for the hunt, just as if J. Ba’tiste himself were in the saddle. Bounced so that every breath seemed her last, Marie Gaboury hung to the baby’s moss bag with one hand, to the horse’s mane with the other, and commended her soul to God; but J. Ba’tiste’s horse had cut athwart the race and he rescued his wife. That night she gave birth to her second daughter, and they jocularly called her “Laprairie.” Such were the adventures of the pioneer women on the prairie. The every day episodes of a single life would fill a book, and the book would record as great heroism as ever the Old World knew of a Boadicea or a Joan of Arc. We are still too close to these events of early Western life to appreciate them. Two hundred years from now, when time has canonized such courage, the Marie Gaboury’s of pioneer days will be regarded as the Boadiceas and Joan of Arcs of the New World.