| Summary: | LOUIS GODON (1836 - 1912) GRANDBOIS (1845 - 1866) — LISSETTE Roseann LaFloe Gladue, (mother of Charles, Cecelia, Josephine and Michael Gladue), and her mother, Angelique Gourneau LaFloe. Marion Gilland Thomas George Irving, son of Marion Gilland. MARION GILLAND Marion Godon, born October 8,1905, graduated from Rolla High School and Haskell Business College. She worked for the U.S. Government Field Service and retired from Hughes Aircraft in California. Marion Irving-Gilland now makes her home in Scottsdale, Arizona. She has one son, Thomas George Irving, deceased, who also had one son, Thomas Anthony Irving, residing in San Diego, California. He and his grandmother, Marion, are the sole survivors of the Moses Godon family. LOUIS GODON — MARIE LAROCQUE (1846-1897) Louis Godon, Metis hunter and trapper, came to the Turtle Mountains to settle in the late 1880's. He was born at the Red River Settlement in 1836 where his family had moved after the abolishment of the Pembina Mission in 1821. His father, Louis Godon (Metis, French-Ojibwe), and mother, Isabella MacDonnel (Metisse, Scotch-Ojibwe) had attended the St. Boniface Mission School. His grandfather, Louis Godon, was a voyageur with Alexander Henry and the North West Company at Pembina and at Rat Portage before the company merged with the Hudson's Bay Company. He had come with Alexander Henry from LaPointe on Lake Superior. The Pembina trading post and the first Catholic mission at Pembina had been abandoned in 1823 after a U.S. survey by Stephen Long determined that they were south of the newly- established boundary between Canada and the U.S. The Hudson's Bay Company was a London-based British company which governed the Red River Colony, which included several small river towns and villages on the Red and Assiniboine rivers, including what is now Winnipeg, St. Boniface, Portage LaPrairie, Saulteau Village, Swampy Cree Village, etc. Prior to 1821 all of Red River Valley of Minnesota and Dakota was H. Bay territory. Most of the Metis considered themselves freemen, independent traders, hunters and trappers, and found it difficult to be dominated and controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company in the fur trade. The English company had been a bitter rival of the Northwest Company which operated out of Montreal and for whom most of the French and Metis had been engaged for a period of about 30 years. So the American Fur Company established trading posts south of the border in the 1840s, including Pembina. Many of the families returned to Pembina and petitioned the U.S. government for protection from what they considered illegal actions of the English company. They could now get supplies brought from St. Paul by the American Fur Company, and so were free at last to trade with them and with other free traders. The Godon family returned to Pembina in the 1840s when Rolette and Kittson establish American Fur Company posts and when Father Belcourt returned to them as a missionary under the Diocese of Dubuque in 1847, and later under the Diocese of St. Paul. From 1831 to 1947 he had been their missionary priest north of the border under the Diocese of Quebec. Members of the family in 1850 were Louis, Joseph, Marguerite, Cathrin, Gilbert and David. Louis was then 14 and, no doubt, learned to hunt and trap in the Pembina Hills, the "Hair Hills" as they were called. When the Pembina mission was moved to St. Joe (now 354 Scanned with a Zeutschel Zeta book scanner at 300 dpi. Edited with Multi-Page TIFF Editor.
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