DCHP-2

country wife "country" wife, "country wife" DCHP-2 (August 2016)

• n. — Fur trade, historical

  a woman of Aboriginal or part-Aboriginal descent who was the common-law wife of a fur trade employee.

  Type: 1. Origin — A country wife was a woman of Aboriginal or part-Aboriginal ancestry who lived in a lasting domestic relationship with a man employed in the fur trade. Their marriage was described as "after the custom of the country," or, in French "à la façon du pays" (see Van Kirk 1980: 28). Many of these relationships were permanent, although some men abandoned their partners, and the children, particularly the boys, were often educated so as to gain employment in the trade. As settlement took over from the fur trade, these relationships were socially condemned (see Johnson [1893] 2002, "A Red Girl's Reasoning"). Since these relationships were uncharacteristic of other colonial settlements elsewhere (Van Kirk 1980: 4), this term is Canadian by origin.
  Chart 1 shows the prevalence of the form in Canada, where it almost unanimously refers to the present meaning. All other domains pertain to different meanings, yet the .ca domain still shows the highest frequency.
  See also COD-2, s.v. "country wife", which is marked "Cdn hist.".

  See also: country alliance  country marriage  wife of the country  country-born  

  • 1845  (1947)  . . . this is the James Keith Simpson referred to by Letitia in this letter as just entering the services. He was born in 1823, and evidence points strongly to the "country wife" of Chief Factor James Keith as his mother.
  • 1948  In 1829 these two men, each of whom had a "country" wife, decided to visit Britain, to find wives there and to make a trial of bringing gently reared women to live in Rupert's land.
  • 1966  . . . James Sutherland and his country wife Jane Flett were formally married in May 1828. . . .
  • 1978  In the fur trading period, the men who went to the upper country were away for years and naturally took "country wives". The children of Scots traders became "improved Scotsmen".
  • 1985  Their terms of service ended, most HBC men would vanish on the September supply ships, leaving their country wives no choice but to rejoin their tribes in a state of widowhood and await another husband. 
  • 2006  Others, like Charlotte Small, Lisette Duval and Catherine Sinclair, the informally contracted country wives of [David Thompson], [Daniel Harmon] and Charles Ermatinger, stayed with their husbands all their lives -- and, contrary to one common stereotype, their husbands refused to discard them and stood by them in spite of bigotry, prejudice and racism of an emerging colonial overclass. 
  • 2008  He dumped his "country wives" -- and their numerous offspring -- as soon as he was through with them, and largely ignored his respectable "white wife," Francis, who died worn out and miserable at age 41. 
  • 2015  While Amanda Lathlin may indeed be the first status First Nations woman to be elected to the Manitoba legislature, she is not the first woman of aboriginal descent to be elected MLA (In conversation with Amanda Lathlin, June 6). That would be Edith Rogers, nee McTavish, the first woman to be elected MLA in Manitoba. Born in Norway House into a prominent fur-trade family, she was a great-granddaughter of Sir George Simpson and a "country wife."