Marie Dorion passed through the Caldwell area in 1811 as the only female traveler in the Wilson Price Hunt Party on what would become part of the Oregon Trail through southern Idaho. She returned in the fall of 1813 with her husband, Pierre Dorion, Jr., and the Reed Trapping Party as a member of the Pacific Fur Company. While at a secondary camp near Caldwell in January 1814, a friendly Indian warned her that hostile Indians were nearby. John Reed remained at the camp while Marie Dorion gathered her two small children and went to warn her husband of the danger. At the remote trapping camp, she found Giles LeClerc nearly dead and learned that her warning had come too late to save the group, making her the first known widow of a European spouse in the area that would become Idaho. After LeClerc died, she returned to the Caldwell camp and found Reed and his men dead, leaving her and her children as the only survivors. Before her rescue in April near present-day Hilgard, Oregon, her determination to save her children carried her on a 200-mile flight across Oregon's Blue Mountains in the dead of winter. Rescue came days after she saw a campfire in the distance, hid her children, and confirmed the presence of friendly Walla Walla Indians, who later traced her route and saw that she had crawled across snow and ice in her effort to save her children's lives. Her survival became a powerful example of courage and perseverance in western American history.