Margaret Montour

The Montour family was a family of Native American and French descent which was prominent in colonial New York and Pennsylvania before and during the American Revolution. Because of the Iroquois practice of reckoning descent through the female line the family is known as "Montour" after the matriarch.

Madam Montour (1667–c.1753). Information on Madam Montour is fragmentary and contradictory. Even her given name is uncertain.

According to her own account:

she was born in Canada, whereof her father (who was a French gentleman) had been Governor; under whose administration the then Five Nations of Indians had made war against the French, and the Hurons and that government (whom we term the French Indians, from espousing their part against the English, and living in Canada) and that, in the war, she was taken by some of the Five Nations’ warriors, bein then about ten years of age, and by them was carried away into their country, where she was habited and brought up in the same manner as their children.

Current research indicates that she was born Élisabeth (or Isabelle) Couc around 1667, in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, the daughter of Pierre Couc and Marie Mitouamegoukoue, an Algonquin.

She was apparently married three times, the last to an Oneida named Carondawanna (Karontowá:nen—Big Tree), who later took the name "Robert Hunter" after the Governor of New York whom he met at the Albany Conference of 1711. By Carondawanna Madam Montour had at least several children:

Her husband was killed about 1729 in battle with the Catawba; after the death of her husband the family moved to Otstonwakin, on the Lawi-sahquick (Loyalsock Creek), now Montoursville, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania.

She served as interpreter on several occasions, notably Albany in 1711, and Philadelphia in 1727. Her skills were highly valued such that in 1719 the Commissioners for Indian Affairs in Albany decreed that she should receive "a man's pay."

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