The life of Félicité Constant Motier, a 19th-century Iowa resident with French heritage, illustrates in a personal way the changes that Iowa and its neighbors up and down the Mississippi were going through at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.
Félicité was born of French-Canadian parents in 1780 in Carondelet, a French community just outside St. Louis on the west side of the Mississippi River. Territory west of the Mississippi was still Spanish at the time of her birth, having been ceded to Spain by the French toward the end of the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War). She married another settler of French origin, François Motier dit Mocquet, around 1805 and they farmed in the small French community of Portage des Sioux, also on the Mississippi. By this time the territory was part of what we know as the Louisiana Purchase, having been re-acquired by the French and then sold to the U.S. government.
An anecdote from Félicité’s life story places her squarely in the context of conflicts over territory in the states of the French Heritage Corridor, as the Native people struggled to maintain control over their lives and their own territorial claims. In Missouri, the Native Sac, Meskwaki (Fox) and Osage peoples were experiencing encroachment on their lands as more and more Americans moved into the territory, causing episodes of violence as the Native people fought for control. In 1804, the Treaty of St. Louis (the first in a series known by that name) was signed, ceding northeast Missouri and much territory in Illinois and Wisconsin to the United States, even though the chiefs who signed the treaty were not empowered by their tribes to give up land.
Information accompanying an 1870 photograph of Félicité bears witness to the Native vs. U.S. settler violence around the time of the treaty of 1804. It states that the Native people, more positively inclined to the French residents of Portage des Sioux than to the Americans, told them that they would spare them if they identified themselves as French by wearing a bandana on their heads. Many years later, Félicité chose to have her photograph taken wearing the bandana, a sign of her French heritage and a remembrance of that tumultuous time.
Félicité and her husband had a large family, and sometime after her husband’s death in 1828, Félicité moved up the Mississippi to Iowa to live with her son Joseph and his wife Mary. She was part of the tight-knit French-speaking contingent in Davenport just after its founding, as church records show that the early Davenport leader Antoine LeClaire and his family were close to Félicité’s family. Félicité died in 1873 and was buried in Ste. Marguerite’s Cemetery (now Mount Calvary Cemetery) in Davenport. (Ste. Marguerite’s Church had been given that name in honor of Marguerite, the wife of Antoine LeClaire, who donated land and financed construction of the building.) At the time Félicité’s photograph was taken in 1870, a painting of her was also done by portrait artist Homer Henderson. The painting is in the collection of the Missouri Historical Society. Her life story has been researched by her descendent, Catherine Keating.
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