West to Iowa
Peace did not mean stillness. The Treaty of Ghent had ended the shooting, but the continent kept rearranging itself — borders surveyed straight because rivers were too quarrelsome, fur companies merged because competition bled profit, and young people who had never seen Perche or Cambridge started walking toward land no parish had named. Between 1816 and 1853 the English branch learned canals and railroad timetables; the French branch learned to cross borders without papers and change a surname to English; and Iowa, which had been someone else's cornfield yesterday, became the place where ' grandson would marry a métis girl's daughter and finally stitch Winifred's tree.
20 October 1818: the United States and Britain signed the Convention of 1818 — fisheries, slave restoration clauses, joint occupation of Oregon, and a boundary at the 49th parallel because a straight line surveys easier than a watershed. Britain ceded Rupert's Land south of the line, including the Red River Colony below the parallel; the United States gave up the northern edge of Missouri Territory. French missionaries at Red River worked with Ojibwe and Cree families; by 1823 roughly eight hundred métis households lived in the colony and present-day North Dakota. In 1821 Parliament forced the North West Company into the Hudson's Bay Company — André Carrière's employer changed names but not latitude. 1820 census: at Westminster, Vermont, with Esther and seven children including twenty-year-old Edith; widow Elizabeth Johnson Smith at Phillipston; , twenty-nine, in Lowell but missing from the enumerator's book.
30 September 1824, married at Lowell, Middlesex County — the short Coss stub grafted onto the long Powers limb Nathaniel and Esther had grown in Vermont hill towns. July 1827, was born to Warren and Edith; no birth certificate survives and census pages disagree between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, but Martha Coss, one year old, died at Peterborough two months later — the grave argues for Hillsborough County. That same year André Carrière held lot 164 in the Red River census: forty-five, Catholic, one woman, six children, three acres, a plough, a canoe. Spring floods and whooping cough had shaken the valley; his daughter Mary Louise would not stay. 17 May 1831, twenty-year-old Benjamin Bonneau III married eighteen-year-old at Saint-Athanase, Iberville — fourteen hundred miles east of St. Boniface, where her father had traded until his HBC record ended.