Laurent Sauvé (Laplante)


     According to a footnote in The Fort Langley Journals, Laurent was from Vaudreuil, and managed a Hudson's Bay Company dairy on an island at the junction of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers that still carries his name.  Sauve Island lies north and west from Portland, Oregon, and due west from Vancouver, Washington.

And from Judy Bridges: Who is Laurent Sauve - dit LaPlante 1784-1858?

     Sauvies Island was called after an old Canadian by the name of Sauve, dit Laplante, wrote George B. Roberts, master of Cowlitz Farm.  Sauve was a dairyman and cowherd for the H.B.C. on the island that bears his name, misspelled, in the Columbia at the mouth of the Willamette.  He had been in the service for about twenty years, and spent perhaps ten more at the diary at the approximate site of Wyeth's old Fort William before retiring to French Prairie in 1844, where he took a claim just north of Horseshoe Lake.

     He was twice married to natives.

     His wife Josephte having died in 1848, he married FRANCOISE WALLA WALLA, widow of THOMAS TAWAKON (Iroquois) and of Paul Guilbeau.  Two children of his first wife died young; one daughter by the same wife married Joseph Champagne and died within a few months.

Source: Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest, St. Paul Volume.


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moved 28 July 2002
updated 21 July 2013