(1800-1900) – A frontiersman and adventurer, Plamondon was born on the St. Lawrence River in Canada in 1900. When still a mere boy, at the age of 15, he began to range along the Mississippi River, and soon spent time on the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. by 1818, he had made his way to the Pacific Northwest and joined the North West Company as a voyageur, trapper and trader. He explored the Columbia River and worked out of Fort Vancouver, after the North West Company had been absorbed by Hudson’s Bay Company. Somewhere along the line he married an Indian wife, who died in childbirth about 1827. He then wandered north as far as Eskimo country and the Arctic plains. Afterwards, he turned to farming in Washington Territory. He died at Cowlitz, Washington in 1900 at the age of 100.