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From: "Ron" <>
Subject: [METISGEN-L] Toussaint Charbonneau (Serena !!).
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 12:23:18 -0800


French Canadians of the West -Cd-rom Version
By Peter Gagne (2000) -Quintin Publications

Charbonneau, Toussaint.
An infamous guide and interpreter in the West at the end of the eighteenth
century and the beginning of the nineteenth. He was probably born in
Montréal
about 1760. In 1793, he could be found in Red River country in the service
of the
North West Company at Pine Fork on the Assiniboine. Three years later,
Charbonneau went to the Missouri River Valley and settled among the Hidatsas
and Mandans. From there, he accompanied several famous expeditions,
including
that of Major Long to the Rocky Mountains. From 1803 to 1804, we find him in
charge of Fort Pembina with Alexander HENRY the younger.
Returning south, he served as a Hidatsa (Minetaree) interpreter for
Captains Lewis and Clark during their expedition across the Rocky Mountains
in
1804-1805. At that time, Charbonneau was living at Metaharta, what Lewis and
Clark dubbed the “first Minetaree village.” He approached the two explorers
on 4
November 1804 at Fort Mandan (North Dakota).172 Clark notes that “a french
man by Name Chabonah…visit us, he wished to hire & informed us his 2 Squars
were Snake Indians.” The explorers hired Charbonneau for $25 a month, not
so much for the fact that he spoke the Hidatsa language, but because his
wives
spoke the language of the Gens-des-Serpents, or Shoshone. Lewis and Clark
enlisted Charbonneau and one of his wives. This wife, a Shoshone who had
been
taken prisoner by the Hidatsas, was Sacagawea. She and Charbonneau’s other
wife were won by him in a bet with the warriors who captured them.
Together with another French interpreter named René Jussaume,
Charbonneau and Sacagawea helped Lewis and Clark compile vocabularies of the
Mandans and Hidatsas. Sacagawea would speak with the natives, then pass
along
the words to Charbonneau, who would then translate them into French for
Jussaume, who would then pass them along in English to the two Americans.
Apparently this process was not without a degree of drama. According to
Charles
Mackenzie, “the two Frenchmen had warm disputes upon the meaning of every
word that was taken down by the captains.” Even if Charbonneau was not the
best interpreter and there is more than one account of him nearly sinking
the
canoe loaded with the expedition’s books, papers and instruments, the
explorers
prized his abilities as a cook. Lewis describes the boudin blanc made by
their
“wrighthand cook Charbono” as being “one of the greatest delicacies of the
forrest [sic], it may not be amiss therefore to give it a place [in the
official journal
of the expedition].” He later noted sadly that when the group would leave
buffalo country, the expedition would have to fast occasionally and the
“white
pudding” would be no more.
On 29 November 1804, Lewis and Clark later lent Charbonneau to
François-Antoine Larocque for a time, for certain considerations. Before
leaving
with his new boss, he had to go with Captain Clark, accompanied by
twenty-five
men and a party of Mandan Indians, to punish the Sioux for killing a Mandan.
When the explorers heard that Larocque was still distributing British flags
and
medals to the Indians in what was now United States territory, they
instructed
Charbonneau to limit his interpreting for Larocque to what was only
necessary for
trade and to refrain – even under orders – from translating any derogatory
remark
against the United States. In December 1804, Charbonneau’s horse was stolen
by
a Mandan chief who believed that Charbonneau owed him the horse, due to the
“rascality of one [Jean-Baptiste] Lafrance,” according to Captain Clark.176
While Charbonneau was serving under Larocque, he was formally united
on 8 February 1805 with Sacagawea. Three days later, she gave birth to his
son,
Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, at Fort Mandan, assisted by Captain Lewis. The
boy
was given the nickname “Pomp” or “Pompey.” The explorers lent the boy’s
name to “Baptiste’s Creek” in Oregon, which is currently known as Pompey’s
Pillar Creek. Some historians mistakenly believe that the river was
originally
named after Jean-Baptiste Lepage. Clark later looked after the boy, paying
for
him to come live with him in Saint Louis and be educated.
In early March 1805, Charbonneau returned from a visit to the
Minnetarees with presents from Charles Chaboillez. However, Clark believed
that this exposure to the “British” traders had tainted Charbonneau’s
allegiance.
He noted in his journal on 11 March that “We have every reason to believe
that
our Menetarre interpreter [Charbonneau]…has been Corrupted by the [North
West] Company &c…we give him to night to reflect and deturmin whether or not
he intends to go with us under the regulations Stated [sic].” Charbonneau
did
not like the constraints and rules of the expedition and decided to leave
the service
of Lewis and Clark. This independence was short-lived, however, as six days
later he returned to Clark, apologizing for his “simplicity” and pledging to
obey
orders from then on if the two explorers would re-hire him, which they did.
Before returning to Saint Louis, Clark settled accounts with Charbonneau
on 17 August 1806, paying him $500.33 for his horse, teepee and services. In
a
letter from Clark dated 20 August 1806, the explorer tells Charbonneau “You
have been a long time with me and have conducted your Self in Such a manner
as
to gain my friendship.” He then went on to offer to raise Charbonneau’s son
Jean-Baptiste as his own child and to give Charbonneau a piece of land with
horses, cows and hogs – even the use of a horse to visit his friends in
Montréal.
Toussaint Charbonneau continued to serve the United States government
and other famous explorers after his service with Lewis and Clark. He and
Sacagawea accompanied Manuel Lisa in an expedition up the Missouri in the
spring of 1811. During the War of 1812, he helped keep the Mandans, Sioux,
Gros Ventres and other tribes of the Upper Missouri loyal to the American
side.
In 1815 he resumed service as a guide in the Northern Plains and Rocky
Mountains, as well as along the Santa Fe Trail. He was in the ill-fated
Chouteau-De
Mun expedition that was captured by Mexican troops and imprisoned for 48
days at Santa Fe in 1817, along with Étienne Provost and Michel Carrière. In
1820, Charbonneau acted as interpreter for Major Stephen J. Long’s
expedition to
the Pawnee tribe in present-day Kansas. Three years later, he was serving as
interpreter for Prince Paul Wilhelm of Württenburg on his explorations.
Charbonneau had arrived in the Missouri River Valley around 1798, and
remained there over forty years. In April 1826, he could once again be found
living among the Hidatsas. On the 6 th of that month, the Missouri River
rose so
rapidly and so high that he was forced to flee with some belongings to a
corn shed
two miles from the river. He stayed there for three days without fire,
exposed to
the bad weather of the stormy season. This same flood caused the death of
the
inhabitants of fifteen Dakota tents.
In the summer of 1833, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied encountered
the now-widowed Charbonneau living in the vicinity of Fort Clark (North
Dakota). Charbonneau, whose age was unknown but estimated conservatively
at 75, had taken up the life of an Indian and was living in the nearby
Indian
village, not at the fort. “He was as bent as a scrub cedar on a bluff, his
face was
as seamed as a claybank, but he was more sagacious than his overlords – in
fact,
he saved Maximilian from robbery – and could travel river or prairie
forever,
winter or summer.” Prince Maximilian mentions Charbonneau in quite
flattering terms in his Voyage dans l’Intérieur de l’Amérique du Nord,
giving him
credit for much of the precious information on the mores of the different
Indian
tribes that he describes. In 1837, William Clark helped secure Charbonneau’s
appointment as interpreter at the Missouri Sub-Agency.
Charbonneau was still living in the spring of 1838, when Charles
Larpenteur met him at “about the most northern point of the Missouri,”
living
among the Mandans about 70 miles or so from Fort Clark. Larpenteur, who
initially took Charbonneau to be one of the Indians, recounts that at that
time,
Charbonneau had already spent “forty years among the Missouri Indians. He
used to say that when he first came to the river it was so small that he
could
straddle it.” His age did not slow him down, apparently. Also in 1838,
François Chardon, the bourgeois of Fort Clark sold Charbonneau a
fourteen-year-old
Assiniboin girl who had been captured by the Arikara. Chardon noted in his
journal that “The old gentleman gave a feast to the Men, and a glass of
grog – and
went to bed with his young wife with the intention of doing his best.
Toussaint Charbonneau was well known among the Mandans, who gave
him five different Indian names: “Chief of the Little Village,” “Man Who
Possesses Many Gourds,” “Great Horse From Abroad,” “Forest Bear” and “Not
Very Refined.” Lewis and Clark wrote his name “Chaboneau,” “Charbono,”
“Shabonoe” and several other different ways and named a creek after him,
probably the present-day Indian Creek. Another creek, a tributary of the
Yellowstone originally dubbed Oak-tan-pas-er-ha by Lewis and Fields’ Creek
by
Clark, later had its name changed to Charbonneau’s Creek. Toussaint
Charbonneau is believed to have died about 1840.


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