Jean Baptiste Charbonneau
Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, sometimes known in childhood as Pompey or Little Pomp, was an American explorer, guide, fur trapper, trader, military scout during the Mexican–American War, alcalde of Mission San Luis Rey de Francia and a gold digger and hotel operator in Northern California. His mother was Sacagawea, a Lemhi Shoshone who worked as a guide and interpreter for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Jean Baptiste's father was also a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, a French Canadian explorer and trader named Toussaint Charbonneau.
Jean Baptiste was born at Fort Mandan in North Dakota. In his early childhood, he accompanied his parents as they traveled across the country with the Lewis and Clark expedition, the first group to cross the U.S. to the Pacific coast. The expedition co-leader William Clark nicknamed the boy Pompey. After the death of his mother, he lived with Clark in St. Louis, Missouri, where he attended St. Louis Academy. Clark paid for his education.
Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau also had a second child, a daughter named Lizette Charbonneau; however, because she receives only occasional mention in Clark's papers, her life remains unclear beyond her third birthday.
Jean Baptiste and Sacagawea appear on the United States Sacagawea dollar coin. He is the second child depicted on United States currency. Pompeys Pillar on the Yellowstone River in Montana and the community of Charbonneau, Oregon are named for him.
Childhood
Lewis and Clark Expedition
Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was born to Sacagawea, a Shoshone, and her husband, the French Canadian trapper Toussaint Charbonneau, in early 1805 at Fort Mandan in North Dakota. This was during the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which wintered there in 1804–05. The senior Charbonneau had been hired by the expedition as an interpreter and, learning that his pregnant wife was Shoshone, the captains, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, agreed to bring her along. They knew they would need to negotiate with the Shoshone for horses at the headwaters of the Missouri River. Meriwether Lewis noted the boy's birth in his journal:The infant traveled from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean and back, carried along in the expedition's boats or upon his mother's back. His presence is often credited by historians with assuring native tribes of the expedition's peaceful intentions, as they believed that no war party would travel with a woman and child.
After the expedition
In April 1807, about a year after the end of the expedition, the Charbonneau family moved to St. Louis, at Clark's invitation. Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea departed for the Mandan villages in April 1809 and left the boy to live with Clark. In November 1809, the parents returned to St. Louis to try farming, but left again in April 1811. Jean Baptiste continued to reside with Clark.Clark's two-story home, built in 1818, contained an illuminated museum long by wide. Its walls were decorated with national flags and life-size portraits of George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, Native artifacts, and mounted animal heads. Upon visiting the museum, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a geologist and ethnographer, wrote:
As a boy, Charbonneau learned from the vast collection.
Clark paid for Charbonneau's education at St. Louis Academy, a Jesuit Catholic school, although the expense was considerable for the time. The school's single classroom was then located in the storehouse of Clark's friend, the trader Joseph Robidoux. Brothers James and George Kennerly paid for Charbonneau's supplies for 1820 and were reimbursed by Clark.
From June through September 1820 and in 1822, Jean Baptiste boarded with Louis Tesson Honoré, a Clark family friend and member of his church, Christ Episcopal. The general had helped organize the church in 1819. They lived in St. Ferdinand Township in St. Louis County, Missouri near Charbonneau's father's of land.
Adult life
On June 21, 1823, at age eighteen, Charbonneau met Duke Friedrich Paul Wilhelm of Württemberg, the nephew of King Friedrich I Wilhelm Karl of Württemberg. Charbonneau was working at a Kaw trading post on the Kansas River near present-day Kansas City, Kansas. Wilhelm was traveling in America on a natural history expedition to the northern plains with Jean Baptiste's father as his guide. On October 9, 1823, he invited the younger Charbonneau to return to Europe with him, which was agreed upon.The two set sail on the Smyrna from St. Louis in December 1823. Jean Baptiste lived at the duke's palace in Württemberg for nearly six years, where he learned German and Spanish and improved his English and French. The latter was still the dominant language of St. Louis, which had first enabled his conversations with the Duke. According to a 1932 translation of Wilhelm's journal by the historian Louis C. Butscher, Wilhelm wrote that Charbonneau was "…a companion on all my travels over Europe and northern Africa until 1829." In 2001, Albert Furtwangler, PhD, questioned the accuracy of Butscher's German translation, noting two more recent translations of the duke's journals, and suggests that Charbonneau's role in Wilhelm's court may have been less intimate than Butscher's perhaps romanticized account implied. Charbonneau may have been hired as a servant, rather than invited as a companion. As support, he notes the apparent lack of further contact between the two men after Charbonneau's return to America. However, lack of contact in itself does not mean Charbonneau was a hired hand. Such an act may have been an insult to Clark, which the duke likely would have avoided. As with many aspects of his life, little is known for certain about Charbonneau's time in Europe.
Children
Parish records in Wuerttemberg show that while there, Charbonneau fathered a child with Anastasia Katharina Fries, a soldier's daughter. The baby, Anton Fries, died about three months after his birth.Nearly two decades later, while in California as an alcalde or magistrate, Charbonneau was recorded as being the father of another child. On May 4, 1848, Maria Catarina Charguana was born to her mother Margarita Sobin, a Luiseño woman, and Charbonneau. Sobin, 23 at the time, traveled to Mission San Fernando Rey de España near Los Angeles for the infant girl's baptism, performed on May 28, 1848, and recorded by Father Blas Ordaz as entry #1884. Margarita Sobin later married Gregory Trujillo, and some of their descendants may be members of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians.
Trapper and hunter
In November 1829, Charbonneau returned to St. Louis, where he was hired by Joseph Robidoux as a fur trapper for the American Fur Company, to work in Idaho and Utah. He attended the 1832 Pierre's Hole rendezvous while working for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. There he fought in the bloodiest non-military conflict that preceded the Plains Indian wars, which began in 1854.From 1833–1840 Charbonneau worked in the fur trade in the Rocky Mountain Trapping System with other mountain men, such as Jim Bridger, James Beckwourth and Joe Meek.
From 1840–42 he worked from Fort Saint Vrain, floating bison hides and tongues down the South Platte River to St. Louis. On one of the voyages, he camped with Captain John C. Frémont on his cartographic expedition. In 1843, he guided Sir William Drummond Stewart, a Scottish baronet, on his second long trip to the American West, which was a lavish hunting expedition.
Seeking employment again, in 1844 Charbonneau went to Bent's Fort in Colorado, where he was a chief hunter, and worked also as a trader with southern Plains Indians. William Boggs, a traveler who met him, wrote that Charbonneau "…wore his hair long, was…very high strung…" He reported, "…it was said Charbonneau was the best man on foot on the plains or in the Rocky Mountains."
Mexican–American War
In October 1846, Charbonneau, Antoine Leroux and Pauline Weaver were hired as scouts by General Stephen W. Kearny. Charbonneau's experience with military marches, such as with James William Abert in August 1845, along the Canadian River, and his fluency in Native languages qualified him for the position. Kearny directed him to join Colonel Philip St. George Cooke on an arduous march from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to San Diego, California, a distance of. Their mission was to build the first wagon road to Southern California and to guide some 20 huge Murphy supply wagons to the west coast for the military during the Mexican–American War.A contingent of soldiers made up of some 339 Mormon men and six Mormon women, known as the Mormon Battalion, were the builders of that new road over the uncharted southwest from Santa Fe to San Diego and Los Angeles. A memorial to the historic trek of the Mormon Battalion and their guide Charbonneau has been erected at the San Pedro River, north of the U.S.–Mexico border near the present-day town of Palominas, Arizona. Other monuments or historic markers are in Tucson, Arizona and in California at Box Canyon near Warner Springs, at Temecula, at Old Town San Diego and at Fort Moore in Los Angeles. Colonel Cooke's diary mentions Charbonneau some 29 times from November 16, 1846, to January 21, 1847. Eight of the twenty wagons reached Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, from today's Oceanside, California, and the leaders counted the expedition as a success.
Cooke wrote of the Mormon Battalion, "History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry." Known as Cooke's Road or the Gila Trail but more currently known as the Mormon Battalion Trail, the wagon road was used by settlers, miners, stagecoaches of the Butterfield Stage line and cattlemen driving longhorns to feed the gold camps. Parts of the route became the Southern Pacific Railroad and U.S. Route 66. Currently, the Boy Scouts of America gives an award for those who hike sections of this historic trail. In February 1848, knowledge gained about the region was used as the basis of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which established the United States-Mexico border in December 1853, following the Mexican-American War.