Toussaint Charbonneau: Biography of a Native American Interpreter
Who Was Toussaint Charbonneau?
Born near Montreal around 1767, free trader, trapper and explorer Toussaint Carbonneau lived among the Hidatsas and Mandan people for years as a young man, purchasing two wives from the Shoshone people, including his now-famous wife Sacagawea.
Charbonneau Joins Lewis and Clark Expedition
After Meriwether Lewis and William Clark arrived into Fort Mandan in late 1804, on March 11th, 1805, the two explorers hired Charbonneau as their interpreter, and while Charbonneau initially declined their offer, he became the oldest member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition at 38 years of age, departing by boat with Sacagawea and his 55-day-old son Jean Baptiste.
During the two-year trek to the Pacific Ocean and back, Charbonneau proved to be an excellent chef and a great negotiator with local Native Americans, yet his skills as a waterman proved to be wildly deficient, and after he nearly capsized a pirogue filled with vital supplies—saved only by Sacagawea’s quick thinking—Lewis wrote that Charbonneau was “a man of little merit,” and “perhaps the most timid waterman in the world.”
Upon the expedition’s successful conclusion, Charbonneau was paid $533.33 and given a land grant for 320 acres, and since Clark had developed a deep affection for Jean Baptiste or “pomp” as the young boy was known, Clark offered to raise the boy as his own and pay for his education. After living for the next three years with the Mandans, Carbonneau moved his family to Missouri where he claimed his 320 acres, and after he grew weary with farm life, he sold his land to Clark for $100, before finding work with the Missouri Fur Company in Fort Manuel Lisa in the South Dakota territory.
During his absence, Sacagawea gave birth to a daughter named Lizette, before passing away on December 20th, 1812 from an infectious bout of typhus. The following year, Charbonneau formally signed both his children to the custody of Clark.
Charbonneau’s Life in Missouri
For the remainder of his life, surviving records from the Missouri Territory indicate that he was widely disliked by others, primarily due to the fact that he repeatedly hired on with rival trading companies, including Lisa’s Missouri Fur Company and John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, while his reputation was further tarnished after he abandoned a third employer, James Kipp, while on a fur trapping expedition in 1834.
Over the course of his life, Charbonneau had a total of five wives—all Native Americans who were sixteen years or younger at the time of their betrothal, marrying his last known wife, a 14-year-old Assiniboine girl when he was more than 70 years old. After his death in 1843, he was buried most likely at Fort Mandan North Dakota, although others believe he was buried in Richwoods Missouri, making Toussaint Charbonneau, an important yet fallible human during one of the greatest expeditions in American history.