Interpreters with Lewis and Clark: The Story of Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau

CHAPTER SEVEN Afterward

68 The St. Louis to which the Lewis and Clark party returned was much changed from the frontier village they had visited on their way to the Mandan Villages in 1803. Then a scattering of houses made of mud, stone and rough-hewn logs had been crammed onto three streets at the river’s edge. Now the village had grown into a city with a population of about 5,000. Before, dead animals had rotted where they fell; now, there was an ordinance requiring their removal. There were speed limits for horses and carts. The town was thinking of starting a public library.1 Among St. Louis’s citizens by the end of 1809 were Toussaint, Sacagawea, and their son Jean Baptiste. They had indicated to Clark they would bring the child to him two years earlier, but may have delayed because hostile Arikara Indians were making river travel dangerous below the Mandan villages. Or maybe they just could not afford a trip to the city. In 1807, however, Toussaint had received another $409.16 and two-thirds cents under a bill passed by Congress doubling the explorers’ pay. The bill also CHAPTER SEVEN Afterward Afterward 69 granted each of them a parcel of land west of the Mississippi. Clark signed for the 320 acres granted to Toussaint, but it is not known whether Toussaint ever took possession of the acreage.2 Whatever was responsible for their timing, they were there in 1809, and were attending to something that the Roman Catholic Toussaint clearly thought important—the baptism of his son. The new boom town was not a very religious community. Father Joseph Marie Dumand, a Trappist prior, had visited the city from Kentucky just a year before and bewailed the “irreligion and licentiousness [that] had made their way into this distant land.” Toussaint, however, made sure that his nearly five-year-old boy would have the benefits of the sacrament of baptism. St. Louis had no resident Catholic priest, but Father Urban Guillet, a Trappist from a monastery across the frozen Mississippi River and twenty miles to the east, was in town for the Christmas season. On December 28, Toussaint and Sacagawea stood by as the white-robed monk made the sign of the cross with holy water on Baptiste’s forehead and intoned in French, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Neither Lewis nor Clark was present at the ceremony in the small vertical-log church. Lewis had died of a gunshot wound, probably suicide although some thought it murder, at an inn on the Natchez Trace on October 11 of that year. Clark was in Washington on business. But Auguste Chouteau, a friend of Clark and a co-founder of St. Louis, signed the baptismal certificate as godfather , after Father Guillet’s signature. Chouteau’s twelve-yearold daughter, Eulalie, signed her name just below his. Then Toussaint made his “X” as “pere de l’enfant.” He was described in the document as “living in this parish.”3 In 1810 Toussaint was still in St. Louis, providing information for Clark to use in answering queries from Nicholas Biddle, who was preparing the first edition of the Lewis and Clark journals. Chapter Seven 70 Clark relied on Toussaint, “the Interpreter who is now with me,” for knowledge of American Indians.4 Clark suggested to Toussaint that he might want to take up farming, and on October 30, 1810, the interpreter bought land on the Missouri in St. Ferdinand Township near St. Louis from his former commander. Toussaint was no farmer, however. On March 26, 1811, he sold the land back to Clark for $100. Francois Robidou, a mutual friend of the two men, witnessed the deed. Toussaint bought fifty pounds of hardtack from August Chouteau and signed to embark on a keelboat voyage up the Missouri. Sacagawea was with him. He had hired on as an interpreter for Manuel Lisa, who had spent the winter of 1808-1809 organizing the Missouri Fur Company.5 Being on Manuel Lisa’s crew was a wise move for anybody who wanted to get back into the fur trade. The brash, headstrong Spanish-American had moved from New Orleans to St. Louis while still in his teens. Before his nineteenth birthday, his aggressive bargaining had won him a grant of exclusive trade with the Osage Indians. In 1807, he went up the...