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CHAPTER NINE At Home and Abroad
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80 On June 21, 1823, Duke Paul Wilhelm Freidrich Herzog, of Wurttemberg, a scholarly German nobleman exploring the “vast, silent places” of North America, disembarked at a trading settlement where the Kansas River flows into the Missouri. Among the traders he met there was Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. It was the beginning of an odyssey that would introduce the young frontiersman to the courts of Europe and help shape the rest of his life.1 The duke, a nephew of Wurttemberg’s King Friedrich I, had been trained for a military career. But like Thomas Jefferson, the impulsive, intellectual Paul was more interested in science and philosophy than in soldiering, and professed to prefer the wilds to a royal court. “In the atmosphere of a palace I would feel like a wild thing that is imprisoned in a gilded cage,” he said. “My heart would never cease to hunger for the vast, silent places.”2 Resigning his commission, he studied botany and zoology and set his sights on the New World. After securing permission from CHAPTER NINE At Home and Abroad At Home and Abroad 81 Secretary of State John Quincy Adams to visit the United States, he set sail from Hamburg for New Orleans. From there he made his way to St. Louis where William Clark, as a representative of the War Department, approved his plan to follow the Lewis and Clark route up the Missouri to the Mandan villages. Visiting seventy -three-year-old Auguste Chouteau at his home at nearby Florissant, he arranged for passage upriver on a “Messrs. Chouteaus & Co. Boat.” 3 When they reached the Kansas River settlement, where Kansas City, Kansas, now stands, the duke learned Baptiste’s history before proceeding upstream. 4 By a quirk of fate, Duke Paul found Baptiste’s father waiting for him when he arrived three weeks later at Fort Recovery, ten miles north of the White River. Toussaint brought an invitation for him to visit Fort Kiowa, twenty miles farther upstream. During their visit, the duke no doubt told Toussaint Charbonneau of Chalk drawing of Baptiste Charbonneau’s patron, Duke Paul Wilhelm of Wurttemberg. “In the atmosphere of a palace . . . my heart would never cease to hunger for the vast silent spaces.” (Courtesy Stadt Bad Mergentheim and Deuschordensmuseum Bad Mergentheim, Germany) [3.93.173.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:08 GMT) Chapter Nine 82 meeting his son. Toussaint had been working with traders at Fort Kiowa, but also did some interpreting for Duke Paul. When Paul arrived back in St. Louis in the fall of 1823, Baptiste was with him. The two young men had hit it off. Baptiste was now eighteen, and the duke was only twenty-five. No doubt they talked to each other in French. It was the language of Baptiste’s father and of the St. Louis schools he had attended, as well as the language of the courts in which the duke had grown up.5 The two sailed from St. Louis December 23 on the steamboat Cincinnati for New Orleans. There they found the copper-bottomed brig Smyrna tied up near a water works, and booked passage for Europe. But the three-masted ship was becalmed for three weeks before setting out in sunny weather. It was the first time Baptiste had crossed a body of water broader than the Missouri River. In Germany, the duke employed him as a hunter on the grounds of his castle in the woods about thirty miles from Stuttgart, and sent him to Wurttemberg’s obligatory public schools.6 Duke Paul also took Baptiste with him on travels in Germany, England, France, and North Africa. But in 1827, the duke married and evidently decided it was time for the young American to go home. Two years later, when Duke Paul embarked on the second of his five trips to America, he again obtained Clark’s approval for a trip up the Missouri and set out from St. Louis with “two hired men of the American Fur Company.” Baptiste may have been one of them, it is not known, but it is certain that he was back in his homeland to stay.7 He had obviously gained some polish from his years in Europe , and he took it with him into the Far West. Connecticut-born journalist Rufus Sage, encountering him on an island in the South Platte River, said the youth “had acquired a classic education and could converse fluently in German, Spanish, French and English...