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

CHAPTER ELEVEN Glimpses of Baptiste

92 Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was something of a greenhorn when he returned to the American frontier from his sojourn in a European palace. Quite quickly, however, he was plunged into the rigors of frontier life as a member of a group of trappers in what is now eastern Idaho. Trying an overland short-cut from the Snake River at present-day American Falls to the Wood River, they found themselves on a seventy-mile trek over lava beds crisscrossed with deep chasms that they had to leap on horseback. When they came to a chasm too broad to leap, they gave up on reaching their destination and turned to searching for water.1 Baptiste, suffering from heat and thirst like the rest, strayed from his companions. They feared he was dead. Spotting a campfire on a bank of the Malad River in the dead of night, he thought the campers must be hostile Indians, and Baptiste decided to retrace his steps. Meanwhile, the other trappers found the Malad and, said trapper J. H. Stevens, “drank, and laved, and drank CHAPTER ELEVEN Glimpses of Baptiste Glimpses of Baptiste 93 again.” Baptiste spent eleven more days of hard hiking and bitter hunger before he made it back to the Snake. When the rest of his party returned, they told him his “Indians” were a party of Hudson’s Bay trappers.2 There were other appearances of Baptiste. Mountain man Joe Meek spotted the returned traveler near the mouth of the Platte River in 1831, clad in worn buckskin and beaded moccasins and wearing his hair shoulder length. In 1833, he was sighted at the fur trade rendezvous on the Green River in today’s Wyoming, interpreting for the Shoshones and mountain man Jim Bridger. In the late 1830’s, Baptiste, described as “graceful, urbane, fluent,” was with Kit Carson on spring and fall buffalo hunts out of Bent’s Fort, a whitewashed adobe trading post on a low bluff along the Arkansas River in present southeastern Colorado. One traveler described meeting an educated Indian in 1839 at Fort El Pueblo, five miles from Bent’s Fort, and asking him, “Why did you leave civilized life for a precarious livelihood in the wilderness?” The reply, somewhat reminiscent of Baptiste’s friend Duke Paul, was that he needed to “range the hills” and could not “be satisfied with the description of things, how beautiful so ever may be the style.” In the spring of 1840, Baptiste was waist-deep in water as a member of a seven-man party pushing a thirty-six-foot boat, loaded with the robes and tongues of 700 buffalo, off sandbars on the notoriously shallow South Platte River.Another western traveler , W. M. Boggs, saw him working out of Bent’s Fort in 1844 and 1845 and called him “the best man on foot on the plains or in the Rocky Mountains.” Still another recalled Baptiste and a companion playing euchre for twenty hours straight while camped on a Bent’s trading trip.3 John Charles Frémont came across Baptiste while heading the first of the western expeditions that would earn him the sobriquet “The Pathfinder” and make him the Republican candidate for president in 1856. The fur trade had also moved west, and Chapter Eleven 94 Baptiste was working as a guide for the Bent brothers—Charles, William, and George—and Ceran St. Vrain, of Bent’s Fort. Frémont, catching his first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains sixty miles to the west as he made his way along the South Fork of the Platte River on a sunny July 9, 1842, spotted three men on horseback a mile or two ahead. He recognized their tall, dark-haired leader as the legendary mulatto frontiersman Jim Beckwourth. Frémont had met him earlier in his travels. Beckwourth was searching for horses that had strayed from Baptiste’s island camp about eight miles upstream at Bijou’s Fork, near today’s Fort Morgan, Colorado. As the two men accompanying him continued the search downstream , Beckwourth guided the Frémont party to Baptiste’s camp. Baptiste had come down the river forty-five miles from Fort St. Vrain, headed for St. Louis with boats laden with profitable winter furs. He ran into low water, as was often the case on the Platte, and camped on the island, to wait for the spring flood. Baptiste christened the camp St...