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

CHAPTER TWELVE Desolation on the Missouri

96 Francis Chardon kept a daily count of the rats killed at Fort Clark. But he had given up counting deaths among the Indians—“they die so fast that it is impossible.”1 The year 1837 was the worst in the three frustrating years during which Chardon, a Philadelphian of French extraction who traded on the Upper Missouri for twenty years, had been in charge of the fortified American Fur Company trading post.2 Smallpox was raging among the Mandans and Hidatsas. The Indians blamed the traders for bringing the infection. Game was scarce, and hunger threatened everywhere. No wonder Toussaint Charbonneau, now at Fort Clark as interpreter, was welcome whenever he arrived from a trip to the Mandan villages with fresh meat.3 Only two weeks before, a young Mandan had come to the whitewashed fort with a cocked gun under his robe and tried to kill Chardon. One of the trader’s men grabbed the intruder and turned him over to the Indians before he could fire, but the incident put Chardon on his guard.4 CHAPTER TWELVE Desolation on the Missouri Desolation on the Missouri 97 Now word came that the Hidatsas were “bent on the destruction of us all.” The seasoned frontiersman suspected the report was false, but wanted to make sure. So he sent Toussaint to the Indian villages with a supply of tobacco and “a bag full of good talk.” His interpreter, he said, would bring the straight news. Toussaint relayed word that the Hidatsas had no thought of attacking the traders, but that their enemies, the Arikaras, had been making threats. “Which of the two, to believe, I Know not,” Chardon recorded, “however, I will still be on my guard.”5 The episode shed further light on the important role played by Toussaint during the warfare, disease, and famine that plagued the Missouri River fur trade in its most terrible decade. By this time, he had been among the tribes of the upper Missouri for more than forty years. For more than thirty years, he had worked among American explorers and fur traders. He was hired as an interpreter on July 1, 1835, by W. N. Fulkerson, the Mandan sub agent for the Indian Affairs bureau. Over and over, Toussaint was the one to turn to for valuable information.6 Chardon cannot have been easy to work for in the best of times. Prince Maximilian, visiting him at his previous post at Fort Union, found him cheerful and courteous, but others painted a different picture. Among a hard-drinking lot of men, he was noted for being excessively fond of whiskey, once finishing off most of a guest’s two-gallon jug with swigs at fifteen-minute intervals. One of his succession of Indian wives was given “a good whipping” for failing to mend his moccasins.7 There was plenty at Fort Clark to exacerbate his temper. Buffalo, valued for the table as well as the fur market, were scarce.As for rats, there were plenty. In March of 1835 alone, 110 were killed, in April, 130. As spring broke in 1836, Chardon reflected that of many winters in Indian country he had “never spent a more unpleasant one.”8 Into this atmosphere, Toussaint brought his gift of gab, his woodsman’s craftiness, and, not least, his culinary skills. One of Chapter Twelve 98 the first times Chardon mentioned him in his journal, it was for giving “a feast to the Indians.” For the first Christmas at the fort, the interpreter prepared a supper of meat pies, bread, fricasseed pheasants, boiled tongue, roast beef and coffee. For the Feast of the Epiphany, a January 6 Christian festival more observed by the French than the Americans, he prepared pudding pies and fried and roasted meat. At another meal, Chardon declared his mince pie “charming.”9 At the age of almost seventy-six, Toussaint’s adventures among Native American women continued unabated. In the fall of 1834, Chardon recorded that the interpreter had two lovely Indian wives. One of them ran away, back to the Hidatsa village she came from. On October 22, 1834, Toussaint left the fort in quest of her, with his other wife in tow. “Poor Old Man,” said Chardon.10 Toussaint apparently did not get his missing wife back, but he returned from the Indian settlement “with all sorts of talk. ” The aging interpreter remained a font of information...