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

Introduction

1 Introduction In the half year since he became superintendent of Indian affairs for Louisiana Territory, Joshua Pilcher had felt himself pestered by visitors to his cluttered office off Pine Street in St. Louis. But when he spotted the stooped, shaggy man who wandered up the stone walk on October 21, 1839, Pilcher welcomed a companion from his well-remembered days as a fur trader. The caller was Toussaint Charbonneau, interpreter to Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, husband to Sacagawea, and father to Jean Baptiste. Together and separately, the three were actors in events that would leave an indelible mark on the American West of their time. To Pilcher, however, Toussaint was simply an old acquaintance he was glad to see again. The Indian affairs superintendent, a one-time St. Louis banker, was president of the Missouri Fur Company when he met Charbonneau. Later he became an Indian agent under William Clark, then the superintendent at St. Louis. He soon began to think Introduction 2 that the aging frontiersman was no longer up to the job and, when Clark died on September 1, 1838, he jumped at the chance for promotion. Once he was installed in the superintendent’s two-room office, he had second thoughts. Pilcher’s waspish, mercurial temper was frayed by long hours at his desk, the problems of hiring good help on a limited budget, and the flood of paper work. But most of all the visitors. Destitute Indians arrived seeking help. Entrepreneurs came by trying to sell him land for distribution to the tribes. Friends dropped in to chat. When would they give him any peace? He paid attention, though, to Charbonneau.1 The old frontiersman was not just passing through, nor had he dropped by from any office in St. Louis. He had traveled 1,600 miles from the villages of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians on the upper Missouri River. He had a grievance. For twenty years he had been a government interpreter with the Mandans and Hidatsas, appointed by William Clark. Clark had befriended Charbonneau and his Indian wife Sacagawea when they were together on the great expedition of 1804 to 1806—Clark as co-captain, Charbonneau and Sacagawea as interpreters. The need for an interpreter at the villages was now questionable at best. A smallpox epidemic had all but wiped out the Mandans. The fur trade with the Indians was dwindling. Nevertheless , Clark kept his old friend on the job. With Clark’s death, the government decided Charbonneau was no longer needed. As of the end of 1838, he was off the payroll. But nobody bothered to tell Charbonneau. At his remote outpost on the Knife River near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota , the news of his dismissal did not reach him until July, 1839. Introduction 3 Amid the jumble of ledgers, boxes, and fireplace tongs in his office, Pilcher listened to the words of an old man who wanted his six months’ pay. Five days later, he wrote to Indian Commissioner Carey A. Harris in Washington. Charbonneau, he said, “came into the office, tottering under the infirmities of eighty winters, without a dollar to support him, to ask what appeared to me to be nothing more than just.” The interpreter had been, noted Pilcher, “a faithful servant of the Government —though in a humble capacity.” He “rendered much service” as a member of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery . He provided intelligence about British efforts to gain Indian allies during the War of 1812. He served on expedition after expedition asAmerican influence spread farther and farther west. “I accordingly have paid his salary . . . for the 1st and 2nd quarters of this year,” the weary bureaucrat wrote, “with the understanding that his services are no longer required.” By 1843, the man who was no longer required would be dead. Somewhere along the line, he had acquired some property, because his son, Jean Baptiste, by then himself a veteran of expeditions into the West, sold it that year for $320. The scene in Pilcher’s office was the last for Toussaint Charbonneau on the stage of history, one that he had entered three and a half decades before on a cold autumn day in his adopted homeland.2 Map of the section of the Missouri River where the Lewis and Clark party spent the winter of 1804-1805. No. 6 near the top of the map is the...