Sacagawea's baby grew up to be the Davy Crockett of the West

It’s really easy, looking back at history, to think stuff was “meant to be.”

When we look back at how the American West was incorporated into the nation, we see it was shaped in the spirit of Manifest Destiny. We see settlers from the east moving out and seizing big chunks of Indian lands, claiming it was God’s will and pointing to the pandemics that were decimating the tribes as a sort of Old Testament-style confirmation of their status as God’s chosen new landowners.

The course of Western history was set by a president, Andrew Jackson, a ruthless individualist who considered Indian lives to be relatively unimportant and pushed a national policy of straight-up ethnic cleansing. Indians would be forced to either move onto reservations far away, or integrate into mainstream society as second-class citizens.

Settlers wouldn’t officially get free land from the government for several decades; but by the time they did, with the Civil War raging, eastern settlers would be all over the West, staking and defending claims and calling upon soldiers to enforce them. The stark difference between whites “blessed by God” and Natives “cursed by God” encouraged a deep-seated fixation on race that the country has struggled with ever since.

But it didn’t have to be that way; and, until Jackson’s presidency, it wasn’t. Indian tribes like the Cherokee and the Seminole lived on their own sovereign lands, like self-governing enclaves. Many of them were adopting the lifestyle of their European-descended neighbors, setting up farms and blacksmith shops and small country towns just like everyone else in the post-Plymouth Rock New World.

This was the vision of Indian relations that most people held during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. And this was what Jefferson thought America would look like after the Louisiana Purchase. The Lewis and Clark expedition was not surveying land or cruising timber. It was Jefferson’s envoys to the Indian nations that lived in the West, and the formerly French and Spanish colonies there.

Jefferson thought westward expansion would follow the same pattern he was familiar with. Settlement would flow out and around the tribes’ ancestral lands, respecting their boundaries and becoming their neighbors. So one of the most important tasks for the Corps of Discovery was to make contact with as many Indian nations as possible, and establish good relations with them, so that they could be incorporated Cherokee-style into the new nation as full sovereign peoples.

Which is a big part of why Toussant and Sacagawea Charbonneau were in the party.

Toussant, a French-Canadian mountain man, spoke several Indian languages. His wife, a Shoshone woman who had been kidnapped at birth by a rival Hidatsa tribe, spoke several more. Chances were pretty good that between them they could communicate with most of the Indian nations they’d encounter.

It worked very well indeed. Plus, Sacagawea was pregnant. She was like a walking, talking proof of the Corps of Discovery’s good intentions. No war party or gang of raiders brings a pregnant lady along.

But pregnancies end. And so, in a birch-bark canoe at Fort Mandan in what’s now North Dakota, Jean-Baptiste “Pomp” Charbonneau was born.

Pomp Charbonneau accompanied the Corps of Discovery on its entire voyage, out to Oregon and back to St. Louis. Out of the entire Lewis and Clark expedition, he would be the only member who would ever set foot in the Oregon territory again — and he’s actually buried there.

Charbonneau was the kind of man Thomas Jefferson envisioned leading the America he was trying to shape. He was, almost literally, a frontier renaissance man. He had a first-class education, had visited the important cultural centers of Europe, spoke eight or 10 languages both European and Indian, and by his métis heritage represented a sort of cultural exchange between the former colonies of the Eastern Seaboard and the Indian nations of the West. A picture of him — or, rather, a picture of a baby that’s supposed to be him — is on the ill-starred “golden dollar” coin released a few dozen years ago to replace the even-more-ill-starred Susan B. Anthony dollar. It’s the only picture of an infant ever to appear on American money. One of the scenic landmarks of the Rocky Mountains, Pompey’s Pillar, is named after him.

Yet today nobody has any idea what he looked like. For such a literate fellow, he seems to have written almost nothing beyond official documents. He drifts through American history like a frontier ghost, and half the stories you’ll hear about his life have been made up to fill the more enticing holes in what we actually know.

Here’s what we do know: After returning from the expedition, William Clark kinda-adopted the little guy and made sure he got as close to a first-class education as you could get in early-1800s St. Louis — which actually was better than you might think.

When he was 18 years old, Charbonneau met Duke Paul Wilhelm of Württembert, who was on a tour of the American wilderness. When the duke returned to Europe, the lad went with him. No one knows the specifics, but we do know he wasn’t an exotic-specimen exhibit and he didn’t function as Duke Paul’s servant. Most likely, he was an exotic and interesting friend and traveling companion, filling a role similar to that of the character of Hadji on “Jonny Quest.”

(Sources: Sacagawea’s Child, a book by Susan Colby published in 2004 by Arthur H. Clark Co .; “Sacagawea’s Son,” an article by Albert Furtwangler published in the winter 2001 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly; The Fate of the Corps, a book by Larry E. Morris published in 2004 by Yale Press; The Other Side of Oregon, a book by Ralph Friedman published in 1993 by Caxton Press.)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.

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