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Reviews
Interpreters with Lewis and Clark: The Story of Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau
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By W. Dale Nelson
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University of North Texas Press, Denton, 2003. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 183 pages. $24.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Albert Furtwangler
Salem, Oregon
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| Sacagawea has become a major symbolic figure in American history. On the jacket of Interpreters with Lewis and Clark, as in many monumental paintings and statues, she is shown as a stately woman with a child on her back, pointing ahead with an outstretched arm as Lewis and Clark pay serious attention. Millions have come to recognize her as the essential guide, intermediary, and young mother who helped white men open the West. |
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Toussaint Charbonneau, the much older man who fathered her child, has a much less glamorous reputation. He is chiefly remembered as a panicky boat handler on the expedition and a cook with a recipe for buffalo guts. Lewis wrote him off as a "a man of no peculiar merit" — especially in comparison to George Drouillard, the indispensable interpreter and hunter in the party. |
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Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau was born just before the expedition headed west from Fort Mandan. Over the next several months he engaged the affection of William Clark, who later sponsored his schooling in St. Louis and may have helped set up his years in Germany in the household of a duke who had visited the upper Missouri. |
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W. Dale Nelson tries to present all that can be known about these three figures in a chronological account that spans the years from late 1804 when the explorers first met Toussaint to the death of Jean-Baptiste in 1866. Much of his information is necessarily sketchy, derived from scattered passages in the expedition journals and later records. Both the parents were illiterate, and Jean-Baptiste has left perhaps two signatures. It is only through others' writings that they can be seen in historical detail. |
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Although this is a university press book with dozens of pages of notes and bibliography, Nelson makes no claims to be an original or judicious scholar. He admits in his acknowledgments that he owes much to "more learned" predecessors (p. x). Unfortunately, he does not fully explain or critically examine the sources he relies on. His notes often lead to casual opinions, dubious secondary works, and annotations (which point to other sources) in scholarly editions of primary texts. He seems to have done much diligent reading, but he does not help readers see into significant problems. |
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For example, the name Sacagawea (or Sacajawea or Sakakawea) gets a one-paragraph treatment with a single endnote reference to ten sources, including two recent newspaper feature articles and two telephone interviews (pp. 11, 135n18). Sacagawea's appearance is summarized as "at least fairly attractive" on the basis of remarks by "some travelers" about young Shoshone women in general (p. 11). Concerning her severe illness near the Marias River, Nelson mentions one unnamed "modern medical authority" who has "speculated that she had a gonorrhea infection." Such a point surely deserves fuller discussion, but it never gets it. "In any case, she was badly off" (p. 30). Were Charbonneau and Sacagawea married in a formal ceremony of some kind? Nelson vaguely suggests that they had a wedding, and he cites an excerpt from a Dictinnain Hishrique [sic] of 1908 found in a file of the Grace Hebard papers (p. 135n14). This is no doubt the Dictionnaire Historique or Historical Dictionary of Canadian Half-Breeds of the West (1912) cited (and quoted) in Hebard's published work about Sacagawea — but what is the primary evidence on which it is based? |
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Does this work offer any new insights into the Corps of Discovery? In the end, Sacagawea emerges once again as a noble Shoshone lady, Charbonneau as a clumsy trader and long-lived trifler with Indian women, and their son as a man of many adventures on the trail. Nelson adds no significant information about Clark, but he introduces Lewis with an unforgettable and unforgivable flourish: "From boyhood, the moody, studious, bow-legged Meriwether had liked to take long solitary walks in the woods" (p. 8). |
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