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Reviews
SACAGAWEA'S CHILD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JEAN-BAPTISTE (POMP) CHARBONNEAU
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by Susan M. Colby
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| Arthur H. Clark, Spokane, Washington, 2005. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 203 pages. $28.50 cloth. |
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| JEAN-BAPTISTE CHARBONNEAU is chieflyremembered as the infant son of Sacagawea who went west with Lewis and Clark. Later, he was schooled in St. Louis at Clark's expense; he spent years in Germany at the court of a duke; and after many years in the West he died at age sixty-one while traveling through southeast Oregon. He left no writings except for two or three signatures, though there are brief passages about him as a traveler, mountain man, guide, interpreter, petty official, and prospector in the journals of other western adventurers. Taken together, his life records would hardly fill twenty printed pages. |
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Recently (OHQ 102:3, 290–315), I argued that current writings about him are forced to treat a symbolic figure — a blessed babe, an object of rough men's affections, a favored protégé, a hearty and heroic outdoorsman — by indulging in embellishment and sheer speculation. |
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This full-length book (volume 33 of the Western Frontiersmen Series) counters my skepticism, sometimes very emphatically. Susan Colby claims descent from two lines of Charbonneau ancestors, and she works to present the career of a "unique American métis," an outstanding figure in the exploration of the West by people of French and Indian ancestry (p. 10–11). She quotes with approval a remark that "the standard label for the Lewis and Clark expedition might with more fairness be expanded to 'Lewis and Clark and Verendrye and Drouillard and Charbonneau'" (p. 24n8). |
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This is a fresh and worthwhile approach to early western history, and Colby seems to have gathered everything written on her particular subject. She traces the Charbonneaus through generations in Quebec. She quotes dozens of passages about Sacagawea, Toussaint Charbonneau, and their son. She tries to challenge prejudices by looking at these figures "in terms of their own cultures and the realities of their own times" (p. 11). She thus creates the most extensive, amply illustrated biography anyone is likely to write. |
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Yet, a close reader will find this book frustrating when it relies on secondary sources rather than primary documents. Many passages from Lewis and Clark, for example, are taken from the Elliott Coues edition — a rewritten and much-edited narrative of the expedition — instead of the painstaking Gary Moulton edition of the Journals or the Donald Jackson edition of letters and documents. Colby's footnotes may point to mere opinions from Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail (pp. 42, 76, 113, 117, 119, 137, 139), to works that quote or report old tales and reminiscences, or to an excellent source that contains nothing whatever about the matter at hand (Jackson at p. 40n45). The genealogies seem to rely on a Dictionnaire des Mariages Charbonneau, which may or may not be a scrupulous family history; its authority is nowhere described or discussed. |
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Colby also makes sweeping generalizations that amount to mind-reading or stereotyping. Sacagawea, she states, "was a confident, accomplished young woman, ready for whatever fate sent her way," and she continually inspired respect, admiration, loyalty, and devotion (p. 37, 47). Jean-Baptiste lived in a palace and then survived on rough western trails. Therefore, he had the temperament of both a bon vivant and a wilderness ascetic. "Fine cuisine ... must have appealed to the debonair Jean-Baptiste, whose educated palate, pampered in the courts of Europe for six years, suffered mightily at times on the range"; yet, at the same time he was perpetually "seduced by the charm and freedom of an unfettered life on the plains and in the mountains," and "the Indian in him rejected avarice, and his whole life illustrated that he was content with the simple life of a lone bachelor" (p. 141, 117, 163). |
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| ALBERT FURTWANGLER
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| Salem, Oregon |
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