Jean
Baptiste Charbonneau was born at a time when stars remained silent to
the fate of men. A between time when the borders of nations expanded
and contracted in accordance with ill begotten and soon discarded
treaties. A sea of languages, of displaced and displacing men, all
caught in the pull of a great tide of endless frontiers.
Born to
a Shoshone woman and a fur trapper from Quebec, who is said to have
won this woman as winnings from a night of gambling, Jean was as an
infant, the youngest member of a party set out to survey the new
territory known as the Louisiana Purchase led by explorers Lewis and
Clark. Perhaps it was because he was born traveling that no horoscope
could be cast which would equal the magnitude of what this child's
life was to become.
No
simple list of his life events will be recounted here, but it was
remarkable by any standard what he achieved in that sad, brutal
century. That he came to me through reading about his mother,
Sacagawea, which is the name of a local park near where I first lived
with my sister upon my return to my hometown after living away for
nearly 30 years, and that I have a coin with both his mother's and
his own images on it, I find ironic. That I drove into the hills he
last traveled and died in I find magical.
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