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Charbonneau Tupper Lake's First Settler
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Lewis & Clark — do you remember those names from
elementary school history books?
Tonight, on public television, a documentary film (the second part of
two-hour segments) entitled Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of
Discovery, will be shown. If this second segment is anything like the first
segment, which aired last evening, you won’t want to miss it. It is not only
a valuable historical travelogue, but there are spectacular shots of
landscapes of the Great Plains, the awesome Rockies, and the Pacific
Northwest.
Equally fascinating is the local connection in the documentary as we meet
the Shoshone Indian girl Sacajawea, who is shown leading the expedition
through the unexplored, trackless country where she was raised as a child
before being kidnapped by a hostile neighboring tribe.
Sacajawea, you may remember, was married to Touissant Charbonneau, uncle to
Michael Charbonneau, Tupper Lake’s first settler.
In May 1804, Meriweather Lewis, his friend William Clark and four dozen
other men set off on an expedition that would take them almost
two-and-a-half years to complete. Their mission was to study the unexplored
lands along the Missouri River and to find a water passage to the Pacific.
They traveled upstream the entire length of the Missouri, a distance of
2,700 miles. It was an inconceivably arduous undertaking and one can only
imagine their shock and despair when they got their first look at the
Rockies (which they expected to be only foothills), an endless fortress of
forbidding snow-capped peaks that stretched to the horizon.
This was one of the most momentous and coveted expeditions in American
history. How did Touissant Charbonneau join this expedition whose size was
purposefully kept small so they would not alarm Indians to the point of
active war and whose members were so carefully selected?
We learn something about it from Clark’s notes, in which he writes that “a
French man by name Chabonoh . . . visit us, he wish to hire and informed us
his 2 squars were Snake Indions . . . “
This uncle of Tupper Lake’s first settler was a trader who first started
working for the North West Trading Co. (competitor to Hudson Bay Trading
Co.) at the time he was living among the Hidatsas Indians as an independent
trader. His squaws or “wives” were Shoshones or Snakes from a band that
lived in the Rocky Mountains at the headwaters of the Missouri. They were
teenagers who had been captured by a Hidatsas raiding party. Charbonneau had
won them in a bet with the warriors who had captured them.
The historian Stephen Ambrose relates that “Lewis & Clark eagerly accepted
Charbonneau’s offer to sign on as an interpreter, not so much for his own
sake but because his wives could speak the language of a mountain tribe. So
on the spot they signed up Charbonneau and one of his wives. He chose
Sacajawea, who was about 15 years old and six months pregnant.
History records that this was a wise move. Sacajawea proved invaluable not
only as an interpreter, but also in her memory and ability to guide them
through the unexplored wilds of the upper Missouri.
Lewis & Clark both, it may be worth noting, have been criticized for not
employing her expertise even more, a failure, it has been suggested, because
of the chauvinistic attitude so prevalent at the time.
Touissant is not treated as kindly. For one thing, he was a poor boatsman
afraid of the water, and his inept boat handling several times caused great
concern to Lewis (many valuable supplies were in his boat). He was also
quite argumentative, often quarreling over trifling matters with Jessuame,
the expedition’s mulatto who had to interpret Charbonneau’s French since he
spoke no English. Nevertheless, despite these disapprobations (and his moral
values), he must have been a resourceful and rugged individual. Certainly
his nephew Michael must have been of that ilk. In 1840, at a time when there
were no other settlers anywhere near, he cleared a patch of ground where the
present day Racquette River Drive makes a bend in the road near the river
(near Mary Alice Burns’ residence) and built a cabin. That same summer he
made a trip back through the wilderness to the Champlain Valley, stopping
along the way to cut and stack wild hay. When the lakes were frozen the next
winter he brought back some cattle, driving them through the woods and
stopping to feed them on the “catches” of hay.
Charbonneau’s wife and children sustained themselves for months in a
trackless wilderness until his return. The Tupper Lake Charbonneau name was
later Anglicized to Cole (Charbon is French for coal).
One of the Charbonneaus’ (Cole) daughters had the distinction of being the
first bride here. In 1850 she was married on an island in Big Tupper Lake
just over the Franklin-St. Lawrence County line, known locally as Sally’s
Rock, located ironically enough near the site in Grindstone Bay, where a
million-dollar plus “camp” is presently being built for the Klingenstein and
Simkins families. |
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