CALIFORNIA
DAYS
Perhaps Baptiste’s most exciting job was guiding an expedition led by Sir William Drummond Stewart. Unlike most non-Indian travelers in the West, Stewart had no interest in making money from the fur trade or exploring unfamiliar territory. A wealthy man from Scotland, Stewart was a sportsman who traveled for fun. He had once hunted wild game in Africa. Now he wanted to stalk the antelope, bighorn sheep, and other wild animals that were only found in North America.
Baptiste was an ideal guide for Stewart. He could not only lead Stewart safely through the wilderness. He could also treat Stewart the way a foreign gentleman expected to be treated. Baptiste’s years in Germany had left him well-schooled in European manners. He was one of the few people in the West who knew how to talk with and entertain a man with Stewart’s privileged background.
There was another reason it was fitting that Baptiste joined the Stewart expedition. Among the party’s eighty members was Jefferson Kearny Clark, the son of Baptiste’s old guardian William Clark. More than thirty years before, Baptiste’s mother Sacagawea had helped the elder Clark explore uncharted western lands. Now Baptiste was guiding Clark’s son on his own journey through the West.
In 1846 Baptiste’s talents as a guide caught the attention of the U.S. Army. He was hired to work for the Mormon Battalion, a group of soldiers headed by Colonel Philip St. George Cooke. Starting from present-day Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cooke’s men set out on a seven-hundred-mile journey to what is now San Diego, California. Their mission was part of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). During this conflict, the United States fought with Mexico for control of lands in present-day California, Arizona, and New Mexico.
The Mormon Battalion’s trek to San Diego took them over some of the roughest lands in North America. Their horses and wagons had to blaze a trail through hot deserts and over high mountains. Baptiste often rode ahead, searching for mountain passes and any patch of water to relieve the men’s growing thirst. Colonel Cooke later gave his valiant guide credit for much of the expedition’s success.
One story in Cooke’s account of their journey showed how valuable Baptiste was to the battalion. Riding before the others to scope out the easiest course over a mountain, Baptiste was attacked by three enormous bears. Without a moment to think, he shot once, then twice. One bear fell dead, while the others roared in confusion. When Cooke heard the cries of the angry bears, he was sure Baptiste was dead. Then through the haze of gun smoke, he saw the brilliant red of Baptiste’s jacket and heard his guide yell out in Spanish for more ammunition. Driving the surviving bears away, Baptiste made the pass safe for the other men to cross. His quick-thinking and sure-shooting also gave them a healthy supply of fresh meat from the bear he was able to kill.
After guiding the battalion to California, Baptiste was released from military duty. He was then hired by a fellow soldier to be the alcalde of San Luis Rey. San Luis Rey was one of twenty-one missions that Spanish priests founded in California. At these missions, Indians lived and worked, while the priests tried to teach them about the Catholic religion.
In the position of alcalde, Baptiste was like the mayor of a small Indian community. He was supposed to make sure the mission residents were treated well and to gather information about their customs. Baptiste tried to help the Indians, but after only eight months, he resigned from his post. According to one army report, white people living near the mission forced Baptiste to leave the job. Because he was half Indian, these whites thought he was “favoring the Indians more than he should do.” Some even accused him of trying to persuade the San Luis Rey Indians to rise up and fight the priests in charge of the mission.
Although this charge was false, Baptiste was no doubt disturbed by some whites’ mistreatment of the San Luis Rey Indians. In one instance, an Indian who owed a white store owner $50 was told he would have to work off the debt. The store owner, though, would only pay him 12 1/2 cents a day. While working, the Indian would need to buy more supplies from the store, driving him deeper in debt. Baptiste could see that at this low rate of pay the Indian would have to slave for the store owner until the day he died.
Although disappointed by his experiences at San Luis Rey, Baptiste now was free to set off for northern California. From old friends in the Mormon Battalion, he learned of an incredible discovery there. They had been working on a crew that was building a mill on land owned by John Sutter. In January 1848, while they labored, their supervisor, James Marshall, spied a shiny yellow rock. The rock turned out to be a chunk of pure gold. Marshall and Sutter tried to keep their discovery quiet so they would have all the precious metal to themselves. But despite their efforts, word spread and spread quickly.
Learning about the gold directly from members of Marshall’s crew, Baptiste was probably among the first to hear the news. He immediately rushed north, determined to strike it rich. He may have been one of the first to arrive in the California gold fields, but he was far from the last. Within a year, the area was flooded with eager miners from the middle and eastern United States. These men, most of whom came to California in 1849, were nicknamed the Forty-Niners.
Unfortunately for Baptiste, his head start did him little good. Mining was a chancy business. For every miner who found gold, hundreds of others walked away with just a little gold dust in their pocket. Still others left California with nothing at all. Baptiste, as it turned out, was not one of the lucky few.
Working as a miner, though, did have some unexpected benefits. At a mining camp called Murderer’s Bar, Baptiste was reunited with several friends from his mountain man days. Among them was the African American adventurer Jim Beckwourth, who became Baptiste’s mining partner for a while. Another old acquaintance, Tom Buckner, later wrote that his “heart was gladdened” when he saw Baptiste in the camp.
One friend Baptiste just missed seeing was his favorite traveling companion Prince Paul. Always attracted by excitement, Paul was lured west by the gold rush. While visiting John Sutter in 1850, he saw some Shoshone horse traders. He wrote that they reminded him of the “handsome youth” he once knew. Apparently Paul had no idea that the real Baptiste was then living so close by.
Although Baptiste didn’t strike gold as he’d hope, he must have found something he liked in northern California. Maybe it was the mild climate, the lush forests, or the calming rush of the Pacific tides that he had first seen as baby. Whatever appealed to him, after a lifetime of roaming, Baptiste decided to put down roots. He stayed in California for seventeen years. Little is known about what he did during this time. Most likely, though, he followed the example of many unsuccessful but smart Forty-Niners: He probably gave up mining himself to make a healthy living selling goods and services to the miners who kept trying.
In 1866, Baptiste was working as a clerk in the Orleans Hotel in Auburn, California. There he heard of a new gold strike, this time in what is now Montana. The news sparked in Baptiste the old urge to wander. He was then sixty-one—by his day’s standards, an elderly man. Still, he couldn't resist heading off on one last adventure.
With two partners in tow, Baptiste left that spring, traveling northeast into Oregon. When the three men reached the Owyhee River, they were all worn down by cold, rainy weather. As they crossed the Owyhee on horseback, they were probably drenched up to their waists in the still icy waters.
The difficult trip took its toll on Baptiste. He soon caught pneumonia, a serious disease of the lungs. In a desperate effort to save his life, his two friends carried him twenty-five miles to Inskip’s ranch and stagecoach station, the nearest shelter. There, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau died on May 16, 1866. His body was buried nearby, the first in a site that would become a small local graveyard.
A longtime friend in California wrote of Baptiste’s death in a local newspaper. The Baptiste he knew was an older man “of pleasant manners, intelligent, well read in the topics of the day, and was generally esteemed in the community in which he lived, as a good meaning and inoffensive man.” But the writer surely heard from Baptiste many exciting tales of his younger days, for he added that his friend “was of a class that for years lived among stirring and eventful scenes.”
This obituary and other historical records make a strong case that Baptiste met his end at Inskip’s station. Still, many Shoshone tell another story. They say that it was not Baptiste’s mother Sacagawea, but Charbonneau’s other wife, who died in 1812. Their story holds that Sacagawea left her husband and spent many years wandering in the West before finally settling on the Shoshone’s Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. There, the Shoshone say, she was reunited with her long lost son. The two supposedly lived together for many years before Sacagawea died at the age of one hundred in 1884. According to his tribe, Baptiste followed her to the grave the next year.
No one knows for sure whether this reunion actually took place. But more than one hundred years later, one of another sort certainly did. In 2000, on the design of the Sacagawea dollar, Sacagawea and Pomp found themselves together once again.
Learn about Pomp's appearance on the dollar coin in
Chapter 6: The Sacagawea Dollar
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© 2000 Liz Sonneborn. All Rights Reserved.