Birth at Fort Mandan
Jean Baptiste Charbonneau entered the expedition record on February 11, 1805, when his mother Sacagawea gave birth at Fort Mandan. Meriwether Lewis attended the labor and recorded an unusual obstetric remedy passed along by the interpreter René Jusseaume: a small portion of the rattle of a rattlesnake, broken between the fingers and administered with water. Lewis remained skeptical but noted the child arrived ten minutes later.
About five Oclock this evening one of the wives of Chabono was delivered of a fine boy. I was informed that her labour was tedious and the pain violent.
The boy’s father was Toussaint Charbonneau, the French-Canadian interpreter the captains had hired weeks earlier; his mother was the young Lemhi Shoshone woman whose presence would soon prove invaluable. From the moment of his birth, Jean Baptiste — soon nicknamed “Pomp” or “Pompey” by Clark — was bound to the fortunes of the Corps of Discovery.
Departure into the Unknown
When the permanent party pushed off from Fort Mandan on April 7, 1805, the infant was less than two months old. Lewis’s famous reflection that day — comparing the small fleet to the ships of Columbus and Cook — counted the baby implicitly among the thirty-three souls about to penetrate “a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden.”
The journals rarely mention Jean Baptiste by name in the early months of travel, but his presence is felt in references to his parents. On June 29, 1805, Clark recorded one of the expedition’s most harrowing moments — the flash flood at the Great Falls of the Missouri — and the toddler was in the ravine with him:
I took my Servent & one man Chabono our Interpreter & his Squar accompanied… about 1/4 of a mile above the falls I obsd a Deep rivein in which was Shelveing rocks under which we took Shelter near the river.
Sacagawea clutched the baby as the water rose; Clark helped push them up the slope. The cradleboard, clothing, and many of the child’s effects were swept away.
Across the Mountains and to the Pacific
By July 13, 1805, Lewis was reorganizing the canoes near the White Bear Islands, sending Charbonneau the elder by water while “the sick man and Indian woman accompanyed me by land” — Sacagawea presumably with the baby on her back. Through the Bitterroots, down the Clearwater and Snake and Columbia, the child traveled in his mother’s care.
At Fort Clatsop on the Pacific coast, Jean Baptiste appears in domestic glimpses. On February 22, 1806, Clark listed the sick of the post: “Gibson, Bratten, Willard McNeal and Baptiest LaPage is Something better” — though here the “Baptiest” is the engagé Baptiste Lapage, not the child. Lapage and Jean Baptiste Charbonneau are distinct figures whom the journals occasionally render with confusing similarity. Lapage appears repeatedly as a hunter (January 24, January 28, May 23, 1806), and care must be taken not to conflate him with the infant.
The Illness on the Clearwater
The most sustained attention to Jean Baptiste in the journals comes during the expedition’s stay among the Nez Perce in May and June 1806, when the child fell seriously ill. Clark and Lewis both recorded daily updates on his condition, and the entries reveal genuine paternal concern from both captains.
On May 22 the swelling in the child’s neck and jaw alarmed them. On May 23, Lewis wrote:
The Creem of tartar and sulpher operated several times on the child in the course of the last night, he is considerably better this morning, tho the swelling of the neck has abated but little; we still apply polices of onions which we renew frequently.
Clark, on the same day, noted: “The Child is Something better this morning than it was last night.” The following day the boy was “very restless,” his jaw and neck “much more Swelled.” The captains tried cream of tartar, sulphur, and repeated poultices of wild onion. By May 26 the swelling continued, but the fever had eased.
By May 28 Lewis could write that “The Child is also better.” On June 3 he reported the “imposthume on his neck has in a great measure subsided and left a hard lump underneath his left ear.” By June 5 Clark applied a homemade salve — “a plaster of Sarve made of the Rozen of the long leafed pine, Beas wax and Beare oil mixed” — and the inflammation finally retreated. On June 8 Clark wrote simply: “The child has nearly recovered.” Lewis confirmed: “the child is nearly well.”
The episode, occupying nearly three weeks of journal entries, is one of the few in which an individual non-soldier receives such concentrated medical attention in the record.
Pompey’s Tower
The expedition’s most enduring tribute to Jean Baptiste came on July 25, 1806, when Clark — descending the Yellowstone River with the southern detachment — climbed a striking sandstone pillar and named it for the boy. The accompanying narrative records:
This rock I shall call Pompy’s Tower, after the young Shoshone boy. I marked my name and the day of the month & year.
The inscription “Wm Clark July 25 1806” remains carved on what is today Pompeys Pillar National Monument in Montana — the only physical trace of the expedition still in place along its route. The name itself is a monument: the captain commemorated the toddler before commemorating himself.
Farewell at the Mandan Villages
On August 17, 1806, the expedition reached the Mandan villages on the return journey, and the Charbonneau family disembarked. Clark, who had grown deeply attached to the child, made an extraordinary offer:
I offered to take his little Son a butifull promising Child who is 19 months old.
Charbonneau the elder was paid $500.33 and given a horse for his services. Sacagawea, by contrast, received no compensation from the government — a fact later generations have found difficult to reconcile with the magnitude of her contribution. The captains parted from the family with the understanding that, in time, the child might come to St. Louis to be raised and educated under Clark’s sponsorship.
The Limits of the Journal Record
Within the expedition record itself, Jean Baptiste appears almost entirely as a small body to be cared for, watched, treated, and named after. He cannot speak for himself in these pages — he was, after all, an infant and toddler throughout. The narrators who mention him are Lewis and Clark; the engagés and sergeants do not record his presence in the surviving entries provided here. What they leave us is striking nonetheless: a baby born in a frozen Mandan winter, carried over the Rockies and to the salt water, nursed through a serious illness on the Clearwater, and given his name to a stone pillar above the Yellowstone.
Anything beyond this — his later education, travels, and life as a frontier figure — lies outside what the expedition journals themselves report and is referenced only briefly in the later editorial framing accompanying the entries of February 11, 1805, and August 17, 1806.
