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Jean Baptiste Charbonneau

GREEN RIVER TRADERS’ RENDEZVOUS, 1833

1 My friends, as we gather around this fire, let me tell you a story. It is the
story of how the worlds of the white men and the Indians came together. There
is no one better to tell the story than I, Jean Baptiste, for I am of both worlds. I
was there on that great journey. Now I am a man who has seen twenty-eight
winters, but then I was a child.

2 It is a story of hard travels and many wonders, a story of bravery and kind
deeds, of treachery and great danger, of strange men and even stranger places,
of high mountains and rivers. It is a story of suffering and triumph.

3 I have been far since then. I have been to the schools of the white men, I
have traveled to Europe, and I have made friends with kings and princes,
guiding them to hunt the buffalo on the plains. I have ridden, too, by the side
of war chiefs and shared the lodges of many Indian nations. Yet no kings or
princes, no warriors or chiefs were ever better men than those who took me on

that journey with them. Of all those who were part of that great adventure,
there is one who was the bravest and best of them all. A great-hearted woman.
Though she was little more than a child when it all began, she was the finest
person I ever knew. That woman was my mother, Sacajawea.

4 But I cannot tell the whole of the story, for I was only a baby during those
years. It is the custom of my mother’s people, the Shoshones, that one can tell
only what they have seen. When the Shoshones come to something they do not
know, one who was there must tell the tale.

5 Those two voices who told that tale to me, my mother’s and my uncle’s, will
now tell it to you. It is the shared telling of this story that is the beginning of my
life. Now, brought back to life and breath are those voices, as I remember them in
my heart. Here is my mother, Sacajawea. Here is my adopted uncle, Captain

William Clark.
6 Listen. Here is our story.

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