Not yet three months old, the baby boy was strapped to his slave-mother’s back.  Nicknamed Pompy by Captain William Clark, he spent the first year of his life traveling by canoe and horseback across the uncharted West of our country. The trip he could never remember shaped his entire life.

Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was his name.  William Clark was his adoptive father.  He traveled with princes and quoted Shakespeare at Frémont’s campfires. Forever he lives in his mother’s shadow; hers grows with each passing year, casting him further into the haze of history little known and seldom shuffled.  But his is a story of interest, if for no other reason than his mother – a slave, the forced wife of a French trapper – lines the annals of our history, continually extolled by both captains of the Corps of Discovery as unruffled even under extreme pressure. Jean Baptiste, trapper, mountain man and guide in his own right, the half-breed son of Sacagewea. 

The story did not end in 1806; it is his story – Pompy’s story – that has yet to be told. 

Is it worth telling?