Toussaint Charbonneau (March 20, 1767 â€" August 12, 1843) was a
French-Canadian explorer, trader and a member of the Lewis and Clark
Expedition. He is also known as the husband of Sacagawea.Charbonneau
was born in Boucherville, Quebec (near Montréal) around 1759.
Boucherville was a community with strong links to exploration and the
fur trade. His paternal great grandmother Marguerite de Noyon was the
sister of Jacques de Noyon, who had explored the region around
Kaministiquia, present day Thunder Bay, Ontario, in 1688. In the late
1790s he became a fur trader that lived among the Hidatsa and Mandan
native tribes.Charbonneau worked, for a time, as a fur trapper with
the North West Company (NWC) assigned to the Pine Fort on the
Assiniboine River in what is now Manitoba. The North West Company was
founded to compete with the dominant Hudson Bay Company which was an
English based company that employed many Frenchmen. This company
pushed West which allowed it to trade with the Mandan and Hidatsa
native tribes. John MacDonell, recorder of one of their expeditions,
first noted Charbonneau in their historical journal. After several
routine mentions of Charbonneau, MacDonell wrote on May 30, 1795:
"Toussaint. Charbonneau was stabbed at the Manitou-a-banc end of the
Portage la Prairie, Manitoba in the act of committing a Rape upon her
Daughter by an old Saultier woman with a Canoe Awlâ€" a fate he highly
deserved for his brutalityâ€" It was with difficulty he could walk
back over the portage."While living among the Hidatsa people,
Charbonneau purchased or won a Shoshone girl: Sacagawea (Bird Woman)
from the Hidatsa. The Hidatsa had captured Sacagawea on one of their
annual raiding and hunting parties to the west. It is possible that
Sacagawea had little choice in the matter, or that she chose it
because it was preferable to her previous position. When he married
Sacagawea in 1804, he was already married to Otter Woman, another
Shoshone woman. Charbonneau eventually considered these women to be
his wives, though whether they were bound through Native American
custom or simply through common-law marriage is indeterminate. By the
summer of 1804, Sacagawea was pregnant with their first child. Toussaint Charbonneau Biography, NetWorth, Height, Age, Weight, Family, Married, Son, Daughter