Jean Baptiste Charbonneau (February 11, 1805 – May 16, 1866), sometimes known in childhood as Pompey or Little Pomp, was an American explorer, guide, fur trapper, trader, military scout during the Mexican–American War, alcalde (mayor) of Mission San Luis Rey de Francia and a gold digger and hotel operator in Northern California.

Jean Baptiste's father was also a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, a French Canadian explorer and trader named Toussaint Charbonneau.

The senior Charbonneau had been hired by the expedition as an interpreter and, learning that his pregnant wife was Shoshone, the captains, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, agreed to bring her along.

Whether this medicine was truly the cause or not I shall not undertake to determine, but I was informed that she had not taken it more than ten minutes before she brought forth perhaps this remedy may be worthy of future experiments, but I must confess that I want faith as to it's efficacy.

His presence is often credited by historians with assuring native tribes of the expedition's peaceful intentions, as they believed that no war party would travel with a woman and child.

Its walls were decorated with national flags and life-size portraits of George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, Native artifacts, and mounted animal heads.

Upon visiting the museum, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a geologist and ethnographer, wrote: Clark evinces a philosophical taste in the preservation of many subjects of natural history.

[a] From June through September 1820 and in 1822, Jean Baptiste boarded with Louis Tesson Honoré, a Clark family friend and member of his church, Christ Episcopal.

Sobin, 23 at the time, traveled to Mission San Fernando Rey de España near Los Angeles for the infant girl's baptism, performed on May 28, 1848, and recorded by Father Blas Ordaz as entry #1884.

[17] From 1840–42 he worked from Fort Saint Vrain, floating bison hides and tongues 2,000 miles (3,200 km) down the South Platte River to St. Louis.

In 1843, he guided Sir William Drummond Stewart, a Scottish baronet, on his second long trip to the American West, which was a lavish hunting expedition.

Charbonneau's experience with military marches, such as with James William Abert[7]: 128  in August 1845, along the Canadian River, and his fluency in Native languages qualified him for the position.

Kearny directed him to join Colonel Philip St. George Cooke on an arduous march from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to San Diego, California, a distance of 1,100 miles (1,800 km).

A memorial to the historic trek of the Mormon Battalion and their guide Charbonneau has been erected at the San Pedro River, one mile (1.6 km) north of the U.S.–Mexico border near the present-day town of Palominas, Arizona.

Other monuments or historic markers are in Tucson, Arizona and in California at Box Canyon near Warner Springs, at Temecula, at Old Town San Diego and at Fort Moore in Los Angeles.

[7]: 150  Eight of the twenty wagons reached Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, four miles (6.4 km) from today's Oceanside, California, and the leaders counted the expedition as a success.

In February 1848, knowledge gained about the region was used as the basis of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which established the United States-Mexico border in December 1853, following the Mexican-American War.

[7]: 151 In November 1847, Charbonneau accepted an appointment from Colonel John D. Stevenson as alcalde (mayor) at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia.

Trying to correct abuses and also facilitate post-war control, in November 1847, Colonel Richard Barnes Mason, the territorial governor, ordered Charbonneau to force the sale of a large ranch owned by the powerful Jose Antonio Pico, whose family was politically connected.

Panning was not done during the hard Sierra Nevada winter or spring runoff, so in June 1849, he joined Jim Beckwourth and two others at a camp on Buckner's Bar to mine the river at the Big Crevice.

[25] His route and travel method likely took him on a stagecoach over Donner Summit and east along the well-traveled Humboldt River Trail to Winnemucca, Nevada, then north to the U.S. Army's Camp McDermitt at the Oregon border.

He may have been on a stagecoach operated by the Boise-Silver City-Winnemucca stage company that began its route in 1866 out of Camp McDermitt and in crossing the river, the coach sank.

Charbonneau's gravesite, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, sits on one acre (4,000 m2) of land within sight of the Inskip Station ruins.

Born to Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau at Fort Mandan (North Dakota), on February 11, 1805, Baptiste and his mother symbolized the peaceful nature of the "Corps of Discovery".

Educated by Captain William Clark at St. Louis, Baptiste at 18 traveled to Europe where he spent six years becoming fluent in English, German, French, and Spanish.

In 1866, he left the California gold fields for a new strike in Montana, contracted pneumonia en route, reached "Inskips Ranche", here, and died on May 16, 1866.

[28] A plaque laid nearby at Inskip Station lists their names beside that of "J.B. Charbonneau", along with the inscription: "Under the wide and starry sky..." Earlier in the twentieth century, Dr Grace Raymond Hebard of the University of Wyoming, a political economist, not a historian or anthropologist, argued that Charbonneau died and was buried at the Shoshone Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.

Dr. Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux and not of the Shoshone language group, did research that attempted to establish that Charbonneau's mother Sacagawea died at the reservation on April 9, 1884.

In 1964, an edited nineteenth-century journal was published stating that Sacagawea died much earlier, on December 20, 1812, of a "putrid fever" (possible following childbirth) at Fort Lisa on the Missouri River.