On the transatlantic voyage, Chartier and his father René became acquainted with René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who was also immigrating to Canada.

[5] Some sources state that the young Chartier spent the next several years in Montreal learning to make gloves,[2][Note 1] but there is also evidence that he was apprenticed to a carpenter.

[10] In 1674, Chartier accompanied Louis Jolliet to the Illinois Country, where he became acquainted with the Pekowi Shawnee, who lived at that time on the Wabash River.

La Salle continued with his men in canoes down the western shore of Lake Michigan, rounding the southern end to the mouth of the St. Joseph River, where Chartier helped to build a stockade in November 1679.

Tonti arrived on November 20; on December 3, the entire party set off up the St. Joseph, which they followed until they had to take a portage at present-day South Bend, Indiana.

[15] Father Hennepin went with a small party to seek the junction of the St. Joseph and the Mississippi rivers; he was captured by Sioux warriors and held for several months.

[17] On his return trip up the Illinois River, La Salle concluded that Starved Rock might provide an ideal location for another fortification and sent word downriver to Tonti regarding this idea.

Following La Salle's instructions, Tonti took five men and traveled upriver to assess the suitability of the Starved Rock site.

"[20] The mutiny was probably caused by the men's fear of being killed by Iroquois raiding parties, who were devastating the local Illinois communities at the height of the Beaver Wars.

[16] In addition, one of the mutineers who was later captured, the shipbuilder Moyse Hillaret, testified that "some [of the men] had had no pay for three years," and alleged that La Salle had mistreated them.

[6][21] In a deposition made before the Sieur du Chesneau, Intendant of New France, dated 17 August 1680, Hillaret stated the mutineers were dissatisfied "because the said Sieur de La Salle wanted them to build sleighs to draw his goods and personal effects as far as the village of the Illinois [the site of the proposed Fort St. Louis (Starved Rock)].

But he apparently returned to Montreal,[11] from where he journeyed in 1685 to Lake Michigan, then to the Cumberland River in Tennessee, evidently in search of his wife and adolescent daughter: In August, he resolved to follow [the Shawnees], and took a canoe and went after them three hundred leagues (about 900 miles) in forty days ...

[6][11]: 127 After reuniting with his family, he visited the future site of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, then crossed the Allegheny Mountains with them and traveled along the Susquehanna River.

[5] In spring 1692, Chartier led a group of 192 Shawnee and an unknown number of Susquehannock (Conestoga) Indians east to Frederick County, Maryland on the Potomac River.

For a few years Chartier and his French-Canadian friends Peter Bisaillon and Jacques Le Tort ran a smuggling operation, bringing furs from Detroit to Albany and Pennsylvania, where the English paid a higher price for them.

[42] By the late 17th century, French settlers and fur traders were moving into the Ohio Valley (then part of New France) to take advantage of the opportunities for commerce among various Native American tribes concentrated there.

[47] At that time, both French and British colonial governments were trying to influence Native American communities to take one side or the other, for trading relations as well as political control.

He was suspected of "using endeavors to incense these people [the local Shawnees], to stir them up to enmity against the subjects of the Crown; and to join with our public enemy, the French, to our destruction.

[11][33]: 251  In 1717, Governor Penn granted Chartier a 300-acre tract of land (one source says 500 acres[33]) along the Conestoga River in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

[33] Immediately after the funeral, Logan seized Chartier's 250-acre estate, on the grounds that the late explorer owed him a debt of 108 pounds, 19 shillings and 3 and 3/4 pence.

[26] Historian Stephen Warren says that Chartier played a crucial role in facilitating communications between the Shawnee and the French (and later British) colonists with whom they frequently interacted: Chartier traded canoeing the interior of the continent for French explorers for a life as a partisan of a Shawnee band that refused to choose sides in imperial quests for power...The colonizers with whom he dealt always treated him with suspicion.

Frustratingly independent, Shawnee migrants made deliberate choices based on the realities of Indian slavery, intertribal warfare, and access to European trade goods.