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Sacagawea is a familiar figure in American popular culture: Her image is blazoned on a commemorative gold dollar coin, and her story as the heroic guide of the Lewis and Clark Expedition has been told in countless history books, poems, novels, and even, most recently, in popular children’s movies through her cameo appearances in the “Night at the Museum” comedies.
But the story of her son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, who is also featured on the dollar coin as an infant carried on his mother’s back, has largely been lost to history.
In “Museum of Human Beings,” Sargent interweaves the fascinating known facts of Baptiste Charbonneau’s life with fictional imaginings into a poetic meditation on race, identity, and personal freedom in America that has resonance today.
Baptiste was a child of mixed parentage: Sacagawea was a Shoshone who was captured in a raid by the Hidatsa tribe in what is now Idaho, and was then either sold to or won in a gambling contest by his father, the French Canadian fur trapper and guide Toussaint Charbonneau.
Baptiste was born shortly after his father was hired by the expedition in 1804; William Clark became fond of Baptiste during that two-year trek from Missouri through the previously uncharted Pacific Northwest and offered to provide for his education afterward. Baptiste was legally signed over to Clark as his ward in 1813, shortly after Sacagawea’s death from an unknown illness at the age of 25.
Sargent’s novel takes its title from the museum of Native American-related artifacts Clark kept at his St. Louis home.
Baptiste, who was educated in the European tradition, longs, in Sargent’s fictional rendering, for the respect and approval of his adoptive parent — attitudes that are not forthcoming from a Clark who is bound by the racial myopia of his day.
“Each high mark he got at school, Baptiste came right home to proudly show his parent, but Clark withdrew further into himself,” Sargent writes.
Baptiste wrestles with anger, despair and self-loathing as he realizes he will never be more than a curiosity in America: “No one expected anything of him, for they considered him a savage and imagined he had no conscience.”
In 1823, Baptiste left Clark with Clark’s blessing to travel through Europe with the German Prince Paul Wilhelm von Wurttemburg, whom he had met at Clark’s home — a decision motivated on Baptiste’s part, in Sargent’s rendering, by a desire to expand his education and acquire a gentility that would finally earn him Clark’s high regard.
For six years, the historical Baptiste did in fact tour Europe with the prince as a kind of living exhibit for Old World inhabitants curious about the “New World” of America, the first Native American so to travel.
It is a difficult passage, in Sargent’s telling, not only because, though he masters multiple languages and becomes an accomplished pianist, Baptiste ultimately fails in his quest for Clark’s approval; but also because the prince sexually abuses Baptiste (in passages definitely not for young adults).
The conclusion of this journey through Europe, both for the fictional and the historical Baptiste, marks not the end but rather the beginning of an even more extraordinary American odyssey.
Baptiste is known to have worked as a trapper for the American Fur Company in the territories of Utah and Idaho; as an army scout, guide and interpreter who traveled with James Beckwourth and John C. Fremont among other legends of the old West, and led the Mormon Battalion from New Mexico to California during the Mexican-American War; and as a government official and gold prospector.
Sargent finds in this peripatetic journey through key moments in American history a moving quest for identity: Baptiste’s initial longing for Clark’s approval turns into a search for his birth father and for his mother’s spirit and remains, and ultimately becomes the mythic search of a man who “tracks his subtler selves into the unknown.”
Sargent’s Baptiste counts “Candide” among his favorite books; as in that book, Sargent weaves actual historical events into a character’s quest for meaning in a way that speaks to both the dark and bright possibilities of human life.
Sargent’s Baptiste suffers grievous personal losses and witnesses the conquest, often through violence, of the American wilderness; the effects of slavery (Clark himself owned slaves); the destruction of natural resources; the loss of culture and ravaging of Native American populations through disease; and the difficult conditions faced by Chinese immigrants in the rapidly-urbanizing California of the 1860s.
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