Background
Charles Larpenteur was born on May 8, 1803, in Fontainebleau, Ile-de-France, France. The earlier birthdate assumed in the inscription on his tombstone is apparently incorrect as to the year but probably correct as to the month and day.
(Forty Years a Fur Trader on Upper Missouri is the preemin...)
Forty Years a Fur Trader on Upper Missouri is the preeminent source for the history of the fur trade in the American West. Drawing upon daily journals recorded by Charles Larpenteur it provides a fascinating insight into the history of the Midwest in the nineteenth century.
https://www.amazon.com/Forty-Years-Trader-Upper-Missouri/dp/1521459096?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1521459096
Charles Larpenteur was born on May 8, 1803, in Fontainebleau, Ile-de-France, France. The earlier birthdate assumed in the inscription on his tombstone is apparently incorrect as to the year but probably correct as to the month and day.
Young Larpenteur had little schooling.
At the age of twenty-one, Charles Larpenteur left for the West. After working for several years in St. Louis and making a journey up the Mississippi, he engaged as a clerk with Sublette and Campbell for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company's expedition of the spring of 1833. From the Green River rendezvous, which was reached in July, Charles Larpenteur accompanied Campbell to the vicinity of the American Fur Company's post, Fort Union, at the mouth of the Yellowstone, where Sublette and Campbell for a year attempted to maintain an opposition. On the failure of the attempt Charles Larpenteur engaged with the dominant company.
As a clerk, trader, fort-builder, chief factor, sutler, and for a brief time as a farmer, he spent the remainder of his life, except for occasional journeys to the settlements, on the upper and middle Missouri, and no man of his time and place had a wider range of adventurous experiences.
In 1851 Charles Larpenteur bought a land claim on the Little Sioux, in the present Harrison County, Iowa, where he developed a farm which he named "Fontainebleau. " For the following twenty years, however, he lived there only at intervals; his residence shifted from post to post in the Indian country. In May 1871, ousted from a good business as a sutler at Fort Buford by the Federal law prohibiting more than one sutler at a post, he gave up the Indian country and returned to his farm.
At Fort Union, in 1834, Charles Larpenteur had started a journal, which except for occasional lapses he kept until the last year of his life. On his retirement he wrote an autobiography, sending it, five months before his death, to Washington Matthews. Twenty-five years later Matthews sent it to Elliott Coues, by whom it was edited and published.
Charles Larpenteur died at a neighbor's house, several miles from his farm. His life was crowded with disasters, and he believed himself born under a baleful star.
(Forty Years a Fur Trader on Upper Missouri is the preemin...)
Charles Larpenteur is described as a small, spare, wiry man of distinct Gallic type, intelligent, informed, and vivacious and witty in conversation. Though in the main kindly and amiable, he was not above harboring resentments, and he writes disparagingly of many of his associates.
Charles Larpenteur was married three times. The first wife was an Assiniboine woman, who died in 1837; her name has not been preserved for posterity. The second wife was another Assiniboine, Makes Cloud, with whom he had five children; she was killed by the Omaha in 1853. The third wife was an American woman, a widow with the name of Rebecca Bingham, with whom he had one child. Regrettably, all of his children predeceased him.
Charles Larpenteur started a farm outside Little Sioux, Iowa, calling it Fontainebleu after his birthplace, and settling his family on it. It was here his second wife was killed by hostile Omahas while picking berries.
Louis Benoist Larpenteur was a Bonapartist who fled to America and in 1818 settled with his family on a farm near Baltimore.
Rebecca Bingham was an American woman, a widow.
Makes Cloud was killed by the Omaha in 1853.
