Jean Baptiste Charbonneau

The next morning after walking the dogs and having breakfast, we continued north on US-95 to Burns Junction where US-95 heads east to Jordan Valley.

On our Oregon Benchmark Atlas, I noticed the Jean Baptiste Charbonneau Grave National Historic Landmark which is about three miles north of US-95 near the small hamlet (wide spot in the road?) of Danner.  The name was familiar, but I couldn't place where I'd heard about him...obviously, he had some connection with Lewis and Clark, but I knew this only because of the signs out on the highway.  We decided to take a quick detour and drive up to the grave site.

Turns out that Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was the son of French Canadian interpreter, Touissant Charbonneau, and his Shoshone wife, Sacagawea (you already knew that, right?).  If you Google his name, you'll come up with lots of websites where you can read about his life.  Here is just one:  http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/inside/jchar.html .



We came across this in the path as we were walking around looking at the grave site.  The area was totally fenced off with a gate that has to be unlatched to get in.  So that must mean this area has humongous birds...or flying cows!