Jean Baptiste truteau, sometimes spelled Trudeau, was a French Canadian who settled in St. Louis and who led an expedition organized by the Spanish-commissioned Missouri Company (illinois trading company). From 1794 to 1796, he explored the Missouri River, with the ultimate purpose of establishing Spanish influence over the Mandan villages in present-day Montana and expelling British and Canadian traders. Truteau failed to reach the Mandans but did spend a winter with the Arikaras (ricara), who occupied two villages near the confluence of the Cheyenne and Missouri Rivers. He sent an account of his experiences to his superiors in St. Louis filled with careful observations of the Indians he encountered and with whom he attempted to trade. It is unclear when TJ obtained a copy of a portion of the journal, although there has been some speculation that it was among the “modern Manuscripts” enclosed by James Wilkinson in a letter of 1 Sep. 1800 (DNA: RG 59, TP, Orleans, 46 p., in French, endorsed in English: “Journal of a Voyage on the Missouri”; endorsed in French: “Journal tenu par J Bte Truteau agent de la Compagnie du haut du Missouris addressé à Mrs Clamorgan et Reihle directeurs de la Compagnie Commencé Le 1er juin 1795” and “Seconde partie”; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, New York, 1928-36, 20 vols. description ends , s.v., “Truteau, Jean Baptiste”; Jean-Baptiste Trudeau, Voyage sur le Haut-Missouri, 1794-1796, ed. Fernand Grenier [Quebec, 2006]; A. P. Nasatir, ed., Before Lewis and Clark: Documents Illustrating the History of the Missouri, 1785-1804, 2 vols. [St. Louis, 1952], 1:217-28, 243-53, 294-311; John Logan Allen, Passage through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest [Urbana, Ill., 1975], 67-8; Vol. 32:119-20). TJ conflated his copy of Truteau’s journal with a different manuscript that also derived from the efforts of the Missouri Company. Endorsed “Account of Indian trade by C___[n],” the document may have been composed by Jacques Clamorgan, the company’s director. References to the company’s royal charter in 1796 and to the commission merchant Andrew Todd, who became that year Clamorgan’s principal supplier of goods, indicate that it was written sometime near the end of or after that year (DNA: RG 59, TP, Orleans, 12 p., in French, undated; Nasatir, Before Lewis and Clark, 2:419, 464-7). Before compiling the extracts for Lewis, TJ took notes from the documents, first drawing from Truteau demographic and geographical information on Indian nations living up the Missouri, and next drawing information on the fur trade from the “Account.” For his enclosure to Lewis, TJ scrambled this organization, interspersing lines derived from the two sources, with the majority coming from the fur trade document. The information contained in TJ’s notes and in the enclosure to Lewis was substantively identical (MS in DLC: TJ Papers, 137:23685; entirely in TJ’s hand; undated; endorsed “Louisiana”; consisting of notes headed “1795. Journal of Truteau the Agent of the Company of the haut Missouri, establd at <St Louis> Illinois” followed on same sheet by notes headed “Account of the commerce”).

milice: militia.

The Arikaras were closely related to the Pawnees (panis). Both were members of the Caddoan language group and derived from common ancestors. The Pawnees were divided into four distinct bands that did not include the Arikaras, although Truteau seems to have believed otherwise. The Gros Ventres (big bellies) at this time lived north of the Missouri River in Canada, so it is likely that Truteau was confusing them with the Hidatsas, who lived in close proximity to the Mandans (Sturtevant, Handbook description begins William C. Sturtevant, Handbook of North American Indians, Washington, 1978- , 15 vols. description ends , 13:365-6, 515, 517-19, 693).

chaquiennes: that is, the Cheyennes. Truteau used the name panis mahas for the Skiri band of the Pawnees, also known as the Loups. The pados were the Comanches. The cayoguas were the Kiowas, and the caminanbeihes were the Arapahos. The pitapahatos were a band of the Kiowas (same, 13:517-19, 860, 880, 970).

pieces de marchandise or piastres de mexique: TJ transcribed the abbreviation “pes de Mes” directly from the fur trade document. It likely represented the monetary value of the merchandise intended for the Indians in exchange for furs. In a report of 8 July 1795, for example, Jacques Clamorgan indicated that the Missouri Company had allocated for Truteau’s expedition merchandise worth 20,000 of an unidentified denomination, probably pesos, possibly French livres. In his notes on the “Account of the commerce,” TJ wrote his query as: “qu. if the characters pes. de Mes [here called pieces or bales of merchandise] do not every where mean ‘piastres de Mexique’?” The author of the fur trade account evidently had an intimate knowledge of the Spanish-sanctioned Missouri River trade as it stood in the mid-1790s, as well as of the obstacles to and opportunities for drawing the lucrative Sioux trade from the Mississippi River and Great Lakes to the Missouri. The sequence of tribes that TJ extracted follows the Missouri upriver and is similar to a 1794 allocation of trade concessions to St. Louis merchants. That allocation listed all but one of the same tribes: the two divisions of the osages, the Kansas, the Otoes (otoctatas), the Omahas (mahas), and the different bands of the Pawnees. The document indicated, therefore, a trade that did not extend farther north than present-day Nebraska. Individual traders from St. Louis had ventured farther upriver but not in the organized fashion that the Missouri Company was attempting (Nasatir, Before Lewis and Clark, 1:209-11, 339; W. Raymond Wood, Prologue to Lewis and Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expedition [Norman, Okla., 2003], 27-31).

In his notes on the “Account of the commerce” cited above, TJ wrote of the Pawnees of the two villages, the republic Indians, and the loups: “these hunt little, take few blankets & cloths, cloathing themselves in skins.”