Museum of Human Beings

A Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, leads Lewis and Clark to the Pacific at the turn of the nineteenth century. On her back is a tiny infant. He is her son, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the youngest member of the Expedition—a child caught between two worlds who is later raised by Clark as his foster son. When the teenage Baptiste attracts the notice of the visiting Duke Paul, Prince of Württemberg, Clark approves of the duke’s “experiment” to educate the boy at court. A gleeful Duke Paul has Baptiste trained as a concert pianist and exhibits him throughout Europe as a “half gentleman–half animal.”

Eventually Baptiste turns his back on the Old World and returns to the New, determined to find his true place there. He travels into the heart of the American wilderness, and into the depths of his mother’s soul, on an epic quest for identity that brings sacrifice, loss, and the distant promise of redemption.