David Thompson’s guide
Posted By admin on March 5, 2009
So who was The Gauche?
Carl Haywood, the David Thompson researcher who spoke last week (March 5) at the Travelers’ Rest Chapter of the L&C Trail Heritage meeting, documented and studied Thompson’s visit to the Missoula Valley in February 1812 in his 2008 book “Sometimes Only Horses to Eat.” (See http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2009/03/05/news/local/znews01a.txt )
Thompson was accompanied that day by a guide he called “the Gauche,” whom he borrowed from a Flathead camp near Dixon. Haywood said Thompson apparently employed him regularly to guide him in during his explorations of the area.
Googling around a bit, I found references to an infamous Assinboin chief named “Le Gauche” or “Le Gaucher” (which means “left-handed”). He reigned in the northeastern Montana/western North Dakota area in the time of Thompson, and he was not a nice man, according to a trader/trapper/writer named Edwin Thompson Denig. Denig said that, as a young man, Le Gauche “gained possession of poisonous drugs by use of which he removed several persons who had offended him in various ways.” Father Pierre DeSmet branded the chief “an unprincipled, deceitful, cunning, cowardly man.”
This was probably not Thompson’s Gauche. Here’s another possibility: Maybe it was Peter Gaucher, also known as Left-Hand Peter and Iroquois Peter. He was one of the Iroquois who adopted the Flathead tribe in the Bitterroot in the early 1800s. He and another Iroquois, Aeneas, were the fourth (and only successful) Flathead delegation to St. Louis to fetch Black Robes to Montana. DeSmet and two other priests came in 1841 and established St. Mary’s Mission at Stevensville.
In “Men and Trade On the Northwest Fronter,” George Weisel cast Gaucher as one of the few successful farmers among the Indians. He lived until May 1856. Major John Owen, who by now owned St. Mary’s and had turned it into the Fort Owen trading post, wrote, “Old Piere’s wife returned to the fort today. She left here in company with her husband on the 17th and returned a widow. Old Piere from what I could understand was thrown from his horse in the Big Hole running an elk and had his neck broken.”
Owen called Gaucher “an old trapper (who had) been a long time in the country.”
Alas, Weisel puts the Iroquois arrival in the Bitterroot at “around 1816″ — four years too late to guide Thompson around the valley.
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