Martin Chartier (; 1655 – Apr 1718) was a French-Canadian explorer and trader, carpenter and glove maker. He lived much of his life amongst the Shawnee Native Americans in what is now the United States.
Chartier accompanied Louis Jolliet on two of his journeys to the Illinois Country of New France, and went with René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle on his 1679–80 journey to Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake Michigan. Chartier assisted in the construction of Fort Miami and Fort Crèvecoeur.Zuber Family Tree: Martin Chartier On April 16, 1680, Chartier, together with six other men, mutinied, looted, burned Fort Crèvecoeur, and fled.
In a letter dated 1682, La Salle stated that Martin Chartier "was one of these who incited the others to do as they did."History of Fort Crevecoeur
Chartier sometimes was written as Chartiere, Chartiers, Shartee or Shortive.
Early life
Martin Chartier was born in 1655 in St-Jean-de-Montierneuf, Poitiers, Poitou, France.Don Greene, Shawnee Heritage II: Selected Lineages of Notable Shawnee (Lulu.com: Fantasy ePublications, 2008), Lulu.com: Fantasy ePublications, 2008; pp. 44–45, 70. In 1667, when he was twelve, his family emigrated from France to New France, including his father René, brother Pierre, and sister Jeanne Renée. They joined his paternal grandfather and uncle there.
On the transatlantic voyage, Chartier and his father René became acquainted with René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who was also immigrating to Canada. Some sources state that the young Chartier spent the next several years in Montreal learning to make gloves, but there is also evidence that he was apprenticed to a carpenter.
Chartier's father, uncle and grandfather were killed in the Lachine massacre outside Montreal on August 5, 1689.The Lachine Massacre
Louis Jolliet's 1672–74 expedition In 1672, Martin Chartier and his brother Pierre took part in Louis Jolliet's second expedition. In December 1672 Jolliett and his company reached the Straits of Mackinac, where he met up with Pierre Marquette. They talked with native people and prepared maps for the 1673 expedition to find the mouth of the Mississippi River; a voyage that would become famous. They wanted to discover whether it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean."Louis Joliet," Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent
In 1674, Chartier accompanied Louis Jolliet to the Illinois Country, where he became acquainted with the Pekowi Shawnee, who lived at that time on the Wabash River. After Jolliet returned to Quebec in 1675, Chartier returned to the territory and married Sewatha Straight Tail (1660–1759), daughter of the Shawnee chief Straight Tail Meaurroway Opessa."The Chartiers: An Indian Life," American-Canadian Genealogist, Vol 19, No 2, p. 61. New Hampshire: American Canadian Genealogical Society Their first child, a daughter, was born in 1676, according to a 1692 statement by Chartier.
La Salle's 1679 expedition Chartier went with René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle on his 1679–1680 journey to Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake Michigan. They were accompanied by Belgian missionary Louis Hennepin and French missionary Zenobius Membre.Jean-Roch Rioux, "Louis Hennepin," Dictionary of Canadian Biography, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003
Chartier assisted in the construction of Le Griffon, a seven-cannon, 45-ton barque, on the upper Niagara River at or near Cayuga Creek. She was launched on August 7, 1679, and was the largest sailing vessel on the Great Lakes up to that time. La Salle sailed in Le Griffon up Lake Erie to Lake Huron, then up to Michilimackinac and on to present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin. Le Griffon left for Niagara with a load of furs, but was never seen again. La Salle continued with his men in canoes down the western shore of Lake Michigan, rounding the southern end to the mouth of the St. Joseph River, where Chartier helped to build a stockade in November 1679. They called it Fort Miami (now known as St. Joseph, Michigan). There they waited for Henri de Tonti and his party, who had crossed the Lower Peninsula of Michigan on foot.
Tonti arrived on November 20; on December 3, the entire party set off up the St. Joseph, which they followed until they had to take a portage at present-day South Bend, Indiana. They crossed to the Kankakee River and followed it to the Illinois River, where they started construction on Fort Crèvecoeur on January 15, 1680."The Site of Fort de Crèvecoeur", University of Illinois, 1925. Father Hennepin went with a small party to seek the junction of the St. Joseph and the Mississippi rivers; he was captured by Sioux warriors and held for several months.
The 1680 mutiny at Fort Crèvecoeur Chartier assisted in the construction of Fort Crèvecoeur, which was built along the Illinois River near the present-day site of Peoria, Illinois. The fort was the first public building erected by white men within the boundaries of the modern state of Illinois, and the first fort built in the West by the French. La Salle also started building another 40-ton barque to replace Le Griffon. Francis Parkman, "La Salle And The Discovery Of The Great West," American Heritage, April 1957, Volume 8, Issue 3. On March 1, 1680, La Salle set off on foot for Fort Frontenac for supplies, leaving Henri de Tonti to hold Fort Crèvecoeur in Illinois."La Salle," New International Encyclopedia, Volume 13, Second Edition, Dodd, Mead, 1915; p. 581.
On his return trip up the Illinois River, La Salle concluded that Starved Rock might provide an ideal location for another fortification and sent word downriver to Tonti regarding this idea. Following La Salle's instructions, Tonti took five men and traveled upriver to assess the suitability of the Starved Rock site. Shortly after Tonti's departure, on April 16, 1680, the seven members of the expedition who remained at Fort Crevecoeur mutinied, plundering the provisions and ammunition, throwing into the river all the arms, goods, and stores which they could not carry off, and burning the fort to the ground."Henri de Tonti, Founder of Peoria" In a letter dated 1682, La Salle blamed Chartier as one of the main instigators "who incited the others to do as they did."Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West: France and England in North America. Part Third, vol. V–VI; Little, Brown, 1897.
The mutiny was probably caused by the men's fear of being killed by Haudenosaunee raiding parties, who were devastating the local Illinois communities at the height of the Beaver Wars. The men were demanding that La Salle return with them to Montreal, which he was unwilling to do. In addition, one of the mutineers who was later captured, the shipbuilder Moyse Hillaret, testified that "some [of the men] had had no pay for three years," and alleged that La Salle had mistreated them."Déclaration faite par devant le Sr. Duchesneau, Intendant en Canada, par Moyse Hillaret, charpentier de barque cy-devant au service du Sr. de la Salle, Aoust, 1680." cited in Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West: France and England in North America. Part Third, vol. V–VI; Little, Brown, 1897.
In a deposition made before the Sieur du Chesneau, Intendant of New France, dated 17 August 1680, Hillaret stated the mutineers were dissatisfied "because the said Sieur de La Salle wanted them to build sleighs to draw his goods and personal effects as far as the village of the Illinois [the site of the proposed Fort St. Louis (Starved Rock)]."
At Fort St. Louis two men who had been at the fort told Tonti of its destruction. Tonti sent messengers to La Salle in Canada to report the events. Tonti then returned to Fort Crèvecoeur to collect any tools not destroyed and moved them to the Kaskaskia Village at Starved Rock. Later La Salle captured a few of the mutineers on Lake Ontario, but not Chartier, who followed the south shore of Lake Ontario headed for upstate New York, as a part of a second group of eight deserters, while the others, who were eventually captured, were pursuing La Salle, intending to kill him.Charles Augustus Hanna, The Wilderness Trail: Or, The Ventures and Adventures of the Pennsylvania Traders on the Allegheny Path, Volume 1, Putnam's sons, 1911 Chartier testified in a deposition in 1692 that he went to Esopus, New York, however he may have meant that he took refuge among the Esopus people, a subgroup of the Lenape living along the Hudson River. Louis-Henri de Baugy, Chevalier de Baugy later testified that Chartier may have stayed with Shawnees in the area of Starved Rock for one or two years before returning to Montreal.
Life with the Shawnee
After the mutiny at Fort Crèvecoeur, Chartier was classified as an outlaw. But he apparently returned to Montreal, from where he journeyed in 1685 to Lake Michigan, then to the Cumberland River in Tennessee, evidently in search of his wife and adolescent daughter:
In August, he resolved to follow [the Shawnees], and took a canoe and went after them three hundred leagues (about 900 miles) in forty days ... He guessed the way, and was guided by the course of the river, and found water in all places ... And when he came to them [the Shawnee] they made him very welcome...and invited [him] to come and live among them.
After reuniting with his family, he visited the future site of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, then crossed the Allegheny Mountains with them and traveled along the Susquehanna River. His second daughter Mary Seaworth (Sewatha) Chartier (1687–1732) was born in Frederick County, Virginia in 1687.
Birth of Peter Chartier In 1689, Chartier established a trading post at French Lick on the Cumberland River in Middle Tennessee, near what developed as the present-day site of Nashville, Tennessee.Robert Trail, "Livingston County, Kentucky: Stepping Stone to Illinois," The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 69, No. 3 (July, 1971), pp. 239–272, His son Peter (Pierre) Chartier was born here in 1690.Chartier Family Association family tree Martin Chartier Historical MarkerSherman Day, Historical Collections of the State of Pennsylvania: Containing a Copious Selection of the Most Interesting Facts, Traditions, Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, Etc., Relating to Its History and Antiquities, Both General and Local, with Topographical Descriptions of Pennsylvania county and regional histories, G. W. Gorton, 1843; p. 391.
Peter Chartier later became a leader of the Pekowi Shawnee and campaigned against the sale of alcohol in indigenous communities in Pennsylvania.William Albert Hunter, "Peter Chartier: Knave of the Wild Frontier; The adventures of the first private owner of the site of New Cumberland and a record of subsequent landowners to 1814." Paper presented before the Cumberland County Historical Society on February 16, 1973. New Cumberland, PA: Historical Papers of the Cumberland County Historical Society Vol 9, no. 4 (1973); Cumberland County National Bank and Trust Co.Stephen Warren, Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America, UNC Press Books, 2014
After Peter's birth, Martin and his Shawnee family established a fur trading post at the confluence of the Monongahela River and the Allegheny River, the present-day site of Pittsburgh. The Ohio River begins here. They resided there for two years.Jean Chartier Robert, The Chartier Families (A Complete Record of the Chartier Families in North America), edited by the American Section of the Chartier Family Association, Portland, Oregon, 1982. Printed in Montreal Canada 1982.
Relocation to Maryland and Pennsylvania