Last updated: May 2, 2022
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Jean Baptiste Chalifoux, the Old Spanish Trail
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Jean Baptiste Chalifoux – Old Spanish Trail[1]
By Angela Reiniche
Jean Baptiste Chalifoux started out as a young fur trapper in French Canada in the early nineteenth century and moved throughout western North America, hunting the era’s most valuable commodities. The waning fur trade motivated Chalifoux to seek new sources of adventure and income. By the late 1820s, he had parlayed his knowledge of the landscape into a career as a mercenary and horse thief, traveling the trails between New Mexico and southern California. The dramatic economic, political, and social changes that emerged in the wake of Mexico’s independence from Spain shaped Chalifoux’s choices, as did his unique skillset. The efforts of the Mexican government to centralize its authority across its northern frontiers fostered intense political and cultural divisiveness and episodic, localized violence. In Mexican California, warring political factions employed men like Chalifoux as mercenaries. When not otherwise occupied as a gun for hire, Chalifoux earned notoriety among raiding parties that captured mules and horses by the thousands and transported them to markets in New Mexico.[2]
Perhaps because he lacked formal education, Jean Baptiste Chalifoux did not leave behind any personal reflections of his everyday life. Although his descendants and documentary evidence disagree somewhat on the details, it is understood generally that Chalifoux traveled west from Quebec as a teenager with a larger group of French fur trappers seeking a route to the Pacific Ocean. After a year of arduous travel in which more than half of the party perished, Chalifoux and the other survivors reached a hot spring in Wyoming. While resting there for a short time, they learned of the burgeoning trade to their immediate south, after which many of the party decided to change course, going their separate ways after reaching present-day Colorado and New Mexico.[3]
Little is known about Chalifoux’s first decade of trapping in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Some of his relations and descendants moved to St. Louis while others remained in southern Colorado and New Mexico. The earliest contemporary writings and legal records of their activities show that Jean Baptiste and his brother Pierre had been trapping and trading on the Gila River in 1826; that same year, they spent time in El Paso del Norte, jailed for the suspected murder of their American partner, Jacob Reid. After an investigation and their release, the Chalifoux brothers headed north to Taos, New Mexico. There, Jean Baptiste joined Francois Rubidoux in 1827, just in time to accompany him to Ute territory.[4] After that trip, Chalifoux once again disappears from the historical record.
As the popularity of the Old Spanish Trail shifted the bulk of economic activity away from the control of Ute and Western Shoshone leaders, Chalifoux likely joined other New Mexico-based trappers and traders who continued to trade with their Native partners along the older, well-used trails to the north.[5] Sources placing him close to the Indigenous leader Walkara, suggest that Chalifoux carried on as a trader and trapper on the trails between Taos and Shoshone territory south of present-day Utah Lake.[6] The only evidence that demonstrates his continued activity as a fur trader is a rock carving of his name, left in 1835 on the trapper’s trail between Willow Creek and Green River.[7]
In 1836, he rode to California with a multiethnic band of men widely known as the “Chaguanosos.” They had been hired by Antonio Maria Osio, a Mexican Californian opposed to the governorship of Juan de Alvarado, to fight alongside Mexican troops at the San Fernando Mission.[8] For their trouble, Osio promised Chalifoux and his men rations and unlimited, non-taxable trapping along California’s rivers.[9] Osio’s plan to dispense with Alvarado and his government failed and, once they dispersed, Chalifoux and much of his band went about the nearby area trapping.[10] Yet beaver fur soon became a passing interest as the abundance of unsupervised livestock presented the Chaguanosos a new opportunity for personal enrichment. In January 1837, less than a year after being contracted by Osio, reports from both the San Fernando and San Gabriel missions complained about Chalifoux’s band of treacherous robbers, having recognized him by sight.[11] Because it was not wise to travel from California to New Mexico until the spring, Chalifoux and his fellow raiders retreated to the mountains. They soon realized, however, that the political tensions in California gave them good reason to return to the coastal valleys of Alta California.
In May 1837, Juan Bandini, another opponent of Alvarado, enlisted the Belgian-born Augustín Janssens to find Chalifoux and request he return with a small army of assistance. After finding him and his party camped at Agua Caliente, a hot springs in the vicinity of present-day Warner Hot Springs, Janssens persuaded Chalifoux to gather his men; twenty-five of them, well-armed, marched out of the mountains toward San Diego prepared to battle the opposing faction at Rancho Santa Ana. They pursued their targets as far as Santa Barbara but, just before attacking, Bandini’s mercenaries learned that Alvarado had officially accepted the Mexican constitution—thus rendering their service unnecessary.[12]
From there, Chalifoux and his band of Chaguanosos reportedly attacked the Santa Ynez and San Luis Obispo missions.[13] After wintering in the Tulares Valley, they left for New Mexico, their plunder by then increased by over a thousand horses and mules.[14] Two years later, Chalifoux made one last trip to California in which he was captured by Vallejo’s troops; soon after his release in August 1840, Chalifoux and his notorious crew revisited the mission at San Luis Obispo and stole its entire herd—just before Chief Walkara had been planning to raid the mission. Not long after, they attacked San Gabriel and made off with three herds of mares. Though stories differ on what happened next, Chalifoux’s horse thieves escaped capture after the volunteer Californio army abandoned their chase upon reaching the Mojave Desert. This escape turned out to be somewhat of a pyrrhic victory; Calvin Jones, a member of Chalifoux’s company, related that their entire bounty of ill-gotten horses had been stolen by Ute raiders and that they had to walk into Santa Fe, all of them “hobbling on their own two feet.”[15]
In the ensuing years, various emigrant parties left New Mexico to build new communities in present-day southern California. Chalifoux, however, settled near Embudo, New Mexico, where in 1846 a visitor to his trading post reported that he was “living with his Mexican wife and was ending his days as a quiet ranchero.”[16] Chalifoux maintained his ties to New Mexico long enough to witness the rebellion at Taos in 1847 and to see New Mexico become a territory of the United States.[17] The tide of United States expansion and the rush of emigration brought substantial change to the economic, social, and political fabric of everyday life in western North America. By 1860, Chalifoux and his family had relocated to Colorado’s San Luis Valley; he died later that year or the next after adjusting to life as a farmer.[18]
[1] Part of a 2016–2018 collaborative project of the National Trails- National Park Service and the University of New Mexico’s Department of History, “Student Experience in National Trails Historic Research: Vignettes Project” [Colorado Plateau Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CPCESU), Task Agreement P16AC00957]. This project was formulated to provide trail partners and the general public with useful biographies of less-studied trail figures—particularly African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, women, and children. Thank you to the Old Spanish Trail Association for providing review of draft essays.
[2] For more on violence in Mexican California, see John Mack Faragher, Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016).
[3] Janet LeCompte, “Jean Baptiste Chalifoux,” in French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West: Twenty-Five Biographical Sketches, ed. LeRoy Hafen and comp. Janet LeCompte (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 1995), 58–60. Various spellings of Chalifoux’s name appear across archival and secondary sources. The spelling used herein is the most common and earliest usage. Some of Chalifoux’s family remained in Pueblo, Colorado, while others moved southeast and stayed in the St. Louis, Missouri areas. Both branches were well positioned to benefit from the emigrant and trade traffic on the trails that passed through those regions. In the 1860s, the earliest accounts that connect Chalifoux to the environs of New Mexico appear in the writings of Colonel Henry Inman, who relied on the intriguing, yet often conflicting recollections of his contemporaries, such as Christopher “Kit” Carson and “Uncle Dick” Wootton. In their memoirs and journals, they remembered Jean Baptiste as a “nervous little Frenchman” who despised Native people, and Carson recounted that Chalifoux had slept through his duties as a juror in the trials that followed the murder of New Mexico governor Charles Bent in 1847.
[4] David Weber, The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 108
[5] Beginning in the 1600s, Spaniards began hearing of a land called Teguayo that lay northwest of Santa Fe. Despite longstanding trade relations with tribes from that area, official knowledge remained hard to come by. In 1765, guided by Utes, Spaniards led by Juan María Antonio Rivera explored beyond Abiquiu to the Delores River, Gunnison River, and eventually somewhere along the Colorado River. In 1776 two Franciscan priests tried to establish a route between Santa Fe and Monterey (then part of Alta California); though the expedition failed, it produced maps—and thus a better understanding of Teguayo. One of the Franciscan’s journals contain the first eyewitness accounts of present-day Utah Lake and its inhabitants, the Timpanogos. Joseph P. Sánchez, Explorers, Traders, and Slavers: Forging the Old Spanish Trail, 1678–1850 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997), 13–14. Sánchez also notes that, by the late 1700s, interest in establishing a trail from Santa Fe to California “appears to have waned.” Thus, the Old Spanish Trail “occurred naturally, as Spanish traders from Santa Fe taught each other about the Yuta Country and the different ways to get to Yuta rendezvous trading points.” Ibid., 15.
[6] Chief Walkara has often been labeled “Ute,” while according to descendants he was a Shoshone-speaking leader of the Timpanogos who controlled the region south of present-day Utah Lake (see http://www.timpanogostribe.com/ ancestors.html).
[7] LeCompte, “Jean Baptiste Chalifoux,” 65.
[8] Elizabeth R. Rhoades, Foreigners in Southern California during the Mexican Period (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1971), 111. For details of Chalifoux and the Chaguanosos participation in the revolutions and counter-revolutions of 1836–1837, see also Augustín Janssens, The Life and Adventures in California of Don Augustin Janssens, 1834–1856 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1953).
[9] LeCompte, “Jean Baptiste Chalifoux,” 67. See also H.H. Bancroft’s History of California: 1825–1840, 495. See also Antonio María Osio, The History of Alta California: A Memoir of Mexican California, translated, edited, and annotated by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 1996.
[10] Bancroft, History of California, 496.
[11] LeCompte, “Jean Baptiste Chalifoux,” 66.
[12] Ibid., 68.
[13] Deanne Stillman, Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 70; LeCompte, “Jean Baptiste Chalifoux,” 68.
[14] LeCompte, “Jean Baptiste Chalifoux,” 68. See also Janssens, The Life and Adventures in California of Don Augustin Janssens. Janssens contributed his memoirs to the collection of historian Hubert Howe Bancroft and which were translated from French approximately sixty years after his death. Bandini likely enlisted him to find Chalifoux because they shared a common language.
[15] LeCompte, “Jean Baptiste Chalifoux,” 69–71 (quote from 70).
[16] British explorer George Frederick Ruxton, a visitor to the post, quoted in Weber, The Taos Trappers, 109.
[17] LeCompte discusses the claim by Chalifoux’s descendants that he was the first rider to carry news of the Taos Revolt to Mexican officials in Santa Fe.
[18] LeCompte, “Jean Baptiste Chalifoux,” 74.