Last updated: December 10, 2022
Person
Antoine St. Charles Janis
Quick Facts
Significance:
Son of Antoine Janis and Marie-Louise, grandson of Nicolas Janis. First non-Indigenous settler in Larimer County, Colorado.
Place of Birth:
St. Charles, Spanish Louisiana
Date of Birth:
December 10, 1797
Place of Death:
Yellowstone River region
Date of Death:
Circa 1840
Place of Burial:
Yellowstone River region
On November 19, 1817 Antoine St. Charles married a creole woman named Marguerite Tibeau at the St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in St. Charles, Missouri Territory. They had five children.
He was a fur trader and joined William H. Ashley’s group of traders on their first and second trips out west. Those expeditions were made to trap and trade furs for the prominent Rocky Mountain Fur Company. In the summer of 1832, Antoine St. Charles and William H. Ashley’s group were at the famous rendezvous point Pierre’s Hole in the Grand Teton range of eastern Idaho and western Wyoming. This location was one of the larger meeting points where fur traders assembled to trade furs and conduct business. In 1833, Antoine St. Charles briefly returned to St. Charles, Missouri before joining another Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigade and heading west again. This time, he went to the mouth of the Yellowstone River (50 miles up the Missouri River) at “Frenchman’s Point" where he was robbed and nearly murdered by members of the locally notorious Deschamps family.
Antoine St. Charles returned home to collect his 12-year-old son, Joseph Antoine Janis (also referred to as Antoine) and took him west to Colorado in 1836. The younger Antoine claimed later in life that he and his father named the Cache la Poudre River in Colorado, although that story is somewhat disputed. Either way, Antoine St. Charles staked a claim to land there and is said to be the first Euro-American settler in Larimer County, Colorado. However, Antoine St. Charles was not just of Euro-American heritage, but rather of mixed heritage. His father was French, and his mother was a woman of color.
In Mountain Men, by LeRoy R. Hafen, Antoine St. Charles is said to have lived along the Big Thompson Creek where the Oregon Trail (or Stage Road) crossed from Fort Collins to Denver, three miles west of the present-day town of Loveland, Colorado. From 1837 to 1839, he had an account with and sold to the American Fur Company after the demise of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. Antoine St. Charles Janis was killed by members of the Blackfeet Tribe on the riverbank in the Yellowstone River region around 1840.