The inference from this is that Captain La Barge could not controvert Larpenteur’s statements, or he would have done so when the opportunity was given. This offer was sent to Captain La Barge through the author of the present work. The old gentleman retained in his old age the same spirit of haughty disdain for willful attempts to injure the reputation of others that characterized his whole life, and he indignantly refused to notice the matter. “Time will set this right,” he said. The truth is that Charles Larpenteur, although very long in the Indian country, was never a man of high standing there, and proved a failure in whatever he undertook. Like all such men, he nursed the delusion that the world was in league against him, and he took advantage of the opportunity offered by the preparation of his memoirs to even matters up. Nearly everyone with whom he deals comes in for a round measure of abuse, until one is led to believe that Larpenteur was a saint, solitary and forlorn, wandering disconsolate among the children of Beelzebub. Larpenteur was probably an honest man in his business relations, but never an able man, and his attempts to account for the consequences of his own deficiencies by attributing them to the rascality of others, does not add to the value of his memoirs as historical material. Bad as the early population of that country was, it was not entirely composed of scoundrels. [60] This was the same man who served as clerk to Captain Bonneville in the latter’s celebrated expeditions. He died March 15, 1864. [61] Following are the official reports of Agents Latta and Reed upon this event: Report of Judge Latta, p. 164, Report Com. Ind. Aff., 1863. “The Crow goods, as I have informed you [Commissioner Dole], were stored at Fort Union by the steamer _Shreveport_. When the _Robert Campbell_ reached the mouth of the Yellowstone, she could get no further, there being only two feet of water in the channel above, it requiring five trips of the steamer _Shreveport_ to convey the _Campbell’s_ freight to Fort Union some six miles above. We found it utterly impossible to proceed any further. The _Shreveport_, though a light-draught boat, could not have passed up empty.”