Where did the name "Chariton" come from, then?

One of the most frequently asked questions about the Chariton River and its namesakes involves the source of the name. "Chariton" sounds French, many think. But then so does Des Moines and, truth be told, no one really knows how, why, after whom or by whom either of these two streams was named.

The most frequent explanation for the name is shared here by Dan Baker on Page 395 of his 1881 history of Lucas County:

"Chariton is a French name," Dan declares. "In a very early day, a French Indian trader by that name located a trading post on the north bank of the Missouri river, at a point where the Chariton empties into it. To this latter stream the trader gave his own name, 'Chariton,' and subsequently, when the early counties of Missouri were being defined, the one at the mouth of this river was also given the name of Chariton. This settles the query in the minds of very many citizens of the county, as to the derivation of the name of their county town."

The difficulty here --- no one ever has located a trader of any nationality named Chariton and there is no indication that any sort of trading post had been located near the mouths of the Chariton as early as the late 18th century, when the name first appears.

Yes, "mouths" of the Chariton. During the late 18th and early 19th century, two branches of the Chariton, big Chariton and little Chariton, emptied separately into the Missouri River in what now is Chariton County. Silting and channel shifts eventually reduced this to one.

Despite his elusive nature, that mythical French trader named Chariton remains among the most common explanations for the names of the river, a Missouri county and an Iowa county seat town.

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Quite a few years after the initial Chariton creation myth had been formed, historians got their hands on the expedition diaries of a documented French trader (and St. Louis school teacher) named Jean-Baptiste Truteau (aka Trudeau). 

Truteau (1748-1827) led a trading and exploratory expedition that departed St. Louis on the 7th of June, 1794, reached the villages of the Arikara people in present-day South Dakota the following year, and returned to St. Louis during June of 1796. In a way, he blazed part of the trail west for Lewis and Clark (that's a segment of William Clark's map above, showing "the two Charatons."

One member of his party was Joseph Chorette (aka Choret, Charet, Charette), in his early 30s, who is remembered now primarily because he was the only member of the party to die during the expedition --- on the 10th of July, 1795, somewhere along the Missouri in South Dakota.

Truteau's journal entry reads, "On the tenth of July, I unfortunately lost one of my Frenchmen, named Joseph Chorette, who was drowned while bathing alone at dusk, in the Missouri."

Once this incident came to light, those in charge of developing theories about Missouri place names shifted their allegiance from a mythical trader named Chariton to a documented trader named Chorette.

The current Wikipedia entry for Chariton River reads in part, for example, "the river is believed to have been named for Joseph Chorette, who drowned while swimming in the river as he accompanied the French Jean-Baptiste Truteau expedition up the Missouri in 1795."

That's a bit of an overstatement, there are various reasons to doubt its accuracy and I am not among those who believe.

For example, as the Truteau expedition was making its way up the lower Missouri during June of 1794 --- when Joseph Chorette still was alive and well --- Jean-Baptiste noted in his journal that his party had passed the "two Charatour rivers" and then, "the Grand River," soon after the 19th.

Remember that, at the time, two branches of the Chariton River, the big Chariton and the little Chariton, entered the Missouri River separately, and the mouth of the Grand River was just upstream.

So a name for the stream we know as Chariton, "Charatour," already was in use at that time --- and if an "r" in the original handwritten journal might have been an "n" instead, we'd have something very similar. 

This is all conjecture, of course, but there is no more reason to believe the Chariton River's name honors the memory of a drowned trader named Chorette that to believe it honors a mythical trader named Chariton.

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And then I've not even mentioned St. Chariton the Confessor, an obscure Christian monk who is venerated as a lesser saint by both the Eastern and Western Christian Church.

Personally, I doubt that the river was named for a person at all. Few were. But having said that, I've no more idea than the next guy about where "Chariton" actually came from.