Martin Chartier — La Salle's Frontiersman and Penn's Interpreter
Near York, Pennsylvania
A marker at Washington Borough recalls Martin Chartier, a Frenchman from Canada who lived one of the most improbable lives on the colonial frontier. Chartier took part in La Salle's expeditions into the Illinois country in the sixteen seventies. When that venture collapsed, he led a band of Shawnee Indians east to Maryland in sixteen ninety-two, and eventually to the Susquehanna River at Pequea Creek in Lancaster County.
Chartier became one of William Penn's most trusted Indian traders and interpreters, helping broker treaties along the Susquehanna. He settled his final years here on a three-hundred-acre tract Penn granted him, with his Shawnee wife. Their son, Peter Chartier, carried on as a trader and interpreter, navigating the increasingly violent borderlands of the mid-eighteenth century. Martin Chartier died here in seventeen eighteen.
