From deprivation in the wilderness to the lavish courts of European nobility, this poignant historical novel explores the life and quest of Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea. After the famed Lewis and Clark expedition and the death of his mother, Jean-Baptiste was brought up as Clark's foster son. He was eventually paraded throughout Europe as a curiosity from the wilds of America, labeled as a half gentleman and half animal, entertaining nobility as a concert pianist. Jean-Baptiste returns to North America with a burning desire to create his own place in the New World. In doing so he returns to the heart of the American wilderness on an epic quest for ultimate identity that brings sacrifice, loss, and the distant promise of redemption. A Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, leads Lewis and Clark to the Pacific at the turn of the nineteenth century. On her back is a tiny infant. He is her son, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the youngest member of the Expedition--a child caught between two worlds who is later raised by Clark as his foster son. When the teenage Baptiste attracts the notice of the visiting Duke Paul, Prince of Wurttemberg, Clark approves of the duke's "experiment" to educate the boy at court. A gleeful Duke Paul has Baptiste trained as a concert pianist and exhibits him throughout Europe as a "half gentleman-half animal." Eventually Baptiste turns his back on the Old World and returns to the New, determined to find his true place there. He travels into the heart of the American wilderness, and into the depths of his mother's soul, on an epic quest for identity that brings sacrifice, loss, and the distant promise of redemption.