U.S. army engineer and frontiersman who gained contemporary fame as an explorer of the Rocky Mountains. Historical reevaluation of his activities, however, has virtually destroyed the romanticized, heroic image of him that had been established chiefly through the author Washington Irving's editing of his journals, The Adventures of Capt. Bonneville, U.S.A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West (1837).

The son of a prominent French radical, Bonneville moved with his family to the United States in 1803. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., in 1815, and was assigned to Fort Smith in 1821. Obtaining leave from the army in order to explore the West (1832), he gathered a party of 110 men and, from a base on the Green River in present-day Wyoming, attempted mainly to establish himself as a fur trader. He sent groups of hunters and trappers in all directions, but his scheme resulted neither in notable exploration nor in his being able to establish himself in the fur trade. Dismissed from the army for overstaying his leave, but reinstated in his commission during the Civil War, he eventually attained the rank of brigadier general (1865).