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WHO WAS SACAGAWEA (SACAJEWA)?

By Theresa Lund

A new dollar coin is being introduced in the United States. It bears the “likeness” of Sacagawea, a Shoshone Indian guide and interpreter. Yet, there are no portraits of her and even the journals of Lewis and Clark contain no sketches or descriptions of what she looked like. So who was she and what clues are there as to what she was like?

Sacagawea was born about 1787(?) either in western Montana or eastern Idaho. She was a member of the Snake tribe of Shoshone Indians. Late in the year 1800 she was captured by a party of Hidatsas or Minnnetaree Indians and taken to their village in the upper Missouri region, in present day North Dakota. There she was sold to a French-Canadian trader and fur trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau who had been living among the Indians. In 1804 Charbonneau married her.

In the fall of 1804, the Lewis and Clark expedition arrived among the Mandan Indians near present day Bismark, North Dakota, to spend the winter. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark hired Charbonneau, who may have had two Indian wives, as an interpreter and guide. Both Indian women were Shoshone or Snake. The younger, Sacagawea, was about 16 years of age, pregnant and eager to accompany her husband and to travel with them for the rest of the journey of exploration to the Pacific. Lewis and Clark were particularly desirous of having Sacagawea along to help them make contact with the Shoshone in Montana and Idaho. Moreover, Sacagawea spoke several indian dialects and was able to communicate through sign language. Her advanced state of pregnancy was no problem, as she would come to term in February, a few weeks before the party was due to leave winter quarters.

On February 11, 1805, Sacagawea gave birth to a baby boy, named Jean Baptiste, who was taken along when the expedition set out again in April. She would carry the infant, nicknamed “pomp” (a Shoshone word meaning first-born) in a cradleboard on her back.

Sacagawea quickly began to make herself useful. Lewis’ journal entry for the third day of the trip noted that, during a halt for dinner, “the squaw busied herself in searching for the wild artichokes which the mice collect and deposit in large hoards. This operation she performed by penetrating the earth with a sharp stick about some small collections of drift wood. Her labour soon proved successful and she procured a good quantity of these roots.”

But the young Indian Woman’s alertness and initiative were soon displayed more dramatically. The “White Perogue”, flagship of the expeditions fleet of eight craft was much less stable than was thought. On May 14, while the expeditions leaders were both ashore and the pirogue out in midstream, a sudden gust of wind struck the craft. The pirogue upset and before it was righted, the boat had nearly filled with water and some of its most valuable cargo was swept overboard. Amid the panic, Sacagawea kept her head. Lewis remarked in his journal “The Indian Woman to whim I ascribe equal fortitude and resolution, with any person onboard at the time of the accident, caught and preserved most of the light articles which were washed overboard.” Thanks to Sacagawea, much of the expeditions irreplaceable equipment had been saved.

On August 17 they made their first contact with the Shoshone. Through the goodwill of Sacagawea’s brother, who had become chief of the tribe, Lewis and Clark were able to obtain horses with which to continue their exploration. Sacagawea helped the expedition negotiate the unfamiliar terrain of the west and as a woman, she was a sign of peace to the many tribes that the explorers encountered.

Charbonneau and Sacagawea stayed with the expedition to the coast, wintered with the explorers in their camp, Fort Clatsop, near the mouth of the Columbia River, and headed back east with them. Clark had become fond of Sacagawea and her child. He sometimes called her “Janey” and referred frequently to the little boy as “my boy Pomp”. How Sacagawea felt about Clark was apparent from the little gifts she gave him during the trip, in November a scrap of bread she had been hoarding, and on Christmas Day, two dozen white weasel’s tails.

When Lewis and Clark reached the Mandan villages in August 1806, Clark paid Charbonneau “for his services as an enterpreter the price of a horse and lodge purchased of him for public Service in all amounting to 500$ 33 1/3 cents” and bade farewell to the little family who remained in North Dakota area. As for Charbonneau’s “femme Janey” , Clark could never fully compensate her. “Your woman,” he later wrote to Charbonneau, “who accompanied you that long and dangerous and fatiguing route to the Pacific Ocian and back, deserved a greater reward for her attention and service than we had in our power to give her at the Mandans”. There is some evidence that the pair traveled to St Louis in 1809 to leave their son with Clark to be educated.

According to some, Sacagawea died of disease on December 20, 1812, probably at Fort Lisa, near present day Omaha. The clerk at Fort Manuel, a trading post on the upper Missouri, included a terse obituary in his daily log:

“This evening the wife of Charbonneau, a Snake Squaw, died of a putrid fever. She was the best woman in the fort, aged about 25 Years.”

Shoshone tradition says Sacagawea had a long life of wanderings and an honored old age. In 1875 an old Indian woman claiming to be Sacagawea was found among the Wind River Shoshone in Wyoming. This woman died in 1884, which would have made Sacagawea nearly 100 years old, and was buried on the Wind River Reservation.

One July afternoon in 1905, a festive but unusual throng assembled on the grounds of the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, Oregon. Members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (holding its annual convention in Portland); the associations president Emeritus, Susan B Anthony; Abigal Scott Duniway, the Northwest’s fighter For women’s rights; and members of the Improved Order of Red Men, a Fraternal organization composed , Oddly enough, of white men. Some Genuine Indians were present too. The purpose for which these people Gathered was to dedicate a statue of Sacajawea, the young Shoshoni wife And mother who had accompanied Trailblazers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their westward Journey 100 years earlier.

There was little doubt in the minds of The women present that without Sacajawea, Lewis and Clark would Probably never made it across the crest Of the Rockies.

The statue had been sculpted by a Woman, Alice Cooper of Chicago; it Was a gift, the citation read, “from the Women of the United States in memory Of Sacajawea and in honor of the pioneer Mothers of old Oregon.”