Sacagawea

Sacagawea was born around 1788 among the Lemhi Shoshone in the mountains of present-day Idaho. When she was about eleven or twelve, a Hidatsa raiding party captured her and carried her east to the Hidatsa villages on the Knife River in present-day North Dakota, where she lived at the Awatixa village. There she became one of the wives of Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trader.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark met her at the Mandan and Hidatsa villages in 1804 and hired Charbonneau as an interpreter; Sacagawea came too, valued for her knowledge of the tribes and terrain farther west. In February 1805 she gave birth to her first child, a boy — Lewis noted that “one of the wives of Charbono was delivered of a fine boy” — and two months later she set out with the Corps, carrying him. On the journey she dug roots and found other food, and showed the men how to make leather clothing and moccasins. Her presence reassured the tribes they met; as Clark wrote, she “reconciles all the Indians, as to our friendly intentions. A woman with a party of men is a token of peace.”

When the expedition reached the Rocky Mountains, everything depended on finding the Shoshone and trading for horses, without which the explorers could not haul their supplies over the mountains. Recognizing landmarks from her childhood, Sacagawea assured the captains that her people were near. When they found the Shoshone, she translated along with her husband, and the Corps secured its horses.

Sacagawea left no written words of her own; what is known of her comes almost entirely from the journals of the expedition’s men, which record her actions rather than her thoughts.

Popular legend made Sacagawea the guide who led Lewis and Clark across the continent, but the expedition journals offer little evidence of that; historians generally believe she joined because her husband was hired as an interpreter. Even basic facts are disputed. Her name is spelled several ways, and the Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara Nation’s Sacagawea Project has published its own account, Our Eagle Woman, Sacagawea: They Got It Wrong, challenging the standard story. Accounts of her later life also differ.

On the return journey in 1806, Sacagawea and her family left the Corps at the Mandan and Hidatsa villages. Little is known of her life afterward; most historians believe she died of a fever at Fort Manuel Lisa around 1812, when she was not yet thirty. Statues honor her, among them one in Portland, Oregon, and the National Park Service tells her story at Lewis and Clark sites from North Dakota to the Pacific.