For the past 24 years, she has appeared on a gold dollar, but with only limited circulation for the past 22 years, as the coin failed to meet demands, due to its size relative to the quarter. As a collector, I have every single one of them. But she has gone down in history as one of the most influential Native American women, especially significant as we celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day.
When spring came in 1805, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left their winter camp near Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the Upper Missouri River and resumed their search for a route to the Pacific Ocean. The day was Sunday, April 7. Included in the party, Clark noted in his journal, was a French-Canadian trapper and trader along the Upper Missouri named Toussaint Charbonneau and his Indian wife (acquired by purchase) to act as an Interpreter & interpretress for the snake Indians (Shoshones), a tribe in the Rocky Mountains important to the explorers in two ways: as a source of horses when the expedition left the river and as one of the tribes Lewis and Clark hoped to recruit for an ambitious diplomatic effort to end intertribal warfare and bring peace to the Northern Plains. That sounds like overreaching, and it was, but it was high on the list of what President Thomas Jefferson had sent Lewis and Clark to do.
This Native woman’s story is complicated from start to finish, but one detail deserves mention at the outset. When Clark hired Charbonneau he had two Shoshone-speaking wives, sisters whom he had separately purchased from their father. Marrying sisters, called sororal polygyny by anthropologists, was a common practice among the Plains tribes at the time. Clark noted that both wives spoke Shoshone, but the older one was too sick to travel when the boats departed.
The younger sister, who joined the expedition, was about 18 or 19 years old, and she was carrying an infant son, born two months earlier.
Over the next 16 months Clark began to call the Native woman “Janey” and grew fond of her son, but when the expedition headed upriver on April 7, he noted him on the roster only as “Shabonahs infant.” After Clark had learned to sound out and spell the woman’s name, he went back and inked it into his journal entry for the departure day: “Sah-kah-gar we â.”
The standard spelling now is “Sacagawea.” It is said as one word but is actually an amalgam of two words, one for bird and one for woman, in the language of the Hidatsa, the tribe of the man who sold the sisters to Charbonneau. Clark is notorious for his erratic spelling - multiple ways for Charbonneau and Jusseaume. But for the younger sister Clark made a special effort. He learned to pronounce her name, he understood its meaning - Bird Woman - and he tried to spell it correctly.
Among the members of the Corps of Discovery, Sacagawea was the youngest, save her son; she was also the only woman, the only Native American, and the only speaker of Shoshone. Today her Hidatsa name is probably recognized more widely than that of any other member, Lewis and Clark included. More statues have been erected in public spaces in her honor than for any other American woman. Why this is so is one of the mysteries of fame.
Sacagawea performed useful service on the expedition and once or twice even pointed the way, but that does not explain the broad appeal of the young mother who carried her infant son across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific and back, a journey second in significance in American history only to Columbus’s. It’s not easy to explain how Sacagawea steals the scene in Lewis and Clark’s journals whenever she is on the page. But scholars sometimes think too much is made of her, scant her role, and never seriously ask who and what she was, exactly, or consider the ways in which that might matter.
Toussaint Charbonneau was paid $500 for making the trip, Sacagawea nothing. Their journey ended in August 1806 when the expedition left them at the villages on the Missouri River where Lewis and Clark had found them. Charbonneau was about 40, Sacagawea 19 or 20. Then what?
Charbonneau lived into his 70s. In the last half of his life he attracted frequent notice from the keepers of diaries and journals as a trapper, trader, and translator on the Upper Missouri before dying in a still-unknown place at an unknown moment: after 1838 and before 1843 is as close as the Utah historian Larry E. Morris can get in The Fate of the Corps, his history of the afterlives of the expeditioners.
But for the much earlier death of Charbonneau’s Snake wife, Morris can pin down the cause, day, and place - “putrid fever” on December 20, 1812, at Fort Manuel Lisa, a trading post downriver from the Hidatsa villages where Clark had hired Charbonneau because his wife spoke Shoshone. That death date for Sacagawea has not been seriously challenged by scholars for 70 years or more because two brief diary entries recorded 20 months apart seem too clear and explicit for error.
But the death date matters. The standard 1812 date describes a short life with a sad ending. A new date proposed by Sacagawea’s descendants and other interested members of the Hidatsa tribe suggests a longer life of broader drama and significance - 57 years longer. The Hidatsa argument arrives in Our Story of Eagle Woman: Sacagawea: They Got It Wrong, by the Sacagawea Project Board of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. No single author is named or thanked within. The book is a tribal effort led by five Project Board members who are all relatives of Sacagawea.
Our Story of Eagle Woman is the clearest and best example of a book written in this spirit that I have seen. Its claims are specific, broad, hard to resolve, and above all numerous: that Sacagawea had a Hidatsa name because she was Hidatsa; that except for travels with Charbonneau, she lived the whole of her life among the Hidatsa on the Upper Missouri; that late in life she had three additional children, all daughters; that her brother, Cherry Necklace, was a notable leader and religious figure; that after 1845 she lived with her brother in a traditional earthen lodge in Like-a-Fishhook village, near the trading post known as Fort Berthold; that her life there was intimately connected to the Hidatsa in all the village ways of the time; that she lived into her 80s; and that she was fatally wounded in 1869 by Sioux warriors - very likely Hunkpapa belonging to a war faction led by Sitting Bull - while traveling with a group on its way to a trading post upriver near Fort Buford.
Every detail of this expansion of the standard story is certain to be debated to exhaustion, but here, too, one detail in particular should be kept in mind from the outset: Our Story of Eagle Woman, drawing on tribal records and the family traditions of Hidatsa elders, asserts that Sacagawea’s father, Smoked Lodge, was Hidatsa, but that her mother was a Crow named Otter Woman or Comes Out of the Water. The Crow and Hidatsa were closely related tribes, but not the same. Having a Hidatsa father and a Crow mother opens a question of what Sacagawea was, exactly.
The revisions proposed by the Project Board begin with a name change: a claim that Bird Woman’s name was actually Eagle Woman - Maeshuwea or Maeshuweash - which proved too difficult for whites to pronounce. But Bird Woman is not wrong in any meaningful sense.
The Sacagawea Project Board is not easily dismissed or explained away, but it was almost completely forgotten after 1923, and the new book has so far been ignored by scholars. The Hidatsa fear their work is overlooked because they are Natives, and they may be right.
The long-accepted argument for the death date of 1812 is not strained but it is thin. It rests on two diary entries and a single word jotted down by William Clark a dozen or more years later.
The first diary entry was recorded by a young traveler, Henry Brackenridge, on his way up the Missouri River in April 1811 with a group bound for a new trading post built by the noted Native trader Manuel Lisa, who mentioned a scout of the Snake Nation who accompanied Lewis and Clark to the Pacific.
The “Indian woman of the Snake nation” is not named but is unmistakably Sacagawea.
Second in the chain of proof is a diary entry some 20 months later by John Luttig, the chief clerk at Fort Manuel Lisa, on December 20, 1812, who mentioned the wife of Charbonneau dying of a putrid fever. Charbonneau had two Snake wives. One of them died in 1812, but which one? The standard telling of the Luttig story ends with the single word that Clark, sometime in the years between 1825 and 1828, wrote next to Sacagawea’s name on a roster of expedition members: “Dead.”
I call the 1812 argument thin because it offers no evidence for where Charbonneau and his two Snake wives were between April 1811 and December 1812 or for which Snake wife died in 1812, because it cannot tell us when or why Clark concluded that Sacagawea was dead, and because it overlooks the fact that Clark in 1813 wrongly believed that Charbonneau was dead. If he was wrong about Charbonneau, was he perhaps wrong about Sacagawea as well? Finally, there is the element of doubt introduced by the figure of Charbonneau himself, who had many wives. Lewis and Clark knew two, and a third was noted by Sergeant Patrick Gass at a Christmas party in 1804.
Charbonneau kept no journal and left nothing like the full account delivered to Captain Welch by Bulls Eye, whose story is not two sentences, plus a word, but an expansive account of the death of his mother and grandmother. With the rest of the material gathered in Our Story it offers a swath of history as substantial as a deposition delivered to lawyers. Outside of the Lewis and Clark journals nothing else comes close to telling us as much about Sacagawea. One way or another, every future history of her life will have to take it into account.
At stake in this inquiry is the truth of two long-standing claims - that Sacagawea was a Shoshone and that she died at 25. The principal argument for a Shoshone tribal identity is the fact that Lewis and Clark believed that is what she was based on her report that a Shoshone chief, Cameahwait, was her “brother.” This is not a question to be settled in a minute. How Hidatsa address relatives is an extremely complicated matter. Any person addressed as “mother,” “brother,” “father,” “sister,” or “cousin” may be one in our sense of the term or may not. The Sacagawea Project Board believes that Cameahwait had been adopted by Sacagawea’s father, Smoked Lodge, and that she had learned Shoshone on family visits to the tribe. The book makes its case and invites comment.
But in the meantime, it also stresses the problem of translation. Everything Lewis and Clark knew about Sacagawea’s history and identity came from her as reported in Hidatsa to Charbonneau, who passed it in French mainly to René Jusseaume, who gave Lewis and Clark the English version of it. Questions went back by the same route. But Washington Matthews, an army doctor in the 1870s who was the first serious American student of Hidatsa, reported that it was a difficult tonal language like Japanese and that Charbonneau had never learned to pronounce it properly.
The Project Board weighs the matter but settles in the end on the conclusion reached by Sacagawea’s son, Jean-Baptiste, who spent the last few years of his well-documented life looking for gold in California. Soon after he died of “mountain fever” on his way to Montana in 1866, a remembrance appeared in an Idaho newspaper, Owyhee Avalanche, by a man who had known him since 1852.
The question of when Sacagawea died is simpler - yes or no for two dates.
The broad narrative of Sacagawea’s life becomes clear, but it is in the journals of Lewis and Clark that the woman herself is seen most clearly. There she is often mentioned and quoted, frequently on the subject of some herb, root, or fruit that the Hidatsa like to eat or use. When Lewis in mid-July 1805 described at length how the Hidatsa made bread of sunflower seeds collected in the river bottoms and ground into a fine flour, it seems likely Sacagawea was his source. Who else among the corps would have known, or thought it important?
But Sacagawea was not just interested and helpful; she was bold. When she wanted something, she had the courage to argue that it was not just reasonable but right. In Oregon one evening in January 1806, she spoke up firmly while Clark was planning an expedition to the Pacific coast the next day to examine the carcass of a whale. Clark had not thought to ask Sacagawea if she might like to go. She made sure he knew.
But when the expedition ended in 1806 Sacagawea was lost from sight. In the six years that followed she is present on a page only a handful of times, always in the company of Charbonneau. Over the following 57 years there is even less.
The actual truth of when she died may forever be lost to history or retold by tribal elders.
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