Sacagawea

by S. K. Wier

“What is reliably known about Sacagawea makes for only a brief sketch.” - James P. Ronda

The woman commonly known as Sacajewea, correctly named Ts'kaka'wea or Sacagawea, meaning Bird Woman in Hidatsa, was one of many members of the Lewis and Clark expedition who made notable contributions to its success.

Sacagawea was raised among the Agui-Dika Shoshone of western  Montana and eastern Idaho. Sometime in the fall of 1800, when about eleven or twelve years old, she was camped with her band near the Three Forks. Women went  out to pick berries. The band was attacked by a Hidatsa raiding party who  killed several Shoshone and took prisoners: four boys and several women.  They returned by horse to the Hidatsa villages at the junction of the Knife and  Missouri rivers, about 500 miles away. She was probably intially treated little better than a slave or servant, but learned the life of a Hidatsa woman and became a regular woman of the tribe. Sometime before the fall of 1804  Sacagawea was purchased for a wife by Toussaint Charbonneau, himself a  French Canadian trader living among the Hidatsa and having some  connection to the British North West company. Charbonneau and Sacagawea  lived in the Awatixa Hidatsa earth lodge village of Metaharta. Lewis and Clark  first met Charbonneau when he came to offer his services as a translator to the captains. They engaged both him and his wife both as interpreters -- but primarily it seems since she spoke Shoshone, which he did not. There was some expectation the explorers would meet the Shoshone the next summer. Charbonneau did not speak Shoshone, nor English for that matter. The Shoshone, also called Snakes, were known as horse breeders of the mountains, and the explorers were planning to trade for horses.

Sacagawea gave birth to Jean Baptiste Charbonneau on Feb 11, 1805, with some assistance from Lewis, immediately after taking four rattlesnake rattles crushed in water, which was recommended by another French trader in the camp.

During the trip to the Pacific and return she participated fully in the expedition and was involved in several adventures, including rescuing important equipment washing out of a swamped pirogue and surviving a flash flood. She was seriously ill at the portage around the falls of the Missouri. The captains tried most every medical treatment they knew and she recovered, perhaps despite their treatments, perhaps aided by mineral waters offered by Lewis.

Her particular value was as an interpreter in Shoshone; she was an “interpretress,” Clark said, with the Shoshone, and with the Flatheads, Nez Perce, and Walulas, via Shoshone prisoner intermediaries. She was not indented to be a guide and did not serve as one, except briefly in her home country around Three Forks (Montana).

“For most of the transcontinental journey Sacagawea was seeing country as new to her as it was new to the captains” (Ronda). She had never crossed the Rockies, or been on much of the Missouri, before the expedition. She apparently aided the party's peaceful mission and meetings with the natives: “The Wife of Shabono our interpreter We find reconsiles all the Indians, as to our friendly intentions. A woman with a party of men is a token of peace” (Clark). She also improved their meat-centered diet by finding prairie turnips, wild artichokes, wild licorice, Indian breadroot, and other vegetables, roots, and berries.

Sacagawea, Charbonneau, and son (called Pompey by Clark) returned to Metaharta on August 18, 1806, when Baptiste was a year and six months old. A few days later Clark wrote a personal letter to Charbonneau offering to set him up in any of several businesses, and to keep Baptiste in St Louis, when he was old enough, for the best of white men's education. Clark ended the letter “with anxious expectations of seeing my little dancing boy Baptieste I shall remain your Friend.”

In the summer of 1811 Sacagawea and her family did travel to St. Louis to leave Baptiste in Clark's care. On the return up the Missouri on a keelboat, another traveler named Henry Brackenbridge wrote the last known description of Sacagawea when she was alive. “We had on board a Frenchman named Charboneau, with his wife, an Indian woman of the Snake nation. The woman, a good creature, of a mild and gentle disposition, greatly attached to the whites, whose manners and dress she tries to imitate.”

Sacagawea died on December 20, 1812 at Fort Manuel on the Missouri river in South Dakota. Trader John C. Luttig was there and wrote “this evening the wife of Charbonneau, a Snake Squaw, died of a putrid fever she was a good and the best woman in the fort, aged about 25 years. She left a fine infant girl.” Hidatsa burial practice was to wrap the deceased in buffalo robes and place it on a burial scaffold or in a tree. Years later a friendly member of her tribe may have recalled her and returned her skull to the ceremonial circle of skulls at Metaharta, but that is purely conjecture and there is no indication it happened. The area of Fort Manuel was later washed away by the Missouri. There is no grave site for Sacagawea.

Luttig took the infant girl, called Lisette, back to St. Louis in May of 1813. Clark became legal guardian of both children shortly thereafter. Note that he accepted Jean Baptiste at an age suitable for school, but Lisette as an infant, due to the death of her mother.

Toussaint Charbonneau was a U.S. government interpreter for many years until 1839. He was engaged by eminent early western travelers, including Stephen H. Long, Prince Paul of Wurttemburg and Prince Maxmilian, and was painted by the artist Karl Bodmer in a group scene around 1833. No likeness of Sacagawea of any kind exists.

Lisette died in St. Louis on June 15 or 16, 1832, age 21, after last rites, and was buried at the Old Cathedral. There is no record that she was married and had children.

Jean Baptiste Charbonneau lived a long and and rather extraordinary life. He was baptised into the Catholic church, since his father was a Catholic and Clark was protestant. Auguste Chouteau, a prominent St Louis businessman, fur trader, a friend of Clark's, and a Catholic, signed the baptismal register which still exists and which I have seen. Jean Baptiste was educated in St. Louis. In the spring of 1823, at age 18, he met Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Wurttemburg, a traveling dignitary from Germany. They became friends, took a steamboat to New Orleans, and sailed to Europe. Jean Baptiste spent the next six years traveling in Europe with the Duke. He learned to speak German, and already knew English, Hidatsa, and French. In Europe, associated with the Duke, he must have been an unusual figure in cultured upper social life. He returned to the west in 1829. He became a guide (with John C Fremont among others), mountain man, California forty-niner, and magistrate. He died in 1866 at age 61 on the trail to a gold strike in Montana. He is buried in a remote location in eastern Oregon and there is a monument.

The pronunciation of Sacagawea is a common question. The captains rarely wrote her name in the journals, but both spelled it phonetically as “Sah cah gah we a” or similarly, always with a hard g (see Lewis 5/20/05 and 6/10/05; Clark 6/10/05). These are attempts to transliterate a word in Hidatsa which may have been spoken something like Ts'kakawea. Clark even wrote sah-car-ga-mea, with an m not w, once or twice; mea is also Hidatsa for woman, a strong sign that the name was Hidatsa. Lewis gave the translation “Bird Woman” for the Hidatsa name Sacagawea, and Sacagawea is the form generally accepted now by historians.

There is a Shoshone word Sacajewea, meaning “boat launcher” or “boat pusher.”, and the Shoshone today claim she actually kept this Shoshone name. The spelling “Sacajewea” first appeared in Nicholas Biddle's 1814 edition of the captain's journals; we do not know why he changed the spelling in the journals. It might be a mistake in printing. There is no “je” sound in Hidatsa. Whether her name as a child was Sacajewea and changed to her adult name Sacagawea, with a very different pronunciation, we cannot say.

No picture survives of Sacagawea, nor of many members of the Expedition and other early western figures of importance. The photograph is of another Shoshone woman made late in the 19th century, shown only to give a suggestion of how Sacagawea and her child may have appeared.

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Sources:

Irving Anderson, “Probing the Riddle of the Bird Woman,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 23 (1973): pp. 2-17.

Irving Anderson, “A Charbonneau Family Portrait,” American West 17 (1980), pp.4-13, 63-64.

William Clark, letter to Toussaint Charbonneau, August 20 1806, in Donald Jackson , ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Related Documents, 1783-1854, 2 volumes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), Vol. 1, pp. 315-316.

Harold P. Howard, Sacagawea (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1971)

Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 13 volumes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983-2001), Vol. 3, pp. 228-229n; p. 291n.

James Ronda, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 256-259. An excellent history by one of the top expedition historians.

Blanche Schrorer, “Boat-Pusher or Bird Woman?” Annals of Wyoming 52 (1980), pp. 46-54.

The best source of online information about the Lewis and Clark Expedition is Discovering Lewis and Clark.

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  Boulder, Colorado
  April 27, 2012

St uart Wier has presented programs about the Lewis and Clark Expedition, from Indiana to Washington State.