To the people in libraries and historical societies in the states of California, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, and in the cities of Montreal, Canada, and Stuttgart, Germany, I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness. Your patient letters and guidance made possible the proper research for this book. In particular I thank the late Edna McElhinney Olsen, of the Historical Society of Missouri in Saint Charles, Missouri, who gave enthusiasm to the work, and also Martha Mann, of the Kirkwood Library, Kirkwood, Missouri, who sent for innumerable books, manuscripts, and pamphlets through interlibrary loan, giving me invaluable sources of information.
I am grateful to my husband, Bill, who thrice toured the Lewis and Clark Trail and the West with me and argued out most of the book, especially geography, critically read the manuscript, and saved me from making a good many errors I certainly would have made except for him.
If any of our five children, Skookumchuck, A Polliwog, Williwaw, Kloochman, or Hee Hee Tum Tum, read this book I have so insistently talked about with them, they will probably feel shock and relief that it is actually finished. I acknowledge that I could not possibly have written the book if they had not criticized my ideas, walked over Lemhi Pass, or had not been quiet while I “worked,” which was beyond the responsibility of usual siblings and offspring.
I thank Carol Sturm Smith and John Burnett Payne for assistance with the manuscript. I thank Jan De-Vries
and Jim Harrison for their kind assistance with the revised manuscript and Candace Finkelston and the Library Services staff at St. Louis Community College at Meramec for their excellent information system.
Like any creation based on literature searches and oral traditions, there are many individuals who have gone before me to whom I owe a large debt of gratitude and thanks for their time and effort. Historians, keepers of diaries or journals, and keepers of legends, which we call folklore, supplied ideas and facts for the basis of this novel. Without these dedicated people, much of early American history would be long forgotten and lost. I am most grateful to the Lewis and Clark party for keeping journals and writing what is still considered the best historical account of Sacajawea’s life, though these accounts cover a period of barely three years.
I am grateful to all those others who wrote about the early Shoshonis, Mandans, and other Missouri River tribes, the river Indians of the Northwest, the Pacific Coast tribes, the Comanches and Arapahos, etc. I am grateful for the historians who believe and show in writing that Sacajawea died at Fort Manuel Lisa when she was only twenty-five. I am equally grateful for those historians who wrote or told me of the persistent oraltradition stories among the Comanche and Shoshoni that Sacajawea lived a long life. Their controversies make her story elusive, mysterious, intriguing, and speculative.
I do not know if Sacajawea died in 1812 or 1884, but as a novelist I prefer the long-life story. I hope that my readers will be thankful for a story that begins with a child wondering about the origin of the ancient medicine circle and ends with an old woman sensing the termination of a free, nomadic culture.
I am thankful that I grew up in northwestern Montana, where Sacajawea is and always has been a heroine for Native and all other Americans alike.
ANNA LEE WALDO