In January 2000, the U.S. government honored Sacagawea’s contribution to the exploration of the West by minting this one-dollar coin.
WHAT LEWIS AND CLARK WERE SUPPOSED TO DO
In 1803, Congress gave President Jefferson $2,500 for a Corps of Discovery to explore and map the new lands of the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson chose his secretary Meriwether Lewis to lead the expedition, and Lewis picked his ex–army buddy William Clark as co-commander. Jefferson told them to “explore the Missouri River … and communicate with the water of the Pacific Ocean.” In other words, to see if it was possible to reach the Pacific Ocean from St. Louis on a single river. Jefferson also told them to gather samples of soil and rocks, describe the weather, name the birds and creatures, collect plants, map the land, and see how tough the legendary grizzly bears really were (very tough, it turned out). Finally they were to convince the Indians they met that their real leader was their “Great Father” in Washington, D.C.—Jefferson himself.
“Had the canoe been lost, I should have valued my life but little.”––William Clark
North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean, 1804–1806
Between 1804 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led twenty-eight white men and one black man (Clark’s slave, York) across the continent and back again. They traveled more than eight thousand miles. History remembers them as the discoverers of the West. But the West was hardly empty when they arrived. When they reached the Great Plains, there were more than thirty tribes living there. Lewis and Clark couldn’t have reached the Pacific without the help of native people, especially one remarkable fifteen-year-old Shoshone girl.
Sacagawea’s childhood ended when she was ten, on a day when her Shoshone tribe was attacked in a Rocky Mountain meadow by a Hidatsa raiding party. It was no contest: The enemy had guns and her people didn’t. She was captured and taken to a Hidatsa lodge, where she lived as a slave with a few other captives. One morning, she and two other girls were pushed toward a big-bellied, hard-drinking white man named Toussaint Charbonneau. She was told that he had won her in a card game and that she now belonged to him.
In the winter of 1804, she rode with Charbonneau to a small fort that had been built by a group of white explorers where the Missouri and Knife Rivers came together. These men had been paddling west for months and had pulled their boats out to spend the winter at the fort until the Missouri’s frozen water ran free again. Charbonneau had heard that they were looking for a guide to lead them west to the Rocky Mountains, someone who could speak the languages of the western tribes. Word was they were paying well.
Charbonneau led Sacagawea and another young woman to Fort Mandan, as Lewis and Clark’s settlement was called, and announced that he was available to guide them west. Motioning to the women, he said simply that his “two squaws” were Snake Indians.
Lewis and Clark were especially drawn to Sacagawea. Though she was only fifteen and pregnant, here was a girl who could speak both Shoshone and Hidatsa. She had grown up among mountain tribes who might be able to provide them with horses and who could guide them farther west. She had so much to offer that it was worth taking
a baby along. Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau and told him they wanted to take Sacagawea but not the second girl.
Sacagawea and Charbonneau moved to Fort Mandan to help prepare for the trip. In February, Sacagawea began to have unusually violent pains during the birth of her baby. She seemed near death. Meriwether Lewis, the group’s doctor, tried everything he knew to help, but nothing worked. Desperate not to lose his guide, he agreed to try a Shoshone custom even though it made no sense to him. Lewis took a rock and ground a rattlesnake’s tail into small pieces and then dissolved them in water. Sacagawea gulped down the mixture eagerly. Ten minutes later she gave birth to a loud, sturdy son. Her boy was named Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, but everybody called him Pomp.
Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery took twenty-eight months to go eight thousand miles. By the time they returned, they were able to give America a much clearer picture of itself.
“CHILDREN”
Lewis and Clark met more than fifty Native American tribes along their way. They tried to convince Indians that the Americans who now “owned” the Louisiana Territory were in charge. In August of 1804, Lewis said this to a gathering of Oto tribesmen: “[President Jefferson] is now your only father; he is the only friend to whom you can now look for protection, or from whom you can ask favors or receive good councils. He will take care to serve you, and not deceive you.”
NATURAL WONDERS
Lewis and Clark were both terrific naturalists. They added two hundred new species to science’s list of known plants. They saw bighorn sheep and mountain goats, and tested the strength of grizzly bears (and nearly got killed). Both men had birds named after them—the Clark nutcracker and Lewis’s woodpecker.
In April, the men lowered their canoes back into the fast-flowing Missouri, now swollen with melted snow. Sacagawea rode proudly in the largest boat with Pomp strapped to a cradleboard on her back.
From the beginning, Sacagawea proved much more than an ordinary guide. She could tell whether a single moccasin track in the dust came from a friendly tribe like the Shoshones or one that might attack them. When the men were unable to kill game, she used a long pointed stick to scrape up buried roots—licorice, wild artichokes, and something called white apples. She found the places where mice had stored food for the winter. Sometimes she dug enough food to feed the entire exhausted group.
One day a sudden gust of wind nearly tipped over their biggest boat. Charbonneau had been steering and had turned the sail the wrong way. Waves swept over the deck, washing all loose objects into the river. Moving swiftly, Sacagawea plunged into the current and swam after the expedition’s maps, journals, instruments, and medicine, rescuing most of them as Clark watched helplessly from shore. That night he wrote, “Had the [canoe] been lost, I should have valued my life but little … The Indian woman to whom I ascribe equal fortitude and resolution with any person on board at the time of the accident caught and preserved most of the light articles which were washed overboard.”
The explorers were nearly starving by the time they reached the Rocky Mountains, but Sacagawea was overjoyed to be near her home once again. In a mountain meadow, she caught sight of her childhood friend Jumping Fish, who had earned her name by the way she had jumped through a stream to escape the Hidatsa on the day Sacagawea had been captured.
Jumping Fish led the explorers to the Shoshone camp. Soon whites and Shoshones were seated in a circle inside a tent of willows, passing a pipe and trying to communicate with one another. Suddenly Sacagawea, who was translating, stopped speaking. She leaped up, ran across the tent, threw her arms around the chief, and flung a blanket over his head, sobbing. It was her brother Cameahwait. He told her that their parents were dead and only two brothers were still alive.
The Shoshones gave Lewis and Clark horses to cross the mountains, and some members of the tribe went along with them, including Sacagawea and Pomp. When they reached the Pacific, the explorers spent a cold, rainy winter in a fort they built. When the explorers
heard that a whale had washed ashore and formed a small group to go see it, Sacagawea insisted that she be allowed to go. It seemed to surprise the others, partly because she had no rights as a slave, but mainly because she had never before taken such a stand. “She observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters,” Lewis wrote, “and that now that the monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted.” They let her go.
On the return journey east, Sacagawea found ways to communicate even with Indians from tribes whose languages she had never heard.
On August 17, 1806, Sacagawea, Charbonneau, and Pomp parted with Lewis and Clark and went back to live among the Mandan. Clark found parting with them very difficult. He offered to take Pomp with him to St. Louis and raise him as his son. Sacagawea diplomatically answered, “Maybe next summer,” but kept Pomp. Clark paid Charbonneau $500.33 for his “services” on the trip, but not a penny went to Sacagawea. Clark later wrote to Charbonneau, “Your woman who accompanied you that long dangerous and fatiguing route to the Pacific Ocean and back deserved a greater reward for her attention and services on that route than we had in our power to give her.”
There are more statues of Sacagawea today than of any female in U.S. history, although no one knows what she really looked like. This early-nineteenth-century magazine illustration shows one artist’s vision of her.
THE EXCEPTION
The other explorers called Sacagawea “Janey.” She was the Lewis and Clark expedition’s only Indian, its only female, its only teenager, one of only two slaves—the other being York. And she was the only member of the party who didn’t get paid.
HOW CLARK LATER REMEMBERED SACAGAWEA
“She was very observant. She had a good memory, remembering locations not seen since her childhood. In trouble she was full of resources, plucky and determined. With her helpless infant she rode with the men, guiding us unerringly through mountain passes and lonely places. Intelligent, cheerful, resourceful, tireless, faithful, she inspired us all.”
Very little is known of her life after she left Lewis and Clark. She separated from Charbonneau at some point. One missionary wrote that Sacagawea died as a very old woman in 1884, but a more detailed account in the journal of a trader said she died December 20, 1812. The trader wrote: “This Evening the Wife of Charbonneau, a Snake Squaw, died of putrid fever … She was best woman in the fort, aged about 25 and she left a fine infant girl.” Clark also wrote that by 1828 Sacagawea was dead. Pomp became a successful guide for Western travelers.