Hi. We hope you enjoyed Sacagawea’s Strength. Like the other Blast to the Past books, this story is a mixture of fact and fiction.
The fiction parts aren’t true. Even though you might know kids like Jacob, Zack, Bo, and Abigail, we made them up. Your teacher may be super cool like Mr. C, but we made him up too.
The story of Sacagawea, though, that’s a fact. Her life was recorded in journals by Captains Lewis and Clark and their exploration team, called the Corps of Discovery.
At age eleven, Sacagawea’s tribe, the Shoshone, was raided by the Hidatsa Indians. The Hidatsa kidnapped many people from the tribe. She was taken with them, far from her homelands.
At sixteen, Sacagawea was married off to a French fur trapper she didn’t know. His name was Toussaint Charbonneau. Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau and Sacagawea to come along and work as translators. Two months after her baby, Jean Baptiste, was born, she strapped him to her back and went off with the Corps of Discovery to explore western America.
President Thomas Jefferson wanted the Corps of Discovery to find a river route across America from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. There was so little known about the area, he needed them to write down information about all the people, animals, and plants they saw. President Jefferson also wanted them to make a map of that new territory.
Just like in our story, Lewis and Clark used very old, incorrect maps and corrected them. Sometimes they had the Native Americans who lived in the area draw maps with sticks and stones in the dirt. Or, if the Native Americans had small maps written with charcoal on animal skins, Lewis and Clark would trade for them, collecting them whenever they could.
They also brought along equipment to make maps on their own, including a compass, a sextant, and a two-pole chain.
It would have been difficult, but Sacagawea might have been able to quit and leave the expedition. When she discovered her brother was the Shoshone chief, many people wonder why she didn’t stay with her tribe instead of going on with Lewis and Clark. We wondered that too.
Maybe making a map was her dream after all?
We’ll never know. But what we do know is that Lewis and Clark would not have survived their journey without her. So, next time you look at a map, whether it’s a street map of your neighborhood or an SRTM map of Earth’s surface, take a second to remember Sacagawea’s strength.
Have a blast,
Stacia and Rhody