Sacagawea (Sakakawea, Sacajawea; see below) (c. 1787 – December 20, 1812; see below for other theories about her death) was a Shoshone woman who accompanied the Corps of Discovery with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in their exploration of the Western United States, traveling thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean between 1804 and 1806. She was nicknamed Janey by some members of the expedition.

Because of the popularity of the Sacagawea dollar, the term "Sacagawea" has become slang for money in general, especially in the midwestern U.S.

Biography

Early life

Sacagawea was born to the Agaidika ("Salmon Eater") tribe of Shoshone between Kenney Creek and Agency Creek, near what is now the city of Tendoy in Lemhi County, Idaho.^[1] However, when she was about ten years old, she and several other girls were kidnapped by a group of Hidatsa in a battle that resulted in the death of four Shoshone men, four women and several boys.^[2] She was then taken to their village near the present-day Washburn, North Dakota. She therefore grew up culturally affiliated with this tribe.

At the age of about thirteen, Sacagawea was taken as a wife by Toussaint Charbonneau, a French trapper living in the Hidatsa village, who had also taken another young Shoshone named Otter Woman as a wife. Charbonneau is said to have either purchased both wives from the Hidatsa, or to have won Sacagawea while gambling.

The Lewis and Clark expedition

Sacagawea was pregnant with her first child when the Corps of Discovery arrived near the Hidatsa villages to spend the winter of 1804-1805. Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark built Fort Mandan and interviewed several trappers who might be able to translate or guide the expedition further up the river in the springtime. They agreed to hire Charbonneau as an interpreter when they discovered his wife spoke the Shoshone language, as they knew they would need the help of the Shoshone tribes at the headwaters of the Missouri River.

Lewis recorded in his journal on November 4, 1804:

"a French man by Name Chabonah, who speaks the Big Belly (Gros Ventres) language visit us, he wished to hire and informed us his 2 squars were snake (Shoshone) Indians, we engage him to go on with us and take one his wives to interpret the Snake language…" [sic]

In April, the expedition left Fort Mandan and headed up the Missouri River in pirogues, which had to be poled and sometimes pulled from the riverbanks. On May 14, 1805, Sacagawea rescued items that had fallen out of a capsized boat, including the journals and records that Lewis and Clark were keeping. The corps commanders, who praised her quick action on this occasion, would name the Sacagawea River in her honor on May 20.

By August 1805 the corps had located a Shoshone tribe and was attempting to trade for horses to cross the Rocky Mountains. Sacagawea was brought in to translate, and it was discovered the tribe's chief was her brother Cameahwait.

Clark's journal recorded the reunion:

"August 17 Saturday 1805 The Interpreter & Squar who were before me at Some distance danced for joyful sight, and She make signs to me that they were her nation [...] the meeting of those people was effecting, particular between Sah cah gar we ah and an Indian woman, who had been taken prisoner at the same time with her and who, had afterwards escaped from the Minnetares [Hidatsa] and rejoined her nation…"

As the expedition approached the mouth of the Columbia River, Sacagawea gave up her beaded belt in order to allow the captains to trade for a fur robe they wished to return to President Jefferson. The journal entry for November 20, 1805 reads:

"one of the Indians had on a roab made of 2 Sea Otters Skins the fur of them were more butifull than any fur I had ever seen both Capt. Lewis & my Self endeavored to purchase the roab with different articles at length we precurred it for a belt of blue beeds which the - wife of our interpreter Shabono wore around her waste..."

When the corps reached the Pacific Ocean at last, all members of the expedition—including Sacagawea—were allowed to participate in a November 24 vote on the location where they would build their fort for the winter. In January, when a whale's carcass washed up onto the beach south of Fort Clatsop, she insisted upon her right to go visit this great wonder.

On the return trip, as they approached the Rocky Mountains in July of 1806, Sacagawea advised Clark to cross into the Yellowstone River basin at what is now known as Bozeman Pass, later chosen as the optimal route for the Northern Pacific Railway to cross the continental divide.

Later life and death

Charbonneau and Sacagawea spent three years among the Hidatsa after the expedition, before accepting William Clark's invitation to settle in St. Louis, Missouri in 1809. They entrusted Jean-Baptiste's education to Clark, who enrolled the young man in the Saint Louis Academy boarding school.

Sacagawea gave birth to a daughter, Squanto Lisette or Lizette, sometime after 1810. According to Bonnie "Spirit Wind-Walker" Butterfield, historical documents suggest Sacagawea died in 1812:

"An 1811 journal entry made by Henry Brackenridge, a fur dealer at Fort Manuel Lisa Trading Post on the Missouri River, stated that both Sacagawea and Charbonneau were living at the fort. He recorded that Sacagawea "…had become sickly and longed to revisit her native country." The following year, John Luttig, a clerk at Fort Manuel Lisa recorded in his journal on December 20, 1812, that "…the wife of Charbonneau, a Snake Squaw [the common term used to denote Shoshone Indians], died of putrid fever." He went on to say that she was "aged about 25 years. She left a fine infant girl".^[3] Documents held by Clark show that her son Baptiste had already been entrusted by Charbonneau into Clark's care for a boarding school education, at Clark's insistence (Jackson, 1962)."^[4]

A few months later, fifteen men were killed in an Indian attack on Fort Manuel Lisa, located at the mouth of the Bighorn River.^[3] John Luttig and Sacagawea's young daughter were among the survivors. Some say Toussaint Charbonneau was killed at this time; others say he signed over formal custody of his son to Clark in 1813.

As further proof that Sacagawea died at this time, Butterfield says:

"An adoption document made in the Orphans Court Records in St. Louis, Missouri states that "On August 11, 1813, William Clark became the guardian of "Tousant Charbonneau, a boy about ten years, and Lizette Charbonneau, a girl about one year old." For a Missouri State Court at the time, to designate a child as orphaned and to allow an adoption, both parents had to be confirmed dead in court papers.

"The last recorded document citing Sacagawea's existence appears in William Clark's original notes written between 1825-1826. He lists the names of each of the expedition members and their last known whereabouts. For Sacagawea he writes: "Se car ja we au- Dead" (Jackson, 1962)."^[4]

It is not believed that Lizette survived childhood, as there is no later record of her among Clark's papers.

Myths and legends

Reliable historical information about Sacagawea is extremely limited and no contemporary portraits of her exist. Her role in the expedition and this lack of records have led to a number of myths surrounding her.

Some Native American oral traditions are said to relate that rather than dying in 1812, Sacagawea left her husband Charbonneau and fell in with one of the Great Plains tribes while making her way back towards her homeland. She is said to have married into their tribe, then left again after her husband was killed, eventually finding her way back to the Lemhi Shoshone in Wyoming.

A Shoshone woman named Porivo ("chief woman") died at the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming on April 9, 1884. A Reverend John Roberts officiated at her funeral, and claimed after her death that she had been Sacagawea.

In 1925, Dr. Charles Eastman, a Dakota Sioux physician, was hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to locate Sacagawea's remains. Eastman visited many different Native American tribes to interview individuals that might have known or heard of Sacagawea, although not her childhood clan the Agaidika Shoshone, who were confined at Fort Hall Indian Reservation and not at Wind River where the woman named Porivo died. It was his conclusion that Porivo was Sacagawea.^[5] In 1963 a monument to "Sacajawea of the Shoshonis" was erected on a Shoshone reservation near Lander, Wyoming on the basis of this claim.^[6]

The belief that Sacagawea lived to old age was widely disseminated in the United States by the novelist Grace Hebard who wrote a 1933 novel called Sacagawea. This notion was also explored fifty years later in the 1984 novel Sacajawea by Anna Lee Waldo; in this case the author was well aware of the historical research supporting an 1812 death, but made a conscious choice to explore the myths instead.

Some fictionalizations of the expedition speculate that Sacagawea was romantically involved with Lewis or Clark during their expedition. While the journals show that she was friendly with Clark and would often do favors for him, the idea of a liaison is believed to have been created by novelists who wrote about the expedition much later. This fiction was perpetuated in the 1955 Western film The Far Horizons.

Name

A long-running controversy has surrounded the correct spelling, pronunciation, and etymology of her name.

Sacagawea

Sacagawea /səˈkagəˈwiə/ is the most widely used spelling of her name, and is pronounced with a hard "g" sound, rather than the soft "g" or "j" sound. Lewis and Clark's original journals themselves mention Sacagawea by name seventeen times, each time with the "g" spelling. The spelling Sacagawea was established in 1910 by the United States Bureau of American Ethnology, and is the spelling adopted by the United States Mint for use with the dollar coin. The spelling is used by a wide range of sources, including the United States Board on Geographic Names, the U.S. National Park Service, and a large number of historical scholars.^[7]

Sakakawea

Sakakawea /səˈkakəˈwiə/, from Hidatsa tsakáka wía, "bird woman",^[8][9] is the next most widely adopted spelling, and is the official spelling of her name according to the Three Affiliated Tribes, which include the Hidatsa. This spelling is widely used throughout North Dakota (where she is considered a state heroine), notably in the naming of Lake Sakakawea, and the Hidatsa etymology is the most widely-accepted among specialists.^[10]

Charbonneau told expedition members that his wife's name meant "Bird Woman", and in May 1805 Lewis used both the Hidatsa meaning and pronunciation in his journal:

"a handsome river of about fifty yards in width discharged itself into the shell river...this stream we called Sah-ca-gah-we-ah or bird woman’s River, after our interpreter the Snake woman."

Sacajawea

Sacajawea or Sacajewea /ˈsækəʤəˈwiə/ is said to be derived from Shoshone words meaning "boat puller" or "boat launcher". It is the preferred spelling used by the Lemhi Shoshone people, some of whom claim that her Hidatsa captors merely reinterpreted her existing Shoshone name in their own language, and pronounced it in their own dialect.^[11]

Idaho native John Rees explored the "boat launcher" etymology in a long letter to the United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs written in the 1920s; it was republished in 1970 as a pamphlet titled "Madame Charbonneau" and contains many of the arguments in favor of the Shoshone derivation of the name.^[12]

The spelling Sacajawea, though widely taught until the late 20th century, is generally considered incorrect in modern academia. Linguistics professor Dr. Sven Liljeblad from the Idaho State University in Pocatello has concluded that "it is unlikely that Sacajawea is a Shoshoni word.... The term for 'boat' in Shoshoni is saiki, but the rest of the alleged compound would be incomprehensible to a native speaker of Shoshoni."^[12] The spelling has subsided from general use, although the corresponding "soft j" pronunciation persists in American culture.

The confusion almost certainly originated from the use of the "j" spelling by Nicholas Biddle, who annotated the expedition's journals in 1814. The error was compounded with the publication of the novel, The Conquest, written by Eva Emery Dye in 1902, in anticipation of the expedition's centennial. It is likely Dye used Biddle's secondary source for the spelling, and her highly popular book made it ubiquitous throughout the United States (previously most non-scholars had never even heard of Sacagawea).

However, Rozina George, great-great-great-great-grandaughter of Cameahwait, says the Agaidika tribe of Lemhi Shoshone do not recognize the spelling or pronunciation Sacagawea, and schools and other memorials erected in the area surrounding her birthplace use the spelling Sacajawea.

"The Lemhi Shoshone call her Sacajawea. It is derived from the Shoshone word for her name, Saca tzah we yaa. In his Cash Book, William Clark spells Sacajawea with a “J”. Also, William Clark and Private George Shannon explained to Nicholas Biddle (Published the first Lewis and Clark Journals in 1814) about the pronunciation of her name and how the tz sounds more like a “j”. What better authority on the pronunciation of her name than Clark and Shannon who traveled with her and constantly heard the pronunciation of her name? We do not believe it is a Minnetaree (Hidatsa) word for her name. Sacajawea was a Lemhi Shoshone not a Hidatsa."^[2]

Since there are, in fact, several different words or phrases in Shoshone which could be the actual root for her name, it is likely that a definitive answer to this question will never be found.

Memorials

• Sacagawea River
• Lake Sakakawea
• USS Sacagawea, one of several United States ships named in her honor
• Sacagawea dollar
• Mount Sacajawea, one of four mountains in the United States (Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Oregon)

The Sacajawea Park

A 71-acre park dedicated to Sacagawea is located in Salmon, Idaho by the rivers and mountains of Sacajawea’s homeland.

In sculpture

• Cheney, Washington, by Harold Balazs: A statue of Sacagawea is displayed in the rose garden in front of the President’s House at Eastern Washington University.

• Bismarck, North Dakota, by Leonard Crunelle: A statue of Sacagawea and baby Pomp appears on the grounds of the North Dakota State Capitol, and a replica of it represents North Dakota in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. Interestingly, a North Dakota law, on the books for over a century, prohibits any statuary whatsoever on State-owned grounds, so a special law had to be passed in order to permit the display on the Capitol grounds, where it occupies a place of prestige on the lawn in front of the capitol building.^[13]
• St Louis, Missouri, by Harry Weber sculptor: A statue of Sacagawea with her baby in a cradle board is included in the diorama of the Lewis & Clark expedition that is on display in the lobby of the St. Louis Drury Plaza Hotel, located in the historical International Fur Exchange building.^[14]
• Portland, Oregon, by Alice Cooper: A statue of Sacagawea and Jean-Baptiste was unveiled July 6, 1905 and moved to Washington Park, April 6, 1906^[15]
• Godfrey, Illinois, by Glenna Goodacre: At Lewis and Clark Community College; by the same artist who designed the image on the Sacagawea dollar.
• Charlottesville, Virginia, by Charles Keck: A statue of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Sacagawea was sculpted in 1919.
• Boise, Idaho: Installed in front of the Idaho History Museum in July 2003.
• Great Falls, Montana, by Robert Scriver: Bronze 3/4 scale statue of Sacagawea, her baby Jean-Baptise, Lewis, Clark, and the Newfoundland dog Seaman, at the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Center in Great Falls, Montana.
• Fort Benton, Montana, by Robert Scriver: A sculpture of Sacagawea and her baby, and Captains Lewis and Clark, in the river side sculpture park.
• Astoria, Oregon, at Netul Landing in Lewis and Clark National Historical Park: Bronze statue of Sacagawea and Jean-Baptiste.

Sacagawea in film

Sacagawea's character is played by Donna Reed in the 1955 film The Far Horizons, and by Mizuo Peck in the 2006 film Night at the Museum.

References