Sacagawea


Sacagawea was a Lemhi Shoshone woman who, at age 16, met and helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition in achieving their chartered mission objectives by exploring the Louisiana Territory. Sacagawea traveled with the expedition thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean, helping to establish cultural contacts with Native American populations in addition to her contributions to natural history.
Sacagawea was an important member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The National American Woman Suffrage Association of the early 20th century adopted her as a symbol of women's worth and independence, erecting several statues and plaques in her memory, and doing much to spread the story of her accomplishments.

Pre-expedition

Reliable historical information about Sacagawea is very limited. She was born into the Agaidika tribe near Salmon, Lemhi County, which sits by the continental divide at the present-day Idaho-Montana border.
In 1800, when she was about 12 years old, she and several other girls were kidnapped by a group of Hidatsa in a battle that resulted in the deaths of several Shoshone: four men, four women, and several boys. She was held captive at a Hidatsa village near present-day Washburn, North Dakota.
At about age 13, she was sold into a non-consensual marriage to Toussaint Charbonneau, a Quebecois trapper living in the village who had also bought another young Shoshone, known as Otter Woman, as his wife. Charbonneau was variously reported to have purchased both girls to be his wives from the Hidatsa or to have won Sacagawea while gambling.

The Lewis & Clark Expedition

The Corps of Discovery arrived near the Hidatsa villages, where Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark built Fort Mandan, to spend the winter of 1804–05. They interviewed several trappers who might be able to interpret or guide the expedition up the Missouri River in the springtime. Knowing they would need the help of Shoshone tribes at the headwaters of the Missouri, they agreed to hire Toussaint Charbonneau after discovering that his wife, Sacagawea, who was pregnant with her first child at the time, spoke Shoshone.
On November 4, 1804, Clark recorded in his journal:
Charbonneau and Sacagawea moved into the expedition's fort a week later. Clark nicknamed her "Janey." Lewis recorded the birth of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau on February 11, 1805, noting that another of the party's interpreters administered crushed rattlesnake rattles in water to speed the delivery. Clark and other European-Americans nicknamed the boy "Little Pomp" or "Pompy."
In April, the expedition left Fort Mandan and headed up the Missouri River in pirogues. They had to be poled against the current 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 of Lewis and Clark. The corps commanders, who praised her quick action, named the Sacagawea River in her honor on May 20, 1805. By August 1805, the corps had located a Shoshone tribe and was attempting to trade for horses to cross the Rocky Mountains. They used Sacagawea to interpret and discovered that the tribe's chief, Cameahwait, was her brother.
Lewis recorded their reunion in his journal:
And Clark in his:
The Shoshone agreed to barter horses to the group and to provide guides to lead them over the cold and barren Rocky Mountains. The trip was so hard that they were reduced to eating tallow candles to survive. When they descended into the more temperate regions on the other side, Sacagawea helped to find and cook camas roots to help them regain their strength.
As the expedition approached the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Coast, Sacagawea gave up her beaded belt to enable the captains to trade for a fur robe they wished to give to President Thomas Jefferson.
Clark's journal entry for November 20, 1805, reads:
. A painting of the Expedition depicting Sacagawea with arms outstretched.
When the corps reached the Pacific Ocean, all members of the expedition—including Sacagawea and Clark's black manservant York—voted on November 24 on the location for building their winter fort. In January, when a whale's carcass washed up onto the beach south of Fort Clatsop, Sacagawea insisted on her right to go see this "monstrous fish."
On the return trip, they approached the Rocky Mountains in July 1806. On July 6, Clark recorded:
The Indian woman informed me that she had been in this plain frequently and knew it well.… She said we would discover a gap in the mountains in our direction .
A week later, on July 13, Sacagawea advised Clark to cross into the Yellowstone River basin at what is now known as Bozeman Pass. Later, this was chosen as the optimal route for the Northern Pacific Railway to cross the continental divide.
While Sacagawea has been depicted as a guide for the expedition, she is recorded as providing direction in only a few instances. Her work as an interpreter certainly helped the party to negotiate with the Shoshone; however, her greatest value to the mission may have been simply her presence during the arduous journey, which demonstrated the peaceful intent of the expedition.
While traveling through what is now Franklin County, Washington, in October 1805, Clark noted that "the wife of Shabono our interpetr we find reconsiles all the Indians, as to our friendly intentions a woman with a party of men is a token of peace," and that she "confirmed those people of our friendly intentions, as no woman ever accompanies a war party of Indians in this quarter".
As he traveled downriver from Fort Mandan at the end of the journey, on board the pirogue near the Ricara Village, Clark wrote to Charbonneau:

Later life and death

Children

Following the expedition, Charbonneau and Sacagawea spent 3 years among the Hidatsa 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, Lizette Charbonneau, sometime after 1810. However, there is no later record of Lizette among Clark's papers. It is believed that she died in childhood.

Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau

Sacagawea's son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, continued a restless and adventurous life. He carried lifelong celebrity status as the infant who went with the explorers to the Pacific Ocean and back. When he was 18, he was befriended by a German Prince, Duke Paul Wilhelm of Württemberg, who took him to Europe. There, Jean-Baptiste spent six years living among royalty, while learning four languages and fathering a child in Germany named Anton Fries.
After his infant son died, Jean-Baptiste came back from Europe in 1829 to live the life of a Western frontiersman. He became a gold miner and a hotel clerk and in 1846 led a group of Mormons to California. While in California he became a magistrate for the Mission San Luis Rey. He disliked the way Indians were treated in the Missions and left to become a hotel clerk in Auburn, California, once the center of gold rush activity.
After working six years in Auburn, the restless Jean-Baptiste left in search of riches in the gold mines of Montana. He was 61 years old, and the trip was too much for him. He became ill with pneumonia and died in a remote area near Danner, Oregon, on May 16, 1866.

Death

According to Bonnie "Spirit Wind-Walker" Butterfield, historical documents suggest that Sacagawea died in 1812 of an unknown sickness. For instance, a journal entry from 1811 by Henry Brackenridge, a fur trader at Fort Lisa Trading Post on the Missouri River, wrote that Sacagawea and Charbonneau were living at the fort. Brackenrige recorded that Sacagawea "had become sickly and longed to revisit her native country." Butterfield then points to the following year, 1812, where a Fort-Lisa clerk, John Luttig, recorded in his journal on December 20 that "the wife of Charbonneau, a Snake Squaw , died of putrid fever." He goes on to say that she was "aged about 25 years. She left a fine infant girl." Furthermore, documents held by Clark show that her son Baptiste already had been entrusted by Charbonneau into Clark's care for a boarding school education, at Clark's insistence.
, 2003
In February 1813, a few months after Luttig's journal entry, 15 men were killed in a Native attack on Fort Lisa, then located at the mouth of the Bighorn River. Luttig and Sacagawea's young daughter were among the survivors. Charbonneau was mistakenly thought to have been killed at this time, but he apparently lived to at least age 76. He had signed over formal custody of his son to William Clark in 1813.
As further proof that Sacagawea died in 1812, Butterfield writes:
An adoption document made in the Orphans Court Records in St. Louis, Missouri, states, '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 and 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."
Some Native American oral traditions relate that, rather than dying in 1812, Sacagawea left her husband Charbonneau, crossed the Great Plains, and married into a Comanche tribe. She was said to have returned to the Shoshone in 1860 in Wyoming, where she died in 1884.

Remains

The question of Sacagawea's final resting place caught the attention of national suffragists seeking voting rights for women, according to author Raymond Wilson. Wilson argues that Sacagawea became a role model whom suffragettes pointed to "with pride." Wilson goes on to note:
Interest in Sacajawea peaked and controversy intensified when Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard, professor of political economy at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and an active supporter of the Nineteenth Amendment, campaigned for federal legislation to erect an edifice honoring Sacajawea's death in 1884.

In 1925, Dr. Charles Eastman, a Dakota Sioux physician, was hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to locate Sacagawea's remains. Eastman visited various Native American tribes to interview elderly individuals who might have known or heard of Sacagawea. He learned of a Shoshone woman at the Wind River Reservation with the Comanche name Porivo. Some of those he interviewed said that she spoke of a long journey wherein she had helped white men, and that she had a silver Jefferson peace medal of the type carried by the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He found a Comanche woman named Tacutine who said that Porivo was her grandmother. According to Tacutine, Porivo had married into a Comanche tribe and had a number of children, including Tacutine's father, Ticannaf. Porivo left the tribe after her husband, Jerk-Meat, was killed.
According to these narratives, Porivo lived for some time at Fort Bridger in Wyoming with her sons Bazil and Baptiste, who each knew several languages, including English and French. Eventually, she found her way back to the Lemhi Shoshone at the Wind River Reservation, where she was recorded as "Bazil's mother." This woman, Porivo is believed to have died on April 9, 1884.
It was Eastman's conclusion that Porivo was Sacagawea. In 1963, a monument to "Sacajawea of the Shoshonis" was erected at Fort Washakie on the Wind River reservation near Lander, Wyoming, on the basis of this claim.
The belief that Sacagawea lived to old age and died in Wyoming was widely disseminated in the United States through Sacajawea, a biography written by University of Wyoming professor and historian Grace Raymond Hebard, which includes the professor's own 30 years of research. However, critics have called Hebard's work into question, as she presents a stout-hearted woman in her portrayal of Sacajawea that is "undeniably long on romance and short on hard evidence, suffering from a sentimentalization of Indian culture."

Spelling of name

A long-running controversy has surrounded the correct spelling, pronunciation, and etymology of the woman's name; however, linguists working on Hidatsa since the 1870s have always considered the name's Hidatsa etymology essentially indisputable. The name is a compound of two common Hidatsa nouns: cagáàga and míà. The compound is written as Cagáàgamia in modern Hidatsa orthography, and pronounced . The double in the name indicates a long vowel, while the diacritics suggest a falling pitch pattern.
Hidatsa is a pitch-accent language that does not have stress; therefore, in the Hidatsa pronunciation all syllables in are pronounced with roughly the same relative emphasis. However, most English speakers perceive the accented syllable as stressed. In faithful rendering of Cagáàgawia to other languages, it is advisable to emphasize the second, long syllable, rather than the last, as is common in English.
The name has several spelling traditions in English. The origin of each tradition is described in the following sections.

Sacagawea

Sacagawea is the most widely-used spelling of her name, pronounced with a hard "g" sound, rather than a soft "g" or "j" sound. Lewis and Clark's original journals mention Sacagawea by name seventeen times, spelled eight different ways, each time with a "g". Clark used Sahkahgarwea, Sahcahgagwea, Sarcargahwea, and Sahcahgahweah, while Lewis used Sahcahgahwea, Sahcahgarweah, Sahcargarweah, and Sahcahgar Wea.
The spelling Sacagawea was established in 1910 by the Bureau of American Ethnology as the proper usage in government documents. It would be the spelling adopted by the U.S. Mint for use with the dollar coin, as well as the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and the National Park Service. The spelling is also used by a large number of historical scholars.

Sakakawea

Sakakawea is the next most widely-adopted spelling, and is the most-often accepted among specialists. Proponents say the name comes from the Hidatsa tsakáka wía. Charbonneau told expedition members that his wife's name meant "Bird Woman," and in May 1805 Lewis used the Hidatsa meaning in his journal:
handsome river of about fifty yards in width discharged itself into the shell river… his stream we called Sah-ca-gah-we-ah or bird woman's River, after our interpreter the Snake woman.

Sakakawea is the official spelling of her name according to the Three Affiliated Tribes, which include the Hidatsa, and is widely used throughout North Dakota, notably in the naming of Lake Sakakawea, the extensive reservoir of Garrison Dam on the Missouri River.
The North Dakota State Historical Society quotes Russell Reid's book Sakakawea: The Bird Woman:
Her Hidatsa name, which Charbonneau stated meant "Bird Woman," should be spelled "Tsakakawias" according to the foremost Hidatsa language authority, Dr. Washington Matthews. When this name is anglicized for easy pronunciation, it becomes Sakakawea, "Sakaka" meaning "bird" and "wea" meaning "woman." This is the spelling adopted by North Dakota. The spelling authorized for the use of federal agencies by the United States Geographic Board is Sacagawea. Although not closely following Hidatsa spelling, the pronunciation is quite similar and the Geographic Board acknowledged the name to be a Hidatsa word meaning "Bird Woman.

Nevertheless, Irving W. Anderson, president of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, argues:
he Sakakawea spelling similarly is not found in the Lewis and Clark journals. To the contrary, this spelling traces its origin neither through a personal connection with her nor in any primary literature of the expedition. It has been independently constructed from two Hidatsa Indian words found in the dictionary Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians, published by the Government Printing Office. Compiled by a United States Army surgeon, Dr. Washington Matthews, 65 years following Sacagawea's death, the words appear verbatim in the dictionary as "tsa-ka-ka, noun; a bird," and "mia , noun; a woman.

Sacajawea

The name Sacajawea or Sacajewea, in contrast to the Hidatsa etymology, is said to have derived from Shoshone Saca-tzaw-meah, 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—they heard a name that approximated tsakaka and wia, and interpreted it as 'bird woman', substituting the hard "g/k" pronunciation for the softer "tz/j" sound that did not exist in the Hidatsa language.
The use of this spelling almost certainly originated from the use of the "j" spelling by Nicholas Biddle, who annotated the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition for publication in 1814. This use became more widespread with the publication of the 1902 novel , written by Eva Emery Dye. It is likely that Dye used Biddle's secondary source for the spelling, and her highly popular book made it ubiquitous throughout the United States.
Rozina George, great-great-great-great-granddaughter 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 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 word for her name. Sacajawea was a Lemhi Shoshone not a Hidatsa.

Idaho native John Rees explored the 'boat launcher' etymology in a long letter to the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs written in the 1920s. It was republished in 1970 by the Lemhi County Historical Society as a pamphlet entitled "Madame Charbonneau" and contains many of the arguments in favor of the Shoshone derivation of the name.
The spelling Sacajawea, although 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." The spelling has subsided from general use, although the corresponding "soft j" pronunciation persists in American culture.

In popular culture

Some fictional accounts speculate that Sacagawea was romantically involved with Lewis or Clark during their expedition, however, while the journals show that she was friendly with Clark and would often do favors for him, the idea of a romantic liaison was created by novelists who wrote about the expedition much later. This fiction was perpetuated in the Western film The Far Horizons.

Film and television

Several movies, both documentaries and fiction, have been made about, or featuring, Sacagawea:
In 1967, the actress Victoria Vetri, under the name Angela Dorian, played Sacajawea in the episode "The Girl Who Walked the West" of the syndicated television series, Death Valley Days.

Literature

Two early twentieth-century novels shaped much of the public perception of Sacagawea. The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark, was written by American suffragist Eva Emery Dye and published in anticipation of the expedition's centennial. The National American Woman Suffrage Association embraced her as a female hero, and numerous stories and essays about her appeared in ladies' journals. A few decades later, Grace Raymond Hebard published Sacajawea: Guide and Interpreter of Lewis and Clark to even greater success.
Sacagawea has since become a popular figure in historical and young adult novels. In her novel Sacajawea, Anna Lee Waldo explored the story of Sacajawea's returning to Wyoming 50 years after her departure. The author was well aware of the historical research supporting an 1812 death, but she chose to explore the oral tradition.

Music and theatre

The Dinner Party, an artwork installation by feminist artist Judy Chicago, features a place setting for Sacagawea in Wing Three, titled American Revolution to the Women's Revolution.
The first episode of the history podcast, The Broadsides, includes discussion of Sacagawea and her accomplishments during the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Memorials and honours

Sacagawea was an important member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The National American Woman Suffrage Association of the early 20th century adopted her as a symbol of women's worth and independence, erecting several statues and plaques in her memory, and doing much to spread the story of her accomplishments.
In 1959, she was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Likewise, in 1976, she became a Hall-of-Fame Honoree of the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2001, she was given the title of Honorary Sergeant, Regular Army, by then-president Bill Clinton. In 2003, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
USS Sacagawea, one of several United States ships named in her honor.

Coinage

In 2000, the United States Mint issued the Sacagawea dollar coin in her honor, depicting Sacagawea and her son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. Because no contemporary image of Sacagawea exists, the face on the coin was modeled on a modern Shoshone-Bannock woman named Randy'L He-dow Teton. The portrait design is unusual, as the copyrights have been assigned to and are owned by the U.S. Mint. Therefore the portrait is not in the public domain, as most US coin designs are.

Geography and parks

'', Washington Park, Alice Cooper, sculptor

Sculpture