Sacagawea

The raid came in 1800 and it killed four Shoshone men, four women and several boys. Sacagawea, about 12, was among the children carried off. Her people were the Agaidika, the Salmon Eaters, a Lemhi Shoshone band in the Lemhi River Valley near what is now Salmon, Idaho, hard against the Continental Divide. Her captors were Hidatsa, and they held her at a village near present-day Washburn, North Dakota. At about 13 she was given in a marriage she did not consent to, to Toussaint Charbonneau, a Quebecois trapper who kept a second young Shoshone wife called Otter Woman. Accounts differ on how he acquired her. Some say he bought both girls from the Hidatsa, others that he won her gambling.

She appears 108 times in the combined journals, and almost never by name. She is the wife of our interpreter, our squaw, the Snake woman. Clark called her Janey. The record credits her with giving directions in only a few places, all of them in present-day Montana: a gap through the mountains in early July 1806, and a week later the crossing that the Northern Pacific Railway would eventually use. BriefHistory tells the expedition and what she did for it. This page is about the woman those journals kept forgetting to name.

Near the mouth of the Columbia in November 1805 the captains wanted a robe made from two sea otter skins and could not buy it. Sacagawea gave up the belt of blue beads she wore at her waist, and the robe went east to Thomas Jefferson. Nothing was recorded as coming back to her. Writing to Charbonneau in August 1806, Clark said her services on that long and fatiguing route deserved a greater reward than the captains had it in their power to give her at the Mandan villages. It was an apology, not a payment. The same letter asked for the boy. Clark wanted to raise Jean Baptiste as his own child, and in the end did: the family came down to St. Louis in 1809 and left the boy's schooling to him.

She died twice in the record. A Fort Manuel clerk, John Luttig, wrote on December 20, 1812 that Charbonneau's Snake wife had died of putrid fever at about 25, leaving an infant girl. A St. Louis court declared both children orphans that August. Against that stand a Wind River grave dated April 9, 1884, promoted by the suffragist Grace Raymond Hebard, and a Hidatsa account given in 1923 by Bulls Eye, who said she lived among his people until 1869. Clark's 1825 list marks her dead, and marks Patrick Gass dead too, though Gass lived to 1870. Charlottesville removed its statue of her in 2021 at the request of the Monacan Nation and her Idaho descendants, who called it servile.

Sacagawea's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Corps of Discovery expedition mission
  Interpreter from Fort Mandan to the Pacific and back, with an infant on the outward leg 1806
• Shoshone horse negotiation at the Continental Divide mission
  The animals that made the mountain crossing possible 1805
• The route over Bozeman Pass discovery
  Recommended to Clark on July 13, 1806, and later the Northern Pacific Railway crossing 1806
• Sacagawea River, Montana other
  Named for her by the captains on May 20, 1805, six days after she saved the records from a swamped boat 1805

• 1800 aged ~12 Taken captive at about 12 in a Hidatsa raid Four Shoshone men, four women and several boys were killed.
• November 4, 1804 aged 16 Lewis and Clark hire her husband at Fort Mandan Clark noted that Charbonneau's two wives were Snake Indians and that one would interpret.
• February 11, 1805 aged 16 Gives birth to Jean Baptiste at Fort Mandan Lewis recorded that crushed rattlesnake rattles in water were given to speed the delivery.
• May 14, 1805 aged 17 Retrieves the journals and instruments from a swamped boat The captains named the Sacagawea River for her six days later.
• November 20, 1805 aged 17 Trades her blue bead belt for a sea otter robe bound for Jefferson
• July 13, 1806 aged 18 Points Clark toward the pass into the Yellowstone basin The Northern Pacific Railway later crossed the divide there.
• 1809 aged ~21 The family settles in St. Louis and leaves her son's schooling to Clark
• December 20, 1812 aged 24 A Fort Manuel clerk records the death of Charbonneau's Shoshone wife Other traditions place her death in 1869 or 1884.
• 2000 The United States Mint issues the Sacagawea dollar No portrait from life exists, so the face was modeled on Randy'L He-dow Teton, a Shoshone-Bannock woman.

• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. expedition ordered by
• Bill Clinton b. 1946
  42nd president whose centrist politics, economic agenda, and impeachment shaped the post-Cold War era. named her honorary sergeant, 2001
• Kit Carson 1809–1868
  Frontiersman and scout who guided John C. Frémont and became a legend of the American West. followed the routes she walked
• Sequoyah 1770–1843
  Cherokee scholar who created the Cherokee syllabary, enabling mass literacy and strengthening Cherokee political and cultural life. Native contemporary who left his own record
• Chief Joseph 1840–1904
  Nez Perce leader remembered for resistance to forced removal and eloquent advocacy for his people. later fought the traffic she guided