Sacagawea (1788?-1884?)

views updated

Sacagawea (1788?-1884?)

Shoshone interpreter

Bird Woman. Sacagawea, the Bird Woman, played an important role in opening up the western territories for settlement by Americans. She was a Shoshone born in the western Rocky Mountains around 1788. When she was about ten or eleven, she traveled east with her family to Three Forks, where the headwaters of the Missouri River begins, in present-day Montana. While there they were attacked by Minnetaree warriors, and Sacagawea and another girl were taken captive. It is not certain how long she remained the captive of the Minnetarees, but at some point she became the wife of Toussaint Charbon-neau, a French-Canadian fur trapper and interpreter, and left them.

Lewis and Clark. In November 1805 she and her husband traveled to the camp of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark near the Mandan tribe in North Dakota. She was approximately sixteen years old at the time. When Lewis and Clark left Fort Mandan in the spring of 1806, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and their infant son Baptiste, who had been born at the fort the previous February, accompanied the expedition. It was not that Lewis and Clark particularly needed Charbonneau’s skills as a guide or interpreter. Lewis and Clark knew they would need to get horses from the Shoshone, and Sacagawea was the only one who spoke the language. Since they needed her, they agreed to take Charbonneau with them. Contrary to the popular belief, Sacagawea did not serve as a guide. She had not traveled in the land of the Shoshone since she was a young girl. In addition to serving the expedition as an interpreter, she knew how to find edible roots and vegetation that were important supplements to the group’s diet. She also was instrumental in saving much of the group’s supplies when a canoe overturned.

Reunion. When they reached the Shoshone territory, Sacagawea was reunited with her brother Chief Cameah-wait and other family members. She also saw old friends, including the woman she had been kidnapped with years ago. Nonetheless, when Lewis and Clark returned to the East, she left with them. The expedition was clearly an important part of her life, and she received gifts and recognition for her role in the endeavor throughout her life. She was even given free passage on the stage lines that ran throughout the West. But her life after the expedition was equally interesting.

Mystery. When Sacagawea left the expedition in 1806, she was not even twenty years old. What happened next to her is somewhat of a mystery. Some historians believe that Sacagawea died at Fort Manuel on the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota on 20 December 1812. They base their conclusion on three recorded accounts that maintain she contracted putrid fever and died soon afterward. Other historians assert that Sacagawea lived to be nearly one hundred years old, and they base their findings on the oral tradition of the Shoshone, Comanche, Mandan, and Gros Ventre tribes. According to the oral tradition, Sacagawea traveled throughout the West living with many different Indian tribes, including the Comanche in Oklahoma. She remarried there and had children and grandchildren; after her Comanche husband died, she left. She finally settled at the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, where she lived with her son Bazil. It is believed that Bazil was the son of Charbonneau and his other Shoshone wife. (Tribal historians argue that it was Charbonneau’s second wife who died at Fort Manuel in 1812.) Sacagawea adopted him because he was treated badly by Charbonneau. The son that she had with Charbonneau, Baptiste, also lived on that reservation. Those who believe the oral tradition say that she died on 9 April 1884 and was buried, according to Bazil’s request, with a Christian service and in a church cemetery because she was a friend of the whites. Bazil died the next year, followed by Baptiste in 1886.