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Episode 7: Sacagawea
Howdy folks, it’s the third week of December 2024 and welcome to This Week in The West.
I’m Seth Spillman, broadcasting from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
On this podcast, we share stories of the people and events that shaped the history, art and culture of the American West – and those still shaping it today.
We start today with two men who were among the country’s most skilled explorers, personally hand-picked by Thomas Jefferson to add an expansive new chapter to the story of the United States.
With them was a pregnant 16-year-old (but she could have been younger), accompanying a man who had purchased her to become his “wife” a few years earlier.
Ahead of them lay thousand of miles of the unknown country. That was in 1804. The men were Lewis and Clark. The girl was Sacagawea, who is thought to have died on this week, December 20, 1812.
Sacagawea has almost become a stock figure in our history of Westward Expansion. She’s often depicted literally pointing the way for Lewis and Clark, a baby strapped to her back.
There are more statues of Sacagawea in the country than any other American woman. She’s been memorialized on coins; she was a character in the movie “Night at the Museum” and was played in another film by Donna Reed.
But as we’ve often learned as a museum that shares the real stories of the West, it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Meriweather Lewis and William Clark didn’t meet up with Sacagawea and her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, until the pair reached North Dakota, looking for a place to build a fort and settle in for the winter.
She was first mentioned in Clark’s diary on November 4, 1804. The husband and wife had been hired as interpreters, hoping that she could help them with the Shoshone language.
Little is known about her early life, but she is thought to have been born around 1788 in present-day Idaho. She was part of the Lemhi Shoshone. When she was about 12, she was taken captive after a raid by the Hidatsa people. She was taken back to their village in what is now central North Dakota.
In that village, she was sold to Charbonneau, along with another girl. Charbonneau also told another story about how he had won her while gambling.
After hiring Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark invited her to stay at the newly built Fort Mandan. It was there, in February 1805, that she gave birth to her son.
Soon, the party was underway, looking for a tribe they could trade with for horses to help them cross the Rockies. They met up with some Shoshone, and it turned out the tribe’s leader was Sacagawea’s brother.
Clark wrote in his journal: “Before me at some distance (she) danced for the joyful sight, and she made signs to me that they were her nation.”
She helped to barter a deal, which secured horses and guides for the group to cross the Rocky Mountains.
The presence of Sacagawea and her baby helped Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery avoid more hostile encounters with native people. Having a woman and a baby in the party showed their peaceful intent.
Clark also wrote this in his journal: “The wife of Charbonneau our interpreter, we find reconciles all the Indians, as to our friendly intentions. A woman with a party of men is a token of peace.”
When the Corps reached the Pacific Ocean, all members of the expedition — including Sacagawea and Clark’s enslaved servant York — voted on November 24, 1805, on the location for building their winter fort.
Sacagawea helped Clark through the Rocky Mountains again on the return trip, guiding him through the Gibbons and Bozeman Passes in modern-day Montana. The same route was later chosen by the Northern Pacific Railway.
Once the expedition ended, Clark invited Charbonneau and Sacagawea to settle near him in St. Louis. Clark eventually adopted the baby boy, Jean-Baptiste, and put him in boarding school.
Sacagawea’s ultimate fate is in dispute. Most documents suggest today as the date of her death in 1812, when a clerk at Fort Lisa, North Dakota, wrote that “the wife of Charbonneau, a Shoshone, died of putrid fever (what we now call typhus).”
Other oral traditions say she left her husband, traveled West, and married into a Comanche tribe, living until 1884.
There’s no evidence to support that tale, which might be just another of the many legends associated with the story of Sacagawea.
If today’s date is true, the story has a much more tragic ending. On December 20, 1812, the supposed day of her death, Sacagawea was just 24.
And with that, we’ll end our journey on this episode of “This Week in The West.”
Our show is produced by Chase Spivey and written by Mike Koehler
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We leave you today with the words of Rozina George, a Shoshone elder, storyteller and Sacagawea descendent: “Sacagawea is the epitome of a Native American woman. It was her spirituality, her connection, and her teaching about our mother earth that helped her to persevere on the arduous journey … the nation and world have accepted Sacajawea as the symbol of unity and harmony because she was an individual who was willing to share her culture and knowledge to perpetuate peace.”
Much obliged for listening and remember, come Find Your West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
