Sacagawea: The woman behind the myth

A statue in Fort Benton, Mont., depicts Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who aided them.

Guide. Interpreter. Diplomat. Wilderness-savvy savior of a group of hapless white men lost in the woods. Cook and seamstress. Model mother, feminist heroine, shy teen-ager, battered wife, focal point of an interracial romantic triangle.

Little is known about the only woman to accompany Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's Corps of Discovery on its journey through unmapped lands to the Pacific Ocean. Even the spelling of her name - Sacagawea, Sacajawea, Sakakwea - is in question. The details of her life before and after that adventure are obscure; the content of her character is merely implied by sparse written references in the explorers' journals; her thoughts and feelings are for the most part unrecorded and unknowable.

To history, she is thus a blank canvas, or one with only the barest outline sketched upon it, inviting generations of writers and storytellers to fill in the blanks with details sprung from their own imaginations, their own hopes and beliefs, or even their own political and philosophical agendas.

Sacagawea's true contributions to the Lewis and Clark expedition were significant, although not as extensive as many of her fans suggest. And although there are many legends and stories about her life before and after her journey to the Pacific, the historical record provides enough details for modern readers to discard the most clearly conjectural tales.

According to the journals of Lewis and Clark, who met Sacagawea when they wintered in North Dakota between Nov. 2, 1804, and April 17, 1805, she was a member of the "Snake" tribe, now known as the Shoshone. She was probably born around 1787 in the Rocky Mountains of today's Idaho, and was kidnapped around 1799 by a Hidatsa war party near Three Forks, Mont., when her people were on the plains hunting buffalo. She was taken to the Hidatsa villages near today's Washburn, N.D., where she lived for about four years before becoming the "wife" of trader Toussaint Charbonneau.

She was pregnant and 16 or 17 years old when Lewis and Clark hired her husband to serve as one of the expedition's interpreters. The commanders believed that Sacagawea's ties to the Shoshone would be useful during negotiations to purchase horses, which the explorers would need to carry their baggage over the Rockies.

Sacagawea did serve as an interpreter. She spoke no English, but she did speak Hidatsa and Shoshone. Her husband spoke French and Hidatsa. Another of the expedition's interpreters, Francois Labiche, spoke French and English. So, the translation chain went like this: Sacagawea spoke with the Shoshone horsemen in their language, and conveyed the conversation to Charbonneau in Hidatsa. He related it in French to Labiche, who rendered it into English for Lewis and Clark. Messages traveled back along the same chain from the explorers to the Indians.

A statue of Sacagawea and her son stands at the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismark, N.D.

Despite the many statues and paintings that depict Sacagawea standing heroically before Lewis and Clark and pointing the way they should travel, she was of no use as a guide during most of the journey because she had never been to any of the countryside through which the expedition passed. She did identify familiar landmarks when the explorers reached the area where she'd spent her childhood, which no doubt was encouraging to the men, and she helped Clark's party find the gap later known as Bozeman Pass during the return trip through the Rockies. Most of the time, though, she was no more familiar with the route than the rest of the group.

Nor was she particularly critical as a provider of food. The men had survived quite well in the wilderness before they met her, and were in fact skilled hunters and gatherers. She sometimes supplemented their meat diet with roots and plants, but it is an exaggeration to say that such help proved crucial to their survival.

Her crucial contribution to the expedition was that she was a woman with a child. As Clark wrote in his journal on Oct. 19, 1805, regarding a meeting with a tribe along the Columbia River, "The sight of this Indian woman, wife to one of our interprs. confirmed those people of our friendly intentions, as no woman ever accompanies a war party of Indians in this quarter." Repeatedly, the presence of a woman and infant likely helped the group of well-armed white men avoid hostile encounters as they passed through the territory of tribes for whom warfare and raiding were a way of life.

Sacagawea's fate after the expedition is a matter of dispute. She, Charbonneau and their son, Jean Baptiste, left the Corps of Discovery when it returned to the Hidatsa villages in North Dakota in August 1806. The Cheyenne believe she later left Charbonneau and married into their tribe. The Shoshone believe she returned to them and died on the Wind River Reservation near Lander, Wyo., where there is a grave marker for her.

That story may have originated in the early 1900s in the writings of Grace Heberd, a librarian at the University of Wyoming, who claimed that a 100-year-old woman who died on the reservation in 1884 was the expedition's "Sacajawea." A woman matching that description - but not that name - does appear in the reservation death rolls for that year, but her age would have made her too old to have been the teen-ager Lewis and Clark met in 1804.

The best documentary evidence suggests a different fate for Sacagawea. In his record book for Dec. 20, 1812, the post trader at Fort Manuel in present-day South Dakota, recorded the following note: "This evening the wife of Charbonneau, a Snake squaw, died of a putrid fever she was a good and the best woman in the fort, aged abt 25 years."