On this second Saturday of Women's History Month, I take up the inspiring story of one of the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition. By the way, if you enjoy this column, make sure to read my series on Lewis and Clark, coming up in May.
If you are, like me, a sucker for incredible tales of rugged adventure, you can’t do much better than the Lewis and Clark expedition. From May 1804 until September 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, along with their crew — together known as the Corps of Discovery — hiked, paddled, sailed, hauled, poled, rode, and portaged thousands of miles across the American West, enduring bitter cold and snow, rain, heat, storms, run-ins with indigenous people, and bouts with bears, fleas, mosquitoes, dysentery, and more.
Lewis and Clark, however, were not the most intrepid pair on this expedition.
At Fort Mandan in modern North Dakota, they met a Shoshone teenager named Sacagawea (sometimes known as Sacajawea). Around the age of 11, she had been abducted by members of the Hidatsa tribe in her homeland in the Rocky Mountain region and was now living with the Hidatsas on the Great Plains as the wife of a French-Canadian trader named Touissaint Charbonneau. During the winter of 1804-1805, while the Corps of Discovery was wintering at Fort Mandan, Sacagawea gave birth to a son, Jean Baptiste. So far this story doesn't sound all that impressive. Raising a child in those days before modern medicine, diapers, iPads, and a steady supply of Barney and Friends had to have been far more difficult than most of us can understand or even imagine, but it was something mothers had been doing since there were mothers and babies. What makes this story impressive, even inspirational is what happened next.
When the Corps of Discovery left their winter quarters in April to continue their journey across the American West, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and their two-month-old son came with them. It might seem like a strange choice. Wouldn't traveling with a teenage girl and her baby complicate an already complicated journey, one involving arduous travel, adverse (to say the least) weather conditions, potential food shortages and illness, and possibly dangerous encounters with animals (such as bears and snakes), as well as hostile indigenous tribes? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes — but Sacagawea had grown up Shoshone, so she knew the language of that tribe, which perhaps could provide horses the corps would need to cross the mountains. If she did nothing else, the ability to act as an interpreter and help secure those vital horses would be an invaluable asset.
As it turned out, she would do much more.
Oddly enough, Sacagawea is probably known primarily for something she did not do while her actual contributions are not widely known. You may have seen one of the various images of her pointing, perhaps even standing with Lewis and Clark and extending her arm as if showing them the way. It’s an attractive notion, one easy to illustrate in this way, but it’s a bit misleading. For much of the journey, after all, the corps was simply following the Missouri River, and, on the one occasion where there was a question of whether to travel left or right at a fork, Lewis and Clark apparently made the decision without help from the Shoshone girl. Later, after they passed her homeland, it seems unlikely that she would have known the Pacific Northwest well enough to provide any guidance. She did recognize a major landmark and later helped guide them to the Bozeman Pass, but she certainly wasn’t leading them across the West.
What, then, did this teenage girl contribute to an expedition led by two masterful explorers?
When the Corps of Discovery reached her homeland in what is today eastern Idaho, she did act as an interpreter, as did Charbonneau. Both wife and husband, along with a French-speaking member of Lewis and Clark’s crew, were necessary because no single person or even pair of people knew all of the necessary languages. Most of the corps members knew English, and one knew English and French. Charbonneau knew French and Hidatsa, and Sacagawea knew Hidatsa and Shoshone. Through this chain, communication could flow from the English-speaking Lewis and Clark to the Shoshone chief.
There was a surprise, though, and, unlike the string of falls that forced the 18-mile portage a few months earlier, this surprise was a good one. The Shoshone chief, Cameahwait, turned out to be Sacagawea's brother. This fortuitous connection surely helped grease the wheels for a positive reception. The corps secured the horses they needed and crossed the Bitterroot Mountains.
There were other contributions, as well. Sacagawea’s mere presence may have warded off attacks from indigenous tribes, since, as Clark noted in the October 19, 1805, entry of his journal,
“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.”
She also apparently helped feed the crew by gathering hog peanuts and breadroot. Describing her method of collecting the hog peanuts, which he called “wild artichokes,” Lewis wrote:
"when we halted for dinner the squaw busied herself in serching for the wild artichokes which the mice collect and deposit in large hoards. this operation she performed by penetrating the earth with a sharp stick about some small collections of drift wood. her labour soon proved successful, and she procurrd a good quantity of these roots"
One of her contributions was more dramatic, worthy of Hollywood. When a squall struck, a boat carrying papers, medicine, and more took in water. Charbonneau, whom Lewis called “perhaps the most timid waterman in the world” was at the helm, but not worthy of it, as Lewis made clear in his journal entry:
"Charbono still crying to his god for mercy, had not yet recollected the rudder, nor could the repeated orders of the Bowsman, Cruzat, bring him to his recollection untill he threatend to shoot him instantly if he did not take hold of the rudder and do his duty . . ."
Faced with this potential disaster, Sacagawea proved as unflappable as her husband was feckless. She managed to recover most of the valuable items before they were lost in the water, as Clark explained in his journal, writing, “the articles which floated out was nearly all caught by the Squar [squaw] who was in the rear.”
Alas, we have to depend on a handful of details such as this one to develop a sense of Sacagawea's personality, since, as Erica Funkhouser explains:
"Sacagawea kept no journal. She wrote no letters. No oral tradition preserved her story in her own words. . . . With a few exceptions, the captains do not record Sacagawea's appearance, her language, or her mannerisms; they do not describe her temperament or her strengths and weaknesses or venture to guess what she is feeling."
Indeed, Funkhouser notes that Lewis and Clark mentioned Sacagawea only a few dozen times in their voluminous journals.
We can wish that they had written more about her or that she had left behind her own account of the expedition, but what we know is enough to inspire anyone, especially those of us who have, like Sacagawea, been blessed and challenged with the most important job in the world.
Even under the best conditions, parenting can be daunting, taxing, exhausting. The stakes are as high as they get, and none of us receive adequate preparation before literally holding a precious, tender, helpless life in our hands. Most of us strive to do our best, but make too many mistakes, maybe because we are forced to do much of the work while, exhausted and sleep-deprived, we juggle careers and other responsibilities.
I’m proud of the work that my wife and I did in raising our two children, but I can’t say that we ever carried them thousands of miles over largely unknown, often treacherous terrain. We never portaged 18 miles over prickly pear cactus or traveled with our children on a horse tramping over 20 feet of snow. We didn’t endure a storm throwing down softball-sized hailstones, near starvation in the Bitterroot Mountains, living quarters infested with fleas, or 94 days of rain in a 106-day period. That rainy season in the Pacific Northwest in the winter of 1805-1806 was enough to rattle even the normally stoic William Clark.
Did all that rain—or any of the other daily trials, petty annoyances, and life-threatening ordeals—unnerve Sacagawea? What was going through her mind as she traveled—and parented—for mile after mile after mile, day after day after day, travail after travail after travail? We will never know.
What we do know is that she endured—and thanks to her, so did her child. Jean Baptiste Charbonneau grew up to become a hunter, a trapper, a guide for a Mormon battalion, a miner, and more before his death in 1866, more than 60 years after riding on this mother’s back across the American West.
That future was possible because of the stamina, perseverance, devotion, and just plain grit of a teenage girl who made America’s greatest journey while surviving for two.
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