Sacajawea: The Biography the Monuments Buried

She was born in the Lemhi River valley of present-day Idaho, probably around seventeen eighty-eight, into the Lemhi Shoshone band whose territory covered the Salmon River drainage and the Continental Divide. Her Shoshone name is not preserved in the historical record. Lewis and Clark's journals referred to her most often as "the Indian woman," or simply by her husband's name. The monuments came later and gave her a name; the record itself almost erased her entirely.

She was around ten to twelve years old when Hidatsa raiders attacked her family's encampment on the headwaters of the Missouri River. She was taken captive, carried north to a Mandan village on the upper Missouri, and sometime in the years that followed was sold or gambled to a French-Canadian fur trader named Toussaint Charbonneau, who was considerably older than she was, by two or three decades. She became his wife. She was about thirteen or fourteen.

Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau was born on February eleventh, eighteen oh five, at Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota. His mother had been pregnant when she joined the Corps of Discovery as Charbonneau's wife. She carried the infant across the continent and back.

Her contribution to the Lewis and Clark expedition was not primarily navigation, a myth that accumulated in the century after her death. Her most documented role was diplomatic: her presence with a newborn child signaled to suspicious tribes that the expedition was not a war party. She identified her own brother, Cameahwait, as the Shoshone chief whose horses were essential to getting the Corps over the Bitterroot Mountains and down to the Columbia. Without those horses, the expedition likely failed.

The date of her death is genuinely disputed, and the historical record, written by outsiders, does not resolve it. Army records from Fort Manuel on the upper Missouri say she died there on December twentieth, eighteen twelve, of a putrid fever. Lemhi Shoshone oral tradition, carried by her descendants across generations, says she lived to nearly one hundred years old and died in eighteen eighty-four, and is buried at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Both accounts have their documentation. Neither has been definitively settled.