Sacajawea: What the Expedition Record Actually Says

The Lewis and Clark journals mention Sacajawea in hundreds of entries. She is the most documented woman in the entire expedition record. What the journals actually say about her is worth reading more carefully than the statues suggest.

She was a Shoshone-speaking woman who had been captured from her people by the Hidatsa as a child and was living in a Hidatsa village near Fort Mandan when the Corps of Discovery arrived in November of eighteen oh four. Her husband, a French Canadian fur trader named Toussaint Charbonneau, was hired as an interpreter. She came with him because the Corps needed someone who could communicate with the Shoshone: the expedition planned to obtain horses from them for the mountain crossing. Without horses, the western passage was impossible.

What the journals document is practical competence. She identified edible plants. She retrieved instruments and goods that fell overboard during a near-capsize. When the Corps reached the Shoshone, the chief turned out to be her brother. That recognition, and her negotiation, made the horse acquisition possible. The expedition would not have crossed the mountains without her.

The journals also document that she had no vote in the expedition's decisions and received no salary. Her husband was paid. After the expedition, the Corps brought her infant son, Jean Baptiste, to Saint Louis to be educated. He was about four years old. What happened to Sacajawea after that is not fully established in the public record. Her later history is a subject of genuine scholarly dispute, and the account that places her death in eighteen twelve appears in most credible sources.