Sakakawea: The Shoshone Woman Who Opened the West

Her name is spelled three different ways depending on which state you're in. Sacagawea in Montana and Oregon, Sacajawea in Wyoming, and Sakakawea here in North Dakota, where the Hidatsa pronunciation is considered closest to the original. The debate over spelling is small compared to the debate over her life, because almost everything about her is contested except what she did.

She was born into a northern Shoshone band in what is now Idaho, probably around seventeen eighty-eight or seventeen eighty-nine. Between the ages of ten and twelve she was seized in a raid by Hidatsa warriors and taken to the Knife River villages near present-day Bismarck. There she became one of the wives of a French Canadian fur trader named Toussaint Charbonneau, a man who gambled at cards and had acquired her through that same process of trade and violence.

Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau in the winter of eighteen oh four, and Sakakawea came with him. She was pregnant. She gave birth to Jean Baptiste inside Fort Mandan on February eleventh, eighteen oh five, and about two months later was traveling west with an infant on her back.

Her contributions to the expedition were specific and concrete. She recognized landmarks in the Rocky Mountains near her homeland. She negotiated a crucial meeting with the Shoshone leader Cameahwait, who turned out to be her brother, and persuaded him to sell horses to the Corps of Discovery. Her presence alongside a baby signaled to every tribal nation they encountered that this was not a war party.

Charbonneau received pay and land. Sakakawea received nothing. Her age at the end of the expedition was perhaps twenty-five. The exact date and place of her death remains disputed by historians.