Sakakawea: The Woman Who Guided the Corps

The lake named for her stretches across much of this landscape, but Sakakawea herself was born far from here. She was a Shoshone woman, probably born around seventeen eighty-eight, who had been captured by Hidatsa raiders as a child and raised in the Knife River villages. When Lewis and Clark wintered at Fort Mandan in eighteen oh four, they hired her husband, the French-Canadian trapper Toussaint Charbonneau, as an interpreter.

Sakakawea came with him, infant son on her back. She proved indispensable: she spoke Shoshone and could negotiate for the horses the expedition needed to cross the Rockies. Her presence also signaled to every nation the Corps encountered that this was not a war party.

Women and children do not travel with raiding parties.