Sacajawea, Pioneer Mother of Oregon

This bronze figure of Sacajawea and her infant son Jean-Baptiste was, when it rose here, among the first American statues to honor a Native woman.

It was unveiled on the sixth of July, nineteen oh five, at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland. The sculptor was a woman, Alice Cooper, and the project was driven by suffragists who saw in Sacajawea both a guide of the great expedition and a symbol of women's strength. Susan B. Anthony and the Oregon reformer Abigail Scott Duniway were present at the dedication.

The inscription calls her the only woman in the Lewis and Clark expedition and the pioneer mother of Oregon. A year later the statue was moved here to Washington Park.

Her real story is more complicated than any statue can hold, a Lemhi Shoshone teenager carrying a baby across a continent. But this was an early, deliberate attempt to put her at the center.