Sacajawea and the Wind River

The most famous Shoshone woman in American history was born sometime around seventeen eighty-eight or seventeen eighty-nine, probably near the headwaters of the Salmon River in present-day Idaho. Her name was Sacajawea, and the name in Hidatsa, the language of the people who captured her in a raid around eighteen hundred, likely meant Bird Woman. She was purchased as a wife by Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trader, while still a teenager.

It was in that capacity, as Charbonneau's wife, that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark hired them both as interpreters for the Corps of Discovery in the winter of eighteen oh four and eighteen oh five. Sacajawea was essential to the expedition's success in ways that the captains' journals document in detail. She served as an interpreter in negotiations with the Shoshone bands that controlled the mountain passes the expedition needed to cross.

When the party met a Shoshone chief named Cameahwait at the continental divide in August of eighteen oh five, Sacajawea recognized him as her brother. The reunion, Lewis wrote in his journal, was among the most affecting scenes he had ever witnessed. What happened to Sacajawea after the expedition is disputed among historians.

William Clark's records suggest she died at Fort Manuel in present-day South Dakota in December of eighteen twelve, at around twenty-five years of age. A competing tradition, supported by oral history among the Eastern Shoshone, holds that she returned to her people, lived to old age, and died in eighteen eighty-four at the Wind River Indian Reservation. A grave marker at the reservation's Saint Stephens Mission cemetery is identified as hers.

The question has not been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. What is certain is that she is buried in Wyoming's memory, wherever her bones lie.