Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans

12. The Kin of Sacajawea: Emma George and Summer Morning Baldwin (Lemhi Shoshone)

233 c h a p t e r 1 2  The Kin of Sacajawea emma george and summer morning baldwin (lemhi shoshone) Emma George “I remember my dad telling us pretty much all our lives, from when I was like six years old, ‘Don’t you forget who you are. You come from chiefs. Chief Tendoy is your great great grandfather. Your ancestor is Sacajawea.’ But when you’re young, you go, ‘Okay Dad, yeah, all right.’” Emma George, curled on her springy couch, smiled at the memory. Light through seen-better-days Venetian blinds warmed the living room of her house on the Fort Hall Reservation in southeastern Idaho. Photographs of relatives hung everywhere. Behind her, on a yellow wall, was one of her father, Wilford George, often called Willie, wearing the regalia of the Lemhi Shoshones. His mother died when he was a toddler, and his father, who was also known as Willie George, went off to earn money, including working as a showcase Indian for the Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West extravaganza. His grandparents raised him. Willie’s grandfather, Emma continued, fought in the Bannock War of 1878, one of several between Natives and Idaho settlers. “His Indian name was Topa-dah. That means ‘breechcloth.’” Topa-dah’s wife was Weetoi’-si. “That means ‘drumming’ in Shoshone. My dad’s great grandfather was Naki-zaka, which mean ‘breaks belt.’” Clearly, each name was precious to her. The name that brought Emma George to my attention was Sacajawea. The Lewis and Clark expedition member who joined the group in late 1804, Sacajawea proved vital to its success. When the expedition got under way, CH012.qxd 12/14/10 8:19 AM Page 233 she was some six months pregnant and married (not necessarily of her own volition) to French Canadian fur trapper Toussaint Charbonneau, who had been hired as an interpreter. In the course of the exhausting trek, Sacajawea famously was reunited with her brother, the Shoshone leader Cameahwait. In Shoshone lore, the two were separated after the Mandan Hidatsas kidnapped her as a young girl. Without her and Cameahwait’s help, Lewis and Clark and their doughty but sometimes starving group might never have reached the Pacific. Only four generations separate Sacajawea from Emma Lou George. The connection is Cameahwait, which in Shoshone, said Emma, means “Won’t Go.” One of his children was the esteemed Lemhi Shoshone chief Tendoy, who, according to the family, called Sacajawea “auntie.” Born around 1834, Tendoy managed not only to keep his people from joining Indian wars, distracting them by initiating bison hunts into Montana, but built relationships with white settlers in and around Salmon, the area’s only town. Tendoy also attempted to retain his people’s beloved homeland in the mountains of Idaho’s Salmon River country. That meant thwarting enormous pressures to vacate it for their assigned place of exile, the flat and unwelcoming Shoshone-Bannock Fort Hall Reservation two hundred miles to the south. In 1868, Tendoy and eleven subchiefs reluctantly signed a treaty granting the Lemhi Shoshones some land along the Salmon River in exchange for increasingly needed annuities. The U.S. Senate, however, never ratified the treaty. In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant approved a reservation, described as “tiny,” along the Lemhi River. The land could not support the seven hundred people who occupied it.1 Finally, in 1905, even Tendoy gave in. The exodus of his destitute people to Fort Hall began in 1907, their weeping reportedly so loud it was heard for miles. The Lemhi Shoshones may have been crying not only for their homeland but their leader. Chief Tendoy was dead.2 He was Emma’s great great grandfather. His son, Hoorah (pronounced HOOR-ah) Tendoy, was born in 1858 and died in 1912 without leaving a sizeable historical legacy. His daughter, Emma’s grandmother and namesake, Emma Tendoy George, was the woman whose early death, in 1929, left Emma’s father, Wilford “Willie” George, in the care of his grandparents. the kin of sacajawea 234 CH012.qxd 12/14/10 8:19 AM Page 234 His daughters, Emma and her two older sisters, Rose Ann and Rozina, thus are the great great great grandnieces of Sacajawea and, following the death of their younger brother years ago, are her closest known blood relatives . (Sacajawea’s two children are not believed to have reached adulthood.) Other individuals claim connection...