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274 S Sacajawea (Shoshone, 1788–1812?/1884?). Sacajawea, or Sok-a-jaw-a, means “Someone Who Pushes the Boat Away from the Land” in Shoshone. But in Hidatsa, the unrelated Plains Indian language she also spoke, the name of this famous Native American women who participated in the epic journey of Lewis and Clark (1804–6) is translated as Bird Woman. Born near Salmon, Idaho, the territory of Lemhi Shoshone Fish-Eaters (Agaidukada) (see Shoshone), Sacajawea was captured by the Hidatsa at age twelve during a raid in 1800 at Three Forks, Montana, while gathering chokecherries . Given over then to a family to replace their own child killed in war, she was subsequently sold to the French fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau. When he was hired as a translator for the scientific and exploratory “Corps of Discovery” expedition sent out by President Thomas Jefferson in 1804 to find the legendary east-west transcontinental waterway Americans believed would gain commercial advantage, and ultimately wrest control of the land from rival European powers as well as help accomplish the country’s Manifest Destiny imperialistic dreams (see Buenaventura River; El Gran Teguayo), Sacajawea was forced to participate. Jefferson’s charge regarding their search for the “Sea of Cathay” was stated as such” “The object of your missions is to explore . . . the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purpose of commerce” (Blackhawk 2006, 151). Although “Janey”—as Sacajawea was nicknamed by William Clark, coleader of that epic journey who subsequently adopted her child—is no longer called the Lewis and Clark expedition’s “official guide,” without the Shoshone woman’s knowledge of her first language, not to mention recollected familiarity with Idaho’s landscape and fateful meeting with her brother in Idaho, it is doubtful whether those explorers would have succeeded. In any event, Sacajawea’s (tearful) reunion on August 17, 1805, with Chief Cameahwait in the Lemhi Valley vetted the expedition with not only food and horses, but also Shoshone guides to lead them across the Bitterroot Mountains and down the Salmon and Columbia Rivers to the Pacific Ocean, which Lewis and Clark finally reached on November 7, 1805. Following their return to St. Louis, Missouri, Clark, a bachelor, convinced Sacajawea to allow him to raise Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the son she gave birth to on the upper Missouri on February 11, 1805. The fascinating life of “Pomp,” as Charbonneau was nicknamed, included his European education (in Germany) and close friendship with Prince Paul of Württemberg, followed by the half-Shoshone’s subsequent travels throughout the American West with European royalty and employment as a guide for both California emigrants and the Mormon Battalion during the Mexican War and a life of additional adventure as a fur trader, ’49er, and gold miner in Montana. Sacajawea’s son died in May 1866, reportedly near the Owyhee River in Nevada; his grave in southeastern Oregon was listed in 1971 under the National Register of Historic Places (Furtwangler 2001). s a c a j a w e a 275 Whether the official “guide” or not, among Sacajawea’s heroic actions during the Lewis and Clark expedition was her rescue of Captain Clark’s journals from the Yellowstone River’s headwaters on April 25, 1805, after his canoe had capsized. After she surrendered custody of her son to him, the “Bird Woman” left her common-law husband and took off on a solo cross-country odyssey. Residing first with the historically related Comanche in Oklahoma, Sacajawea married a Comanche named Jerk Meat and parented a second family consisting of five children, two of whom survived. However, the marriage did not last long. Thus, with her new name, Porivo (possibly meaning “Chief Woman”), she continued westward, heading toward Northern Shoshone country, where among other activities Sacajawea reportedly then worked as a translator for a famous Eastern Shoshone chief (see Washakie). One of the main unresolved issues surrounding the life of Sacajawea is whether she died young—of “putrid fever”—on December 20, 1812, at Fort Manuel, at age twenty-five, and was buried in South Dakota, leaving behind an infant daughter, or, as the Newe (Shoshone) maintain, settled on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, where she cared for her sister’s child until dying as an old woman seventy years later and was buried in their cemetery at Fort Washakie. Political economist Grace Hebard (1957) was the famous Shoshone woman’s first biographer. Relying on oral histories collected from the Wind River...
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