Interpreters with Lewis and Clark: The Story of Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau

Epilogue

123 In 1907, the Journal of American History published an article by Grace Raymond Hebard, a librarian and professor at the University of Wyoming, entitled, “Woman Who Led the Way to the Golden West: Pilot of the First White Men to Cross America.” We must take a look at this article, and writings that echoed it, because many people believe them, and if they are true, then much of what has been said in this book is false. To Hebard, the woman who died at Fort Manuel in 1812 was not Sacagawea but another Shoshone wife of Toussaint Charbonneau. She identified this other wife as Otter Woman. The real Sacagawea, she said, lived to a great age, spent time with the Comanches in Oklahoma, and died on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming on April 9, 1884.1 On that morning, a woman sometimes known as Porivo was found dead in her tepee by her apparently adopted son Bazil, with whom she lived. The Rev. John Roberts, the Episcopal missionary who presided at her funeral, entered her name in the ParEpilogue Epilogue 124 ish Register of Burials as “Bazil’s Mother.” Roberts said he knew little about the Lewis and Clark expedition at the time, but later learned that the woman was Sacagawea.2 A year before his mother’s death, Roberts reported, Bazil told him that he didn’t know her exact age but she must have been about one hundred years old. Accordingly, the cleric entered her age as one hundred. This would mean she was born in 1784 and would have been sixteen or seventeen when Sacagawea was captured by the Hidatsas. Lewis said in his journal that at that time Sacagawea had not reached the age of puberty, which he said the Indians reckoned at thirteen or fourteen. Curiously, Hebard said in her article that Sacagawea was five years old when captured, which would have made her only ten when Baptiste was born.3 Grace Raymond Hebard of the University of Wyoming wrote that Sacagawea lived a long life and died on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. She stuck to her opinion despite “ridicule, doubt, suspicion, denial” by other historians. (Photo Courtesy American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming) Epilogue 125 Grace Hebard was a highly respected person in Wyoming, and remained so nearly a century later. A research room in the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center bears her name and contains her voluminous and detailed research files. In a fortyfive -year career with the university, she served as librarian, trustee, and professor of political economy and western history. At her death in 1936, she was eulogized as the state’s “most eminent historian ” and a leader in the struggle for women’s rights.4 Nevertheless, her theory of Sacagawea’s life and death was greeted with, in her own words, “ridicule, doubt, suspicion, denial ” as other historians found flaws of fact and reasoning. In 1924, the Commissioner of IndianAffairs asked Charles Eastman, a physician , author and lecturer who was a Sioux Indian, to look into the controversy. Eastman reported that the woman buried on the Wind River Reservation was indeed Sacagawea.5 This did not end the matter. Much of Eastman’s report was based on hearsay, sometimes at second or third hand. He quoted, for instance, information provided by an eighty-year-old woman who had heard it from her father when he was 102. Her father, the woman said, was relating what had been told him by one Eagle Woman.6 Included in Eastman’s report was a transcription prepared by Indian agent James I. Patten of an 1877 census roll of inhabitants of the reservation. Where the roll said simply “Bazil’s Mother,” Patten interpolated “Sacajawea.”7 Eastman cited Brackenridge’s journal of his 1811 journey up the Missouri, the relevant portion of which read in full: “We had on board a Frenchman named Charbonneau, with his wife, an Indian woman of the Snake nation, both of whom had accompanied Lewis and Clark to the Pacific, and were of great service. The woman, a good creature, was of a mild and gentle disposition, greatly attached to the whites, whose manners and dress she tries to imitate, but she had become sickly, and longed Epilogue 126 to revisit her native country; her husband, also, who had spent many years among the Indians, had become weary of civilized life.”8...