The Louisiana Purchase "Opens" the West
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The Voyage of Discovery:
Sacagawea

Sacagawea
Sacagawea was a Native American (Shoshone) woman
who accompanied the expedition
from the Mandan Villages on.
Here she's interpreted in a bronze sculpture
by Eugene Daub located at Clark's Point in Kansas City.
Source - NET, Bill Ganzel.

Imagine being a young teenage Indian girl married to a French Canadian over 40 years old who won you as a result of a bet with some Indians who, in turn, had captured you from your own tribe. Then imagine becoming pregnant and accompanying your husband and a band of, mainly, white men on an 8,000-mile expedition for 28 months into some of America's most treacherous territories. Such was the fate of Sacagawea, a member of the Shoshone tribe, who had been taken prisoner by members of the Hidatsa tribe. Her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, was an independent trader who lived among the Hidatsas. Lewis and Clark accepted Charbonneau's offer to sign on as an interpreter, not so much because of his abilities, but because of his wife, Sacagawea. Sacagawea spoke Shoshone as well as Hidatsas, and a little French.

Sacagawea played a very important role in the success of the expedition, not as a guide as she's been described, but rather as a person who could read the landscape fairly well. She could read the rivers the valleys. She had a sense of what the landscapes said about direction, where they were, and where they were going. She also had a sense of what could be eaten along the way as well as finding food. Her service as an interpreter proved invaluable when she negotiated with the Shoshone for horses. Without those horses, who knows what would have happened to the expedition.

On August 17, 1806 as Lewis and Clark prepared to return to St. Louis and "settled up" with Charbonneau. He received approximately $500 for his horse, his tepee, and his services. Needless to say, Sacagawea received nothing.

Unfortunately, there is a sad ending to the story of Sacagawea; although, there seem to be a variety of interpretations of what the final story was. One account indicates she eventually moves to St. Louis. Sacagawea was a citizen of the West, but someone who had citizenship no place else. Where did she belong — in a Hidatsa village, with her Shoshone relatives, in St. Louis? Where was her home? The last glimpses we have of her are in 1811 when a traveler described her as a woman wearing the cast off clothing of white women, drifting through St. Louis, seemingly alone, having given up her children to the care of William Clark. Regardless of the various accounts of what happened to Sacagawea after the expedition, it appears most are in agreement that she died in approximately 1812 when she would have been in her early twenties. If ever there was a displaced person, it was Sacagawea. An orphan in a world made by the expedition.

Clark did pay tribute to Sacagawea in a letter to Charbonneau referring to her as, "Your woman who accompanied you that long dangerous and fatiguing rout to the Pacific Ocean and back disserved a greater reward for her attention and services on that route than we had in our power to offer her."