The Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06 was the fulfillment of a longtime dream of Thomas Jefferson, and the success of that incredible enterprise owes much to its two leaders, the scientific-minded Meriwether Lewis and the more practical-minded William Clark. What their Corps of Discovery accomplished–essentially opening up all the possibilities of the vast trans-Mississippi West to the people of the United States–has rightly been called one of the great feats of exploration. But Lewis and Clark did not do it alone. Their most famous assistant during the transcontinental trek was a young Indian woman whose life remains largely a mystery but whose legend lives on as strong as ever–Sacagawea.

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Many know her better as Sacajawea (and some know her as Sakakawea). ‘Among scholars there’s a preferred spelling [Sacagawea], said Lewis and Clark scholar James P. Ronda during an interview that appeared in the August 1999 Wild West Magazine, but there is never going to be a preferred spelling among the general public. In any case, hers is a Hidatsa name and was translated by Captains Lewis and Clark as Bird Woman.

Early twentieth-century historians tended to glorify her role, writes Harold P. Howard in his 1971 book Sacajawea. More recent writers are inclined to minimize her contribution, and even to adopt a somewhat scornful view of her assistance to the explorers. The truth no doubt lies somewhere in between. It certainly was not the Sacagawea Expedition; she did not guide Captains Lewis and Clark all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But she did know some of the geography they passed through, and she did interpret for them when they came across Shoshone-speaking Indians. Her accomplishments have not been overlooked by the U.S. government. A Sacagawea one-dollar coin (if you see it spelled Saca-jawea, you can assume it’s a counterfeit) is expected to replace the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin in the year 2000.

The Corps of Discovery left Camp Dubois, outside St. Louis, on May 14, 1804, but Sacagawea only became part of the picture in November, after the explorers made winter camp at Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota. The two captains hired her husband, the French-Canadian fur trapper Toussaint Charbonneau, as an interpreter, with the understanding that she would come along to interpret the Shoshone language. Sacagawea was only about 16 and pregnant.

Her people were the Lemhi Shoshones, who made their home in what is now southeastern Idaho and southwestern Montana. About 1800 she was captured by a Hidatsa raiding party at the Three Forks of the Missouri River. Sometime in 1804, she and another woman were purchased by middle-aged Charbonneau, who lived among the Hidatsa and Mandan Indians, to be his wives. Eight weeks before Lewis and Clark and company departed their camp on the upper Missouri, Sacagawea gave birth to her first child. The boy was named Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, but he was more often called Pompey or Pomp. When the Corps of Discovery continued upriver in early April 1805, Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea were part of the team, and so was Pomp, whom his mother carried on a cradleboard.

The late Wyoming writer Rhea Eliza Porter White, who knew many descendants of Sacagawea, said that the young mother had almost died during childbirth. As she was suffering and in great agony, Clark, in an effort to raise her spirits, presented her with a beaded turquoise belt that he had been wearing, White wrote in Things That I Appreciate, an unpublished manuscript penned in the early 1970s. He had been watching her admire it and knew she wanted it more than anything else in the world. As she lay suffering and at death’s door, he took it off and laid it across her.

Suddenly, he saw her eyes sparkle and a smile come across her face as she put her arms around the belt and pulled it against her face. The Indian girl gave birth to a boy, Pomp, who became the pet of the corps.

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