Sacagawea: Assisted the Lewis and Clark Expedition

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Sacajawea had known that the Indian woman with the sea otter coat would probably want the beautiful turquoise belt, too, just like she did. She was right. After a night of bartering and discussions she had unselfishly traded her precious belt for a fur coat her white friend wanted so much.

The Corps of Discovery finally left Fort Clatsop on March 23, 1806, heading east and passing many familiar landmarks. Once back in what is now Montana, Clark and Lewis temporarily parted company to explore different areas. Sacagawea, now back on more familiar ground, stayed with Clark’s larger group and helped lead those men to the Yellowstone River. Lewis and Clark were back together and back at the Mandan village by mid-August. The Corps of Discovery started to disband. One of its members, John Colter, headed west again with two fur traders. Charbonneau, Sacagawea and Pomp returned to the Hidatsa village at the mouth of the Knife River. Charbonneau was paid $500 for his services to the Corps of Discovery, but his wife, Sacagawea, was apparently not paid at all.

Toussaint Charbonneau would later do some trading and become a longtime government interpreter for the Indian Bureau. He probably died in 1843. There is also some uncertainty–and a lot more controversy–about when Sacagawea died. Most Lewis and Clark scholars believe that she died in December 1812 at Fort Manuel, the Missouri River trading post of Manuel Lisa in what would become northern South Dakota. Lisa’s clerk, John C. Luttig, recorded in his journal the death of the wife of Charbonneau, a Snake squaw….aged about twenty-five years. A note that Clark wrote in a ledger book in the 1820s seems to support the view that Sacagawea died in 1812. It has been argued, however, that it was another wife of Charbonneau who died at Fort Manuel. These people believe that Sacagawea died on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming Territory in 1884 and is buried at the Fort Washakie cemetery, near Lander, Wyo. Rhea Porter White was one of those people, and she played a leading role in having a monument erected at Sacagawea’s Wyoming gravesite in 1963. The site of Fort Manuel is now covered by the waters of Lake Oahe. If Sacagawea did die there, her grave is no doubt also under those waters. A monument to Sacagawea stands on a hill just west of the Missouri River, across from Mobridge, S.D.

In the early 1960s, the governors of South Dakota and Wyoming had a dispute over where she was buried. The Wyoming governor asked Rhea Porter White if she really had proof that the grave was at the Wind River Reservation, where Sacagawea had reportedly gone in the 1840s after living for many years among the Comanches in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). My mother answered calmly that she could prove Sacajawea was buried in Fort Washakie from the records of the Mormon Church, said Dale Porter White. There was no question about it at all and she could show him the paperwork. The governor laughed and said, ‘Mrs. White…that’s good enough for me, and it ought to be good enough for the people of South Dakota. I will see that justice is done.’

Rhea Porter White also made the argument that John Roberts, onetime Episcopalian minister at the Wind River Reservation, had conducted a burial on April 9, 1884, of a Shoshone woman, who was identified as Bazil’s mother and near one hundred years old. The Rev. Roberts later identified Sacagawea as Bazil’s mother.

In any case, Jean Baptiste Pomp Charbonneau, the baby boy that Sacagawea carried on her back all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back, was not her only child. U.S. Indian Inspector Charles A. Eastman reported in 1925 that Sacagawea had five children…. As for the first of them, Pomp, he grew up to be a mountain man, spending some 15 adventurous years in the Rocky Mountains before guiding Philip St. George Cooke and the Mormon Battalion through New Mexico Territory to California in 1846. Considering who his parents were, that was no doubt a most logical career path.

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Tags: Expeditions, Historical Discoveries, Historical Figures, Wild West, Women's History

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