Sacagawea was pregnant when Lewis and Clark arrived at the Mandan villages, and she gave birth to a baby boy named Jean Baptiste on February 11, 1805. One of the more amazing aspects of an expedition brimming with astounding events is that Sacagawea safely took her baby to the Pacific Coast and back — surviving buffalo stampedes, grizzly attacks, treacherous rapids, bitter cold, and near starvation. Another expedition episode further epitomized Sacagawea’s mettle. On the journey west, she and Charbonneau and others were riding in a sail-equipped pirogue when a sudden squall capsized the vessel. The incident jeopardized the mission because the pirogue contained the expedition’s papers, instruments, books, and medicine. Charbonneau cried to heaven for mercy, but Sacagawea had the presence of mind to save most of the articles that had been washed overboard, all the while preserving her baby. Cruzatte managed to right the pirogue, and the men rowed to shore. Lewis wrote that Sacagawea had ‘equal fortitude and resolution, with any person onboard at the time of the accedent.’ When writer Henry Brackenridge met Charbonneau and Sacagawea in 1811, he described her as a ‘good creature, 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 to revisit her native country.’ In a book published in 1933, Grace Hebard theorized that Sacagawea lived a long life and did return to her Shoshone people in Wyoming, where she died at 100 years of age in 1884. But this theory runs contrary to evidence from William Clark, certainly in a position to know what became of Sacagawea. In the list of expedition members he compiled between 1825 and 1828, Clark noted: ‘Se car ja we au Dead.’ Probably 24 at her death, Sacagawea left one son and one daughter.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Early in the expedition, Privates Joseph Whitehouse, John Collins, and Robert Frazer all experienced discipline problems that foreshadowed trouble afterward. Whitehouse fought with ‘F’ (Frazer, Floyd, or one of the Field brothers); Collins stole a hog from a local farmer; and Frazer did ‘bad,’ committing an unspecified offense. Still, all three remained with Lewis and Clark and all three contributed — Whitehouse as the camp tailor, Collins as a hunter, and Frazer as a frequent member of dangerous missions. Whitehouse and Frazer also kept journals of the journey, although Frazer’s was lost.

After the expedition, Whitehouse and Frazer reverted to old habits, frequently running afoul of the law. During 1807 and ‘08, Whitehouse was summoned or arrested several times for bad debts. He re-enlisted in the army and served in the War of 1812 but deserted on February 1, 1817, at about age 42. Then he disappeared from public view. He married and had one son.

Frazer’s offenses tended to be violent. A court document from 1808 states that he assaulted Sheriff Jeremiah Conner ‘with fists, feet, and sticks, did beat, and illy treat, to the great damage of the said Jeremiah, to the evil example of all others.’ A year later Frazer was accused of attacking an Indian on the streets of St. Louis and striking him several times, without any provocation. But the most serious charge came in 1812: ‘Robert Frazier is charged with murder,’ read the St. Charles, Missouri court record. The details of the charge, as well as Frazer’s acquittal, are still unknown.

Although he appeared to be headed for a lifetime of trouble, Frazer changed his ways. In 1814 he ran a notice in a newspaper that he had found a black and white spotted cow; two years later he advertised for a journeyman cabinetmaker to assist him in his work. By 1821 he was running a watch-repair business. He married a woman named Tabitha, and they had two sons. He died in 1837 at about age 62. Among his belongings were 12 books and a box of newspapers.

Collins’s post-expedition trouble took a different form — a deadly battle. In the spring of 1823, Collins signed on with William Ashley’s trading party of 90 men and headed up the Missouri. Several of the trappers later became famous mountain men, including William Sublette, James Clyman, Edward Rose, and Hugh Glass. Jedediah Smith joined them upriver. On May 30 they reached the Arikara villages — where George Shannon had been wounded in a battle 16 years earlier. Knowing that rival fur traders had recently killed two braves from the Arikara, Ashley approached the village with extreme caution. He anchored his keelboats in midstream and posted 40 well-armed men on the shore with about the same number of horses.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to