Her Childhood

It was a night made for storytelling. Stars flickered over what would become known as Idaho in a sky yet to be diminished by electric light. The Agaidika camp was fragrant with cedar needles smoldering on a campfire rock.
This was not a night for stories, however. A Blackfeet raiding party was seen that day. It was the first sighting of the Agaidikas' feared enemies in some time, and the girl's father was worried.
"Always be aware that our enemies can be anywhere," he told his children. "Like us, they have many horses and can come suddenly. Never stop watching and listening for signs of danger. And never be without a weapon."
The girl listened solemnly, gently fingering the obsidian blade of the knife she always carried. She and her brothers and sisters had heard their father's warnings many times. She remembered his instructions on how to use the knife on an enemy if attacked. It had never happened, but already she was an expert with a blade. She made the knife herself, used it to prepare food and scrape hides for her clothing and was confident she could use it to defend herself.

If she were alive and the same age today, she'd be too young for middle school. When she was born, the United States was 12 years old and ended at the Mississippi River. She didn't know it existed. None of the members of her band had ever seen a white person.

She was born a member of the Agaidika tribe in Idaho's Lemhi Valley, near what is now the town of Salmon, in about 1788. Some Agaidikas, a branch of the Lemhi Shoshoni, say her true name has been lost in time.
Others say it was a Shoshoni word Sacatzahweyah. Its pronunciation is close to that of the more commonly used "Sacajawea," the spelling and pronunciation her tribe prefers today. In their language, it doesn't mean Bird Woman or Boat Launcher. It means a burden that is pulled or carried.
Until she was old enough to walk, Sacajawea spent much of her time in a cradleboard made of willow branches. Her mother carried it on her back. Babies quickly became accustomed to their cradleboards and felt secure and contented in them. That was important, because children had to be well-behaved. Enemies could be anywhere, and a crying child could give away an entire band. A baby who cried without a good reason got its nose pinched.
Agaidika bands wintered in the river valleys of the part of Idaho roughly bordered by the present-day towns of Carmen, Lemhi, North Fork and Challis. In the spring, they began their annual forays in search of food. Babies and small children were left at home with parents or aunts and uncles, who took turns staying with them.

The Agaidika prized their children. They gave them necklaces made with elk teeth, a symbol of status. They began teaching them almost from the time they were born, and everyone was expected to help with a child's education. Discipline for young children wasn't just their parents' responsibility. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings and others all had the authority to correct a child who was misbehaving.
Sacajawea's practical training for her tribe's difficult way of life began when she was a toddler. Agaidika children were expected to learn early and work hard. Their survival depended on it.

The men of the tribe fished and hunted, decided when and where the bands would travel in search of food and protected the women and children against enemies. The women were in charge of raising the children and running the camps.

Girls had many teachers. From her father and older brothers, Sacajawea learned to make weapons, defend herself and trap, hunt and fish. Her mother, aunts and older sisters taught her the rest of the many skills she needed.

By the age of six or seven, she was making her own clothes. The job was far more difficult than it would be now. The tribe didn't have textiles, buttons, zippers, thread, sewing machines or metal needles. Everything had to come from nature. In today's world, Sacajawea would be considered poor, but the concept of poverty as we know it didn't exist for her. In her world, the Earth provided what she needed.

To make her dresses, leggings and moccasins, she skinned a deer and scraped the hair from the hide with her knife and a scraper she made from an elk bone. She made soft leather of the rough hide by soaking it three times in deer or elk brains and smoking it.

Smoking involved digging a hole, positioning sticks around it to make a tripod and filling it with chips of cedar, quaking aspen or red-pine wood. When the chips had burned to coals, she draped the hide over the tripod to catch the smoke. Smoking helped waterproof the leather and changed its color from gray to soft yellow. Unlike chemical tanning methods used now, it left the leather's pores open, allowing it to breathe and keep her cooler in hot weather.

She cut the leather into the proper shapes and sizes with her blade, made by smashing obsidian into shards against another rock. For thread, she used thin strips of sinew cut from the back of a deer or an elk. Her sewing needles were thorns or pointed bones with holes drilled with a bone awl. It took about three weeks to make a dress.

The unrelenting need for food was a dominant fact of life. Gatherers had to be in the right places at exactly the right times to harvest roots, berries, nuts and wild vegetables when they were ready. The men hunted and fished by following the migratory patterns of game.

The tribe's name, Agaidika, comes from salmon - a staple of their diet. They divided their time between salmon fishing west of the Continental Divide and buffalo hunting to the east of it. The Agaidikas gradually merged with other northern Shoshoni groups, the Tukadikas (sheepeaters) and Kucundikas (buffalo eaters), to form the Lemhi Shoshoni tribe. Lemhis today joke that if they'd been eating carrots when the white men came, they'd be known as Yumbydikas, or carrot eaters.

The nomadic lifestyle demanded by the need to hunt, fish and glean took them far from the Snake River at Salmon Falls to the Yellowstone and Three Forks areas of Montana to the headwaters of the Bitterroot River. They claimed this territory for generations before the first white people came.

Their food-gathering trips couldn't last too long. Bands came and went many times between spring and the following winter, always returning home to the Lemhi Valley between trips. If they stayed too long and left too few warriors behind, the women and children were vulnerable to enemy tribes' raiding parties.

Children learned from their fathers to fish by making weirs from willow branches and nets of rope made with the strong fibers from the inner bark of sagebrush. They speared fish as well. Salmon and other fish were eaten fresh and dried to save for the winter. Sacajawea may have made and carried an Agaidika version of a purse, a bag made from the skin of a large salmon. A few Lemhi Shoshonis still make them today.

Starting at about the age of 6, girls were allowed to accompany the women on their food-gathering expeditions and begin learning their methods. The women were adept at harvesting camas roots, bitterroots, balsam and pinyon pine seeds, wild onions and carrots, chokecherries, serviceberries, blackberries and gooseberries.

Sacajawea learned to make a stone grinder, which was used to make meal from dried berries. The meal was pressed into cookies.

Sacajawea knew how to skin and butcher animals and how to make stews and other meals with fish, ground squirrels, deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, buffalo and other game. Like all her people, she'd have been an expert at drying the meat into jerky that could be eaten when the snow was deep and fresh food scarce.

Her mother and aunts taught her to make the tools and implements needed for daily life. She could make a sewing-needle sharpener from a rock, a bow from a chokecherry branch, a comb from the bones of a salmon tail. She cleaned her teeth with bone toothpicks, mint and other plants. She knew where to find the white clay her people used for soap. They bathed every morning, even on days when it was so cold they had to break ice for their bath water.

The Agaidikas had many horses and raced one another for recreation. Another pastime was a betting game played with bones and sticks.

Sacajawea learned to ride a horse at an early age. She knew how to make saddles and stirrups out of wood, bone and rawhide.

She could make a buffalo coat, a rabbitskin blanket, a cattail mattress, a tepee. She knew the plants her people used to cure or ease illnesses and how to use them. Like all Agaidika girls, she became proficient at making baskets and doing what resembled modern Indian beadwork at a time when her people had never seen beads. Porcupine needles were soaked in dye, chewed or pounded flat and woven together in intricate patterns.

She'd have mastered all these skills by the time she was 12.
At that age, she was said to have been small but wiry, with attractive facial features.

From her tribe's elders and her relatives, she learned the Agaidikas' history, cultural traditions and spiritual beliefs. Stories of who they were and what they believed were told to children from the time they were old enough to understand. Members of other tribes would have recognized her immediately as an Agaidika, identified by the reddish paint her people wore in the parts in their hair, around their eyes and on their foreheads and cheeks. The paint, made with red, iron-oxide clay, was a symbol of peace.

Between the ages of 10 and 12, Agaidika girls went with their mothers, aunts and grandmothers for one of the last parts of their education. They called it the doe-yuh-huvee. A spiritual quest and a coming-of-age ritual, it was a day and a night spent in the mountains away from the rest of the tribe.

A girl was told, among other things, about the changes she would experience as she became a woman.

She learned about the moon houses where women went during menstruation, when custom required them to remain separate from the men.
She learned what to expect and what to do during childbirth.

Children were not allowed to be present during a birth. Babies were born in moon houses or special dwellings used only for child-bearing. Two stakes were pounded into the ground for the woman to grip during labor. A woman's mother or husband usually helped during birth. The baby was washed in the river and laid on cattails covered with soft rabbit fur. The highly absorbent cattails also were used to make diapers.

A girl only chose her husband if she was lucky. Marriages were arranged by her family, with her father playing a decisive role. Girls could be promised to a man years before they were old enough to marry. A girl with a stern authoritarian for a father had little choice but to accept the husband he approved. A girl with a kind, loving father would have considerable influence in the decision. Either way, wives were expected to obey and respect their husbands.

Depending on their ability to provide for them, Agaidika men had up to three wives. A capable provider who treated his wives well was in great demand.

Girls married between the ages of 14 and 16. Men were forbidden to have sexual relations with girls who had not come of age, even if they were married to them.

There was no formal ceremony of the kind we have today, but couples commonly chose to exchange vows and gifts. It was customary for the husband to give a gift to his new wife's father, and their parents also may have exchanged gifts. Sometimes there was a feast to celebrate.

By the time she was 12, Sacajawea would have had a strong sense of identity with her tribe and a clear idea of what was expected of her as a woman. She'd have learned virtually all of the skills she needed to survive in a camp or alone in the wilderness, to care for herself, a husband and a child, and to be a fully contributing member of her tribe.

She would need all her skills and resourcefulness for what lay ahead. In her 12th year, Sacajawea was the victim of a brutal attack. It would take the Agaidika girl from Idaho to center stage for one of America's great adventures.

Taken from her home

The Agaidikas´ traditional enemies at the beginning of the 19th century were the Blackfeet and the Sioux Indians. The Hidatsas, who recently had acquired horses and extended their range, were relative newcomers to the Agaidikas´ territory. The newcomers smiled when they saw the lightly defended Agaidika camp. The girls picking chokecherries would be easy pickings for the Hidatsa warriors.

Like the Agaidikas, the Hidatsas were skilled horsemen. Unlike the Agaidikas, they had rifles. Plains Indians whose raids lengthened with the acquisition of horses, the Hidatsas traded with white men the Agaidikas didn´t know existed.

Sacajawea´s life with her people ended in a few terrifying moments.

Her band was camped where three rivers meet in what is now western Montana. Her father, brothers and most of the other men had left to hunt buffalo. A few men and some older boys had stayed with the women and children.

As always, Sacajawea was carrying her knife. Some of the Agaidikas had bows and arrows. All were habitually alert to the possibility of danger. But the attack was so sudden and overwhelming that they had no chance.

The horses and gunfire seemed to explode from the trees. Terrifying in their red and black war paint, the riders fired with deadly accuracy. All around her, Sacajawea´s relatives and friends were falling.

The primary objects of the raid were the horses and the girls and young women, whom the Hidatsas hoped to capture. Four Agaidika men, four women and some boys died. Sacajawea heard them screaming, saw their blood staining the buckskin clothing the girls and women had worked so hard to make.

Sacajawea wanted to help her mother, but her mother told her to run. She´d been taught to do as her parents said. With a last look at the woman she loved more than any other, she ran.

She was strong and fast, but no match for the warrior who chased her and threw her over the back of his horse. In less time than it took to build a campfire, she became one of several young women who lost their families, their people and their freedom. She was now a Hidatsa slave.

No one knows how many days it took to reach her captors´ home in what later would be called North Dakota. For Sacajawea, the journey was a time of heartache and fear. Often given only a few sentences in history books, her abduction was a devastating experience. She watched her mother, aunts and friends die agonizing deaths. She was taken from her family, her home and way of life. If a similar event occurred now, it would dominate the news. And with each day that passed, hope of rescue faded and a fear of the unknown increased.

It was only about 600 miles to where the Hidatsa and Mandan tribes lived, but it was a different world. The mountains and forests of her homeland gave way to flat, seemingly endless plains. Accustomed to the varied topography of Idaho and Montana, where it was possible to travel from sagebrush desert to snowcapped mountains in a day, Sacajawea found the plains monotonous, her captors bewildering.

Unable to speak her language, they communicated in gestures and used commands she couldn´t understand. They looked different from her people, too.

These people were hunters and farmers. When they weren´t hunting or traveling with raiding parties, they tended to stay close to the villages where they lived. White explorers called the Hidatsas "Big Bellies."

The name came from misinterpreting a sign-language gesture in which the hands were moved in front of the stomach. Agaidikas object to claims by white historians that their ancestors often were close to starving. They say the bounty of a land yet to be exploited by the white people was sufficient, but the tribe´s high-protein diet and mobile lifestyle made for lean people. Ample bellies almost certainly were more prevalent among the relatively settled Hidatsas than the nomadic Agaidikas.

Sacajawea had never seen anything like the Hidatsa villages. Her people lived in tepees. When they traveled, they often slept in the open. The Hidatsas lived in circular lodges made of earth and logs. Up to 40 feet across, they housed people, dogs and horses. Fires vented through the roofs kept the lodges warm during cold weather. They were spacious, secure and comfortable.

Unlike Sacajawea´s people, the Hidatsas obtained much of their food by farming. Their crops included beans, corn and squash. Instead of traveling for days to dig roots, they walked to their well-tended gardens. Compared with what Sacajawea had known, it was in some ways a life of ease.

But she was still an outsider. She worked hard and contributed to the tribe´s welfare. She learned to help make their lodges and to grow, harvest and prepare their foods. She learned to speak their language. She learned their customs. But she wasn´t one of them. Most Agaidikas reject the claim that she was adopted by a Hidatsa family. They say the Hidatsas in time may have treated her well, but she was still a captive rather than an equal.

It was in their village that she first saw a white man. Unlike the Agaidikas, who lived in what was still a distant wilderness for European Americans, the Hidatsas lived within the white man´s known and rapidly expanding world. By 1800, the year Sacajawea was captured, white explorers and traders had long since established relations with the Hidatsas and other Plains tribes.

She had never seen anyone like the pale men with their strangely colored hair, shaggy faces and alien ways. They used iron pots for cooking. They were almost never without their rifles, disturbing reminders of the day she saw her mother die. They traveled on the Missouri River in awkward-looking boats and drank a strong-smelling beverage that made them stagger and laugh. Sometimes it made them mean. They had brightly colored beads and ribbons, which they traded for things they wanted more. And they always wanted more.

Sacajawea never mastered the white people´s language. She learned to speak Hidatsa, but the white language she found stranger still.

She saw the value of the metal tools and implements and learned to use them, just as she learned new and useful things from the Hidatsas. But her native ways - the survival skills, cultural traditions and spiritual beliefs she learned in her youth - remained primary. For her time, place and age, she was becoming well-traveled, almost worldly. But she was first and always an Agaidika.

The skills she learned from her native tribe, her second tribe and the white explorers and traders would serve her better than anyone could have known.

Like those who were captured with her, Sacajawea lay awake nights on her bed in the earth-covered lodge and dreamed of returning to her people. Escape wasn´t impossible. As time passed, captives tended to be guarded less closely. In the dark, it might be possible to slip away. The thought was tantalizing.

Getting home again was another matter. Within hours, she would be missed. A search party would be dispatched, and her punishment if found would be severe. It was a long and hazardous journey to her homeland, especially alone on foot, and stealing horses from the Hidatsas without their noticing would be all but impossible.

For one of the Agaidika girls, the temptation was irresistible. She took a chance, beat the odds and made it home.

For reasons that may never be known, Sacajawea didn´t go with her. She may have been bound or watched more closely than the other girl. She may have thought the chances of being caught were too great or the way home was too perilous. Whatever the reasons, her life with the Hidatsas continued as it had - with an important exception.

One day, a white trapper came to the Hidatsa camp. He spoke differently than most of the other white men, who seemed to have little in common with him. He had an Indian wife, and it was said that he was always marrying someone.

Sacajawea was pleased when she was told that his wife was a member of the Snake tribe, a term used for the Shoshonis. Some say the name came from a hand sign misinterpreted by the white men. The Agaidikas believe it was because their ancestors lived near rivers where there were snakes, used snake-like patterns in weaving their baskets, or resembled snakes in the way they sneaked up on their enemies.

The Snake woman and Sacajawea came to know each other well. The man who was always marrying someone was about to take another bride, and Sacajawea was about to shoulder her burden. His name was Toussaint Charbonneau.

Life with Charbonneau

Most Agaidikas believe Sacajawea was sold or traded to Charbonneau. Some say he won her in a gambling game played with sticks and bones. Half of the bones were painted black. Each player began the game with seven sticks. Players lost a stick each time they drew a black bone.

Sacajawea´s fate may have been decided by whoever had the most sticks in a game played on a date never recorded against people now forgotten.

Regardless of how he came to have her as his wife, the fact that she was given to Charbonneau is the basis of a Lemhi Shoshoni claim that the Hidatsas never adopted her or welcomed her as a daughter. Few Indian parents, they say, would willingly give a daughter to such a man.

Little of what is known about Charbonneau is complimentary. Historical records portray him as abusive and obsessed with Indian women a fraction of his age. If he were living in modern times, he´d be a more likely candidate for criminal court than a place in history.

A French-speaking Canadian, Charbonneau was born near Montreal in about 1759. Then a town of only a few thousand people, the Montreal of his youth was the center of a lively fur trading industry. Like many young men of his time and place, he chose the roughneck life of a trader.

In his late 30s, he reportedly was stabbed by the mother of a woman who said he raped her daughter. The journal entry reporting it is the first known mention of behavior that revealed a lifelong fixation with younger women.

Charbonneau´s life as an itinerant trader took him from Montreal to what is now North Dakota. Compared with the primitive camps he had known in the northern wilderness, the pleasant villages and abundant gardens of the Hidatsa and Mandan tribes were inviting. A man who took his comfort seriously, Charbonneau settled there in about 1797. Except for short absences - and one historic one - he is thought to have lived in Indian villages along the upper Missouri River for the rest of his life.

Charbonneau´s weakness was well known - people gossiped about his lack of interest in women his own age - and young Shoshoni women in particular seemed to appeal to him. He already had one Shoshoni wife, and Sacajawea´s youthful good looks quickly caught his attention.

In 1804, he took her as his second wife. He was then about 45. She was 16.
There was no wedding, no exchange of vows or gifts, no feast. Her family, the traditions of her tribe, the Agaidika man to whom she was promised in childhood all were distant memories.

Charbonneau was far from being the type of man she would have chosen. Though Agaidika women commonly married older men in their own tribe, Charbonneau at 45 was pushing the envelope. He was almost three times Sacajawea´s age. To her, he was an old man.

Nor was she likely to have chosen a white man. Even now, most Lemhi people try to find spouses within the Shoshoni tribe. Sacajawea had never seen a white person until she was nearly grown. And at least one other aspect of Charbonneau´s physical appearance bothered her.

Then as now, Shoshoni men plucked or closely shaved their beards. Women of the tribe consider excessive facial hair distasteful. Charbonneau´s beard, his age and his reputation for mistreating women repulsed his reluctant bride.

Once he became her husband, however, Sacajawea accepted him and did her best to adapt to Charbonneau. Her mother, aunts and grandmother taught her that marriage is for life. It was her duty to make her marriage work even if it wasn´t to a man she would have chosen. Agaidika women sometimes left their husbands, but it was rare. For better or worse, Sacajawea stayed with Charbonneau.

They lived in a tepee in or near the village. She preferred the tepee to the earth-covered lodges because it reminded her of home.

Charbonneau´s other wife was glad to have someone to help with the work. The women expected Charbonneau to provide food, and he expected them to do the domestic chores.

When he brought game, they cleaned and butchered it, made stews and other meals and dried the rest of the meat to be eaten later. They planted and tended gardens, harvested crops and prepared meals using fresh vegetables - skills learned from the Hidatsas and the Mandans. They made Charbonneau´s pants, shirts, moccasins, hats and coats. They cared for him when he was sick. They kept their home clean, comfortable and stocked with the necessities of daily life.

Sacajawea was pleased to be living with a woman who understood her native language, but her happiness was tempered by her husband´s linguistic limitations and domineering behavior. Charbonneau spoke only French and Hidatsa and late in his life admitted that his Hidatsa was far from perfect. He had no desire to learn another language and didn´t want his wives saying things he couldn´t understand, particularly about the man of the house. Only Hidatsa was to be spoken in their home. He forbade the women from speaking the Shoshoni language.

That didn´t always stop them. Charbonneau was often gone. And although he was fond of laying down the law and known to have beaten Sacajawea, she didn´t allow him to control her. Smart and resourceful, she found ways around his decrees that she found intolerable. Occasionally she even made fun of him. She was dedicated to making the marriage work, but not at any price.

By the summer of 1804, Sacajawea was pregnant. She was grateful for the lessons her mother and the other women in her tribe had taught her about childbirth. Unlike Agaidika husbands, who sometimes helped in childbirth, Charbonneau would be of little or no use when the baby came.

In October of that year, more white men came to the village.
These men were different from the traders and fur trappers Sacajawea was accustomed to encountering. Some of them wore uniforms. They had strange-looking boats, heavily laden with wonders she had never seen. They had mysterious tools, fearsome weapons, exotic scientific instruments. Disciplined and well-organized, they set about building a winter camp, which they called Fort Mandan.

The newcomers answered to two men who clearly were in command. One day Sacajawea saw the men talking to her husband. Charbonneau later told her they were planning a long journey that would take them through her homeland.

They would need horses from her tribe.
They would need interpreters.

Charbonneau´s fluent French and passable Hidatsa would be useful to them, but he spoke no Shoshoni. Either of his wives could prove to be more valuable when the expedition entered Shoshoni territory.

Fearing he wouldn´t take her if she seemed too eager to return to her people, Sacajawea hid her enthusiasm.

Adventure of a lifetime

“We saw people trying to get to us. You know how the mountains are. They have those rocks; they run. Then we saw one woman. She had a baby on her back. . They were trying to get down, you know, through those little, flaky rocks in the mountains. . She was here with those men with mozo (beards). They said there was two of them."

Sacajawea´s baby was born with a full head of dark hair on Feb. 11, 1805, eight weeks before the Corps of Discovery left its winter camp at Fort Mandan. Charbonneau named him Jean Baptiste. Sacajawea called him Baambi, a Shoshoni word for hair. Clark called him "Pomp."

A baby could be a liability on so perilous a voyage. Charbonneau could have chosen to take his other wife, but she was an eastern Shoshoni who didn´t know the Agaidika territory the Corps of Discovery would have to cross. Sacajawea would have been the logical choice for the expedition´s leaders. She knew the land and the people and might be useful in procuring horses from them.

Charbonneau, however, was not a man to let his wives call the shots. If she begged him to take her, he´d have feared that she´d return to her people for good and almost certainly refused. Her best chance was to feign indifference.

It worked. The 31 men, one woman, one baby and one dog of the Corps of Discovery left Fort Mandan on April 7, 1805, plying the Missouri in six canoes and two larger, flat-bottomed pirogues. Sacajawea set up a warm tepee the first night, a skill learned as part of her Agaidika education. Most of the men slept outside. The tepee was reserved for Lewis and Clark, Charbonneau and another civilian interpreter, and Sacajawea and her baby. It was used until it fell apart.

On the third day, Sacajawea dug Jerusalem artichokes for the men to eat. It was the first of many times she added variety to a diet that relied heavily on meat.
One of her most important contributions, however, was her mere presence.

Though Lewis and Clark thought of themselves as traveling through unexplored territory, the continent west of the Mississippi was actually well known. It was home to dozens of Indian tribes who knew the land intimately and vigorously defended their turf. Intruders ran the risk of paying with their lives. Without Sacajawea and Jean Baptiste, the Corps of Discovery could have been mistaken for a war party and annihilated. The presence of a woman and a child assured potential enemies that its intentions were peaceful.

Sacajawea´s days began as they had in her homeland, except that now the morning bath included her infant son. It was a daily routine for much of the next 16 months. Wherever there was a river, she started the day by bathing herself and Jean Baptiste. When the rivers were frozen, she broke through the ice to get their bath water.

Next, she built a fire and prepared breakfast for herself and Charbonneau. Depending on the foods available, meals usually included meat, fish, corn meal, roots or berries, or combinations of them. She learned to make chokecherry pudding sweetened with sugar, which she had never seen until she met the white men.

After breakfast, she took down the tepee and packed it for traveling. When the explorers arrived at the next camp, after traveling an average of 14 river miles a day, she unpacked it and set it up. She gathered wood for the fires needed for the evening meal. She hauled water from rivers and springs for use in the camps. When there was time, she searched for fruits, nuts, roots and vegetables and collected plants she recognized as having medicinal uses.

She also was the Corps of Discovery´s chief seamstress. Though many of the men were handy with needle and thread, Sacajawea spent many hours repairing or making clothing not only for herself and her family but for other members of the expedition as well. With the hard use they endured during the arduous journey, even leather clothes ripped, deteriorated and had to be replaced. Footwear was especially vulnerable, which was to be expected in view of the thousands of miles traveled over rough terrain in every kind of weather. When all her other chores were finished, Sacajawea often could be found making replacement moccasins.

Though only 16 or 17 when she joined the expedition, she proved to be more than competent as a mother. Surrounded by men, without another woman to offer advice or the benefit of experience, she cared for all of her infant son´s needs while carrying him halfway across a continent and back. By all accounts, he was a healthy, happy baby.

Difficult as the journey had to have been for her, she wasn´t known to complain of its hardships. She had an even disposition and kept her head in times of trouble. Five weeks out from Fort Mandan, in a squall, Charbonneau almost sank the pirogue carrying the expedition´s documents and scientific records. The wind and churning waves terrified him. While he begged God for mercy, his wife calmly retrieved the irreplaceable items that were washed overboard.

A few weeks later, near the Great Falls of the Missouri, Sacajawea became seriously ill. She was so sick that some of the men were afraid she would die. Lewis tried several remedies with varying degrees of success. The one that appeared to make the difference was sulphur water from a nearby spring. She eagerly drank it and soon recovered. Generations of Lemhi Shoshonis have valued sulphur water for its healing properties.

In the summer of 1805, the expedition reached the place where the Hidatsas had captured Sacajawea almost exactly five years earlier. Lewis recorded that she showed no emotion, but he may have interpreted depth of feeling for absence of feeling. This was the place where her mother and other important people in her early life were killed, the place where the innocence of youth abruptly ended. Seeing it again, she wouldn´t necessarily have been demonstrative. If she remained quiet and somber, who could have blamed her?

One of the most famous entries in the journals of Lewis and Clark, written when they achieved their heart´s desire of reaching the Pacific Ocean, is "O! the joy." For Sacajawea, the equivalent moment occurred on Aug. 17, 1805.

By then, the Corps of Discovery was in the homeland of her people. Though some Lemhi people blame Sacajawea for showing the white men her homeland, others say she had no choice. The day began auspiciously when she was reunited with a friend who had been captured with her but escaped. Later, Lewis ordered a conference with the Shoshoni chiefs. To communicate with him, they spoke to Sacajawea, who translated to Hidatsa for Charbonneau, who translated to French for one of the corps´ privates, who translated to English for Lewis. Sacajawea was looking at the Shoshoni leaders when Lewis realized that she was capable of emotion, after all.

Away from her people for five years, traveling for months over an uncertain route and arriving just in time for a hastily arranged meeting, she recognized the leader of the Shoshoni chiefs as her own brother. Forgetting her deeply ingrained belief that women were to remain submissive and respectful at important conferences, she ran to its most important person, hugged him, threw a blanket over him and wept.

Lewis and Clark wanted the chief and some of the members of his band to help them cross the Bitterroot Mountains to Nez Perce territory and the rivers they hoped would take them to the sea. The Shoshonis, concerned that they could encounter Blackfeet raiding parties en route, were reluctant. Their chief agreed to help, but by then considerable misgivings had been expressed.

The chief´s name for nearly two centuries has been given as Cameahwait, which Lewis accepted as meaning "one who never walks." Lemhi Shoshonis today say it means "I won´t go." Some believe that his name wasn´t Cameahwait at all, that his or his braves´ refusal to go over the mountains was at some point misinterpreted as his name, and that no one today knows what his real name was.

After years of hoping to be reunited with her people, Sacajawea chose to stay with Charbonneau instead of remaining with her brother and her tribe. She may have felt unwelcome. Most of her family was dead, and the man to whom she had been promised no longer wanted her because she´d had Charbonneau´s baby. Politics may also have played a part. The tribe had long feared its enemies´ rifles. Its leaders may have told her to stay with the white men and assist them in hopes of gaining alliances with the well-armed newcomers.

The Shoshonis provided the expedition with the horses it desperately needed to cross the mountains, and a guide to lead the way. The guide´s name was Deetobi. Lewis and Clark called him Old Toby. Today, he is best known as a guide who twice managed to get lost. Some Lemhi people say he was never lost, but saw the white men as potential enemies and deliberately misled them. The more confused they were, the less likely they would be to return to their hosts´ homeland.

With help from the Nez Perce tribe, the expedition reached the Pacific by way of the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia rivers early in November. When a vote was held to decide the location of the party´s winter camp, Sacajawea was allowed to join the men in voting. As a further sign of her status, the captains humored her request to be permitted to go and see a beached whale.

The return journey that began the following spring was less eventful for Sacajawea. Her routine was well established, the country wasn´t quite the vast question mark it had been on the westbound trip, and there were no boat mishaps or family reunions for her. The corps reached the Mandan villages on Aug. 14, 1806.

A few days later, Clark paid Charbonneau for his services - Sacajawea received nothing - and left for St. Louis. Charbonneau, Sacajawea and Jean Baptiste, now a toddler, stayed to resume the life they´d known before Lewis and Clark paddled into their lives.

Sacajawea never saw the homecomings for the expedition´s leaders, never met the great white father in Washington who conceived it, never suspected how famous it would make her. She did have the satisfaction of knowing she had performed useful services, seen an ocean, traveled farther than virtually any of her people and made important friends - especially Clark.

And she may never have thought of herself in quite the same way again.

For its only woman, the Voyage of Discovery was a time of personal discovery. She exchanged a life of oppression for a breath of liberation and, though she may never have known it, a place in history. Her time with Lewis and especially Clark, who on at least one occasion restrained her husband from beating her, allowed her to see herself as a person of value rather than as a slave or possession.

She had had the adventure of a lifetime.

Her final journey.
Sacajawea, Charbonneau and Jean Baptiste spent about three years in the Mandan village after completing their journey to the Pacific and back. Charbonneau preferred the Indian lifestyle to living in a city, but an offer he couldn´t refuse took the family to St. Louis.

William Clark had taken a liking to Jean Baptiste during their travels together. He called him his "little dancing boy, Baptiste." Clark offered to adopt him and raise him as his own child. Sacajawea agreed to consider it, but told him she wanted to wait until he was older.
She and Charbonneau ultimately accepted the offer, knowing their son would be well cared for and receive a better education than they could give him. They took Jean Baptiste to St. Louis, where Clark was living, in 1809. Clark by then was a general and superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Louisiana Territory.
Sacajawea and Charbonneau stayed in St. Louis with Jean Baptiste for two years, then left him under Clark´s care and returned to the Mandan villages. Jean Baptiste was 6. Sacajawea, then in her early 20s, was pregnant.
Her second child was born in 1812. A daughter named Lizette, she is thought to have died in infancy.
But Sacajawea died before her daughter.
"This evening the Wife of Charbonau a Snake Squaw, died Of a putrid fever she was a good and the best Woman in the fort, aged about 25 years she left a fine infant girl."
The words are those of John Luttig, a clerk with the Missouri Fur Company. He recorded the death in his journal on Dec. 12, 1812, at Fort Manuel, S.D.
Sometime between 1825 and 1828, Clark compiled a list of expedition members. After their names, he recorded whether they were still living. After Sacajawea´s name, he wrote "dead."
The Lemhis, along with some of the nation´s foremost scholars, accept Luttig´s and Clark´s reports. They say Clark was closer to her than anyone else on the expedition except her husband and son, that he was in contact with Jean Baptiste and in a better position than almost anyone to know Sacajawea´s fate.
If she had lived to be old, as some maintain, Sacajawea would have had decades to realize her dream of returning to her Idaho homeland. There is nothing in the tribe´s oral history to indicate that she was ever seen there again after the Lewis and Clark expedition.

There is Lemhi oral history, however, regarding the place of her death. Consistent with the report of an early death at Fort Manuel, it attributes to Jean Baptiste statements that his mother died in South Dakota.