A ceremony at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello recently kicked off
the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial celebration, with events scheduled
along the great explorers’ route over the next three years. But if
the 1992 500th year anniversary of Columbus’s landing was any
indication, the Lewis and Clark observance will be politically
volatile. Many on the Left view them as the vanguard of racism,
literal and cultural genocide, and environmental degradation in the
West. The person of Sacagawea will be a lightning rod. There’s
already a small imbroglio over the correct spelling of her name
(“Sacagawea,” “Sacajawea,” “Sakakawea”).
The story is familiar to anyone who studied American History in
high school (though that’s problematic nowadays). In 1805-06,
Sacagawea was the young Shoshone (also called Snakes) woman who
served as an interpreter for the Lewis and Clark expedition from
the Mandan villages on the Missouri River to her homeland in the
Rockies of present Idaho and beyond. Much of today’s scholarship
views her as an oppressed victim for this service (actually for her
whole life), though as the Bicentennial proceeds, Sacagawea’s
status as a native feminist icon will be overshadowed by two
questions that continue to nag like a toothache: When did she die;
and where are her remains?
Sacagawea was born circa 1785-90, and as an adolescent was
carried off near the Three Forks of the Missouri in present Montana
during a raid by the Hidatsas, a tribe related to the Crows, and
who lived on the Missouri near the Mandans in present North Dakota.
Her Hidatsa captor lost her in a gambling game to Toussaint
Charbonneau, a brutish French-Canadian trapper who lived with the
Mandans. He married her, and she assumed the then-common cultural
role among Indians of wife-property or “squaw,” with all its
subservient unpleasantness.
Lewis and Clark’s “Corps of Discovery” arrived in the fall of
1804, built cabins, and spent the frigid winter of the plains among
the friendly Mandans. (So friendly, in fact, that a number of crew
members contracted venereal disease from compliant Mandan squaws.
Clark’s black slave York was especially popular.) During that stay
they hired Charbonneau as a “guide,” though this is problematic as
the trapper was no more knowledgeable of the vastness of the West
than any number of itinerant Canadian “voyageurs” then plying the
Missouri. No, Lewis and Clark knew a good package deal when they
saw it; to get Charbonneau would also include Sacagawea and her
considerable Indian linguistic skills and knowledge of the country
from which she came.
With Meriwether Lewis as midwife, Sacagawea gave birth to a son
(Jean Baptiste Charbonneau) that winter, and in the spring (1805)
put the infant on her back as the Corps of Discovery again took to
their keelboats to ascend the upper Missouri. After numerous
adventures in the following months, Sacagawea located her people
the Shoshones, who sold horses to Lewis and Clark for the
continuation of their travels.
Sacagawea went on with “the Captains” to the Pacific, where they
spent the miserably rainy winter of 1805-06 at a stockade and
cabins they built named Fort Clatsop, and where — according to the
famous “Journals” — she marveled at the “big fish” (a whale
beached on the Oregon coast). After further well-known adventures,
the expedition returned to the Mandan villages in the summer of
1806, where Charbonneau was released from his duties, and according
to his contract was paid $500. Sacagawea got nothing. Sometime
later the couple traveled to St. Louis and left the child Jean
Baptiste in Clark’s care to be educated. At this point Sacagawea
fades into the mists of history.
IT IS MOST LIKELY THAT Sacagawea died at Fort Manuel Lisa, a
trading post in present South Dakota in December, 1812, at the
approximate age of 25. From the journal of one John Luttig , a
clerk at Fort Manuel Lisa: “Sunday the 20th….this Evening the
wife of Charbonneau a Snake Squaw, died of putrid fever she was a
good and best Woman in the fort, aged about 25 years she left a
fine infant girl.”
Nevertheless, no gravesite exists in South Dakota. Indians were
known for burying their dead in remote places, so her body was
probably removed far from the fort.
There is another controversial theory that she lived nearly a
century, died in 1884, and is buried at Fort Washakie on the Wind
River Reservation in western Wyoming. In the next grave lie the
supposed remains of her son Jean Baptiste. Or so the Eastern
Shoshones who live there would have us believe.
A University of Wyoming historian, Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard,
made this claim in her 1932 book Sacajawea (also the
preferred Shoshone spelling). The book was mostly based on hearsay
and the personal recollections of by-then elderly Shoshones, but
caught on with the Indians themselves, and Wyoming boosters. In
1941, a rough granite marker was dedicated at the cemetery by state
and tribal officials. And in 1963, an elaborate six-foot granite
monument was dedicated by the Daughters of the American Revolution
(DAR), the organization officially sanctioning the Hebard myth.
Besides the 1812 Luttig journal entry, we have a bit more to go
on to prove that Sacagawea died young. In his Pulitzer
Prize-winning Across the Wide Missouri (1947), Bernard
DeVoto has a traveling German nobleman, Prince Maximilian of
Wied-Neuwied, accompanying the famous Indian portrait artist Karl
Bodmer. At Fort Clark on the Missouri in 1833, the prairie
travelers meet a “geologically old” Toussaint Charbonneau, in the
employ of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. DeVoto tells us
that Charbonneau, “the widower of Sacajawea” and “ancient as
Ramses” (probably about 75), would be around a few years yet, long
enough to survive the 1837 smallpox epidemic that killed thousands
of Mandans, Arikaras, Sioux, Assiniboines, Hidatsas and Blackfeet.
William Clark, writing at length in a journal in 1828 about the
fates of some of his Corps of Discovery compatriots, makes this
simple, haunting note in his idiosyncratic spelling: “SarcarJawea
— Dead”.
JEAN BAPTISTE CHARBONNEAU (“Pomp,” as he was affectionately
nicknamed by Clark) is easier to follow, and led an interesting
life. He attended schools in St. Louis and eventually in Europe,
and was a cultured, well-read man who spoke four languages and,
according to DeVoto, “recited Shakespeare around wilderness
campfires.” He returned to the West sometime in the 1830s, and
figures in a number of histories of the fur trade and pioneer
emigrant eras. He caught gold fever and went to California in the
1850s. A newspaper obituary and death records prove that he died in
Oregon in 1866. His grave at Danner, Oregon, was entered into the
National Register of Historic Places on March 14, 1973.
Since modern forensic methods like DNA don’t apply, and even
dental records are many times nonexistent to identify remains of
over a century, this mystery will remain with us. We know that
there is an old Indian woman buried at Fort Washakie, along with a
man next to her. Exhumation — even if permitted — would be a
futile exercise. In light of the recent Kennewick Man controversy
in the Pacific Northwest, it would lay before us a minefield of
bitter, culturally-sensitive identity politics. American Indians
are viewed on the left as A-List victims.
Our age of political correctness will ensure that the Wind River
Shoshones will stick to their story for a myriad of cultural
reasons boiled down to simple economics. After all, they wouldn’t
want to disappoint all those tourists visiting the gravesites at
Fort Washakie during these next few Lewis and Clark Bicentennial
years.
Tim Thorson, executive director of the nearby Riverton, Wyoming
Chamber of Commerce, and president of the Wind River Visitors
Council, was recently interviewed by a local reporter about plans
for observing the Bicentennial in western Wyoming. “Our biggest
challenge is how to promote the history in a culturally sensitive
way,” he said.
No kidding.
Bill Croke is a writer in Cody,
Wyoming.
