Sacagawea

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(Redirected from Sakakawea)

Sacagawea (Sakakawea, Sacajawea, Sacajewea; see below) (c. 1787 – December 20, 1812 or April 9, 1884) was a Native American woman who accompanied the Corps of Discovery with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

1 Birth
2 Marriage
3 Lewis and Clark
4 Myths and legends
5 Name
6 In sculpture
7 Popular Culture
8 External links

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Birth

Sacagawea was born to a tribe of Shoshone near what is now Lemhi County, Idaho. However, in 1800, when she was about 11 or 12, she was kidnapped by a group of Hidatsa, and taken to their village near the present Washburn, North Dakota. She therefore grew up culturally affiliated with this tribe; some believe her name is taken from the Hidatsa phrase for "bird woman." She was named so because when she was born a flock of white birds flew overhead. The origins and proper pronunciation of her name has become a great point of controversy and contention among interested historians and her brother Cameahwait's descendants (Sacajawea has no known direct descendants).

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Marriage

At the age of about sixteen, Sacagawea married a French trapper, Toussaint Charbonneau, who was also currently married to another Shoshone woman. Two accounts survive of Charbonneau's acquirement of Sacagawea: (1) he purchased both from the Hidatsa as wives, and (2), her husband won her in a card game.

Sacagawea was pregnant with their first child, Jean Baptiste (nicknamed "Pomp"), when the Corps of Discovery arrived in the area to spend the winter of 1804-1805. Needing someone to interpret the Hidatsa language, Lewis and Clark interviewed Charbonneau for the job. Although they were not exactly impressed with him, the deal was sealed when they discovered that Sacagawea spoke Shoshone, a great advantage. She would become valuable in her role as interpreter. Today many monuments are dedicated to Sacagawea. Also, several programs such as musicals are about Sacagawea's journey with Lewis and Clark.

Sacagawea also gave birth to a daughter, Lisette, shortly before her death from a fever. The child is not believed to have survived infancy.

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Lewis and Clark

Lewis and Clark met Sacagawea when she was sixteen. Contrary to a common romantic view, Sacagawea did not "guide Lewis and Clark across the continent." She did offer some geographic guidance and confirmation in the Three Forks area where she had lived as a child, for instance advising Clark to cross Bozeman Pass on his separate return journey. Sacagawea also instructed Lewis on which plants were edible/useful to the party, translated when they met the Shoshone (the original purpose for which she was brought along), and served as a passive goodwill ambassador. The presence of a woman and child with the group would serve as a signal that the expedition, while armed, was an essentially peaceful undertaking.

In one noted act in 1805 as the expedition moved up the Missouri River, Sacagawea rescued items that had fallen out of a capsized boat, including the notes and records that Lewis and Clark were keeping. The corps commanders, who praised her quick action on this occasion, would name a river in her honor.

By August 17, 1805 the corps had located a Shoshone tribe and were attempting to trade for horses to cross the Rocky Mountains. Sacagawea was brought in to translate, and it was discovered the tribe's chief was her brother Cameahwait.

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Myths and legends

Previously noted, reliable historical information about Sacagawea is extremely limited. For example, there was no contemporary portrait made of her. Regrettably, the lack of records has fostered a number of myths about Sacagawea. One of these is that she was romantically involved with Lewis or Clark; while the journals show that she was friendly with Clark and would often do favors for him, the idea of a liaison is almost certainly manufactured wholly by novelists who wrote about the expedition decades and centuries later.

Another legend surrounding Sacagawea involves a Shoshone woman who claimed to be her, and who died at the Wind River Band reservation in Wyoming on April 9, 1884. The Wyoming DAR in 1963 went so far as to erect a Sacagawea monument near Lander, Wyoming on the basis of this claim.

One legend says that when Sacajawea was born, a bird flew into her tent and pecked her on the cheek.

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Name

Image:Sakakawea-statue-bismarck-nd-2004.jpg Sacagawea is the most widely used spelling of her name, and is properly pronounced Template:IPA. Up until the latter part of the 20th century, however, schools mostly taught her name as being Sacajawea or Sacajewea Template:IPA. The confusion here almost certainly originated from the use of the "j" spelling by Nicholas Biddle, who annotated the expedition's journals in 1814. The error was compounded with the publication of the novel, The Conquest, written by Eva Emery Dye in 1902, in anticipation of the expedition's centennial. It is likely Dye used Biddle's secondary source for the spelling, and her highly popular book made it ubiquitous throughout the United States (previously most non-scholars had never even heard of Sacagawea). Conversely, the journals themselves mention Sacagawea by name seventeen times, each time with the "g" spelling. While the spelling Sacajawea has subsided from general use, the corresponding pronunciation persists in American culture. Sacagawea is the spelling adopted by the United States Mint for use with the dollar coin. (See Sacagawea Dollar.)

Sakakawea Template:IPA is the next most widely adopted spelling and pronunciation, and is the official spelling of her name according to the Three Affiliated Tribes, which include the Hidatsa. This spelling is widely used throughout North Dakota, notably in the naming of Lake Sakakawea. However, some historians and linguists discount this version, alleging its development was based on faulty research that went into an 1877 US Government Printing Office Publication, Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians, which transliterated "bird" as "tsa-ka-ka," and "woman" as "mia," "wia" or "bia." Some advocates of this version prefer it because it approximates the generally accepted pronunciation but avoids the g/j confusion.

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In sculpture

A Harold Balazs statue of Sacajawea is displayed in the rose garden in front of the President’s House at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington.
A statue of Sakakawea and baby Pomp by Leonard Crunelle appears on the grounds of the North Dakota State Capitol in Bismarck, North Dakota, and a replica of it represents North Dakota in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol.
A statue of Sacagawea with her baby in a cradle board is included in the Harry Weber diorama of the Lewis & Clark expedition "Late May 1805", that is on display in the lobby of the St. Louis Drury Plaza Hotel, located in the historical International Fur Exchange building.