If Grace Hebard gave half a damn about the opinions of men, perhaps she would’ve married one. But she never had the time: Since ditching Iowa in 1882 for a pioneer’s life in Wyoming, she had become one of the most renowned scholars in the West. So when U.S. government officials kept rejecting requests for public cash, Hebard simply took matters into her own hands: In the spring of 1933, now in her seventies, Hebard shelled out $150 of her own money to round out a set of three historical markers up the road from Fort Washakie. The center monument honored the gravesite of Sacagawea, the fabled Shoshone interpreter who hiked with Lewis and Clark to the Pacific. The other two were for her sons: one for Bazil, and one for Jean-Baptiste, whose life began as a transcontinental papoose strapped to his mother’s back.
Grace Raymond Hebard
Wikipedia
Hebard is the one who blew the Sacagawea story wide open, discovering the Native American guide had been buried right there on the Wind River Indian Reservation. Hebard’s conclusions were amazing: The girl guide apparently lived to be 100 years old. She witnessed years of westward expansion, conquest, ethnic cleansing, and forcible corralling. Hebard even unearthed evidence that Sacagawea eventually reunited with her long-lost Jean-Baptiste, and became a chief among her people until she died in 1884.
That is, if you believe a single word of it. Plenty of historians, members of other tribes, and even some residents of Wind River, say Sacagawea never set foot in Wyoming. She never rejoined her tribe, never got this amazing new life, never even lived long enough to see a Native American reservation. Detractors claim Hebard didn’t even spell her subject’s name right. She used a "J," as in “Sacajawea," while most scholars — and I, as long as we're at it — favor “Sacagawea” with a hard "G." Grace Hebard had engineered a historical fantasy that hoodwinked the country. The old woman buried in that hill by Fort Washakie is not Sacagawea, and the boy to her left is certainly not the transcontinental papoose. And Bazil? Who the heck is Bazil?
One hot morning in May I visited Sacajawea Cemetery, where Hebard’s modest stones have been replaced with much more assertive ones. But a plaque near Sacagawea’s grave had been vandalized. The sentence “The tall granite headstone directly west of this sign is Sacajawea’s burial marker” had been violently edited with a switchblade. The phrase “directly west” had been scratched off — and “EAST” carved in block letters underneath.
Natalie Shure / BuzzFeed News
Hundreds of miles “EAST,” in fact. Whoever scratched up that plaque is talking about Fort Manuel Lisa, on the border between North and South Dakota. Most researchers have reached the far less romantic conclusion that Sacagawea died there of typhoid fever in 1812, likely buried in an unmarked grave, dead without a name at 25.
An anonymous, premature death is at odds with Sacagawea’s modern-day status as an American icon. She’s inspired lesson plans, picture books, movies, and one-woman shows. In the 2006 megahit Night at the Museum, a life-size Sacagawea figurine is among the exhibit items in the Museum of Natural History that spring to life overnight. As one museum docent squealed, “She literally led these men across rivers, up mountains… She was the ultimate working mother!”
Hillary Clinton had hit similar points in her 1999 address unveiling the golden dollar coin depicting Sacagawea lugging wee Jean-Baptiste. “Even as she cared for her baby, she demonstrated remarkable courage and ingenuity, serving the expedition as an invaluable interpreter and guide … Sacagawea played an unforgettable role in the history of our nation.” For the rollout, coins were widely advertised and hidden in Cheerios boxes, as part of a $40 million marketing campaign and partnership with Wal-Mart and General Mills.
And statues have popped up all over the country. In fact, the National Women's History Museum hazards that there may be more monuments honoring Sacagawea than any other woman in the United States. A bronze statue of her wading into the Pacific, as she might have done on the expedition, stands not far from her Wind River gravesite. You can also find her in Texas, Missouri, and the U.S. Capitol Building (repping North Dakota, not Wyoming). One statue of Lewis, Clark, and a kneeling Sacagawea even sparked protest in 2007, when feminists turned out with signs reading “SACAGAWEA NEVER COWERED.”
But how did Sacagawea become such a beloved American heroine that people literally fight over her bones? She has proven to be a powerful vessel for so many disparate agendas, trotted out as a symbol to endorse Manifest Destiny, champion women’s rights, and gesture toward American diversity. Few American historical figures have reached such iconographic status despite so little being known about them. So how do we know what we do know about Sacagawea? And do we have it right?
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson bought a massive swath of land, now known as the Louisiana Purchase, off of Napoleon. The deal instantly almost doubled U.S. territory, extending it from the edge of Illinois up through most of Montana, and diagonally down to the lucrative port city of New Orleans. As he later wrote to his successor James Madison, Jefferson envisioned on this land an eventual “empire for liberty,” as if these two things might not be mutually exclusive.
The U.S. government knew little about the land, a rugged blob populated by Native Americans and fur trappers. Jefferson was eager to know what resources could be exploited by his newborn republic. So he sweet-talked Congress into budgeting $2,500 for an expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific Northwest and back to explore what, exactly, the country had bought. (Think of it like a two-year episode of Storage Wars.)
Jefferson appointed his personal assistant Meriwether Lewis — a family friend who wasn’t yet 30 — to lead the journey. Lewis invited his old army buddy William Clark to serve as co-captain, and the two assembled a team of a couple dozen explorers to serve under them in the Corps of Discovery. The military party set off in the spring of 1804, with ridiculously ambitious goals: to extend U.S. sovereignty westward, to create an American foothold into the still-technically British Oregon country, to establish trade relationships with tribes, to chart a transcontinental water route to pump up American commerce, and to generate a detailed report of everything they found.
So they journaled to keep close tabs on the people, flora, fauna, and terrain they came across. The combined, unabridged daily logs of the captains and four of their men topped a million words. And an eensy-weensy proportion of them constitute almost the sum total of human knowledge about Sacagawea, whom the men were about to meet.
The Corps of Discovery decided to spend their first winter upstream from Illinois territory, near Hidatsa and Mandan country, in present-day North Dakota. That’s when they met a French-Canadian fur trapper in his forties named Toussaint Charbonneau, whom Lewis once described as “a man of no particular merit.” With him were his two Shoshone “wives”: Otter Woman and Sacagawea, who was probably about six months pregnant. The girls were around 16 years old, and had been sold off to Charbonneau after being kidnapped as children by the Hidatsa as the spoils of intertribal war.
However unimpressive Charbonneau may have been, he, unlike the rest of the corps, spoke passable Hidatsa. Even more crucially, his wives spoke Shoshone — the language of the strategically located tribe the corps would have to rely on for horse trades and guidance over the Rockies. Sacagawea and Charbonneau joined their new co-workers at the finished encampment called Fort Mandan. It speaks to Sacagawea’s intelligence and language skills that she was chosen for the job over his other wife, Otter Woman, even though it would mean bringing a screaming infant along for the ride. Sacagawea gave birth to her healthy baby boy on Feb. 11, 1805. To soothe the intense labor, she guzzled down an elixir made of mashed-up rattlesnake tail.
Fifty-five days later, Sacagawea was famously strapping the kid to her spine for the long walk to Oregon. (So ingrained is our image of the two as a pair that Jean-Baptiste even made it onto his mother’s golden coin.)
Come April, they were off.
So Sacagawea wasn’t exactly a “guide,” as we tend to think of her. But several anecdotes, recorded in the expedition’s 5,000-page account, show how she came in handy.
Like the time, a month into the trip, their canoe got wind-whipped onto its side. Crucial supplies were thrown overboard and would have been lost if it weren’t for Sacagawea, who thought fast and plunged in to save the imperiled cargo. Lewis wrote of his gratitude toward “the Indian woman, to whom I ascribe equal fortitude and resolution, with any person onboard at the time of the accident” — especially when compared with her lousy husband, who let everyone else do the work while “still crying to his god for mercy,” proving himself to be “perhaps the most timid waterman in the world.” (This is how to call someone a “pussy” in the 19th century.)
Months later, right around Three Forks, Montana, the corps bumped into Sacagawea’s own tribe. She bubbled with joy to be reunited with her people, whom she hadn't seen since being snatched during battle as a kid years before. For Lewis, her exuberance upon meeting them was “really affecting.” The tribal elders spoke to her in Shoshone; she relayed their words in Hidatsa to Charbonneau, who put it in French to a corps member named Francois LaBiche, who Englished it back to pretty much everyone else. They negotiated trades for horses, and enlisted the Shoshone to help shepherd the group safely across the Rocky Mountains.
And then there’s everyone’s favorite anecdote about Sacagawea — the one that gets brought up by every historian and every Shoshone I’ve come across. In December of 1805, the Corps of Discovery had hit their halfway point and set up a second winter campsite near the edge of Oregon. After building Fort Clatsop, the corps members caught wind of a scintillating rumor from local tribes: There’s a beached whale carcass washed up on the shore, if you want in on that!
A big dead whale could be a flammable blubber bonanza for a bunch of people who, desperate for protein while crossing the Rockies, had eaten their candles made of animal fat. So right after the new year, Clark announced that he’d peel off with a smaller group to take a short trip to the water, leaving much of the crew — including our leading lady — back at the fort.
But Sacagawea begged to come. As Clark described it, she “was very impatient to be permitted to go with me ... She observed that She had traveled a long way with us to See the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be Seen, She thought it verry hard that She Could not be permitted to See either (She had never yet been to the Ocian).” Side note: That whole paragraph is under a [sic] umbrella. Lewis and Clark were pretty lousy spellers.
And, dang, Clark. Of course she wanted to go. She had just taken an eight-month postpartum hike with a bunch of dudes twice her age while breastfeeding a newborn. She didn’t come here to play an entire game of solitaire and not watch the cards dance down.
Getty (5); Natalie Shure
It was the most assertive she ever gets in the journals, and it paid off. She was allowed to join the trip to the beach — which yielded a 300-pound blubber haul — and got to see a 105-foot-long whale skeleton sprawled against the vast Pacific. That March, in 1806, the crew began their long trip back home. Jean-Baptiste had turned 1, and he boosted the men’s morale by bouncing around in the firelight. The tyke had grown especially on Clark, who’d nicknamed him “Pomp” and wrote lovingly of “my little dancing boy.” On July 25, Clark carved his signature into a natural rock formation in Montana that he dubbed “Pompy’s Tower,” now called Pompeys Pillar, literally setting his affection into stone.
By August, the crew had returned Fort Mandan, where they’d spent that first winter in North Dakota. The members said goodbye to Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and Jean-Baptiste as the family returned to Hidatsa country. For his services to the mission as interpreter, Charbonneau was paid $500 and 33 and 1/3 cents. Sacagawea got nothing.
After squaring up, the rest of the corps continued down the Missouri River. But Clark immediately regretted leaving the Charbonneau family behind. En route to St. Louis, Clark sent Charbonneau a letter that made a significant promise: If Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and Pomp came south to live in St. Louis, Clark would set them up with some land and a first-rate education for Pomp. “You know well my fondness for [your boy] and my anxiety to take and raise him as my own child,” Clark wrote. Three years later, the family would accept the invite and join Clark down the Missouri.
News of the expedition’s success was an instantaneous media sensation for the time. Jefferson really milked the political victory the success had earned him, and Lewis and Clark were lauded as heroes. Edited and abridged (thank god) versions of the expedition journals were published shortly after the trip. Historians latched onto the American Odyssey as soon as their boots hit the dock.
But none of them wrote about Sacagawea. Not for nearly 100 years.
Sometime around 1900, a woman named Eva Emery Dye was on the hunt for a heroine. Dye was an amateur historian who served as chair of her local chapter of the Oregon Equal Suffrage Association. At the time, many women’s rights activists focused on highlighting women’s overlooked contributions to the country’s past as a way to show that their voting rights were long overdue. So Dye began retracing women’s steps over the historical record to find a worthy protagonist.
Eva Emery Dye
Wikipedia
And did she ever find one! In 1902, Dye published a sensational book. The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark introduced an intriguing new character into an already well-known American epic, performing feats that only a woman could. Years later, Dye described how she made Sacagawea a star: “I traced down every old book and scrap of paper. ... Finally, I came upon the name of Sacajawea and I screamed, ‘I have found my heroine.’ I then hunted up every fact I could find about Sacajawea. Out of a few dry bones I found in the old tales of the trip I created Sacajawea and made her a real living entity. For months I dug and scraped for accurate information about this wonderful Indian maid. The world snatched at my heroine, Sacajawea. ... The beauty of that faithful Indian woman with her baby on her back, leading those stalwart mountaineers and explorers through the strange land, appealed to the world.”
Dye’s timing was just right. Plans were already underway for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in 1905, a world fair that would put Portland, Oregon, on the map. That summer and fall, nearly 1.6 million visitors turned up to commemorate the Corps of Discovery’s legendary trek across the uncharted wilderness.
The suffragettes were not about to blow this chance. A coalition of women’s organizations crowdfunded a monument to Sacagawea to be presented at the exposition. Seven thousand dollars and one statue later, an unveiling was held on July 6, 1905. Susan B. Anthony gave the opening address. “The recognition of the great assistance rendered by [Sacagawea] is but the beginning of the work to be done here,” Anthony said. “Next year the men of this proud state ... will decide whether women should at last have the right in it which they have been denied them so many years.”
In this way, turn-of-the-century white progressives reappropriated Sacagawea for their own rose-colored history. Now the glory of American expansion belonged to women, too! But many still wondered: What happened to this newly minted American patriot after the expedition?
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