Over several decades, when I have encountered my friend Gerard Baker of the Mandan-Hidatsa, he has invariably said, “You know Sacagawea was Hidatsa.” The Hidatsa (Lewis and Clark’s Minnetarees) believe that Sacagawea was always Hidatsa, that she had an important relationship with the Shoshone, but that she was not genetically Shoshone. The Hidatsa believe that Lewis and Clark “got it wrong.” Now they have published a book to make their case, Our Story of Eagle Woman: Sacagawea: They Got it Wrong.
This is a very difficult book to review for several reasons. First, its argument, its insistence, contradicts everything we thought we knew about Sacagawea. We thought Sacagawea was born Shoshone, captured by the Hidatsa, acculturated into the Hidatsa world, given a Hidatsa name (Bird Woman), and that Lewis and Clark took her with them in April 1805 to help secure horses from her natal people, the Shoshone. According to Gerard Baker, the Sacagawea Project Board, Calvin Grinnell, Bernard Fox, Carol Fredericks Newman, and Wanda Fox Sheppard, solid Hidatsa oral tradition confirms that she was Hidatsa all along, and the Lewis and Clark world needs to accept the truth and correct the record.
Second, Gerard Baker, Calvin Grinnell, and the others involved in this project are formidable people, who have earned the right to be taken very seriously. Grinnell is a distinguished Mandan-Hidatsa elder and historian who has worked extensively with the State Historical Society of North Dakota for many years. Baker is a distinguished, even celebrated, Mandan-Hidatsa elder who had a remarkable career in the National Park Service. He served as Superintendent of Mount Rushmore National Monument, Superintendent of the Little Bighorn National Monument, and, during the Bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, as Superintendent of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. They do not enter this debate lightly.
Third, the authors of this book are Hidatsa. It is their tradition. Lewis and Clark were Anglo outsiders who passed through the world of the Upper Missouri carrying a great deal of Eurocentric cultural baggage, who might have misunderstood the basic facts of Sacagawea’s biography. Half a century ago, it was routine in white historical circles to dismiss oral tradition as unworthy of scholarly respect. For example, the testimony of one of Sally Hemings’ sons, Madison Hemings, as told to an Ohio newspaperman in 1873, that Thomas Jefferson was his father and the father of several of his siblings, was summarily dismissed by Jefferson historians, including the great Dumas Malone, until around 1980, even though it was the recorded testimony of the son of Sally Hemings. All that has changed. We have learned to take oral tradition much more seriously than we used to. It is not that oral traditions are invariably 100 percent accurate, but nor are more traditional document-based histories. And even when oral traditions don’t hold up in all of their details, they usually reveal some important truth about the people telling the stories that must be respectfully factored into our analysis of historical events.
The Hidatsa Account
Here, as carefully as I can piece it together, is the Hidatsa story. The woman we call Sacagawea would more accurately be known as Eagle Woman. She was born on Night Walker Butte, near the confluence of the Little Missouri and Missouri Rivers (the confluence now drowned by Lake Sakakawea). The men of the Awatixa Hidatsa village were out hunting when a raiding party of the Shoshone attacked the village. Eagle Woman was taken back to the Shoshone world as a captive, along with a number of other Hidatsa children. She refused to forget her Hidatsa life and often looked longingly towards the east. An old Shoshone woman noticed her intense homesickness and offered to help her escape. The old woman escorted her some ways east of the Shoshone village and gave her essential advice. Eagle Woman was to let herself be led home by wolves that would appear to her each night and lead her towards the Hidatsa. At first light the wolf would disappear and Eagle Woman must hide through the day. The journey was an immense undertaking. Altogether four wolves would be needed to get her home. The Hidatsa acknowledge that “four” is a symbolic number (like the creation over six days in the book of Genesis) and that it might have taken much longer than four days for Eagle Woman to cross Montana and get home.
This is known as the Strong Jaw Story, first written down by the white historian and ethnologist Alfred Bowers in the 1930s. There are several other variations of the story. There is, for example, the Bull’s Eye version, in which Bird Woman was taken by her father on a visit to the Shoshone, during which she established relationships with several individuals, whom thereafter she called “brother” or “sister,” in the wider kinship definitions of the Hidatsa and other Native American tribes. In another version she may have been more Crow-Hidatsa than Hidatsa, which would make the distances less gigantic. The Hidatsa and Crow were linguistic and cultural cousins. They had once all lived on the Missouri River in North Dakota, but after a dispute, part of the Hidatsa relocated along the Yellowstone River in Montana.
Most Hidatsa accounts have Eagle Woman (Sacagawea) dying on Sand Creek near Wolf Point, Montana, at the age of approximately 86. That tradition rejects both the December 1812 death story (at Fort Manuel on the North Dakota-South Dakota border) and the Wind River Indian Reservation April 9, 1884, death story, as indicated by a grave marker at Fort Washakie, Wyoming.
I confess that I am skeptical of the full Hidatsa claim.
What Degree of Skepticism is Proper?
It needs to be acknowledged, however, that the Hidatsa have already been remarkably successful in claiming Sacagawea. The really old view that she was a Shoshone girl named Sacajawea who was captured by the Hidatsa, but who returned to her people in company with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, has mostly been retired, except in parts of the Shoshone world. Led by the Hidatsa, and particularly Gerard Baker, by the time the Bicentennial was underway, the new view was that while she may have been born Shoshone and may even have been called Sacajawea in her childhood, her Lewis and Clark name was unmistakably Hidatsa, and she had been largely culturally absorbed by the Hidatsa by the time the Corps of Discovery arrived at the mouth of the Knife River in October 1804. The giant reservoir behind Garrison Dam in North Dakota is named Lake Sakakawea (as if to emphasize the point as powerfully as possible!). The Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site calls one of the earthlodge villages, Awatixa, the Sakakawea village.
In other words, what the Hidatsa have already accomplished represents a serious revision (almost a revolution) in our thinking about Sacagawea. Their more extreme claim that she was Hidatsa all along has to overcome some formidable evidence in the journals of the expedition.
Let me explain.
How Lewis and Clark Saw It
Before May 20, 1805, the woman in question was invariably called the “interpreter’s wife,” the “interpreter,” the “interpretess,” the “squar,” or Charbonneau’s “woman.”
For example, on the day she gave birth to her first child, February 11, 1805, Captain Lewis wrote a 200-word account of the day, almost all of which was devoted to her prolonged and difficult labor, which may or may not have been relieved by a rattlesnake rattle concoction suggested by the French Mandan interpreter Rene Jusseaume. In the course of this entry, Lewis refers to the woman in question as “one of the wives of Charbono,” as “this woman,” “the woman,” and “she” (twice), but never by name. I think it is quite possible, even likely, that Lewis did not know her name in February 1805. She was just the “wife” of Toussaint Charbonneau, à la façon du pays (in the accepted coupling manner of the outback).
On the day of the spring mustering, departure day, April 7, 1805, Lewis lists all of the members of the 1805 exploration party, including, in his subordinate list, “an Indian Woman wife to Charbono with a young child.” William Clark makes a similar list in his journal entry for the day, including “Shabonah and his Indian Squar to act as an Interpreter & interpretress for the snake Indians — one Mandan & Shabonahs infant. Sah-kah-gar we â.” Editor Gary Moulton, who studied the original journals painstakingly, provides a footnote suggesting that Sah-kah-gar we â was added in at some later point. “Sacagawea’s name may have been added as an afterthought, or perhaps later, after Clark came to know her better.” Precisely: when he “came to know her better.”
So, whatever Lewis and Clark called the woman in question during the winter and spring of 1805, they seem not to have known her name — or perhaps were unable to pronounce or write her name, which, if you have ever heard the Hidatsa pronounce it, is difficult and guttural. She was the wife of Charbonneau. Their view of her was pragmatic and instrumental, “interpretress for the snake Indians.” At this early point in their relationship with her, they seem to have regarded her as something more than a camp follower but less than a full member of the Corps of Discovery.
Then something happened.
On May 14, 1805, in eastern Montana, near today’s Snow Creek Bay now inundated by Fort Peck Reservoir, the White Pirogue nearly sank during a sudden squall on the Missouri River. Charbonneau, who was at the rudder, panicked when the wind nearly overturned the pirogue, threw up his hands in prayer, and only got control of the boat when Pierre Cruzatte threatened to shoot him.
The two captains were both on shore far across the river at the time of the incident. They watched in helpless anguish. If the White Pirogue had gone down, the Expedition would have been severely compromised, and might have collapsed altogether. As Lewis wrote, we “were too far distant to be heard or to do more than remain spectators of her fate; in this perogue were embarked, our papers, Instruments, books medicine, a great part of our merchandize and in short almost every article indispensibly necessary to further the views, or insure the success of the enterprize in which we are now launched to the distance of 2200 miles.”
In this dramatic account of the accident, Lewis makes no mention of Sacagawea. In his entry for the same day, Clark does mention her, but only in the usual manner. Matter-of-factly, Clark writes, “the articles which floated out was nearly all caught by the Squar who was in the rear.” The Squar. Two days later, however, viewing the incident in retrospect, Lewis added “the Indian woman” to the story. “[T]he loss we sustained was not so great as we had at first apprehended; our medicine sustained the greatest injury, several articles of which were intirely spoiled, and many others considerably injured; the ballance of our losses consisted of some gardin seeds, a small quantity of gunpowder, and a few culinary articles which fell overboard and sunk, the Indian woman to whom I ascribe equal fortitude and resolution, with any person onboard at the time of the accedent, caught and preserved most of the light articles which were washed overboard.”
“Fortitude and resolution” are high praise, but even so, “the Indian woman” is not accorded a name.
That moment came just four days later. On May 20, 1805, Lewis writes, “about five miles abe the mouth of shell river a handsome river of about fifty yards in width discharged itself into the shell river on the Stard. or upper side; this stream we called Sâh-câ-gar me-âh [NB: Sah ca gah we a]or bird woman’s River, after our interpreter the Snake woman.” The bracketed [NB…] is Nicholas Biddle’s attempt to get even closer to the true pronunciation of her name.
Now, more than five months after they first met her at the Fort Mandan building site, Sacagawea finally has a name, and the beginnings of an origin story. The care with which Lewis tries to spell her name phonetically is unmistakable. You can almost hear someone, perhaps Charbonneau, repeating her name again — and again — while Lewis tries to render it in the roman alphabet. Sâh câ gar me âh. Note: it is possible that Lewis wrote a w rather than an m in the journal, and that Biddle later got the right pronunciation from Clark or George Shannon. Lewis also learned the translation of her name on May 20: Bird Woman. Not Boat Launcher or She Who Carries Burdens, but Bird Woman, which establishes beyond debate that what he was given on that day in Montana was Sacagawea’s Hidatsa name. (Just how Biddle brought the variant Sacajawea into the world of the 1814 edition of Lewis and Clark is still a mystery, one that we would give a great deal to sort out. And Lewis clearly identifies her here as a Snake or Shoshone woman (by birth).
This much seems clear. First, Sacagawea first got named in the journals almost immediately after her resolute and heroic behavior in the potentially disastrous White Pirogue incident. Second, Lewis had to make enquiries before he put ink to paper. Third, he worked hard to get the facts right. There is nothing haphazard or informal about this journal entry. Fourth, Sacagawea got a river named for her precisely because she had performed an important service for the Corps of Discovery, the more impressive because she could not have known at the time how essential those papers, instruments, books, and medicine she plucked out of the river were to the success of the voyage.
Today’s Hidatsa are certainly not going to dispute the name Sah ca gar we a or the translation Bird Woman on May 20, 1805. They surely believe that she deserved to have a river named for her, more than a slack water reservoir in North Dakota that nearly destroyed the lifeway of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara in the 1950s. (Today the tributary in Montana is usually known as Crooked Creek, though attempts have been made to restore the name Sacagawea River.) It’s Lewis’ words “Snake woman” the Hidatsa dispute.
Later in the summer of 1805, Lewis provided more information about Sacagawea’s back story. On July 28, 1805, not far southwest of the three forks of the Missouri, Lewis wrote: “Our present camp is precisely on the spot that the Snake Indians were encamped at the time the Minnetares of the Knife R. first came in sight of them five years since. from hence they retreated about three miles up Jeffersons river and concealed themselves in the woods, the Minnetares pursued, attacked them, killed 4 men 4 women a number of boys, and mad prisoners of all the females and four boys, Sah-cah-gar-we-ah or Indian woman was one of the female prisoners taken at that time.”
Again, this seems authoritative. Lewis had no reason to distort whatever was told to him by Charbonneau or Sacagawea through Charbonneau. On a number of occasions in “Our Story of Eagle Woman, Sacagawea,” the authors suggest that Charbonneau may have made up the Shoshone origin story in order to secure the contract of accompanying Lewis and Clark with one or both of his “Shoshone” wives. According to this far-fetched account, Charbonneau was worried that if he correctly identified Sacagawea as Hidatsa or Hidatsa-Crow, the captains of the Expedition might not have been persuaded that they needed Sacagawea to secure Shoshone horses. Because Charbonneau was a very resourceful opportunist (I agree heartily with this view) and because he was not particularly wedded to the truth, he fabricated the Hidatsa capture story to get the contract and assumed that he would be able to finesse things somehow once the Expedition arrived at the Shoshone camps. Too late to turn back now! When Charbonneau struck his wife on the evening of August 14, 1805, the authors offer this explanation: “Sacagawea was most likely under constant threat of being struck if she didn’t do as Charbonneau said. He may have seen her as not following his cover story that she was Shoshone.” This is so speculative as to be meaningless. Isn’t it more likely, by far, that Charbonneau was sometimes just a brute?
The authors of the book attempt to weaken the Shoshone origin story by arguing that Sacagawea did not really know the Shoshone language. Because Lewis used the problematic word tab-ba-bone (meaning stranger or possibly enemy) when he came within earshot of the Shoshone, the authors conclude that Sacagawea gave Lewis an imprecise word because her “Shoshone language ability was questionable.” This seems like a stretch. Lewis must have asked her what a good word for white man would be, and she gave him the nearest equivalent in Shoshone, stranger, which indeed he was. He should have asked for the Shoshone word for friend.
When, on August 17, 1805, Lewis writes, “acordingly about 4 P. M. we called them together and through the medium of Labuish, Charbono and Sah-cah-gar-weah, we communicated to them fully the objects which had brought us into this distant part of the country, in which we took care to make them a conspicuous object of our own good wishes and the care of our government,” the authors of Our Story of Eagle Woman, Sacagawea write, “Note that it took several to interpret between the party and the Shoshones, not just Sacagawea who was to be the interpreter. She was not fluent in Shoshone.” Thus, in a couple of pages she has gone from having “questionable” Shoshone language skills to the more severe liability of being “not fluent” in the language.
But this is to miss the point entirely. If Lewis wanted to explain to Cameahwait the Expedition’s needs and purposes, he would have to speak in his only language, English. Then Francois Labiche would translate from English to French, and Charbonneau, who was apparently weak in both English and Hidatsa, would translate into the language he shared with his wife Sacagawea, Hidatsa. She then (and only then) could communicate the words of Lewis to her relatives. There was no way to make this chain of interpretation any easier. Sacagawea could not be expected to speak on behalf of the Expedition’s purposes without explicit instructions from Lewis himself through such interpreters as he was able to assemble. It wasn’t that Sacagawea was weak in Shoshone, though she had been away for a long time, but that at least two other translators stood between her and whatever it was that Captain Lewis was attempting to communicate.
Our Story of Eagle Woman, Sacagawea is a fascinating book and it is an important book, even if it is wrong about the identity and biography of Sacagawea. We need more Native books about Lewis and Clark. The authors of this book have gathered into one place all the accumulated oral tradition the Hidatsa have about Sacagawea. The stories they tell are extraordinarily interesting, even if they are not all explicitly about the woman in question. The book has excellent short summaries of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara history before and after the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Any earnest Native perspective about what happened in the American West between May 14, 1804, and September 23, 1806, is important to add to our evolving understanding of the story. The authors of Our Story may possibly be right. We all know that the life and character and achievement of Sacagawea is characterized more by mystery, perplexity, and confusion than by any unchallengeable conclusion. She is an enigma, and she has been loaded over 220 years with all sorts of nonsense about her life, most of it promulgated by white historians, novelists, fantasists, and mythmakers! It’s not Native Americans, certainly not the Hidatsa, who have made her be the guide of the expedition, the diplomat, the exemplar of domesticity, the pioneer suffragist. What we actually know about this fascinating and elusive woman would not fill a passport book, and yet she has been swollen, almost entirely by white people, into one of the most “recognized” Native American women in our history. But most of what has ever been said or written about her cannot be substantiated.
Where was Sacagawea born? We don’t actually know.
When and where did she die? We don’t actually know.
What happened to her after the expedition ended? We know a little, but not much.
What exactly did she contribute or add to the expedition that would not have happened if she had never met Lewis and Clark? This is much harder to formulate than you might think.
When she met Lewis and Clark, was she primarily Shoshone and partly Hidatsa? Or was she by now mostly Hidatsa and yet still partly Shoshone? Or was she solely Hidatsa? Or Hidatsa-Crow?
Each of us has a name we go by, no matter what name our parents or family gave us. If the woman in question were here today and we asked her, what is your preferred name, what would she say? For all we know it was something other than Sacajawea, Sacagawea, Sakakawea, or Janey.
We need all the thoughtful contributions we can muster in our effort to understand the Lewis and Clark story. I marked scores of passages in Our Story of Eagle Woman, Sacagawea, and learned a great deal about the nation that claims her. My hope is that I can sit down with Calvin Grinnell and Gerard Baker and ask a hundred questions. For the rest of my life, when I think about Sacagawea, I will now have no choice but to include the Hidatsa origin story in my imagining of this elusive and remarkable woman who lifts the Lewis and Clark story into the empyrean of American memory and mythology.
And I would give anything to be led by wolves to my true home, wherever that is.