Life and Death of Sacagawea: A Mystery to Many
DENVER—September 8 , 2003—One of the most enduring stories to emerge from the Lewis and Clark expedition is that of the young Indian girl who joined the Corps of Discovery as an interpreter in the winter of 1804. A Shoshone, she had been kidnapped by a Hidatsa raiding party and eventually sold to a French trader named Toussaint Charbonneau, who took her as his wife. She gave birth to their son while the Corps of Discovery waited out the winter season near the Mandan and Hidatsa villages in what is now North Dakota. She then carried her infant son on the grueling trek to the Pacific Ocean and back. The assistance she provided along the way was critical to the success of the expedition.
The pronunciation of her name, “Sa-GA-ga-WEE-uh” or “SA-ca-ja-WAY-uh,” is largely dependent on tribal affiliation. The Midwestern Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, with whom she was living when Lewis and Clark met her, would pronounce “Sacagawea” with a hard /g/ sound. In fact, scholars point out that those tribes have no /j/ sound in their vocabulary. The Shoshone, who lived farther West, near today’s Idaho, would have pronounced her name with the /j/ sound.
A greater mystery about the young woman, to whom Lewis once attributed “equal fortitude and resolution” to the enlisted men in his expedition, is how long she lived. Many believe she died in her mid-twenties, shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Lisette. Lisette and Sacagawea’s first child, Jean Baptiste, came to live with William Clark. Some Shoshone claim Sacagawea lived to be 100, dying on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Whatever her final fate, Sacagawea made a tremendous contribution to the success of the Corps of Discovery, earning a place in history as a true American hero.
