It is March 4th. Welcome to Episode 63 of History in a Year. Today, we meet the most famous woman of the American West. As the brutal winter of 1804 sets in, the Corps of Discovery builds Fort Mandan in the freezing plains of North Dakota. There, they hire a French-Canadian fur trapper and his pregnant, teenage Shoshone wife: Sacagawea. We bust the myth of Sacagawea as a wilderness guide, exploring instead her true, indispensable role as a diplomat, a multi-lingual translator, and a walking white flag of peace. We watch the expedition send a live prairie dog back to Thomas Jefferson before pushing off into the terrifying unknown of the Rocky Mountains.
STEPHEN:
Welcome to History in a Year: America’s First 250 Years.
LEAH:
Join us every single day as we journey from the Revolution of 1776 to the 250th anniversary of the United States.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode and join the discussion at PointedWords.com. I’m Stephen.
LEAH:
And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
It is March 4th. Welcome to Episode 63. Yesterday, the Corps of Discovery narrowly avoided a bloodbath with the Teton Sioux.
LEAH:
They survived, but the clock was ticking. It was late October 1804. They were in present-day North Dakota, and the Great Plains winter was closing in fast. The Missouri River was starting to freeze, and they needed to find shelter.
STEPHEN:
Fortunately, they had arrived at one of the greatest economic hubs in North America.
LEAH:
They reached the villages of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes. These were agricultural, earth-lodge building Native Americans who sat at the very center of a massive, continent-wide trade network.
STEPHEN:
If you were a French fur trapper from Canada, or a Spanish trader from the South, or a warrior from the Rocky Mountains, you eventually came to the Mandan villages to trade.
LEAH:
Lewis and Clark held a council with the chiefs, handed out their silver Jefferson peace medals, and got permission to build a winter camp just across the river. They called it Fort Mandan.
STEPHEN:
And they were just in time. The winter of 1804 to 1805 was absolutely brutal. The temperatures plunged to 45 degrees below zero. The river froze solid. The men would get frostbite just stepping outside to chop wood.
LEAH:
But inside the fort, Lewis and Clark were incredibly busy. They spent the winter interviewing the Native Americans and the French-Canadian trappers who lived in the villages, trying to draw a map of what lay ahead.
STEPHEN:
They knew that in the spring, they were going to hit the Rocky Mountains. And to cross those mountains, they were going to have to abandon their boats and buy horses.
LEAH:
And the people who had the horses were a tribe called the Shoshone, who lived high up in the mountains.
STEPHEN:
The problem was, nobody in the Corps of Discovery spoke Shoshone. If they couldn’t talk to them, they couldn’t buy horses. If they couldn’t buy horses, the expedition would freeze to death in the Rockies.
LEAH:
So, Lewis and Clark started looking for a translator. They found a French-Canadian fur trapper living in the Hidatsa village named Toussaint Charbonneau.
STEPHEN:
Charbonneau was, to put it mildly, kind of a deadbeat. He wasn’t a great trapper, he was notoriously cowardly, and he was abusive. But Charbonneau had something Lewis and Clark desperately needed.
LEAH:
He had two wives. And one of them was a pregnant, 16-year-old girl from the Shoshone tribe.
STEPHEN:
Her name was Sacagawea.
LEAH:
Sacagawea’s life story up to this point is a tragedy. When she was about 12 years old, her Shoshone camp had been attacked by a Hidatsa raiding party. She was kidnapped, torn away from her family, and dragged hundreds of miles east to the Mandan villages.
STEPHEN:
A few years later, she was essentially sold, or won in a gambling bet, by Toussaint Charbonneau.
LEAH:
Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau as an interpreter, with the explicit understanding that Sacagawea had to come along.
STEPHEN:
Now, this is the perfect time to bust one of the biggest myths in American history.
LEAH:
If you grew up watching movies or reading old textbooks, you probably picture Sacagawea standing at the front of the boat, bravely pointing her finger west, guiding Lewis and Clark through the wilderness like a human compass.
STEPHEN:
That is completely false. Sacagawea was not a guide. She had only been through this territory once in her life, as a terrified 12-year-old captive. She didn’t know the way. Lewis and Clark navigated using compasses, sextants, and the stars.
LEAH:
But just because she wasn’t a guide doesn’t mean she wasn’t valuable. She was arguably the most indispensable member of the entire team. But her value was in diplomacy and translation.
STEPHEN:
Let’s talk about the translation chain. When they finally met the Shoshone, Lewis and Clark couldn’t just talk to them. It required a massive game of telephone.
LEAH:
A Shoshone chief would speak in Shoshone. Sacagawea would listen, and then translate it into Hidatsa. Her husband, Charbonneau, would hear the Hidatsa, and translate it into French. A member of the expedition named Labiche would hear the French, and translate it into English for Lewis and Clark.
STEPHEN:
And then the whole process had to run in reverse so Lewis could reply!
LEAH:
But her other vital role was purely visual.
STEPHEN:
A few months into the winter, in February 1805, Sacagawea went into a long, agonizing labor. Meriwether Lewis actually gave her a potion made of crushed rattlesnake rattles to speed up the process.
LEAH:
It worked. She gave birth to a healthy baby boy named Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. William Clark absolutely adored the kid and nicknamed him “Pompey.”
STEPHEN:
So, when the expedition finally left Fort Mandan in the spring, they were a heavily armed military unit of rough frontiersmen… traveling with a teenage girl carrying a newborn baby strapped to her back on a cradleboard.
LEAH:
William Clark wrote in his journal that this was the greatest insurance policy they could have ever asked for. He noted that a woman with a baby “reconciles all the Indians as to our friendly intentions.”
STEPHEN:
A war party does not travel with a woman and an infant. When other Native American tribes saw Sacagawea from a distance, they immediately lowered their weapons. She was a walking white flag. She kept the Corps of Discovery from being massacred.
LEAH:
By April 1805, the ice on the Missouri River finally melted. It was time for the expedition to split.
STEPHEN:
The massive 55-foot keelboat was too big to go any further up the river. So, Lewis and Clark loaded it up with a dozen men and sent it back down the river to St. Louis.
LEAH:
And they loaded that boat with a treasure trove of scientific discoveries for Thomas Jefferson.
STEPHEN:
They sent back Clark’s hand-drawn maps. They sent Native American robes and bows. They sent the antlers of an elk, and the horns of a bighorn sheep.
LEAH:
But the most famous cargo on that returning keelboat was the live animals.
STEPHEN:
Jefferson wanted to know what kind of wildlife was out there. So, Lewis and Clark managed to capture four live magpies, a live sharp-tailed grouse, and a live, barking prairie dog.
LEAH:
They put the prairie dog in a wooden cage and shipped it thousands of miles back to Washington D.C. The little guy actually survived the trip, and Thomas Jefferson kept him as a pet in the President’s House!
STEPHEN:
With the keelboat heading east, the core group of the Corps of Discovery—about 33 people, including Sacagawea and her baby—loaded into smaller wooden canoes.
LEAH:
On April 7, 1805, they pushed their canoes into the water and headed west.
STEPHEN:
Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal that day: “We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden. I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life.”
LEAH:
They were leaving the map completely behind.
STEPHEN:
Join us tomorrow for Episode 64. The Great Divide. The Corps of Discovery runs headfirst into the terrifying reality of the Rocky Mountains. We witness a near-disaster on the river, the desperate search for the Shoshone, and the incredible, movie-like coincidence that saves the entire expedition from certain death.
LEAH:
I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
And I’m Stephen.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode at PointedWords.com. And this… is our story.