The Read on Sacagawea

Sacagawea—and the first fact of her record is that none of it is in her own words. But her public signal is not empty: there are two distinct layers, and they should be read separately. The CONTEMPORANEOUS published record: the expedition's official narrative, published in 1814 while Clark lived, names her repeatedly—the recovery of the instruments and papers from the swamped boat, the interpreting through the Shoshone negotiation, the recognition of her home country's landmarks; Clark's own published and private words credit her as his pilot through that country and record his guardianship of her children; a fur-post clerk's 1812 journal entry, written with no audience in mind, calls her the best woman in the fort. That is what her own era published about her: specific deeds, credited by name, by the men who watched them. The LATER layer—the statue-era guide-myth, the suffrage-era emblem, the trail-pointing figure of the monuments—was authored a century after her death by people with their own uses for her, is not supported by the journals, and should be read as a fact about her mythologizers, not about her. Read the first layer; discount the second explicitly.

The Corps of Discovery, 1804–1806—attached at Fort Mandan with her husband; afterward, the Missouri Fur Company post at Fort Manuel, where the clerk's 1812 journal records her death: the wife of Charbonneau, the best woman in the fort.

A Shoshone childhood in the Three Forks country—plants, roots, river ground, and the geography of her nation's seasonal rounds, learned as a girl learns her home. Abducted by a Hidatsa raiding party at about twelve; the Mandan-Hidatsa villages added their language to her own. Sold or gambled into marriage with the trader Charbonneau while still in her early teens—the record states it that plainly and so should we. No schooling, no letters; two languages at the load-bearing joint of a four-language chain, and a knowledge of country that the expedition's formally trained men did not have and knew they did not have.

The deed record, from the journals only. Joined the expedition at Fort Mandan in 1805, weeks after giving birth; carried Jean Baptiste the entire route, west and back. The May 14 1805 squall: recovered the instruments, books, and medicine from the river while the boat wallowed—the captains named the articles saved and praised her by name. Fed the Corps from wild ground repeatedly through the starving stretches. Recognized Beaverhead Rock and placed the expedition relative to her nation when the maps ran out. Interpreted the Shoshone negotiation that produced the horses without which the Bitterroot crossing fails—through the four-language chain, through the discovery mid-council that the chief was her brother. Voted, and was counted, in the November 1805 poll on the wintering site. Crossed with the party that viewed the beached whale at her own insistence. On the 1806 return, advised Clark's party through the pass to the Yellowstone—his own words credit her as his pilot through that country. After the expedition: the St. Louis years, leaving Jean Baptiste to Clark's schooling; Fort Manuel, and the clerk Luttig's entry of December 1812 recording her death of fever in her mid-twenties, followed by Clark's own ledger later marking her dead—the documentary record, noted plainly against the later Wind River tradition of a long-lived Sacagawea, which this intake does not adjudicate. What is NOT in the record matters as much: no journal has her pointing the way west like the statues, no page carries her own account of anything, and the granularity of any honest reading is capped by that mediation.

Kept the sergeant's log alongside the captains' and set down what I saw with my own eyes. In the May squall on the Missouri the white pirogue broached with the captains' papers, instruments, and medicine aboard; her husband froze at the tiller and cried to his God, and she, seated in the stern with the child on her back, leaned out and gathered from the water, article by article, most of what the current was taking—the captain wrote that evening of her fortitude being equal to any person aboard, and he was not a man who wrote such things idly. She fed sick men from ground the rest of us read as bare—wapato, roots, currants—quietly, without being detailed to it. At the Beaverhead she knew the rock and said her nation's summer home was near; days later, interpreting the horse negotiation on which the crossing depended, she recognized the Shoshone chief as her own brother, wept on him, and then sat back down and carried the interpreting through to the end—the trade chain ran Shoshone to Hidatsa to French to English, four links, and she was the joint that bore the load. She asked for almost nothing the whole way; the two demands the record shows are that her vote on the wintering ground was taken and counted, and that having come so far she would see the ocean and the great fish beached on it—and both were granted because by then no one aboard thought of refusing her. What she thought of any of it, no one wrote down, and I will not invent it.

I have to evaluate someone whose entire record reaches me through other people's reports—she left nothing in her own words, and half her legend was built by people with their own uses for her. What can honestly be read from a record like this, at what granularity, and what must be left unread?