sacagawea -- 3/11/24
Today's selection -- from Wild Girls by Tiya Miles. The indispensable contribution of Sacagawea to the expedition of Lewis and Clark:
“Nearly a century earlier, Sacagawea had stepped into an equally uncertain future, stripped of family save for the two-month-old baby on her back. She was born into the Shoshone nation (or ‘Snake’ tribe) of present-day Idaho and Montana. Her people lived in a vast and varied ecology stretching across the Rocky Mountains, intermountain prairies, and northwestern rivers. They moved seasonally across this terrain, spending time in summer and winter settlements and taking what they needed to sustain their homes (teepees made of hide), diets (hunting and gathering), and clothing (leather and fur) from bison herds. As a girl in the community of her birth, Sacagawea would have learned the mentally and physically demanding subsistence skills all women needed: identifying, collecting, and preparing wild plants; drying and preserving salmon; cooking bison meat and smaller game; cleaning and tanning buffalo hides; constructing and transporting teepees and other household implements; sewing and beading articles of clothing; and caring for children.
“When she was an adolescent, Sacagawea's band departed from their seasonal settlement to travel eastward toward the headwaters of the Missouri River. The group set up a temporary camp in a seemingly peaceful spot where three streams fringed by cottonwood trees curved through the green and gold prairie grasses. But they were acting within a charged economic and political environment shaped by an increasing European presence, an international trade in bison hides, and frequent raiding. Suddenly, a Hidatsa raiding party attacked, scattering the Shoshone campers and taking three girls and four boys. Those girls—Sacagawea, Otter Woman, and Leaping Fish Woman—were transported over 500 miles eastward to the Knife River villages of the allied Hidatsa and Mandan nations. The three female captives were held in the lodge of Red Arrow, who intended to keep them as wives. One of them, Leaping Fish Woman, escaped and rejoined the Shoshones. Sacagawea and Otter Woman remained in this household for six months to two years.
“In June of 1803, around the time of Sacagawea's captivity on the bluffs of the Missouri, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, spelled out detailed instructions to Meriwether Lewis (who would then recruit fellow Virginian William Clark), requesting observations ‘to be taken with great pains and accuracy’ of the Indigenous people inhabiting the lands around the Missouri River. Jefferson wanted to know, among other things, ‘the names of the nations & their numbers; the extent and limits of their possessions; their relations with other tribes or nations; their language, traditions, monuments; their ordinary occupations ... their food,
clothing & domestic accommodations; the diseases prevalent among them, & the remedies they use; moral and physical circumstances which distinguish them from the tribes we know; peculiarities in their laws, customs & dispositions; and articles of commerce they may need to furnish.’ Jefferson did not want to instigate open conflict, neither did he plan, at that time, to expel Indigenous residents. Rather, he wanted intercourse with Native nations to follow a diplomatic course, so he further instructed Meriwether Lewis to treat Indigenous people in a ‘friendly & conciliatory manner’ and to ‘satisfy them of it's [the expedition's] innocence.’
“But the mission was not innocent, in that it grew out of an existing policy of American national expansion into Indigenous lands and was intended ‘formally to extend American power up the Missouri and toward the mountains,’ writes one major historian of the expedition. Thomas Jefferson would soon augment his initial instructions in a letter, spelling out the kind of soft power he wanted Lewis to wield. Native people must be informed that the United States had ‘now become sovereigns of the country’ and ‘without ... diminution of the Indian rights of occupancy ... are authorized to propose to them in direct terms the institution of commerce.’ In essence, Jefferson wanted Lewis and Clark to convey to representatives of Native nations that the United States had ‘become their fathers,’ the political sovereign with a higher authority to dictate commercial relations.
“This was the diplomatic morass in which Sacagawea would become entangled in the spring of 1805. Historical sources differ on how Sacagawea, by then thirteen or fourteen, came into the hands of the trader Toussaint Charbonneau, a resident in one of the Hidatsa villages. Red Arrow may have lost Sacagawea and Otter Woman to Charbonneau in an ‘all night gambling match,’ or he may have ‘sold’ them to Charbonneau. At the time that she came into this forty-something Frenchman's household as his teenage ‘spouse,’ Sacagawea was not a free person. She had this unfree status in common with Harriet Tubman's mother, Rit, who was her temporal contemporary. So when Charbonneau offered his services as an interpreter to Lewis and Clark, he was also altering the course of Sacagawea's life. As the captains interviewed Charbonneau, they noticed his two Shoshone ‘wives,’ who had come from the lands the captains needed to cross. They hired Charbonneau, knowing they would need these women to translate when they entered Shoshone territory, and they solicited information from the young women, including requests for cartographic drawings.
 |
| Portrait of Sacagawea at the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium |
“In 1804, while Lewis, Clark, and their men wintered over in their fort near the Mandan villages, the approximately sixteen-year-old Sacagawea gave birth to her first child, whom Charbonneau named Jean-Baptiste. William Clark would later nickname the baby ‘Pomp,’ a reference to either Napoleon (the French commander) or Pompey (a Roman emperor)—a grandiose pet name like the hyperbolic and intentionally humorous classical names, such as Caesar and Hercules, that Southern slaveholders assigned to enslaved African Americans. By all indications, William Clark grew fond of Jean Baptiste and likely used the nickname to express affection. At the same time, Clark was a Southerner from Virginia who grew up in a slaveholding family and had brought his own enslaved man since childhood, York, along on the expedition; he carried with him into the West the psychology of an enslaver for whom white superiority was assumed.
In April of 1805, after the snows had melted, Lewis and Clark's contingent was preparing to depart. Sacagawea would be compelled to accompany them and leave her pregnant friend Otter Woman, also around sixteen years old, behind. Sacagawea departed as the lone female in the company of over thirty men and one infant, whose life rested in her hands. During the journey that lasted more than a year, she had no privacy. She and the child slept with Charbonneau, Lewis, and Clark in a separate tent from the soldiers, who all camped in close quarters. Charbonneau may have been in the habit of physically abusing her, as Clark recorded in the expedition journals that he once criticized the Frenchman for ‘Strikeing his woman at their Dinner.’
“But it was Sacagawea, rather than Lewis, Clark, or Charbonneau, who had expertise in ‘the visible world of rivers, mountains, and plains’ and the ‘sometimes invisible universe of Indian politics and European rivalries,’ as one historian of Native women's intercultural relations has put it. What the expedition needed, and what ‘Lewis and Clark took from Sacagawea,’ a historian of slavery notes, ‘was her knowledge.’ Early in the journey, near the Judith River in what is now central Montana, Sacagawea identified a pair of abandoned moccasins as bearing artistic markers of the Atsina nation, more commonly known today as Gros Ventres or Aaniiih people, Fort Shaw student Genevieve Healy's forebears.
“As the expedition continued west across the northern plains and mountains, Sacagawea provided essential information that helped Lewis and Clark orient and interpret the geographical, political, and cultural zones around them. Many months later, on the return trip to St. Louis, she recognized landmarks in what is today the Bozeman Pass of the Rockies, advising Clark, who recorded: ‘The indian woman who has been of great Service to me as a pilot through this Country recommends a gap in the mountain more South which I shall cross.’ Although she had a brief encounter with her brother, the Shoshone leader Cameahwait, and other members of her tribe near the three forks of the Missouri River (a reunion of great benefit to Lewis and Clark, who traded guns with Cameahwait for horses and guides), Sacagawea made most of this journey as an isolated young woman far from those who cared for her. Seeing Sacagawea afresh as a teenaged mother, as a shrewd interpreter of people, landscapes, and geopolitics, and as someone whose mental and physical prowess was exploited by others indicts the expedition she served and disrupts the popular notion of an Indian princess pantheon set against a romanticized natural backdrop.”
COMMENTS (0)
Notice: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool in /home/customer/www/delanceyplace.com/public_html/cmsAdmin/plugins/websiteComments/websiteComments.php on line 279