The Sixteen-Year-Old Who Carried a Nation's Map
A pregnant teenager, kidnapped from her people years before, would become the only reason a floundering American expedition survived the Rocky Mountains — and found its way home again.
In the winter of 1804, at Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were desperate for someone who could speak to the tribes waiting at the headwaters of the Missouri River. They found their answer not in a seasoned guide, but in a young Shoshone woman living among the Hidatsa, married to a French-Canadian trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau. Her name was Sacagawea. Born around 1788, she was perhaps sixteen years old that winter, pregnant with her first child, and about to become indispensable to one of the most consequential journeys in American history.
Her path to that fort had already been marked by violence. Born into the Agaidika, or 'Salmon Eater,' band of the Lemhi Shoshone near present-day Salmon, Idaho, she was taken captive around 1800 at about age twelve during a Hidatsa raid that killed several Shoshone men, women, and boys. She was carried to a Hidatsa village near what is now Washburn, North Dakota. There, around age thirteen, she was given in marriage to Charbonneau, who — depending on the account — either purchased her from the Hidatsa or won her while gambling.
When Lewis and Clark arrived in the winter of 1804–05, they needed an interpreter who could speak Shoshone, the language of tribes they would meet near the Rocky Mountains. Charbonneau claimed to speak several Native languages, and one of his wives spoke Shoshone. On November 4, 1804, Clark wrote in his journal about hiring 'a french man by Name Chabonah' whose 'Squars' were Snake Indians, agreeing to take one of his wives along to interpret. A week later, Charbonneau and Sacagawea moved into the expedition's fort. Clark nicknamed her 'Janey.'
On February 11, 1805, still at the fort, Sacagawea gave birth to a son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, in a difficult delivery eased, Lewis noted, by crushed rattlesnake rattles administered in water. The boy became known to the men as 'Pomp' or 'Pompy,' and Sacagawea carried him on her back in a cradleboard for the thousands of miles that followed.
The expedition left Fort Mandan in April 1805, pushing up the Missouri River in pirogues. On May 14, one of the boats capsized, spilling supplies into the river — among them the journals and records that documented the entire mission. Sacagawea moved quickly and recovered the items before they were lost. Grateful for her composure, the captains named the Sacagawea River in her honor on May 20, 1805.
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