The Legacy of Sacajawea
Born in 1788 into the Lemhi-Shoshone Tribe in the Lemhi River Valley near present-day Salmon, Idaho, Sagajawea was kidnapped along with several other girls at age 12 and taken to a Hidatsa village in North Dakota, where she was then sold into marriage to French-Canadian fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau.
Four years later the Corps of Discovery, led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, arrived and built Fort Mandan. While interviewing trappers for the position of interpreter, they discovered that the then-pregnant Sacajawea spoke Shoshone, which Lewis & Clark knew they would need during their journey West. Sacajawea and Charbonneau were hired as interpreters
Just two months after giving birth to Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, Sacajawea was on her way west with the Lewis & Clark expedition. Along the way, she rescued the men’s journals when their boat capsized, assisted the expedition in bartering for horses after reuniting with her brother, who had become Chief of the Shoshone, and revealed a route back East through the Rocky Mountains—a route that would later be used by the Northern Pacific Railroad.
Of Sacajawea, Clark wrote that she “deserved a greater reward for her attention and services on that route than we had in our power to give her.” Clark went on to adopt both of Sacajawea’s children after her reported death in 1812.