Sacagawea Memoir

                   

Sacagawea Memoir!        In 1800, when I was about 11 years old I was kidnapped  by a war party of Hidatsa! Indians-enemies of my people, the Shoshones.  I was taken from my

Rocky
Mountain homeland, and I was brought back to their Hidatsa-Mandan villages near modern
Bismarck, North Dakota.  There, I was later sold as a slave to Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trader who claimed me and another Shoshone woman as his “wives.”       In November 1804, the Corps of Discovery arrived at the Hidatsa-Mandan villages and soon built a fort nearby.       Captain Clark wrote that the “great object was to make every letter sound” in recoding Indian words in their journals.  The pronunciation of my name in years since the expedition as “Sacagawea” does not match “Sah-cah-gah-we-ah” the way that the captains recorded my name.  In fact, my name- made by Hidatsa words for bird (“sacaga”) and women (“wea”) – was written 17 times by the explorers in their journals and their maps, and each time it was spelled with a “g” in the third syllable.       The Shoshones owned horses that the expedition needed to cross the

Bitterroot
Mountains.  The captains felt that because of my Shoshone heritage, I could be important in trading for horses when the corps reached the western mountains and the Shoshones.       I did not speak English, I spoke Shoshone and Hidatsa.  My husband, Charbonneau spoke French and Hidatsa.  In effect, Charbonneau and I would become an interpreter team.       As
Clark explained in his journals, Charbonneau was hired “as an interpreter through me, his wife.”  If and when the expedition met the Shoshones, I would talk with them, and then translate in Hidatsa for Charbonneau, who would translate to French.  The Corps’ Francois Labiche spoke French and English, and would make the final translation so that the two English-speaking captains would understand.       If I wasn’t kidnapped by the Hidatsa Tribe and sold to Lewis and Clark.  I would have never found what I did find.  The world would not be the same.                              By:                       Sacagawea