The Woman Who Saved the Lewis and Clark Expedition

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Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. This is our American Stories and we tell every kind of story here on this show. And our favorite kind, of course, has to do with American history. And up next comes Deidre Berzer. And Deidre is a professor at Hillsdale College, proud sponsors of all of our history stories. And today she'll be sharing with us the story of one of history's most essential women, Sacajawea.

Here's our own Monty Montgomery to kick off the story. When Lewis and Clark left St. Louis, Missouri on August 31st, 1803 to find a passage to the west, they left with 45 men, 27 of which were unmarried bachelors. Needless to say, there was no womanly presence within the core of discovery at all. But something changed.

Here's Hillsdale College's Dr. Deidre Berzer with more on that. They add in Sacajawea, who is just an amazing character on every level. So they spend the first winter with the Mandan people in their villages in what is now north of Bismarck, North Dakota. Here in those villages, they encounter one of these French metis, Toussaint Charbonneau, who has three wives. And two of them are Hidatsa, and then they have Sacajawea as a third wife. And she is Shoshone, but she was captured as a child and sold to the Hidatsa. So she's about 16 years old.

She's pregnant. But the key here is that she is Shoshone, so she knows that language. And Lewis and Clark already know, and they're very worried, actually, that they're going to need horses to get across the mountains.

Right? The boats are not going to be able to go across the mountains. They're going to need horses and they are going to need them from the Shoshone people. And they've been really, really concerned about how all of this is going to transpire. And they're actually so worried, they think they might have to turn back around and go back and give up the expedition. So they meet Sacajawea, and they convince Charbonneau to sign on to the expedition, and they know that she is going to be essential to them.

And what her being a young mother, so she gives birth during these winter months in February, February 11, actually, 1805. She, by her presence, not only is going to be able to help them with making translations and connections with her people, the Shoshone, but she's also going to give the expedition a friendlier demeanor, right? That they're not going to look like a military group to different Indian tribes they encounter if they have a woman and a baby with them.

And that turns out to be really essential to the safety of the entire Corps. And so she's amazing on so many levels, but I wanted to just think a moment about the translation issue. So she speaks Shoshone and Hidatsa.

So she speaks to her husband, Charbonneau, in Hidatsa. Then he knows Hidatsa in French. So he then speaks in French to one of the members of the expedition, a French matine named La Biche. Okay, then La Biche takes the French and translates it into English for Lewis and Clark. Can you imagine how much might get lost in translation there?

But apparently it went really, really well and was so important. You have to picture how patient Lewis and Clark had to be for all of the negotiations to go through four languages before they could take part and understand what was being said. But one of the things that Sacagawea brings to them is her vast knowledge, not just of the territory once they head out along the Missouri from the Mandan villages when the river finally is free of ice. And she starts to recognize places, especially when they get closer to Montana, but she knows how to find edible roots. When they start out, it's early spring.

There aren't any things for them to eat that have grown yet, right? They're just starting to peep out from under the snow. She knows where the little rodents have cacheed things for the winter. And she sees these kind of piles of logs and she knows that that is a place where mice tend to hoard the goodies that they have collected. And so she goes immediately and Lewis and Clark just kind of watching her going, what is she up to?

And she finds all these roots for them. So she's continually foraging and finding things that are essential for their diets, for their nutrition, especially when they can't go hunting. To throw in an aside here, when they are able to hunt, they do so. They find out that they really like beaver steaks. Beaver is really tasty. Someone along the way has averaged this out to figure out on the days when the Corps of Discovery could eat meat, each of them was eating about nine pounds worth of meat that day. We're talking about 50 some men eating nine pounds of meat a day.

Yes. And they were very partial as well to buffalo tongue and they would kill the buffalo just for the tongue and the bone marrow. Then Sacagawea would come and use every single part of that buffalo and really show them how. Even the bones that she would boil down for grease and then be able to use that to seal up things from the water, all kinds of stuff. So she brought essential knowledge to the Corps and Lewis and Clark wrote everything down, all the different medicines. And even when she was giving birth, she was having a really hard time. And some of the Indians said something in translation to Lewis and Clark about does anyone have a rattlesnake rattle?

And they did. And so that was ground up and given to her and it really eased her labor pains and she gave birth very shortly after that. So that all is being recorded in these journals of all the different medicinal things. She got very sick a couple of months into the trek in the summer of 1805. She was very sick, very close to dying. And of course, the medicine of the time probably made it worse for her. So she went across a place of sulfur hot springs and Lewis remembered that taking the sulfur water was something that was used as a medicine sometimes and that it might be effective.

And so he gave her a lot of the sulfur water to drink and it almost immediately started working. So if she was dehydrated, if that was the problem, getting that liquid in her would have been a very important thing to save her. But she was really close to death. And one of the ways we know this is they wrote in the journals that she was complaining all night long.

And she was so reticent, she wouldn't have made all of that noise at all, all night long. But the other ways we see her being really essential is they often had trouble with keeping the boats from capsizing. Sudden winds would come up or the water would suddenly get really rough.

And they seem to not have the weight distributed very well sometimes. And Charbonneau would just freeze. And he was supposed to be manning the sails at the rudder and he would freeze. He would just get scared and couldn't do anything and the people in the other boats and on the shores were trying to yell at him what to do and he would just kind of freak out.

And all of the things are falling out of the boat. So picture this, Sacajawea sitting in the back of the boat, calmly picking up everything she could reach out of the water and putting it back in. So her calmness and ability to do what needed to be done in the moment of crisis was a real contrast with her husband who was a liability on many, many fronts. But they had to deal with him. They had to keep him in line so they could have access to the knowledge that Sacajawea kept. And the importance of Sacajawea is really seen in how every night the Charbonneau family was kept in the tent with the captains, with Lewis and Clark. And part of that is that Sacajawea was the only woman with these almost 50 men.

And so they wanted to protect her, but they kept the Charbonneau family very close to them and over time became extremely close to the baby who was named Jean Baptiste. They called him Pomp. And he was a great favorite.

And he took ill too. And that was a real crisis moment for them. So when they finally meet up with the Shoshone people and they are looking and looking all through the western side of Montana for the Shoshone and split up into different groups and all kinds of things. And it's kind of this just unbelievably crazy story. The chief that they meet turns out to be Sacajawea's brother.

And so they're able to negotiate with him. They have this great reunion. She was kidnapped when she was 11. So she hasn't seen her family since then and the horses that the Shoshone could provide and the directions were very, very important. And so they provided a guide named Old Toby and about 36 really fine horses. And Old Toby led them through the Lolo Trail, which is how you get kind of from the mountains in Montana into. It's US 12 now.

It's US 12, right, into Idaho. And it's very twisty and turny and cavernous. And they would not have gotten through there very well without the guidance of Old Toby. So this connection provided through Sacajawea is like this sort of providential moment that she was essential for. And the entire journey would not have happened in the way it did without her. And a special thanks to Hillsdale College Professor Deidre Burzer.

Sacajawea's story told here on Our American Stories. How are you spending your weekend with friends and family or at the car dealership? Why lease a new car the old way with Roto lease your vehicle and three easy steps all from our app shop real time inventory and see the clear cost. That means the best price personalized to you with no haggling. Then complete your lease right from your phone.

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