Sacagawea

Updated: February 3, 2026

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark met Sacagawea in the winter of 1804-1805 at the Mandan-Hidatsa villages in present-day North Dakota, when she was a teenager who had recently given birth to her first child. Most historians agree that she was born into a Shoshone community near the Lemhi River in today's Idaho or Montana border region, captured around age 12 by a Hidatsa raiding party, taken down the Missouri River, and later entered into a non-consensual marriage arrangement with the French Canadian trader Toussaint Charbonneau. By the time the Corps of Discovery built Fort Mandan, Charbonneau was living among the Hidatsa, and his household included Sacagawea, who was then pregnant with a son the captains would call Jean Baptiste.

Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau as an interpreter in late 1804, but it soon became clear that Sacagawea's linguistic skills and cultural knowledge were just as important as his. She spoke Shoshone and Hidatsa, while Charbonneau spoke Hidatsa and French; another interpreter, François Labiche, spoke French and English, so messages often passed through a chain from English to French to Hidatsa to Shoshone and back again. When the expedition left Fort Mandan on April 7, 1805, Sacagawea traveled with the Corps as its only woman, carrying four-month-old Jean Baptiste (nicknamed "Pomp" or "Pompée") on her back. Her presence, along with the baby, signaled peaceful intentions to many Native communities they met, because war parties on the Plains and Plateau did not typically travel with women and infants.

While popular stories long portrayed Sacagawea as a "guide" leading Lewis and Clark to the Pacific, modern work with the expedition journals shows that her role centered on interpretation, recognition of key landmarks, and important moments of diplomacy and practical help rather than day-to-day route-finding. As the Corps ascended the Missouri and then the Jefferson River into present-day Montana and Idaho, Sacagawea recognized features such as Beaverhead Rock and other familiar places from her childhood homelands, which reassured the captains that they were approaching Shoshone country and the Continental Divide. In August 1805 near today's Dillon, Montana, she helped interpret during negotiations with a band of Shoshone led by Cameahwait-very likely a close relative, often identified in later retellings as her brother-which allowed the Corps to secure desperately needed horses and a guide to cross the Rockies. On the return journey in 1806, Clark noted that she also helped identify a suitable crossing in what is now southwestern Montana, later known as Bozeman Pass, confirming that her local knowledge contributed at key points even if she did not design the overall route.

Sacagawea's practical courage appears repeatedly in the journals. On May 14, 1805, when a pirogue Charbonneau was steering nearly capsized in high wind on the upper Missouri, Sacagawea calmly stayed in the boat and saved important papers, instruments, medicines, and trade goods as others struggled to control the craft, a feat Lewis praised in his journal as a sign of her "fortitude and resolution." Throughout the expedition she gathered edible roots and plants, helped prepare food, and served as a visible symbol of peaceful intent when the Corps entered unfamiliar villages and camps. Despite this contribution, she was not paid separately for her work; payment for services went to Charbonneau, reflecting both the gender norms and power imbalances of the time.

After the expedition reached the Pacific and returned to the northern Plains, Sacagawea and Charbonneau parted ways with the Corps in 1806 and remained in the Upper Missouri region, occasionally reconnecting with former expedition members. In 1809, Charbonneau brought Sacagawea and Jean Baptiste to St. Louis at William Clark's invitation; Clark arranged for Jean Baptiste's education and, in legal documents, referred to both Sacagawea's children-Jean Baptiste and a daughter often called Lisette-as his wards. The best-supported documentary evidence, including contemporary trading-post and missionary records, indicates that Sacagawea likely died at or near Fort Manuel Lisa on the upper Missouri (in what is now South Dakota) around December 1812, probably from illness. Later oral traditions among some communities place a woman identified as Sacagawea living into the 1880s on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming or in northeastern Montana, but most historians now regard those accounts as referring to a different woman, noting that detailed research on Fort Manuel's records strongly supports an 1812 death for the expedition's Sacagawea.

Sacagawea's memory has continued to evolve in American culture, inspiring both mythmaking and careful re?examination. In 2000, she became one of the first Indigenous women represented on circulating U.S. currency when the U.S. Mint released a golden-colored one-dollar coin featuring her image with infant Jean Baptiste on her back; sculptor Glenna Goodacre created the obverse design using Shoshone-Bannock college student Randy L He dow Teton as the live model, since no authentic portrait of Sacagawea exists. The coin and the many memorials, schools, and parks that bear her name have helped keep her story in public view, while recent scholarship and Native perspectives emphasize both her courage and the limits of what the historical record can truly tell us about her inner life and choices.

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Updated: February 3, 2026