Sakakawea's life leaves questions

KEN ROGERS, Bismarck Tribune
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Three mysteries surround Sakakawea.

The first of the mysteries centers on how to spell her name. The second is where she died. The third arises from from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation where a story questions Sakakawea's origins and suggests she was actually a Hidatsa woman.

HER NAME

The Shoshone, Hidatsa and Mandan had no written language. And Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are of little help in determining proper spelling. The two explorers spelled mosquito 16 different ways in their journals, and were not consistent in spelling their Shoshone guide's name.

We don't know if Sakakawea was the name given her when she was with the Shoshone, or a name she acquired living with the Hidatsa and Mandan people. The source of the name could help determine its spelling.

Among scholars, the spelling has been moving toward "Sacagawea."

North Dakota institutions continue to use "Sakakawea." The use derives from research done by Russell Reid, the respected superintendent of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, who died in 1967.

So as to not conflict with the state's choice and cause confusion, this publication has chosen to use "Sakakawea."

Reid wrote in "Lewis and Clark in North Dakota" that Toussaint Charbonneau said Sakakawea's Hidatsa name meant Bird Woman. The proper spelling, then, according to Rev. C.L. Hall, a Hidatsa language expert, would be "Tsakaka-wias" and, anglicized, would be "Sakakawea."

Sacajawea means Boat Launcher in Shoshone. This choice is based in part by the spelling used by Lewis and Clark in the later part of their journals.

The people who feel Sakakawea should be Sacagawea use both the Hidatsa origin of the name and the spellings in the Lewis and Clark journals. This spelling has behind it a consensus of contemporary Lewis and Clark scholars, as well as the Bureau of Ethnology, the National Park Service, the National Geographic Society and the Encyclopdia Americana.

HER DEATH

Two theories exist about Sakakawea's death: That she died at a young age, in 1812, at Fort Manuel in present day South Dakota. That she died 72 years later on the Wind River Indian Reservation in 1884.

The report of Sakakawea's death in 1812, at age 25, is attributed to John Luttig, who knew Sakakawea and was at Fort Manuel. Charbonneau was also there.

Luttig wrote on Dec. 20, 1812: "Šthis Evening the wife of Charbonneau, a Snake Squaw, died of a putrid fever she was a good and the best woman in the fort, aged abt 25 years she left a fine infant girlŠ" Luttig, as surrogate for William Clark, then became the guardian for Jean Baptiste and Lizettee, Sakakawea's two children.

The suggestion that Sakakawea died in 1885 came from Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard, a University of Wyoming professor who in 1932 published a major work on Sakakawea. Hebard claims it was Otter Woman, a second Shoshone wife of Charbonneau, who died in 1812.

Using 1877 census material from the Wind River Shoshone Reservation, Hebard makes her case for a longer-lived Sakakawea. The census rolls include a man name Bazil or Bazeel who had a mother living in a lodge with another woman. Hebard claims Bazil was Jean Baptiste. The woman, Hebard claims, was Sakakawea.

Esther Horne, who lives in a Wahpeton, N.D., nursing home, claims to the the great great granddaughter of Sakakawea, the woman identified by Heberd as Sakakawea. Esther Horne was honored for her works -- 30 years teaching with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, including taking many of the children from the Indian school at Wahpeton into her home. She was also the model for a bust of Sakakawea that's in the Heritage Center.

Esther Horne lives in a nursing home in Wahpeton. She has documented her heritage with family and oral histories.

Modern historians discount Hebard, in part, because Luttig did know Charbonneau and did know Sakakawea. His eyewitness account is given more weight, by experts, than Hebard's interpretation of written records, 25 years after they were put down on paper.

HER ORIGINS

Lewis and Clark believed Sakakawea to be a Shoshone. The expedition journals say a Hidatsa raiding party took her from her Shoshone family at Three Forks, where the Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin rivers join in present day Montana. She was brought to the Knife River Indian villages.

But a number of people on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, relying on oral histories, believe that Sakakawea was a Hidatsa woman.

A Hidatsa man named Bulls Eye told the story in 1925 that Sakakawea was his grandmother. Bulls Eye said, "When my grandmother was 18 years old her father gave her to a white man. She married this whiteman, who was my grandfather. His name was Sharbonish. He lived among the Mandans and Hidatsa then."

According to Bulls Eye, Charbonneau and Sakakawea had four children, not two children as most mainstream historian believe.

Bulls Eye continued: "The same year when my grandfather took Sakakawea away from the lodge they went far away somewhere. They went toward the west and were gone a long time and traveled far."

He says that his grandmother traveled all of the way to the ocean.

The reason why Lewis and Clark got Sakakawea's origins wrong, says Bulls Eye, is that one of the other interpreters made a mistake.

Oral histories supporting Bulls Eye's version of Sakakawea's nationality continue to be told on Fort Berthold.

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