This episode illustrates one the rare but powerful moments in the journals that make you long to know more about this woman whom we recognize mostly as a sturdy figure of American mythology — a face on a coin. The very sketchiness of our knowledge has permitted novelists, feminists, and Native American tribes with dueling claims to project what they wish upon Sacagawea, to see her as a metaphor more than a human being. But who was she, really?



  November 1804
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Sacagawea's Journey with the Corps of Discovery
In Their Own Words:
"The Indian woman, to whom I ascribe equal fortitude and resolution, with any person onboard at the time of the accedent, caught and preserved most of the light articles which were washed overboard."
— Meriwether Lewis
May 1805
May 14, 1805, started off auspiciously for the Lewis and Clark expedition, but by evening a gusty wind was blowing along the Missouri River, threatening disaster. It was late afternoon when a sudden squall nearly capsized one of the boats, the white pirogue that carried the most vital instruments, trade goods, and papers — "in short," wrote Meriwether Lewis, "almost every article indispensibly necessary to further the views, or insure the success of the enterprize."

At the helm of the pirogue, alas, was Toussaint Charbonneau, the French-Canadian fur trader who served as an interpreter for the expedition. Charbonneau, Sacagawea's husband, had an unfortunate tendency to panic in a crisis, which, coupled with the fact that he couldn't swim, made him, in Lewis's estimation, "perhaps the most timid waterman in the world."

Lewis and Clark themselves were stranded on shore, reduced to shooting into the air in a futile attempt to attract the crew's attention. The waves were mounting higher, the boat was filling to its gunwales, and Charbonneau, who was "crying to his god for mercy," had "not yet recollected the rudder." Lewis was about to hurl himself into the river when it occurred to him that swimming the 300 yards to the boat in freezing, turbulent water would be "madness." To convince the petrified Charbonneau to do his duty and take hold of the rudder, another man on board the pirogue finally threatened to shoot him.

Amid all the shouting and gunshots and waves, however, there was one member of the expedition who proved calm and resourceful: Charbonneau's teenage wife, Sacagawea, the only woman in the party. Though no one seems to have instructed her to, Sacagawea reached into the water and fished out the articles that were swiftly floating away from the boat. A day and a half later, with most of these precious goods dried and repacked, Lewis realized the expedition had averted disaster.
Her Life  |  Her Journey  |  Her Companions  |  Historical Significance  |  Fact & Fiction