Childhood  |  Marriage  |  Journey  |  Death
What we know about her: She was a teenage mother and a valued interpreter for Lewis and Clark.

What we don't know about her: Almost everything else.

The Life of Sacagawea


Artist's rendering of Sacagawea's capture by the Hidatsa.

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Learn more about the history and culture of the Hidatsa Indians, the tribe that captured Sacagawea.
Childhood Capture
Very little is known about Sacagawea's childhood, other than her capture by the Hidatsa Indians, enemies of her people, the Shoshones. Around 1800, when she was about 13 years old, Sacagawea was kidnapped by a war party of Hidatsas. She was taken from her Rocky Mountain homeland, located in today's Idaho, to the Hidatsa-Mandan villages near modern Bismarck, North Dakota. The Hidatsa-Mandan villages were near the confluence of the Missouri and Knife rivers, now a national historic site.

Slavery Among the Hidatsa Indians
It has been customary to describe Sacagawea as a slave of the Hidatsa, sold in marriage to Toussaint Charbonneau. But terms like "slave" and "sold" can be misleading. She was certainly a war captive, kidnapped from the Shoshone, the tribe into which she had been born, by a Hidatsa war party some four years before Lewis and Clark showed up.

Plains Indians did have a type of slavery but it was different and more ambiguous than the kind practiced in the American South," says Carolyn Gilman, curator of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Exhibition. "A onetime slave could be adopted by a clan, for example, and his or her status could change. It was a more fluid identity."
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