| The Life of Sacagawea |
| How to Spell "Sacagawea" So little is known about Sacagawea that even the spelling and pronunciation of her name is in debate. While "Sacagawea" is regarded by most historians as the correct spelling, "Sacajawea" and "Sakakawea" also persist. The captains recorded their interpreter's name more than a dozen times in their journals, each time using phonetic spelling and each time using a hard "g" in the third syllable. For example, on June 10, 1805, Clark noted "Sah cah gah we a our Indian woman verry sick." Lewis earlier recorded that the name meant "bird woman." Many geographers and historians have now adopted a spelling that most closely follows the one found in the journals: Sacagawea (sah-KAH-guh-WEE uh). It is derived from two Hidatsa words: sacaga, meaning bird, and wea, meaning woman. Shoshone advocates, though, proclaim that the young explorer should really be known as Sacajawea. This version of the name first appeared in the 1814 edition of the Lewis and Clark journals edited by Nicholas Biddle. Biddle never gave a reason for spelling it with a 'j' instead of a hard 'g.' Later researchers alleged it stemmed from the Shoshone for "boat pusher." As for Sakakawea, that apparently originated in a 19th-century Hidatsa ethnology compiled by a U.S. Army surgeon. His work stated that the phrase "bird woman" in Hidatsa is tsakakawias, which the North Dakota Historical Society then anglicized to Sakakawea. |