c. 1788–1812
Lemhi Shoshone guide and interpreter of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Sacagawea was a young Lemhi Shoshone woman who, carrying her newborn son, guided and interpreted for the Lewis and Clark expedition across the American West between 1804 and 1806. Born about 1788, she is among the most honored Native women in the history of the United States.
Taken from her people as a girl and living among the Hidatsa when the expedition wintered in what is now North Dakota, she joined the Corps of Discovery as it set out for the Pacific. Her presence, with a child, signaled peaceful intent to the nations they met along the way.
When a boat capsized on the Missouri she saved the journals and instruments that would otherwise have been lost; and when the party reached the Rockies she found among the Shoshone her own brother, Cameahwait, and won from him the horses without which they could not have crossed the mountains.
The record of her later life is contested — documents suggest she died in 1812, while Shoshone and Hidatsa tradition holds she lived to great age. Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.
Kept with honor.
References
Biography drawn from the public historical record, verifiable against the sources above.
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