She Was Never Just a Guide

The journals of Lewis and Clark reveal a far more complicated role for Sacajawea than the frontier mythology that followed.

Editor’s Note: Historical records preserve several spellings, including Sacagawea and Sakakawea. For clarity, this article uses Sacajawea, the version most familiar to modern readers of Western history.

Some accounts say the Hidatsa raided a Shoshone village sometime around 1800, possibly along the upper Missouri or near the Three Forks of the Missouri in present-day Montana. Among those taken was a girl, ten or eleven years old, whose name in her own language was something closer to Boinaiv, or “Grass Woman.” The Hidatsa are said to have given her a different name, one historians still argue about.

Other accounts say that she was always Hidatsa on her father’s side and Crow on her mother’s. Was not kidnapped, and instead is said to have lived among her Crow mother’s family as a teenager.

The Story Before the Journals

Regardless of these conflicting accounts, one thing is clear: By the time Meriwether Lewis wrote her into his journal in November 1804, she had already passed through one life and into another. She was, Lewis noted without much comment, one of two wives of the…