Over the past 200 years, Sacagawea has been glorified and fictionalized everywhere from elementary school classrooms to seductive romance novels. She has risen from being an interpreter to a heroine, and while no original photograph or portrait of her exists or has ever existed, that hasn’t stopped artists from rendering her supposed likeness in paintings, on coins and stamps, and from clay and bronze. In fact, more statues have been dedicated to Sacagawea than any other woman in the history of the United States.

Writers should be cautious with their sources and double-check facts, because fiction written about Sacagawea outweighs fact. She’s become a cultural icon, yet her life is still something of a mystery.

Reenactor playing Sacagawea (Click for a larger image)

Historians believe her name was derived from the Hidatsa Indian language and means Bird Woman. But scholars have yet to agree on the spelling and pronunciation of her name. Some say it should be pronounced with a j sound; others argue it should be sounded with a softer g sound. It’s spelled many different ways in Lewis and Clark’s journals, and even today, several different spellings are accepted.

All academic wrangling aside, she was a young girl, just 16 or 17 years old and pregnant when Lewis and Clark arrived at the Mandan villages in what is now central North Dakota. But she wasn’t Mandan, or even from the neighboring Hidatsa tribe. She came from the heart of the Rocky Mountains from the Shoshone tribe, who Lewis and Clark called the Snake Indians. As a child, she had been kidnapped and taken as a slave. Her captors were Hidatsa, and she accompanied them down the Missouri.

Sacagawea was barely 14 years old when she was traded to Toussaint Charbonneau, a mixed-blood French fur trader who lived among the Mandans. She was his second “wife.”

By the end of that first long, harsh winter, Lewis and Clark had contracted with Charbonneau as an interpreter, and Sacagawea had given birth to a son, Jean Baptiste. The infant was just four months old when the expedition set off to find the origin of the Missouri River. Lewis and Clark knew they would need Sacagawea when they reached the Rocky Mountains to translate for the Corps in order to secure horses from the Shoshone, which would be necessary if the Corps failed to find an all-water route through the Continental Divide to the Columbia River.

As the Corps of Discovery pushed upstream and into what is now Montana, it was heading into a landscape no one had seen before, save one member of the party—Sacagawea was going home.

Her mere presence on the expedition probably afforded Lewis and Clark a greater measure of protection than all of the 1800s, state-of-the-art firearms they carried. Historians have surmised that tribes that may have been bent on conflict saw a woman and child in the group as an indication that the Corps was peaceful. After all, no Indian war party ever included a woman and an infant.

Lewis and Clark’s journals offer occasional glimpses of Sacagawea, and their perceptions of her vary widely. Lewis seems somewhat indifferent, calling Sacagawea the Indian woman or the interpreter’s wife. In one journal entry Lewis observes, “if she has enough to eat and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.”

Clark, on the other hand, affectionately nicknamed her Janey, and refers to her often in his journals. Almost from the beginning, he developed a sincere fondness for her son, whom he called Pomp.

Regardless of how the captains felt toward her, it was Sacagawea who was credited with saving much of the expedition’s scientific instruments, specimens and even the captains’ journals when the boat Charbonneau was steering almost capsized on May 14, 1805, on the upper Missouri. Her husband couldn’t swim, and as other members of the party scrambled to paddle the waterlogged boat to shore, she remained calm and stayed with the boat, reaching out into the heavy waves to retrieve nearly all of the Corps’ important papers and instruments. Lewis praised her “fortitude and resolution” after the ordeal was over.

As the expedition reached the Missouri’s headwaters, where the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin rivers come together, Sacagawea began to recognize the mountains in the distance. As the party made their way up the Jefferson, she pointed out the Beaver’s Head and other landmarks she remembered as a child.

Sacagawea took center stage when the Corps finally came into contact with her people, the Shoshone, near present-day Dillon, Montana. In an amazing twist of fate, the tribe’s chief, Cameahwait, was none other than Sacagawea’s brother. According to a journal account of their meeting, Sacagawea “instantly jumped up, and ran and embraced him throwing over him her blanket and weeping profusely: The chief was himself moved, though not in the same degree.” Throughout the intense trading by way of interpreters that followed, Sacagawea often broke down in tears, overpowered by her emotion at the chance reunion with her brother.

Were it not for Sacagawea and Cameahwait, the party likely would not have been outfitted for the arduous few weeks ahead of them. Lewis and Clark were able to secure many horses, and even an experienced guide to take them across the mountains.

When the expedition reached the Pacific Ocean, they set up their winter camp at Ft. Clatsop, along what is now called the Lewis and Clark River. In mid-January, Indians reported that a whale had washed ashore some miles from the encampment. The captains decided to send Clark with a detachment to the whale to harvest blubber. Sacagawea would not let them leave without her.

“She observed that she had traveled a long ways with us to see the great waters, and now that a monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard that she could not be permitted to see either,” Clark wrote.

Sacagawea ultimately got her way, and accompanied the men to the whale and saw the great Pacific.

When the Corps returned to St. Louis later that year, Sacagawea and Charbonneau stayed at the Mandan villages in present-day North Dakota. Carbonneau was paid $500 for his services, and Sacagawea received nothing. Clark offered to take Pomp and raise him as his own son and educate him, but the baby wasn’t yet weaned.

In 1809, Charbonneau and Sacagawea brought Pomp to St. Louis, and Clark kept his promise. He raised and educated little Jean Baptiste as one of his own.

Sacagawea died shortly after giving birth to her second child, a girl she named Lisette, in 1812 at Ft. Manuel, a fur-trading post located in what is now present-day South Dakota. Clark also adopted Lisette and raised her as his own as well.

Unsubstantiated legends maintain that Sacagawea didn’t die that year, but lived to be nearly 100 years old and died on the Wind River Shoshone Reservation in Wyoming. However, in a letter Clark wrote on the expedition in the 1820s, Sacagawea was listed as already dead.