Giving Birth in a Hidatsa Village

Shoshone elder Martha Dick pictured here with her grandson, Bodagwitche, in Owyhee, Nevada in 1986. Martha Dick holds her grandson in a traditional cradleboard likely of a style similar to the one Sacajawea would have used to carry Pomp.

Blanton Owen Photograph, courtesy of the Nevada Arts Council Folklife Archives.

The only direct clues we have to Sacagawea’s birth experience come from Meriwether Lewis’s journal. We know hers was a long labor, as is common with first pregnancies. We know that she was given part of the rattle of a rattlesnake to help speed childbirth and that she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. But to understand more about her experience, we must look to other sources.

Sacagawea lived with Hidatsa people at the time of the birth of her son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. A Hidatsa woman traditionally gave birth to her first child in her mother’s lodge, where the female members of her family gathered to support and care for her. Would this have been the case for Sacagawea? Having lived in both Shoshone and Hidatsa communities, did she have the necessary kinship connections, especially after having married Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian? Lewis’s journal only mentions the presence of René Jusseaume, another French-Canadian man who lived in the Mandan village.

During difficult labors, Hidatsa women’s knowledge of certain sacred rites might be called on to assist. These women might have a special connection to the otter, believed to have the power to make childbirth easier. Sometimes, women in labor were given medicinal herbs like black root or a mixture of water and pulverized rattlesnake rattle to speed delivery. According to Lewis, Jusseaume gave Sacagawea the latter to help with hers.

A newborn would be wrapped in a soft blanket of tanned hide and then placed in a cradle board. The baby was swaddled tightly within the bundle, which was long enough to hold space for heated sand at the bottom to keep the baby’s feet warm. It is easy to imagine how necessary the extra warmth would be for Sacagawea’s baby, born during a cold North Dakota February. Mothers removed the babies from their bundles two or three times a day to be washed and to stretch. They used cattail down for diapers. Sacagawea would have cared for Pomp in much the same way. She likely carried him in his cradle bundle on her back as they traveled through Montana, across the Rocky Mountains, until finally reaching the Pacific Ocean. And then she carried him back home.

About this article: This article is part of series called “Pivotal Places: Stories from the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.”