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Historical Background

Personnel gains and losses

An unexpected dividend from the British traders was personnel. On October 27 Lewis and Clark temporarily hired Jessaume as an interpreter with the Mandans. A week later, to replace Private Newman, they recruited Lepage into the permanent party. The next day, November 4, Charbonneau applied for a job as interpreter with the Minitaris. A 44-year-old French-Canadian from near Montreal, he had been living and trading among them for 5 years and had been active on the Upper Missouri since at least 1793. Lewis and Clark hired him and eventually convinced him to accompany the expedition. [76]

Some manpower was also lost at the Mandan villages. On November 3 a group of the French boatmen, whose assignment ended at the Mandan villages, began to build a pirogue for their homeward trip to St. Louis. [77] Not long thereafter, part of them, after apparently being paid in cash by Lewis, returned to St. Louis, but a few of them stayed over the winter and two went back with Corporal Warfington's party in the spring. [78]

Bronze statue of Sacagawea and her child Baptiste, on the State capitol grounds, Bismarck, N. Dak. (North Dakota Historical Society.)

Sacagawea joins the expedition

On November 11 two Indian women from one of the Minitari villages visited Fort Mandan. One, named Sacagawea, was young and pregnant. A 16- or 17-year-old Shoshoni, she was one of two "wives" of that tribe which Charbonneau had bought or won in a gambling game from some Minitaris. [79] They had captured her about 5 years earlier in a raid on her people in the foot-hills of the Rockies near the Three Forks of the Missouri. She did not speak French or English, but communicated with Charbonneau in Minitari. On February 11, 1805, she gave birth to her first child, a son named Jean Baptiste. To ease her labor, Jessaume ground up in water some rattlesnake rattles, obtained from Lewis, and administered them.

Lewis and Clark finally assented to Charbonneau's request that Sacagawea be allowed to come with him. By this time, they knew that the Shoshonis would be crucial to their success because they could provide horses for the land traverse, of uncertain length, that would need to be made from the Missouri to the Columbia watershed. The Indian girl not only could help interpret in her native tongue, but might also be a valuable intermediary with her tribe. Because women, particularly those carrying a papoose, were not members of war parties, she would also remove fear and ease the way with all the natives.

Sacagawea, the only female member of the expedition, was never the brilliant guide and inspirational force that her eulogistic biographers have presented. Yet she exhibited courage and determination and aided in many important ways. She did smooth relations with the Shoshonis and other tribes, in places guided the group, served as interpreter on occasion, pointed out or collected herbs and roots that had food or medicinal value, and provided other valuable help.

This segment of Lewis' journal entry for May 20, 1805, is the most explicit original source on Sacagawea's name. Lines 8-10 state: "...this stream we called Sah-ca-gee Me-ah or bird woman's River, after our interpreter the Snake woman." Later, someone lined through Lewis' handwriting and supplied the spelling "Sah ca gar wea." (American Philosophical Society.)

A severe winter

Few of the men had ever experienced the sort of severe weather they endured at Fort Mandan. It began early in December. On the 10th, Clark saw large numbers of buffalo crossing the Missouri without breaking the ice. The temperature sometimes dropped as low as 45° below zero, and the river ice continually groaned. The cold was sometimes so bad that sentries needed to be replaced every half hour. Many of the complement suffered frostbite. The natives were no more immune; Lewis amputated the frozen toes of an Indian boy.