A Shoshone Miracle

[With this addition, my little trip up the Missouri will end. Honestly, I didn't need to say anything at all because it's almost impossible to imagine how much has already been written about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Library shelves overflow with books, and Google will supply any interested reader with endless sights.  

I wouldn't have written what I have if the KWIT radio weren't parked as close as it is to the Floyd Monument, Sioux City's own towering obelisk that commemorates the life and notes the death of Sgt. Charles Floyd, the only man who didn't return. He was just 23 years old. 

I started at Kansas City and will finish with Sacajawea, who didn't get drafted into the Corps of the Discovery until the company was long gone from the neighborhood.

So she's last on the little tour I created. Hope you enjoyed it.]

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What happened to her when she was a kid wasn't that unusual among nomadic, war-faring Great Plains tribes. When hers--the Shoshones--got into a bloody fight with another--the Hidatsas--she got herself kidnapped, lost her home, and was eventually--sad but true--sold into slavery. She was, then, only ten years old. 

All of that sounds awful today, and it was. On the other hand, it wasn't wildly unusual. What was unusual was the strange white men coming up the river, a whole number of them, sometimes dressed in ridiculous blue uniforms. It was the party of Lewis and Clark, who'd struggled up the Missouri in any way they could, bound for nobody knew exactly what--to find, those Native people must have figured, whatever it was they could at the mouth of the river, like the end of the rainbow maybe. Sickly-looking people too--so pale.

She'd got herself won in a card game after being kidnapped, both she and her friend Otter Woman, when a French-Canadian trapper named Toussaint Charboneau, who was hardly a prize, won both of them with a fair-to-middlin' poker hand, then got Sacajawea with child, this 16-year-old girl hundreds of miles from her family.

So when Lewis and Clark signed that trapper to do some scouting for them--they were up in what would be North Dakota at the time--Sacajawea was pregnant, plump as a plum. That baby, Jean Baptiste, was born mid-winter, February, 1805, while the whole party hibernated at Fort Mandan amid the Dakota icebox.

None of that happened anywhere close to Siouxland, but any string of tales told about the corps has to mention Sacajawea, without whom success would never have been anything more than a fantasy.

Let’s just be forthright, Sacajawea wasn't baggage, but a bona fide unforeseen benefit. Just 16 years old, she just happened to know her way around the neighborhood when the Missouri elbowed its way west into Montana. What's more, she knew the language! Good night, what a deal she was.

One could argue, although white people might find it hard to do, that without this girl, this kid, this teenage, unmarried mom, this Indian(!), Lewis and Clark and their much bally-hooed Corps of Discovery would never have made it to Oregon. Others would have, of course, because pale-faced folks were swarming west in numbers that seemed unending to Native people, white folks carrying diseases that would eventually wipe out tens of thousands, including most all of the Hidatsas.

In what had to be the most memorable public homecoming of the whole adventure, this young mom found herself in a Shoshone camp where she spotted, almost miraculously, her brother, Cameahwait, who was chief of the Shoshones. Astonishment—that’s what the entire corps must have felt right then.

Had Lewis and Clark made it no farther than Great Falls, there certainly would have been other explorers and frontiersmen to see the vast American riches in a country only recently purchased by a government in faraway Washington. Still, what the Corps of Discovery did was an accomplishment more impressive than any other back then, finding their way from St. Louis to the Oregon coast and the Pacific Ocean, then returning, all in a couple of years, a feat they could not have accomplished without little Sacajawea, who was carrying, for weeks of that trek, mile after mile, her own lively little bundle of joy, caring dearly for him during what months remained of the adventure. 

As remarkable an enterprise as the Lewis and Clark adventure was, and it was—their only loss being Sgt. Charles Floyd--they could not have done it without Sacajawea, that little Shoshone girl with the tiny baby, a woman who died just a few years later, in 1812, of some kind of fever.

It’s impossible to tell the story without giving her the attention she deserves. What she did must be remembered, and not just remembered either, but celebrated.