[If you are a book lover, I highly recommend Delanceyplace.com. It will expose you to titles you might never find yourself. SB SM]
Today’s selection — from Wild Girls by Tiya Miles. The indispensable contribution of Sacagawea to the expedition of Lewis and Clark:
“Nearly a century earlier, Sacagawea had stepped into an equally uncertain future, stripped of family save for the two-month-old baby on her back. She was born into the Shoshone nation (or ‘Snake’ tribe) of present-day Idaho and Montana. Her people lived in a vast and varied ecology stretching across the Rocky Mountains, intermountain prairies, and northwestern rivers. They moved seasonally across this terrain, spending time in summer and winter settlements and taking what they needed to sustain their homes (teepees made of hide), diets (hunting and gathering), and clothing (leather and fur) from bison herds. As a girl in the community of her birth, Sacagawea would have learned the mentally and physically demanding subsistence skills all women needed: identifying, collecting, and preparing wild plants; drying and preserving salmon; cooking bison meat and smaller game; cleaning and tanning buffalo hides; constructing and transporting teepees and other household implements; sewing and beading articles of clothing; and caring for children.
“When she was an adolescent, Sacagawea’s band departed from their seasonal settlement to travel eastward toward the headwaters of the Missouri River. The group set up a temporary camp in a seemingly peaceful spot where three streams fringed by cottonwood trees curved through the green and gold prairie grasses. But they were acting within a charged economic and political environment shaped by an increasing European presence, an international trade in bison hides, and frequent raiding. Suddenly, a Hidatsa raiding party attacked, scattering the Shoshone campers and taking three girls and four boys. Those girls—Sacagawea, Otter Woman, and Leaping Fish Woman—were transported over 500 miles eastward to the Knife River villages of the allied Hidatsa and Mandan nations. The three female captives were held in the lodge of Red Arrow, who intended to keep them as wives. One of them, Leaping Fish Woman, escaped and rejoined the Shoshones. Sacagawea and Otter Woman remained in this household for six months to two years.
“In June of 1803, around the time of Sacagawea’s captivity on the bluffs of the Missouri, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, spelled out detailed instructions to Meriwether Lewis (who would then recruit fellow Virginian William Clark), requesting observations ‘to be taken with great pains and accuracy’ of the Indigenous people inhabiting the lands around the Missouri River. Jefferson wanted to know, among other things, ‘the names of the nations & their numbers; the extent and limits of their possessions; their relations with other tribes or nations; their language, traditions, monuments; their ordinary occupations … their food,
clothing & domestic accommodations; the diseases prevalent among them, & the remedies they use; moral and physical circumstances which distinguish them from the tribes we know; peculiarities in their laws, customs & dispositions; and articles of commerce they may need to furnish.’ Jefferson did not want to instigate open conflict, neither did he plan, at that time, to expel Indigenous residents. Rather, he wanted intercourse with Native nations to follow a diplomatic course, so he further instructed Meriwether Lewis to treat Indigenous people in a ‘friendly & conciliatory manner’ and to ‘satisfy them of it’s [the expedition’s] innocence.’
“But the mission was not innocent, in that it grew out of an existing policy of American national expansion into Indigenous lands and was intended ‘formally to extend American power up the Missouri and toward the mountains,’ writes one major historian of the expedition. Thomas Jefferson would soon augment his initial instructions in a letter, spelling out the kind of soft power he wanted Lewis to wield. Native people must be informed that the United States had ‘now become sovereigns of the country’ and ‘without … diminution of the Indian rights of occupancy … are authorized to propose to them in direct terms the institution of commerce.’ In essence, Jefferson wanted Lewis and Clark to convey to representatives of Native nations that the United States had ‘become their fathers,’ the political sovereign with a higher authority to dictate commercial relations.
“This was the diplomatic morass in which Sacagawea would become entangled in the spring of 1805. Historical sources differ on how Sacagawea, by then thirteen or fourteen, came into the hands of the trader Toussaint Charbonneau, a resident in one of the Hidatsa villages. Red Arrow may have lost Sacagawea and Otter Woman to Charbonneau in an ‘all night gambling match,’ or he may have ‘sold’ them to Charbonneau. At the time that she came into this forty-something Frenchman’s household as his teenage ‘spouse,’ Sacagawea was not a free person. She had this unfree status in common with Harriet Tubman’s mother, Rit, who was her temporal contemporary. So when Charbonneau offered his services as an interpreter to Lewis and Clark, he was also altering the course of Sacagawea’s life. As the captains interviewed Charbonneau, they noticed his two Shoshone ‘wives,’ who had come from the lands the captains needed to cross. They hired Charbonneau, knowing they would need these women to translate when they entered Shoshone territory, and they solicited information from the young women, including requests for cartographic drawings.
| author: Tiya Miles | |
| title: Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation (A Norton Short) | |
| publisher: W.W. Norton & Company | |
| date: | |
| page(s): 78-83 |