In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (5 page)

At Portland's Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905, ceremonies honored Lewis and Clark, and speakers expounded upon the magnitude of their achievement. An article by H. W. Scott in the fair's official publication states that “the expedition of Lewis and Clark, though as humble an undertaking as the settlement at Plymouth or Jamestown, was the prologue to the theme of our later national
expansion.”
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Yet despite the fair's ostensible signs of commemorating that undertaking, it remained overshadowed by the promotion of municipal and regional economic potential. Carl Abbott points out that this made it easier to obtain national funding for the exposition: “No one in Congress had much interest in the historical heroes and their . . . trek.” What the members of Congress
were
interested in was the “vision of Pacific trade that had motivated the exploration and settlement of the Oregon Country.” To garner support, Oregonians learned quickly in the winter of 1903–1904 to cut the number of references to Lewis and Clark and to hammer home the idea that a Portland fair was “an undertaking of national interest and importance.”
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The rhetoric commemorating the Corps of Discovery's feat had a distinctly imperialistic ring. In his 1904 article, Scott called the expedition “that Anabasis of the Western World” and explained the “Historical Significance of the Lewis and Clark Expedition” as a “prologue to the theme of our later national expansion [that] pushed our National boundary line to the shores of the Pacific.” Scott proclaimed that the expedition “epitomized” the movement of and conquest by the “races of the North” in “one of the great dramas of history.” Scott was not shy about using Lewis and Clark to support American expansionism, such as the recent annexation of the Philippines.
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Perhaps the fact that they were known at the time primarily as agents of American Manifest Destiny worked against the explorers and their party being idolized as romantic heroes. Abetting national expansion and stimulating economic development, no matter how significant to politicians and boosters in 1905, was decidedly less exciting or dramatic in the public mind than conquering enemies by force of arms or heroically and tragically failing (all but one of the Corps of Discovery's crew, after all, survived the adventure). The figure of Sacagawea, on the other hand, invited celebration of a more human and personal type of heroism in Portland and with increasing frequency throughout the twentieth century. Around two dozen statues, monuments, and markers have been erected to honor Sacagawea; and she is widely celebrated in writings, place names, music, paintings, pageants, motion pictures, and other forms of representation. Public perceptions of Sacagawea, her popularity as a historical icon,
and the legends that have grown up around her life and death constitute topics unto themselves. As far as commemoration is concerned, Sacagawea often seems to occupy a place apart from the rest of the expedition, perhaps because of the various purposes to which her story—historical or legendary—has been put.
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Fig 1.1
Although dated 1908, this photograph depicts a parade in Helena, Montana, celebrating the Lewis and Clark Centennial. Photo by Edward Reinig. Courtesy, Montana Historical Society Research Center, Helena.

The young Shoshone woman, who had been captured and separated from her people years before she encountered Lewis and Clark at Fort Mandan, accompanied the expedition all the way to the Pacific Coast and back in 1805–1806. She has become perhaps the leading popular icon related to that journey. Some authors have even claimed that the expedition would have failed without her. Donna Kessler has pointed out that different editions of the expedition journals and accounts of the expedition indicate different “versions of Sacagawea's function.” One is that she had “no specified role,” as Sergeant Patrick Gass's journal and the Biddle edition suggest. Sacagawea was just along for the trip. Accounts by both William Clark and Meriwether
Lewis, however, document several ways the Shoshone woman contributed.
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Esther Burnett Horne and Sally McBeth categorize them as “interpreter,” “guide,” “emissary,” and “unconventional counselor.” The first two categories are probably the most recognized, although there has been some controversy over the question of the extent to which Sacagawea acted as a guide for the expedition. Her husband, Charbonneau, was brought along primarily as an interpreter and possibly also because his wife offered the additional skill of being able to interpret from the Shoshone language.
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Horne and McBeth acknowledge that the journals offer scant evidence that Sacagawea was “the guide and pilot” for the expedition and note that her “geographical knowledge was limited to the region near her homeland” in the vicinity of the Three Forks. Yet the fact that she recognized landmarks, such as Beaverhead Rock, was important because it indicated to the captains that they were on the right path. Also, in July 1806 she recommended that Clark's party, seeking a way to the Yellowstone River on the return trip, cross the mountains by way of Bozeman Pass. As “emissary,” Sacagawea's dramatic reunion with her brother Cameahwait at Camp Fortunate paved the way for the expedition to obtain Shoshone horses to cross the Bitterroot Mountains. “Unconventional counselor” refers to a number of instances in which Sacagawea contributed to expedition members' morale and provided practical aid. As the mother of an infant born just before the group left Fort Mandan, she signaled to newly encountered Indians the group's peaceful intent and offered the men of the expedition a soothing domestic and maternal touch. She also gathered wild foods, and on one occasion her coolness in an emergency saved important supplies from being washed away when a canoe was nearly capsized on the Missouri River.
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Historian Laura McCall states unequivocally that “without Sacagawea, the men of the Lewis and Clark Expedition would have either perished or been forced to turn back.”
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But McCall also refers to Sacagawea as an “enigma.” Except for the circumstances of her having been kidnapped by a raiding party near the Three Forks of the Missouri River when she was young and taken to the Hidatsa village in North Dakota, where Clark and Lewis encountered her while in winter encampment in 1804–1805,
little is known about Sacagawea's life before she joined the expedition.
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In addition, unless one accepts the oral tradition that she lived to be rather old and was buried on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, little is known about her life after she left the expedition.
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What Horne and McBeth refer to as the “South Dakota version” of Sacagawea's subsequent life and death is the one most commonly accepted by scholars. Although several records or accounts between 1806 and 1812 apparently refer to her as the Shoshone (or Snake) wife of Toussaint Charbonneau, her actual name rarely appears. Evidence indicates that Sacagawea, her infant son, Jean Baptiste, and her husband, Charbonneau, traveled to St. Louis four years after the expedition returned and accepted a gift of land from William Clark and funds to help educate the boy. They soon left to go back up the Missouri, however, leaving Baptiste in Clark's care, and Charbonneau went to work at one of Manuel Lisa's fur trading posts.
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According to this version, Sacagawea became ill and died at Fort Manuel Lisa on December 20, 1812. The supporting evidence is entirely textual, based largely on handwritten notations made by the chief trader at Fort Manuel Lisa (in present-day Nebraska) and by William Clark. Despite questions about the interpretation of this evidence, most scholars accept the South Dakota version. The so-called Wyoming version of Sacagawea's life and death following the conclusion of the expedition is based on oral tradition of several Indian tribes compiled in a 1925 report by Charles Eastman. This version—popularized by Grace Raymond Hebard, then a historian at the University of Wyoming—claims that Sacagawea moved from tribe to tribe after parting from Charbonneau, married a man named Jerk Meat, and settled with Comanches in Oklahoma. After Jerk Meat's death, she “traveled up the Missouri River in search of her own people” and, under another name, eventually settled among the Eastern Shoshone on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. According to this version, she lived to be almost 100, dying on April 9, 1884. She was buried on the reservation near Lander, Wyoming.
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A third version, one that has earned much less support among scholars, is that Sacagawea did live later than 1812 and was killed in northeastern Montana in 1869.
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The beginnings of Sacagawea's transformation in the popular imagination can be traced back to Elliott Coues, who emphasized
her heroic contribution to the expedition, and to Eva Emery Dye's book
The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark
, which described Sacagawea as an Indian princess who was as significant to the exploration as were Clark and Lewis. Dye was a suffragette, and her image of Sacagawea provided the movement with what Kessler calls “a prototype for the emancipated woman” and a historically great American woman.
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Sacagawea assumed the leading historical role at the Lewis and Clark Exposition when the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) accepted an invitation to hold its 1905 national convention in Portland. In the convention's presidential address, Anna Howard Shaw called voting rights for women “the logical conclusion of Sacagawea's heroic efforts.” Dye “dwelt on the claims of Sacajawea to the patriotism of all true Americans—far greater claims than those of Pocahontas.”
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The Woman's Club of Portland had already established a Sacajawea Statue Association, with Dye as president, and raised $7,000 for a statue by selling souvenir “Sacajawea spoons” and “Sacajawea buttons.” Dr. Washington Matthews of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology produced what the
Exposition Journal
called “The First Model of a Statue of Sacajawea.” One statue had been prepared for St. Louis. The one for Portland was being sculpted in Chicago by Denver sculptor Alice Cooper, who used photographs of Minataree women as studies for the work. Cooper's finished bronze statue for the fair portrayed Sacagawea in a buffalo robe, her baby strapped to her back, pointing the way for the explorers. It was unveiled on July 6, 1905, at a ceremony in which both Susan B. Anthony and Portland suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway praised Sacagawea in speeches. A year later the statue, a potent symbol of the view that Sacagawea had guided Lewis and Clark (because it showed her pointing), was placed in Portland's Washington Park. But Sacagawea symbolized more than progress toward women's rights in the early twentieth century.
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Kessler points out that she became closely identified with Manifest Destiny and that of the “thirty-three texts [and monuments] highlighting Sacagawea within fifteen years of the publication of Dye's
The Conquest
,” fewer than half were by suffragists.
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For example, a poem about the Portland statue, written by Bert Huffman of Pendleton, Oregon, for the official exposition publication, describes her “glorious fate”
to stand upon “fame's pedestal. . . . Bronzed, barefoot, yet a patron saint, / The keys of Empire in her hand.”
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