01Biography
Sacagawea was a Lemhi Shoshone woman from the Salmon River country of present-day Idaho. As a girl, about 1800, she was captured by Hidatsa raiders and taken east to their villages in present-day North Dakota. There a French-Canadian trader, Toussaint Charbonneau, took her as one of his wives. In February 1805 she gave birth to a son, Jean Baptiste, and that April she set out west with Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery, carrying him.
She never traveled the Oregon Trail. In August 1805 the explorers met a Shoshone band led by her brother, Cameahwait, and she helped them talk with her people and get the horses they needed to cross the mountains. She went on with the Corps down the Snake and Columbia rivers to the Pacific, a generation before the first wagon trains.
02Why they matter
Went with the Corps of Discovery to the mouth of the Columbia and helped it get horses from her Shoshone people to reach the Oregon Country.
03How they died
Most historians believe she died of a fever on December 20, 1812, at Fort Manuel, a trading post on the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota, when she was about 25. The trader who wrote down the death did not give her name, and Shoshone tradition at Wind River, Wyoming, holds that she lived there until 1884. William Clark, who became the guardian of her children, listed her as dead in the 1820s.
04Legacy
A bronze statue of her, paid for by women campaigning for the vote, was unveiled at Portland's Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905 and stands in Washington Park. Since 2000 an image of her carrying her baby has appeared on the U.S. golden dollar coin.