Lewis and Clark would have been turned into cougar poop if not for her



--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: April 9, 1884--

Lewis and Clark would have been turned into cougar poop if not for her

. She did not have an easy life. When she was 12, she and several other girls were kidnapped from her home in present-day Idaho by Hidatsa and taken to what is now North Dakota. A year later she was sold to a Quebecois trapper named Charbonneau for a non-consensual marriage. Or he may have won her gambling. Either way, she was basically sold as a sex slave to a colonist. Three years later, in 1804, Lewis and Clark, who were part of the Corps of Discovery, showed up and were looking for someone who spoke Shoshone to help them find their way west. When they learned Charbonneau’s “wife” Sacagawea, who was pregnant, spoke it, they hired them. 
 
During the journey to the Pacific, Sacagawea served in multiple roles, all while caring for an infant son. She was an occasional guide, she helped prevent starvation by knowing what was edible and what was not, she served as interpreter, and perhaps most important was that her very presence in the expedition demonstrated to Natives they encountered that they came in peace. All-out war against Native Americans would come later, when the colonists had numbers on their side. 
 
It is generally believed that Sacagawea died in 1812 from an unknown illness. But record-keeping at the time wasn’t much of a thing, and Charbonneau had more than one wife. So, when the death of his unnamed wife was mentioned, there is no guarantee it was Sacagawea. 

Her son, Jean-Baptiste, had been entrusted to Clark for his education, as he’d become fond of the boy and felt like a second father to him. Sacagawea gave birth to a girl in 1810, but no later mention of her was made so it is believed she died in infancy. Potentially having no dependents and married against her will, there are other possibilities. 

Stories persist that she did not die, but rather fled Charbonneau and married into a Comanche tribe in Oklahoma, staying with them for several decades. Then, in 1860, at the age of 72, she finally returned to her native Shoshone in Wyoming. It is in that state, in the cemetery of the Wind River Indian Reservation, that a large granite tombstone proclaims the final resting spot of Sacagawea, the date of her death inscribed as April 9, 1884. 
Who is truly buried there? We likely will never know. 



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