By Ruth Steinhardt
Her name was Sacagawea, Sakakawea, Wadze-wipe, Pohe-nive or something else entirely. She was a willing wife or a captured slave. She died of a fever in 1812 or of old age in 1884—or maybe somewhere else, at another time, of another cause.
There reportedly are more statues of the Shoshone woman popularly known as Sacagawea, who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition through the American West from 1804 to 1806, than of any other American woman. But the basic facts of her life are hardly known and hotly contested.
That confusion is not incidental to Sacagawea’s iconic status, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Elizabeth Fenn.
“That the facts of her life are contested is not surprising, since I think we all want a piece of her,” Dr. Fenn said, speaking at the George Washington University’s annual Elmer Louis Kayser Memorial Lecture on Thursday. A former member of the GW History Department, Dr. Fenn now is chair of the history department at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
The specifics of Sacagawea’s life may be irrevocably lost, Dr. Fenn admitted in her talk, “Sacagawea’s Capture and the History of the Early West.” But a record of the young mother’s adaptability and resourcefulness remains in the journals kept by expedition leaders Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—which survive only because Sacagawea rescued them from a capsized boat. And the surviving facts of her life and travels can shed light on a transformative period in the American West.
Elizabeth Fenn delivers the Kayser Lecture at the Marvin Center on Feb. 18. (Rob Stewart/GW Today)
Sacagawea’s life had been altered by travel long before she became an interpreter and guide to Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, Dr. Fenn said. When Sacagawea was about 10, a party of raiders from the Hidatsa tribe captured her and several other Shoshone children. As a prisoner, Sacagawea would travel well over 500 miles from her own home in the Lemhi River Valley in what is now Idaho to a Hidatsa settlement in present-day North Dakota.
Dr. Fenn described the Western landscape through which Sacagawea and her fellow captives moved with a novelist’s lyricism. The party traveled from the “protective fortress” of the mountains where the Shoshone lived across the vast, empty stretch of the Great Plains, where the “sheer expanse” would have been terrifying, Dr. Fenn said. She described “buffalo jumps” the travelers would have passed: high cliffs where human hunters would drive entire herds of game to their deaths in what Dr. Fenn, quoting aptly-named historian Jack W. Brink, called “the most productive food-getting enterprise ever devised by human beings.”
From the plains they would have come to the lush abundance of the game-heavy Milk River Valley—including the “drawback” of “huge, amply-fed grizzly bears”—and the flint quarries of the Knife River, craggy with one of the major trading materials of the time.
All of these places, Dr. Fenn said, were changing, and the people who lived there were changing too.
The Shoshone, for instance, were a mountain people whose possession of horses had until the 18th century made them ascendant in battles against rival tribes. But the neighboring Blackfeet had recently acquired firearms, which put the Northern Shoshone at a strong disadvantage. It was in part this deficiency that permitted Sacagawea’s capture, Dr. Fenn suggested, and set in motion the train of events leading to her history-making part in the Corps of Discovery.
That sense that place and history are intertwined, and that historians should examine both, informs Dr. Fenn’s work deeply.
She said she always tells her students to “get a sense of the geography…it will shape the way you understand your subject matter.” Her book “Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People,” which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in history, “would have turned out very differently had I not spent a lot of time in North Dakota…bringing that present landscape to bear on the past.”
The impossibility of determining the facts of Sacagawea’s life, Dr. Fenn said, is no reason not to study her. In fact, she said, the ambiguities surrounding one iconic woman can open up broader dialogues about American history.
“I’m not going to find out anything new about Sacagawea,” Dr. Fenn said. “I want to use those contested parts of her history to raise questions. That’s what I love about history. Wife or slave? Let’s talk about it. What does it mean [either way]? I almost find it too glib to pick one or the other. And it’s treacherous, too, because it’s always something in between—something more muddy.”