This is what is actually known about Sacagawea’s early childhood and the
customs of her people.
Sacagawea was a Lemhi Shoshone Indian born around 1788 between Kenney Creek
and Agency Creek along the banks of the Lemhi River near Tendoy, Idaho. She,
along with other female children of her band, experienced mistreatment in her
Shoshone village because of their gender. They experienced beatings, given only
to girls, and did hard work not required of the male children. Boys in the tribe
were never spanked because the Shoshone knew that severe punishment can break
the spirit of their young braves. Shoshone males enjoyed a privileged lifestyle,
while the females of the tribe were given a life of drudgery, as indicated by
Meriwether Lewis in his log for August 19, 1805: “They seldom correct their
children particularly the boys who soon become masters of their own acts.” Lewis
continued, “They give as a reason that it cows and breaks the spirit of the
boy to whip him, and that he never recovers his independence of mind after he is
grown. They treat their women but with little rispect (respect), and compel them
to preform every species of drudgery.” They watched as Shoshone women were
prostituted by their own husbands, made to do all the work of the camp, while
the males engaged solely in the excitement of hunting and war.
Although most of these pratices were widely held by other Shoshone Bands,
Sacagawea’s people were in an unusually distressed state in the early 1800’s.
Enemy tribes had been chasing them, robbing and decimating their particular
group for many years. It had left them terribly poor and continually on the run,
breaking down social values that would have provided the desperately needed
unity and peace within the Band. Captain Lewis wrote of his discovery that they
even hoarded meat which was killed during a hunt, letting other members of their
own Band starve.
During the fall of 1800, while the Lemhi tribe were wintering near the three
forks of the Missouri River, in what is now Montana, they were attacked by a
band of Minnetaree Indian raiders from the Hidatsa village. They had killed most
of her Shoshone Tribe and captured her to serve as a slave.
Sacagawea was then sold to the Mandan Indians who kept her enslaved. Sometime
between then and 1804, she was gambled off to an irritable, abusive, middle-aged
white French-Canadian fur trader named Troussaint Charbonneau. He forced her to
become his dutiful wife after winning her in a game of chance with the Mandan
Indians that he lived among. A female Indian in the 1800’s had few freedoms. A
girl of about 16 years old when Lewis and Clark met her at Fort Mandan in the
North Dakota territory, she had been beaten by her own people, kidnapped by the
Minnetaree, sold and enslaved by the Mandan, then gambled off to a very abusive
fur trader, Sacagawea had had no positive experiences with either the White or
the Red Man. Instead of these harsh beginnings breaking her spirit, all of
Sacagawea’s experiences contributed to the courage and strength she would
repeatedly demonstrate on the expedition. Most importantly, Lewis and Clark’s
attitude towards her would change over the course of the expedition with the
Corps of Discovery, transforming itself from complete indifference into
tremendous respect and admiration for everything she endured.
