Fort Mandan to the Pacific

Sacagawea · 1804 CE – 1806 CE · Earth

Carry the expedition west as interpreter to the Shoshone, so that horses could be bought for the crossing of the Rocky Mountains.

Historical context

The Corps of Discovery reached the Mandan villages in October 1804 knowing that the Rocky Mountains would have to be crossed on horseback and that the only horses were owned by the Shoshone, a people none of them could address. Sacagawea was hired in the person of her husband, spent the winter in a hut at Fort Mandan and gave birth there in February, and left in April with a two-month-old son on her back. The expedition’s success at the divide, and much of its safety on the rivers, turned on a captive teenager who had last seen that country as a child.

The voyage, step by step

1. Winter at Fort Mandan

   1804 CE

   A sixteen-year-old captive is hired, with her husband, because she speaks Shoshone.

2. The white pirogue, 14 May

   14 May 1805

   A squall lays the boat over and she gathers the instruments and journals out of the water.

3. The Great Falls portage

   1805 CE

   A month is lost hauling canoes twenty-eight kilometres round five waterfalls.

4. Three Forks

   1805 CE

   She recognises the place where she was taken captive five years earlier.

5. Camp Fortunate

   1805 CE

   She sits down to interpret and finds her own brother on the other side of the council.

6. Over the divide

   1805 CE

   Twenty-nine horses and a guide carry the expedition across the continental divide.

7. Down from the Lolo trail

   1805 CE

   A starving party comes out of the Bitterroots onto the Weippe prairie and is fed.

8. Fort Clatsop and the whale

   1806 CE

   A wet winter among the Clatsop, and an argument about who is allowed to see the ocean.

Outcome

The horses were bought at Camp Fortunate from her own brother’s band, the party reached the Pacific in November 1805, and she wintered at Fort Clatsop before returning east in 1806.

Sacagawea

Lemhi Shoshone woman who travelled from the Mandan villages to the Pacific and back with the Corps of Discovery, carrying an infant, and whose language and presence opened the Rocky Mountain crossing.

Read on Wikipedia

Sources

• Sacagawea — Wikipedia
• The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, thirteen volumesGary E. Moulton, editor · University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln · 1987

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