Probably the best-known member of the Corps of Discovery after Lewis and Clark themselves is Sacagawea, the young Shoshone/Hidatsa woman who accompanied the expedition to the Pacific Ocean as an interpreter. Born about 1789 in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho, Sacagawea was a Lemhi Shoshone. Suddenly in the year 1800 a raiding party of Hidatsa warriors captured the 11-year-old girl and brought her back to their nation along the Knife River in what is today central North Dakota. Sacagawea was adopted into the Hidatsa tribe, and later given in marriage to Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trader who lived among them. When Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery arrived in North Dakota at the end of 1804, Charbonneau offered to work as an interpreter, bringing along one of his two Shoshone wives to assist in the translation of the Shoshone language. Realizing that they would probably have to trade with the Shoshone for horses to get over the Rocky Mountains, Lewis and Clark quickly agreed to Charbonneau’s offer. Sacagawea, about 16 years of age and ready to give birth to her first child, was chosen to accompany the expedition. She turned out to be a far more valuable contribution to Lewis and Clark’s success than her husband. Sacagawea’s baby boy, named Jean Baptiste Charbonneau (later nicknamed 'Pomp' or 'Pompey' by William Clark), was born in the explorer’s Fort Mandan on February 11, 1805. Less than two months later the expedition set out up the Missouri River accompanied by the young woman and her baby. In this painting Sacagawea has been portrayed as she may have looked in the spring of 1805. Although she wears little personal adornment such as earrings and bracelets, her attire includes some fine examples of ways in which Indian women used natural materials to accent their beauty. She is dressed in an early plains style dress made of two deerskins. The yoke of this dress is painted gold and is outlined with deer fur and accented with a deer’s tail on the front. The dress is an example of everyday working attire of the early style, few of which survive in museum collections. Sacagawea carries a wood and deer’s antler rake, a common tool among Hidatsa women, expert farmers who owned the fields they worked. Her hair is braided and bound with red trade cloth. A streak of red vermilion has been applied to the skin in the part of her hair, a sign of beauty among the women of most plains tribes of the era. Sacagawea’s belt is adorned with a mix of porcupine quillwork (in a pattern taken from a Hidatsa robe painted by George Catlin) and early trade beads made in the very popular blue color. These early beads were called 'pony beads' and were much larger than the later 'seed beads.' William Clark described Sacagawea as wearing a belt composed of blue beads while with the expedition near the Pacific Ocean. The knife sheath on her belt is copied from an artifact collected by Lewis and Clark and later given to Thomas Jefferson. The leather of the sheath has been tooled in a geometric pattern and is accented by quillwork and tin tinklers. Hanging from her belt is an awl case wrapped in red, yellow, violet and green plaited quills and fringed with quill wrapped leather, dentalium shells and dyed horsehair. Sacagawea wears soft buckskin leggings bound at the knee and trimmed with red trade cloth; plains Indian women were very modest and never exposed their ankles in public. Her moccasins are cut in the plains style and finished with beadwork around the sole seam. At her side is a Shoshone-style cradleboard within which her two-month-old son sleeps. Sacagawea would have been quite familiar with a cradleboard, used by her own people the Shoshones but not her adopted tribe, the Hidatsa. Looking forward to the rigors of the trip ahead, it is reasonable to suppose that Sacagawea fashioned a cradleboard from buckskin formed over a wooden base. The cradleboard is finished with pony bead's and bright painted colors. William Clark reported that Sacagawea’s baby 'bier' was lost in a gully-washer near Great Falls, Montana in the summer of 1805 on their way to the western sea.
