The Idaho Governor's Lewis and Clark Trail Committee and the Idaho State Historical Society are honored to support this publication. Join us as we commemorate the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. Boise Cascade Corporation is proud to support this unique story of Sacajawea and her people.

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Sacajawea never learned to read or write, never held a public office, never made a significant discovery. Countless Americans have grown up believing she was the Indian guide who led Lewis and Clark to the Pacific Ocean, when in fact she wasn´t a guide at all.

Two centuries later, her story is taught to every American child. Historians and Indian tribes wrangle over the spelling, pronunciation and meaning of her name. They disagree on her tribal loyalties, her importance to the Lewis and Clark expedition, her life after the expedition and when and where she died.

Sacajawea´s story has been told many times, in many ways. This is her story as told by her tribe - the Lemhi Shoshoni of Idaho. Other sources were consulted only when necessary to bridge gaps in the tribe´s oral history, and information obtained in this way was used only when it didn´t conflict with their history.

Out of respect for her people, their preferred spelling of her name is used throughout. or a person who has been called one of the most famous women in American history, the absence of concrete information about Sacajawea is remarkable.

She was never sketched or painted, or if so the likenesses were lost. Though her "image" has graced everything from stamps to statues, no one really knows what she looked like. A monument in Idaho´s Lemhi Valley denotes her birthplace, but no one knows whether the location of the monument is within miles of being accurate.

The best reporting done on her during her lifetime is contained in the journals of Lewis and Clark, and they raise more questions than they answer. Some of her tribe´s interpretations of her story differ from long-accepted facts of the story. They are presented as accurate in the sense that they reflect the oral history and opinions of the Lemhi people. And, like people everywhere, they have differences of opinion among themselves.

This, then, is an amalgam of what they believe about their most famous ancestor. The story of Sacajawea doesn´t - and shouldn´t - end with Sacajawea. It´s also the story of her tribe today.

As the nation commemorates the Lewis and Clark bicentennial with seemingly inexhaustible tributes to her, her people are living as an obscure and repressed minority on a desert reservation nothing like the beautiful mountains of their homeland. The woman who appears on the Sacajawea coin isn´t a Lemhi Shoshoni, and the tribe of the woman who contributed more than any other to the opening of the West isn´t recognized as a tribe by the federal government.

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This is her story and theirs. The story of Sacajawea and her people - by her people.

It was a night made for storytelling. Stars flickered over what would become known as Idaho in a sky yet to be diminished by electric light. The Agaidika camp was fragrant with cedar needles smoldering on a campfire rock. This was not a night for stories, however. A Blackfeet raiding party was seen that day. It was the
first sighting of the Agaidikas' feared enemies in some time, and the girl's father was worried.

"Always be aware that our enemies can be anywhere," he told his children. "Like us, they have many horses and can come suddenly. Never stop watching and listening for signs of danger. And never be without a weapon."
The girl listened solemnly, gently fingering the obsidian blade of the knife she always carried. She and her brothers and sisters had heard their father's warnings many times. She remembered his instructions on how to use the knife on an enemy if attacked. It had never happened, but already she was an expert with a blade. She made the knife herself, used it to prepare food and scrape hides for her clothing and was confident she could use it to defend herself.

If she were alive and the same age today, she'd be too young for middle school. When she was born, the United States was 12 years old and ended at the Mississippi River. She didn't know it existed.
None of the members of her band had ever seen a white person. She was born a member of the Agaidika (salmoneater Shoshone) tribe in Idaho's Lemhi Valley, near what is now the town of Salmon, in about 1788. Some Agaidikas, a branch of the Lemhi Shoshoni, say her true name has been lost in time.

Others say it was a Shoshoni word Sacatzahweyah. Its pronunciation is close to that of the more commonly used "Sacajawea," the spelling and pronunciation her tribe prefers today. In their language, it doesn't mean Bird Woman or Boat Launcher. It means a burden that is pulled or carried.

Until she was old enough to walk, Sacajawea spent much of her time in a cradleboard made of willow branches. Her mother carried it on her back. Babies quickly became accustomed to their cradleboards and felt secure and contented in them. That was important, because children had to be well-behaved. Enemies could be anywhere, and a crying child could give away an entire band.
A baby who cried without a good reason got its nose pinched. Agaidika bands wintered in the river valleys of the part of Idaho roughly bordered by the present- day towns of Carmen, Lemhi, North Fork and Challis. In the spring, they began their annual forays in search of food. Babies and small children were left at home with parents or aunts and uncles, who took turns staying with them.

The Agaidika prized their children. They gave them necklaces made with elk teeth, a symbol of status. They began teaching them almost from the time they were born, and everyone was expected to help with a child's education. Discipline for young children wasn't just their parents' responsibility. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings and others all had the authority to correct a child who was misbehaving.

Sacajawea's practical training for her tribe's difficult way of life began when she was a toddler. Agaidika children were expected to learn early and work hard. Their survival depended on it. "I've been to North Dakota and seen the sign saying 'home of Sacagawea.' I don't like what these other tribes are doing with their Sacagawea and Sagawaga and all that.

In our language, her name is Sacajawea. It means burden." Snookins Honena. The men of the tribe fished and hunted, decided when and where the bands would travel in search of food and protected the women and children against enemies. The women were in charge of raising the children and running the camps.

Girls had many teachers. From her father and older brothers, Sacajawea learned to make weapons, defend herself and trap, hunt and fish. Her mother, aunts and older sisters taught her the rest of the many skills she needed.

By the age of six or seven, she was making her own clothes. The job was far more difficult than it would be now. The tribe didn't have textiles, buttons, zippers, thread, sewing machines or metal needles. Everything had to come from nature. In today's world, Sacajawea would be considered poor, but the concept of poverty as we know it didn't exist for her. In her world, the Earth provided what she needed.

By the age of six or seven, she was making her own clothes. The job was far more difficult than it would be now. The tribe didn't have textiles, buttons, zippers, thread, sewing machines or metal needles. Everything had to come from nature. In today's world, Sacajawea would be considered poor, but the concept of poverty as we know it didn't exist for her. In her world, the Earth provided what she needed.

To make her dresses, leggings and moccasins, she skinned a deer and scraped the hair from the hide with her knife and a scraper she made from an elk bone. She made soft leather of the rough hide by soaking it three times in deer or elk brains and smoking it.

Smoking involved digging a hole, positioning sticks around it to make a tripod and filling it with chips of cedar, quaking aspen or red-pine wood. When the chips had burned to coals, she draped the hide over the tripod to catch the smoke. Smoking helped waterproof the leather and changed its color from gray to soft yellow. Unlike chemical tanning methods used now, it left the leather's pores open, allowing it to breathe and keep her cooler in hot weather.

She cut the leather into the proper shapes and sizes with her blade, made by smashing obsidian into shards against another rock. For thread, she used thin strips of sinew cut from the back of a deer or an elk. Her sewing needles were thorns or pointed bones with holes drilled with a bone awl. It took about three weeks to make a dress.

The unrelenting need for food was a dominant fact of life. Gatherers had to be in the right places at exactly the right times to harvest roots, berries, nuts and wild vegetables when they were ready. The men hunted and fished by following the migratory patterns of game.

"The children started learning almost as soon as they could walk. All the kids were left with an aunt and uncle if they were too little to go out gathering food. Twenty or 30 kids at a time would stay with an aunt and uncle. The next time, it would be another aunt's and uncle's turn. Discipline was a hand and a switch. Everybody disciplined the children. If you saw kids doing something wrong, you corrected them." Eloise Lopez

The tribe's name, Agaidika, comes from salmon - a staple of their diet. They divided their time between salmon fishing west of the Continental Divide and buffalo hunting to the east of it. The Agaidikas gradually merged with other northern Shoshoni groups, the Tukadikas (sheepeaters) and Kucundikas (buffalo eaters), to form the Lemhi Shoshoni tribe. Lemhis today joke that if they'd been eating carrots when the white men came, they'd be known as Yumbydikas, or carrot eaters. The nomadic lifestyle demanded by the need to hunt, fish and glean took them far from the Snake River at Salmon Falls to the Yellowstone and Three Forks areas of Montana to the headwaters of the Bitterroot River. They claimed this territory for generations before the first white people came.

Their food-gathering trips couldn't last too long. Bands came and went many times between spring and the following winter, always returning home to the Lemhi Valley between trips. If they stayed too long and left too few warriors behind, the women and children were vulnerable to enemy tribes' raiding parties.
Children learned from their fathers to fish by making weirs from willow branches and nets of rope made with the strong fibers from the inner bark of sagebrush. They speared fish as well. Salmon and other fish were eaten fresh and dried to save for the winter. Sacajawea may have made and carried an Agaidika version of a purse, a bag made from the skin of a large salmon.

A few Lemhi Shoshonis still make them today.

Starting at about the age of 6, girls were allowed to accompany the women on their food-gathering expeditions and begin learning their methods. The women were adept at harvesting camas roots, bitterroots, balsam and pinyon pine seeds, wild onions and carrots, chokecherries, serviceberries, blackberries and gooseberries. Sacajawea learned to make a stone grinder, which was used to make meal from dried berries. The meal was pressed into cookies.

Sacajawea knew how to skin and butcher animals and how to make stews and other meals with fish, ground squirrels, deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, buffalo and other game. Like all her people, she'd have been an expert at drying the meat into jerky that could be eaten when the snow was deep and fresh food scarce.

Her mother and aunts taught her to make the tools and implements needed for daily life. She could make a sewing-needle sharpener from a rock, a bow from a chokecherry branch, a comb from the bones of a salmon tail. She cleaned her teeth with bone toothpicks, mint and other plants. She knew where to find the white clay her people used for soap. They bathed every morning, even on days when it was so cold they had to break ice for their bath water. The Agaidikas had many horses and raced one another for recreation. Another pastime was a betting game played with bones and sticks.

Sacajawea learned to ride a horse at an early age. She knew how to make saddles and stirrups out of wood, bone and rawhide.

I made (the weir) to show my boys. We used to set it above the Lemhi store a couple hundred yards. You set it in the river at kind of an angle. We let the females go - only take the males. Every morning we pull the salmon. A long time ago, there were a lot of salmon." Leo Ariwite Sr.

She could make a buffalo coat, a rabbitskin blanket, a cattail mattress, a tepee. She knew the plants her people used to cure or ease illnesses and how to use them. Like all Agaidika girls, she became proficient at making baskets and doing what resembled modern Indian beadwork at a time when her people had never seen beads. Porcupine needles were soaked in dye, chewed or pounded flat and woven together in intricate patterns.

She'd have mastered all these skills by the time she was 12. At that age, she was said to have been small but wiry, with attractive facial features. From her tribe's elders and her relatives, she learned the Agaidikas' history, cultural traditions and spiritual beliefs. Stories of who they were and what they believed were told to children from the time they were old enough to understand. Members of other tribes would have recognized her immediately as an Agaidika, identified by the reddish paint her people wore in the parts in their hair, around their eyes and on their foreheads and cheeks. The paint, made with red, iron-oxide clay, was a symbol of peace.

Between the ages of 10 and 12, Agaidika girls went with their mothers, aunts and grandmothers for one of the last parts of their education. They called it the doe-yuh-huvee. A spiritual quest and a coming-of-age ritual, it was a day and a night spent in the mountains away from the rest of the tribe. A girl was told, among other things, about the changes she would experience as she became a woman.

"The men would deal with movement, where the bands would go. The women would have the say around the camps. Children started learning right away. There was no TV then. And you'd listen to the stories that would tell you about your beliefs and customs. Long ago, girls worked harder than they do today. It was based on your survival and the fact you could be attacked by the enemy. Girls were taught to be aware of enemies. They were taught to use weapons, and they always carried a knife." Camille George

She learned about the moon houses where women went during menstruation, when custom required them to remain separate from the men.

She learned what to expect and what to do during childbirth. Children were not allowed to be present during a birth. Babies were born in moon houses or special dwellings used only for child-bearing. Two stakes were pounded into the ground for the woman to grip during labor. A woman's mother or husband usually helped during birth. The baby was washed in the river and laid on cattails covered with soft rabbit fur. The highly absorbent cattails also were used to make diapers.

A girl only chose her husband if she was lucky. Marriages were arranged by her family, with her father playing a decisive role. Girls could be promised to a man years before they were old enough to marry. A girl with a stern authoritarian for a father had little choice but to accept the husband he approved. A girl with a kind, loving father would have considerable influence in the decision. Either way, wives were expected to obey and respect their husbands. Depending on their ability to provide for them, Agaidika men had up to three wives. A capable provider who treated his wives well was in great demand.

Girls married between the ages of 14 and 16. Men were forbidden to have sexual relations with girls who had not come of age, even if they were married to them.

There was no formal ceremony of the kind we have today, but couples commonly chose to exchange vows and gifts. It was customary for the husband to give a gift to his new wife's father, and their parents also may have exchanged gifts. Sometimes there was a feast to celebrate.

By the time she was 12, Sacajawea would have had a strong sense of identity with her tribe and a clear idea of what was expected of her as a woman. She'd have learned virtually all of the skills she needed to survive in a camp or alone in the wilderness, to care for herself, a husband and a child, and to be a fully contributing member of her tribe.

She would need all her skills and resourcefulness for what lay ahead. In her 12th year, Sacajawea was the victim of a brutal attack. It would take the Agaidika girl from Idaho to center stage for one of America's great adventures.

"I was raised by my grandparents and went to a boarding school for two years to learn the white ways. I mostly learned the Indian ways. We used to camp by the river and get salmon. The ladies would dry it for winter food. We killed deer and dried the meat. We picked gooseberries and blueberries and dried those, too. We made baskets out of deer hide. We'd dry the skin of a big salmon and make an Indian suitcase out if it. It smelled." Gladys George

he Agaidikas´ traditional enemies at the beginning of the 19th century were the Blackfeet and the Sioux Indians. The Hidatsas, who recently had acquired horses and extended their range, were relative newcomers to the Agaidikas´ territory. The newcomers smiled when they saw the lightly defended Agaidika camp. The girls picking chokecherries would be easy pickings for the Hidatsa warriors.

Like the Agaidikas, the Hidatsas were skilled horsemen. Unlike the Agaidikas, they had rifles. Plains Indians whose raids lengthened with the acquisition of horses, the Hidatsas traded with white men the Agaidikas didn´t know existed.

Sacajawea´s life with her people ended in a few terrifying moments.

Her band was camped where three rivers meet in what is now western Montana. Her father, brothers and most of the other men had left to hunt buffalo. A few men and some older boys had stayed with the women and children.

As always, Sacajawea was carrying her knife. Some of the Agaidikas had bows and arrows. All were habitually alert to the possibility of danger. But the attack was so sudden and overwhelming that they had no chance.

The horses and gunfire seemed to explode from the trees. Terrifying in their red and black war paint, the riders fired with deadly accuracy. All around her, Sacajawea´s relatives and friends were falling.

The primary objects of the raid were the horses and the girls and young women, whom the Hidatsas hoped to capture. Four Agaidika men, four women and some boys died. Sacajawea heard them screaming, saw their blood staining the buckskin clothing the girls and women had worked so hard to make.

Sacajawea wanted to help her mother, but her mother told her to run. She´d been taught to do as her parents said. With a last look at the woman she loved more than any other, she ran.

She was strong and fast, but no match for the warrior who chased her and threw her over the back of his horse. In less time than it took to build a campfire, she became one of several young women who lost their families, their people and their freedom. She was now a Hidatsa slave.

No one knows how many days it took to reach her captors´ home in what later would be called North Dakota. For Sacajawea, the journey was a time of heartache and fear. Often given only a few sentences in history books, her abduction was a devastating experience. She watched her mother, aunts and friends die agonizing deaths. She was taken from her family, her home and way of life. If a similar event occurred now, it would dominate the news. And with each day that passed, hope of rescue faded and a fear of the unknown increased.

It was only about 600 miles to where the Hidatsa and Mandan tribes lived, but it was a different
world. The mountains and forests of her homeland gave way to flat, seemingly endless plains. Acustomed to the varied topography of Idaho and Montana, where it was possible to travel from sagebrush desert to snowcapped mountains in a day, Sacajawea found the plains monotonous, her captors bewildering.

Unable to speak her language, they communicated in gestures and used commands she couldn´t understand. They looked different from her people, too.

These people were hunters and farmers. When they weren´t hunting or traveling with raiding parties, they tended to stay close to the villages where they lived. White explorers called the Hidatsas "Big Bellies."

The name came from misinterpreting a sign-language gesture in which the hands were moved in front of the stomach. Agaidikas object to claims by white historians that their ancestors

often were close to starving. They say the bounty of a land yet to be exploited by the white people was sufficient, but the tribe´s high-protein diet and mobile lifestyle made for lean people. Ample bellies almost certainly were more prevalent among the relatively settled Hidatsas than the nomadic Agaidikas.

Sacajawea had never seen anything like the Hidatsa villages. Her people lived in tepees. When they traveled, they often slept in the open. The Hidatsas lived in circular lodges made of earth and logs.

Up to 40 feet across, they housed people, dogs and horses. Fires vented through the roofs kept the lodges warm during cold weather. They were spacious, secure and comfortable.

Unlike Sacajawea´s people, the Hidatsas obtained much of their food by farming. Their crops included beans, corn and squash. Instead of traveling for days to dig roots, they walked to their well-tended gardens. Compared with what Sacajawea had known, it was in some ways a life of ease.

"Lewis and Clark said the salmon eaters were starving. I don't believe it. Food was so abundant then. How could they be starving?" Irene Ariwite

But she was still an outsider. She worked hard and contributed to the tribe´s welfare. She learned to help make their lodges and to grow, harvest and prepare their foods. She learned to speak their language. She learned their customs. But she wasn´t one of them. Most Agaidikas reject the claim that she was adopted by a Hidatsa family. They say the Hidatsas in time may have treated her well, but she was still a captive rather than an equal.

It was in their village that she first saw a white man. Unlike the Agaidikas, who lived in what was still a distant wilderness for European Americans, the Hidatsas lived within the white man´s known and rapidly expanding world. By 1800, the year Sacajawea was captured, white explorers and traders had long since established relations with the Hidatsas and other Plains tribes.

She had never seen anyone like the pale men with their strangely colored hair, shaggy faces and alien ways. They used iron pots for cooking. They were almost never without their rifles, disturbing reminders of the day she saw her mother die. They traveled on the Missouri River in awkward-looking boats and drank a strong-smelling beverage that made them stagger and laugh. Sometimes it made them mean. They had brightly colored beads and ribbons, which they traded for things they wanted more.

And they always wanted more. Sacajawea never mastered the white people´s language. She learned to speak Hidatsa, but the white language she found stranger still.


"I went to the place where she lived with the Hidatsas. You could see the circles where their lodges were. They kept their vegetables under the ground and their horses inside the lodges. Sacajawea learned to garden from them and learned new ways to gather and prepare foods. But she didn't forget her Lemhi ways.

They were what she used to gather food on the expedition." Lucille Pohipe Eldridge She saw the value of the metal tools and implements and learned to use them, just as she learned new and useful things from the Hidatsas. But her native ways - the survival skills, cultural traditions

and spiritual beliefs she learned in her youth - remained primary. For her time, place and age, she was becoming well-traveled, almost worldly. But she was first and always an Agaidika.

The skills she learned from her native tribe, her second tribe and the white explorers and traders would serve her better than anyone could have known.

Like those who were captured with her, Sacajawea lay awake nights on her bed in the earth-covered lodge and dreamed of returning to her people. Escape wasn´t impossible. As time passed, captives tended to be guarded less closely. In the dark, it might be possible to slip away. The thought was tantalizing.

Getting home again was another matter. Within hours, she would be missed. A search party would be dispatched, and her punishment if found would be severe. It was a long and hazardous journey to her homeland, especially alone on foot, and stealing horses from the Hidatsas without their noticing would be all but impossible.

For one of the Agaidika girls, the temptation was irresistible. She took a chance, beat the odds and made it home.

For reasons that may never be known, Sacajawea didn´t go with her. She may have been bound or watched more closely than the other girl. She may have thought the chances of being caught were too great or the way home was too perilous. Whatever the reasons, her life with the Hidatsas continued as it had - with an important exception.

One day, a white trapper came to the Hidatsa camp. He spoke differently than most of the other white men, who seemed to have little in common with him. He had an Indian wife, and it was said that he was always marrying someone. Sacajawea was pleased when she was told that his wife was a member of the Snake tribe, a term used for the

Shoshonis. Some say the name came from a hand sign misinterpreted by the white men. The Agaidikas believe it was because their ancestors lived near rivers where there were snakes, used snake-like patterns in weaving their baskets, or resembled snakes in the way they sneaked up on their enemies.

The Snake woman and Sacajawea came to know each other well. The man who was always marrying someone was about to take another bride, and Sacajawea was about to shoulder her burden. His name was Toussaint Charbonneau.

"The Lemhi men treated their women well. They were proud of their work. The women did most of the work in the camps, and the men were grateful for it. The Hidatsa treated Sacajawea like a slave, and Charbonneau didn't treat her right. He was a bully." Jed Wilson

Most Agaidikas believe Sacajawea was sold or traded to Charbonneau. Some say he won her in a gambling game played with sticks and bones. Half of the bones were painted black. Each player began the game with seven sticks. Players lost a stick each time they drew a black bone. Sacajawea´s fate may have been decided by whoever had the most sticks in a game played on a date never recorded against people now forgotten.

Regardless of how he came to have her as his wife, the fact that she was given to Charbonneau is the basis of a Lemhi Shoshoni claim that the Hidatsas never adopted her or welcomed her as a daughter. Few Indian parents, they say, would willingly give a daughter to such a man.

Little of what is known about Charbonneau is complimentary. Historical records portray him as abusive and obsessed with Indian women a fraction of his age. If he were living in modern times, he´d be a more likely candidate for criminal court than a place in history.

A French-speaking Canadian, Charbonneau was born near Montreal in about 1759. Then a town of only a few thousand people, the Montreal of his youth was the center of a lively fur trading industry. Like many young men of his time and place, he chose the roughneck life of a trader.

In his late 30s, he reportedly was stabbed by the mother of a woman who said he raped her daughter. The journal entry reporting it is the first known mention of behavior that revealed a lifelong fixation with younger women.

Charbonneau´s life as an itinerant trader took him from Montreal to what is now North Dakota. Compared with the primitive camps he had known in the northern wilderness, the pleasant villages and abundant gardens of the Hidatsa and Mandan tribes were inviting. A man who took his comfort seriously, Charbonneau
settled there in about 1797. Except for short absences - and one historic one - he is thought to have lived in Indian villages along the upper Missouri River for the rest of his life.


Life with Charbonneau:
Charbonneau´s weakness was well known - people gossiped about his lack of interest in women his own age - and young Shoshoni women in particular seemed to appeal to him. He already had one Shoshoni wife, and Sacajawea´s youthful good looks quickly caught his attention.

In 1804, he took her as his second wife. He was then about 45. She was 16. There was no wedding, no exchange of vows or gifts, no feast. Her family, the traditions of her tribe, the Agaidika man to whom she was promised in childhood all were distant memories.

Charbonneau was far from being the type of man she would have chosen. Though Agaidika women commonly married older men in their own tribe, Charbonneau at 45 was pushing the envelope. He was almost three times Sacajawea´s age.

To her, he was an old man.

Nor was she likely to have chosen a white man. Even now, most Lemhi people try to find spouses within the Shoshoni tribe. Sacajawea had never seen a white person until she was nearly grown. And at least one other aspect of Charbonneau´s physical appearance bothered her.

Then as now, Shoshoni men plucked or closely shaved their beards. Women of the tribe consider excessive facial hair distasteful. Charbonneau´s beard, his age and his reputation for mistreating women repulsed his reluctant bride.

Once he became her husband, however, Sacajawea accepted him and did her best to adapt to Charbonneau. Her mother, aunts and grandmother taught her that marriage is for life. It was her duty to make her marriage work even if it wasn´t to a man she would have chosen. Agaidika women sometimes left their husbands, but it was rare. For better or worse, Sacajawea stayed with Charbonneau.

They lived in a tepee in or near the village. She preferred the tepee to the earth-covered lodges because it reminded her of home.

Charbonneau´s other wife was glad to have someone to help with the work. The women expected Charbonneau to provide

food, and he expected them to do the domestic chores. When he brought game, they cleaned and butchered it, made stews and other meals and dried the rest of the meat to be eaten later. They planted and tended gardens, harvested crops and prepared meals using fresh vegetables - skills learned from the Hidatsas and the Mandans. They made Charbonneau´s pants, shirts, moccasins, hats and coats.

They cared for him when he was sick. They kept their home clean, comfortable and stocked with the necessities of daily life. Sacajawea was pleased to be living with a woman who understood her native language, but her happiness was tempered by her husband´s linguistic limitations and domineering behavior. Charbonneau spoke only French and Hidatsa and late in his life admitted that his Hidatsa was far from perfect. He had no desire to learn another language and didn´t want his wives saying things he couldn´t understand, particularly about the man of the house. Only Hidatsa was to be spoken in their home. He forbade the women from speaking the Shoshoni language.

That didn´t always stop them. Charbonneau was often gone. And although he was fond of laying down the law and known to have beaten Sacajawea, she didn´t allow him to control her. Smart and resourceful, she found ways around his decrees that she found intolerable. Occasionally she even made fun of him. She was dedicated to making the marriage work, but not at any price.

By the summer of 1804, Sacajawea was pregnant. She was grateful for the lessons her mother and the other women in her tribe had taught her about childbirth. Unlike Agaidika husbands, who sometimes helped in childbirth, Charbonneau would be of little or no use when the baby came.

In October of that year, more white men came to the village. These men were different from the traders and fur trappers Sacajawea was accustomed to encountering. Some of

them wore uniforms. They had strange-looking boats, heavily laden with wonders she had never seen. They had mysterious tools, fearsome weapons, exotic scientific instruments. Disciplined and well-organized, they set about building a winter camp, which they called Fort Mandan.

The newcomers answered to two men who clearly were in command. One day Sacajawea saw the men talking to her husband. Charbonneau later told her they were planning a long journey that would take them through her homeland.

They would need horses from her tribe. They would need interpreters.

Charbonneau´s fluent French and passable Hidatsa would be useful to them, but he spoke no Shoshoni. Either of his wives could prove to be more valuable when the expedition entered Shoshoni territory. Fearing he wouldn´t take her if she seemed too eager to return to her people, Sacajawea hid her enthusiasm.

"We saw people trying to get to us. You know how the mountains are. They have those rocks; they run. Then we saw one woman. She had a baby on her back. . They were trying to get down, you know, through those little, flaky rocks in the mountains. . She was here with those men with mozo (beards). They said there was two of them."

Sacajawea´s baby was born with a full head of dark hair on Feb. 11, 1805, eight weeks before the Corps of Discovery left its winter camp at Fort Mandan. Charbonneau named him Jean Baptiste. Sacajawea called him Baambi, a Shoshoni word for hair. Clark called him "Pomp."

A baby could be a liability on so perilous a voyage. Charbonneau could have chosen to take his other wife, but she was an eastern Shoshoni who didn´t know the Agaidika territory the Corps of Discovery would have to cross. Sacajawea would have been the logical choice for the expedition´s leaders. She knew the land and the people and might be useful in procuring horses from them.

Charbonneau, however, was not a man to let his wives call the shots. If she begged him to take her, he´d have feared that she´d return to her people for good and almost certainly refused. Her best chance was to feign indifference.

Lemhi elder Nessie Sheepskin, telling a story she heard more than 80 years ago from an old Lemhi woman, who heard it when she was young from women who said they saw Sacajawea entering the Lemhi Valley in 1805.

It worked. The 31 men, one woman, one baby and one dog of the Corps of Discovery left Fort Mandan on April 7, 1805, plying the Missouri in six canoes and two larger, flat-bottomed pirogues. Sacajawea set up a warm tepee the first night, a skill learned as part of her Agaidika education. Most of the men slept outside. The tepee was reserved for Lewis and Clark, Charbonneau and another civilian interpreter, and Sacajawea and her baby. It was used until it fell apart.

On the third day, Sacajawea dug Jerusalem artichokes for the men to eat. It was the first of many times she added variety to a diet that relied heavily on meat.

One of her most important contributions, however, was her mere presence.

Though Lewis and Clark thought of themselves as traveling through unexplored territory, the continent west of the Mississippi was actually well known. It was home to dozens of Indian tribes who knew the land intimately and vigorously defended their turf. Intruders ran the risk of paying with their lives. Without Sacajawea and Jean Baptiste, the Corps of Discovery could have been mistaken for a war party and annihilated. The presence of a woman and a child assured potential enemies that its intentions were peaceful.

Sacajawea´s days began as they had in her homeland, except that now the morning bath included her infant son. It was a daily routine for much of the next 16 months. Wherever there was a river, she started the day by bathing herself and Jean Baptiste. When the rivers were frozen, she broke through the ice to get their bath water.

"Sacajawea was more likely to know the terrain and the people. Charbonneau's other wife was a Wind River Shoshoni." Rod Ariwite

Next, she built a fire and prepared breakfast for herself and Charbonneau. Depending on the foods available, meals usually included meat, fish, corn meal, roots or berries, or combinations of them. She learned to make chokecherry pudding sweetened with sugar, which she had never seen until she met the white men.

After breakfast, she took down the tepee and packed it for traveling. When the explorers arrived at the next camp, after traveling an average of 14 river miles a day, she unpacked it and set it up. She gathered wood for the fires needed for the evening meal. She hauled water from rivers and springs for use in the camps. When there was time, she searched for fruits, nuts, roots and vegetables and collected plants she recognized as having medicinal uses.

She also was the Corps of Discovery´s chief seamstress. Though many of the men were handy with needle and thread, Sacajawea spent many hours repairing or making clothing not only for herself and her family but for other members of the expedition as well. With the hard use they endured during the arduous journey, even leather clothes ripped, deteriorated and had to be replaced. Footwear was especially vulnerable, which was to be expected in view of the thousands of miles traveled over rough terrain in every kind of weather. When all her other chores were finished, Sacajawea often could be found making replacement moccasins.

Though only 16 or 17 when she joined the expedition, she proved to be more than competent as a mother. Surrounded by men, without another woman to offer advice or the benefit of experience, she cared for all of her infant son´s needs while carrying him halfway across a continent and back. By all accounts, he was a healthy, happy baby.

Difficult as the journey had to have been for her, she wasn´t known to complain of its hardships. She had an even disposition and kept her head in times of trouble. Five weeks out from Fort Mandan, in a squall, Charbonneau almost sank the pirogue carrying the expedition´s documents and scientific records. The wind and churning waves terrified him. While he begged God for mercy, his wife calmly retrieved the irreplaceable items that were washed overboard.

A few weeks later, near the Great Falls of the Missouri, Sacajawea became seriously ill. She was so sick that some of the men were afraid she would die. Lewis tried several remedies with varying degrees of success. The one that appeared to make the difference was sulphur water from a nearby spring. She eagerly drank it and soon recovered. Generations of Lemhi Shoshonis have valued sulphur water for its healing properties.

In the summer of 1805, the expedition reached the place where the Hidatsas had captured Sacajawea almost exactly five years earlier. Lewis recorded that she showed no emotion, but he may have interpreted depth of feeling for absence of feeling. This was the place where her mother and other important people in her early life were killed, the place where the innocence of youth abruptly ended. Seeing it again, she wouldn´t necessarily have been demonstrative. If she remained quiet and somber, who could have blamed her?

"A white man wouldn't have told her about taking sulphur water when she was sick. Indians would have taught her that. She probably saw the water and told the white man to get it for her. She'd have learned that from her people." Lois Navo

One of the most famous entries in the journals of Lewis and Clark, written when they achieved their heart´s desire of reaching the Pacific Ocean, is "O! the joy." For Sacajawea, the equivalent moment occurred on Aug. 17, 1805.

By then, the Corps of Discovery was in the homeland of her people. Though some Lemhi people blame Sacajawea for showing the white men her homeland, others say she had no choice. The day began auspiciously when she was reunited with a friend who had been captured with her but escaped. Later, Lewis ordered a conference with the Shoshoni chiefs. To communicate with him, they spoke to Sacajawea, who translated to Hidatsa for Charbonneau, who translated to French for one of the corps´ privates, who translated to English for Lewis. Sacajawea was looking at the Shoshoni leaders when Lewis realized that she was capable of emotion, after all.

Away from her people for five years, traveling for months over an uncertain route and arriving just in time for a hastily arranged meeting, she recognized the leader of the Shoshoni chiefs as her own brother. Forgetting her deeply ingrained belief that women were to remain submissive and respectful at important conferences, she ran to its most important person, hugged him, threw a blanket over him and wept.

Lewis and Clark wanted the chief and some of the members of his band to help them cross the Bitterroot Mountains to Nez Perce territory and the rivers they hoped would take them to the sea. The Shoshonis, concerned that they could encounter Blackfeet raiding parties en route, were reluctant. Their chief agreed to help, but by then considerable misgivings had been expressed.

The chief´s name for nearly two centuries has been given as Cameahwait, which Lewis accepted as meaning "one who never walks." Lemhi Shoshonis today say it means "I won´t go." Some believe that his name wasn´t Cameahwait at all, that his or his braves´ refusal to go over the mountains was at some point misinterpreted as his name, and that no one today knows what his real name was.

"Lewis and Clark asked Cameahwait if he would take them over the mountains. He said 'No, I won't go.' He was worried about Blackfeet raiding parties. They thought he was telling them his name. That's wrong. Ask any Lemhi. 'Cameahwait' in our language means 'I won't go.' It wasn't his name. No one knows what his real name was." Dan Arriwite

After years of hoping to be reunited with her people, Sacajawea chose to stay with Charbonneau instead of remaining with her brother and her tribe. She may have felt unwelcome. Most of her family was dead, and the man to whom she had been promised no longer wanted her because she´d had Charbonneau´s baby. Politics may also have played a part. The tribe had long feared its enemies´ rifles. Its leaders may have told her to stay with the white men and assist them in hopes of gaining alliances with the well-armed newcomers.

The Shoshonis provided the expedition with the horses it desperately needed to cross the mountains, and a guide to lead the way. The guide´s name was Deetobi. Lewis and Clark called him Old Toby. Today, he is best known as a guide who twice managed to get lost. Some Lemhi people say he was never lost, but saw the white men as potential enemies and deliberately misled them. The more confused they were, the less likely they would be to return to their hosts´ homeland.

With help from the Nez Perce tribe, the expedition reached the Pacific by way of the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia rivers early in November. When a vote was held to decide the location of the party´s winter camp, Sacajawea was allowed to join the men in voting. As a further sign of her status, the captains humored her request to be permitted to go and see a beached whale.

The return journey that began the following spring was less eventful for Sacajawea. Her routine was well established, the country wasn´t quite the vast question mark it had been on the westbound trip, and there were no boat mishaps or family reunions for her. The corps reached the Mandan villages on Aug. 14, 1806.

A few days later, Clark paid Charbonneau for his services - Sacajawea received nothing - and left for St. Louis. Charbonneau, Sacajawea and Jean Baptiste, now a toddler, stayed to resume the life they´d known before Lewis and Clark paddled into their lives.

Sacajawea never saw the homecomings for the expedition´s leaders, never met the great white father in Washington who conceived it, never suspected how famous it would make her. She did have the satisfaction of knowing she had performed useful services, seen an ocean, traveled farther than virtually any of her people and made important friends - especially Clark.

And she may never have thought of herself in quite the same way again.

For its only woman, the Voyage of Discovery was a time of personal discovery. She exchanged a life of oppression for a breath of liberation and, though she may never have known it, a place in history. Her time with Lewis and especially Clark, who on at least one occasion restrained her husband from beating her, allowed her to see herself as a person of value rather than as a slave or possession.

She had had the adventure of a lifetime.

Sacajawea, Charbonneau and Jean Baptiste spent about three years in the Mandan village after completing their journey to the Pacific and back. Charbonneau preferred the Indian lifestyle to living in a city, but an offer he couldn´t refuse took the family to St. Louis.

William Clark had taken a liking to Jean Baptiste during their travels together. He called him his "little dancing boy, Baptiste." Clark offered to adopt him and raise him as his own child. Sacajawea agreed to consider it, but told him she wanted to wait until he was older.

She and Charbonneau ultimately accepted the offer, knowing their son would be well cared for and receive a better education than they could give him. They took Jean Baptiste to St. Louis, where Clark was living, in 1809. Clark by then was a general and superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Louisiana Territory.

Sacajawea and Charbonneau stayed in St. Louis with Jean Baptiste for two years, then left him under Clark´s care and returned to the Mandan villages. Jean Baptiste was 6. Sacajawea, then in her early 20s, was pregnant.

Her second child was born in 1812. A daughter named Lizette, she is thought to have died in infancy.

But Sacajawea died before her daughter.

"This evening the Wife of Charbonau a Snake Squaw, died Of a putrid fever she was a good and the best Woman in the fort, aged about 25 years she left a fine infant girl."

The words are those of John Luttig, a clerk with the Missouri Fur Company. He recorded the death in his journal on Dec. 12, 1812, at Fort Manuel, S.D.


Sometime between 1825 and 1828, Clark compiled a list of expedition members. After their names, he recorded whether they were still living. After Sacajawea´s name, he wrote "dead."

The Lemhis, along with some of the nation´s foremost scholars, accept Luttig´s and Clark´s reports. They say Clark was closer to her than anyone else on the expedition except her husband and son, that he was in contact with Jean Baptiste and in a better position than almost anyone to know Sacajawea´s fate.

If she had lived to be old, as some maintain, Sacajawea would have had decades to realize her dream of returning to her Idaho homeland. There is nothing in the tribe´s oral history to indicate that she was ever seen there again after the Lewis and Clark expedition.

There is Lemhi oral history, however, regarding the place of her death. Consistent with the report of an early death at Fort Manuel, it attributes to Jean Baptiste statements that his mother died in South Dakota.

Charbonneau had several more wives, each a fraction of his age. He lived to be well into his 80s.

Almost two centuries after the Lewis and Clark expedition, in November 2001, a group of Hunkpapa Indians asked some Lemhis to go to South Dakota for a traditional ceremony at what they believe to be Sacajawea´s grave. The Hunkpapas told them they´d heard Sacajawea´s spirit crying and wanted her people to set it free.

They don´t give the exact location, citing concerns that the grave would be desecrated.

The general location is Fort Manuel.

Eagles were circling high overhead, a propitious sign in Indian culture. Some of those taking part in the ceremony said they felt Sacajawea´s fingers running through their hair and experienced a feeling of peace.

"When Pomp came through this area, he met some Shoshoni Paiutes and told them he was a salmon eater and that his mother died in South Dakota. That's in our oral history." Rod Ariwite

The baby of the Lewis and Clark expedition lived a life as adventuresome as his mother's.

William Clark never did adopt Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. But he did make good on his promise to pay his living expenses at a St. Louis boarding house and finance his education. At about the age his mother was when she met Lewis and Clark, Jean Baptiste met a wealthy German duke named Paul Wilhelm, who was visiting St. Louis. Wilhelm was impressed with the young man and offered to help him with his education. He took him to Europe and financed his studies there. Sacajawea´s son studied European art, music and literature. He could speak English, German, French, Spanish and several Indian languages.

"As we were walking to the gravesite, I had a feeling that somebody was hugging me. It was so strong it made me want to cry. My heart was happy and crying at the same time. It made me know for sure he was buried there." Virginia Bache Mendez,

reflecting on a ceremony at the Oregon gravesite of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.Though his education was excellent for his time and could have made him prominent, he preferred life in the wilderness to the trappings of society. Like his father, he spent his early adulthood as a fur trapper, trader and interpreter. Later he served as an alcalde, a judicial and administrative official, in California and mined during the California gold rush.

He was still seeking his fortune, en route to a new strike in Montana, when he became ill and died near what is now Jordan Valley, Ore. He was 61.

A contingent of Shoshoni people joined members of tribes from Nevada and Oregon there in 1999 to perform an American Indian burial ceremony at his grave.

"One night I dreamed I was digging bitterroots and Sacajawea was there. I said 'Isn't it sad what happened to our people?' She didn't know, so she asked me what happened. When I told her we'd lost all our land, she started to cry. Then she asked me if it was her fault. I told her 'no, it would have happened anyway.' "

Rose Ann Abrahamson

For half a century after Sacajawea accompanied Lewis and Clark to her homeland in 1805, isolation preserved her people´s traditional way of life.

The next half century all but ended it.

In 1855, a Mormon mission was established in the Lemhi Valley. The missionaries built a fort about two miles from what is now the town of Tendoy and introduced the Lemhis, Bannocks, Nez Perce and other tribes that frequented the area to the ways of the white world. Some Lemhis converted to the Mormon faith. Others, alarmed by what they saw as the whites´ growing presence and exploitation of Indian land and resources, attacked the mission in 1858. It closed as a result, but the white incursion was just beginning.

"They didn't want to leave their homes. It was a great hardship. People died on the way. My grandparents told me that even the white people cried as they watched them go."

Lucy Diaz, on the tribe's forced march from the Lemhi Valley to Fort Hall in 1907

Photo: Lucy Honena Diaz remembers her grandfather, Chief Toopompey, to whom it fell to lead the tribe out of the Lemhi Valley. Chief Tendoy had steadfastly refused to move, but after his death in 1907, federal troops escorted the tribe 200 miles to Fort Hall. • Diaz' grandmother, Nena Tendoy Tissidimit, right, and her husband, Charlie Tissidimit, lived in a tepee while they worked picking potatoes in Idaho. Diaz said her grandmother made the tepee out of flour sacks. Photo courtesy of Lucy Diaz.

In 1862, gold was discovered in nearby Montana. The following year, a group of miners shot and killed Lemhi Chief Snag and two other members of the tribe. Snag´s successor was Tendoy, a chief the white settlers revered for his work as a peacemaker. Tendoy repeatedly kept the hotheads of the tribe from exacting revenge on the whites or joining other tribes in their wars with them.

More gold was discovered in 1866, near what is now Salmon, Idaho. The town was laid out the following year, drawing miners, farmers and ranchers to the mountains and river valleys the Lemhis had claimed for centuries as their home. In 1868, with their people struggling to survive on shrinking resources as the newcomers encroached on their hunting and fishing grounds, Tendoy and 11 other Lemhi leaders signed a treaty surrendering the tribe´s land in exchange for annual annuities from the government and two townships on the north fork of the Salmon River.

The treaty was never ratified. Instead, the government pressured the tribe to move to Fort Hall, a desert reservation created in 1867 for the eastern Shoshoni and Bannock tribes near today´s Pocatello, Idaho. Tendoy refused to go, arguing that his people wanted no part of Fort Hall. They wanted what the government had promised them.

"We were taken from our Garden of Eden homeland and put in the desert where there's nothing. We left everything - the buffalo, the salmon, the berries and roots - everything we had and came here where there's nothing."

Lucille Pohipe Eldridge
Photo: Lucille Pohipe Eldridge - who is shown with granddaughters Noreen, 13, and Paula, 11 - raised her children and grandchildren in Fort Hall and taught them about their heritage. With her father from Salmon and her mother from the Boise Valley, Eldridge says she is in the middle of their homelands. "I married a Navajo. I don't even speak the language. My children only speak English. My children are in-between, too." • Eldridge's mother, Annie Sadegant Pohipe, a Boise Valley Shoshoni. Photo courtesy of Eldridge.

Seven years passed before they got their wish. The Lemhi Valley Indian Reservation, created in 1875 by executive order of President Ulysses S. Grant, was roughly 100 square miles south of Salmon. Its mountains and wooded river valleys had been home to Sacajawea and generations of her people. The tribe settled in and began the transition from nomads to farmers, but circumstances combined to make the reservation temporary.

The times were edgy. The Nez Perce, Bannock and Sheepeater wars of the late 1870s made whites fear an attack by the Lemhis. The government responded with inducements to move them to Fort Hall, some 200 miles away. The fears were unfounded, as Tendoy kept the tribe at peace. When its aggressive elements argued for war, he led them on extended buffalo hunts that doubled as cooling-off periods. But the pressure to move to Fort Hall remained.

A more urgent concern for the Indians was their hand-to-mouth existence at the tiny Lemhi reservation. Much of its land was too mountainous for farming, the ground that could be farmed was insufficient for the 1,050 Lemhis and other Indians living there, and the government had difficulty delivering on its promises of assistance. Its position was that the Lemhis would be better off at Fort Hall. The Lemhis remained adamant that they wouldn´t go.

In his preface to a history of the Lemhi, late Idaho Historian Emeritus Merle Wells wrote that the "impasse was solved for a time when, in 1880, the chief, a few of his sub-chiefs and a delegation of leading Indians from Fort Hall traveled to Washington, D.C., where they were cajoled into signing an agreement which would have moved the Lemhi to Fort Hall."

The agreement relinquished the Lemhis´ claim to their reservation. In return, the government promised to pay them $4,000 a year for 20 years. The eastern Shoshonis and Bannocks living at Fort Hall agreed to give the government part of their reservation land for the Lemhis´ use in return for annual payments of $6,000 for 20 years.

"In 2006, it won't be right for the Corps of Discovery people from St. Louis to come start coming on the Lewis and Clark Trail to reach my grandfather and our tribal homeland and we're not there. They put the wolf back in our homeland. Are we less than the wolves?" Darrell Tendoy

"We didn't have much but we shared everything. We didn't need much."
Eloise Lopez

Photo: Eloise Lopez learned a lot from her mother, Cora Pegoga George - tanning hides, beadwork, drying roots, preserving berries. "Skills passed down from our ancestors in the Lemhi Valley," she says. "I don't even think about it. It's just natural." In the photo she holds of her mother, Cora George is in the final process of making white buckskin. The photo is by Jed Wilson.

But Tendoy underestimated the intensity of his people´s resistance. For another quarter century, the Lemhis refused to leave their homeland. And Tendoy´s own heart had never truly been with the move, which he supported only briefly. At the time of his death, in May of 1907, he was still working to keep the Lemhis in Lemhi Valley.

Some said Tendoy fell from his horse into a steam while drinking and died of exposure. Others said he was murdered. His death never was fully explained.

By June, federal troops had escorted the majority of his people to Fort Hall. The Lemhis loaded what they could on horses and wagons, sent some of their heaviest items by train and and left the rest behind. Their oral history says their cries became a wail and the wail became a keen that reverberated through the valley. Even ranchers living on what had been Lemhi land were said to have wept as they watched them go.

"My father was a little boy when they left," Lemhi Elder Lucille Pohipe Eldridge said. "He never talked about it - never. They were pulled out; they didn´t want to leave. They had a lot of horses and cattle up there. They had to leave everything and walk."

Eloise Lopez´s mother was a teenager at the time.

"She told me about a woman who went into labor on the way and bled to death," Lopez said. "She remembered the mountain where it happened along the Big Lost River. They wrapped her in a blanket, and the men put her on the back of a horse and went and buried her."

Lois Navo´s grandfather and his family came on a wagon.

"My aunt died on the way," she said. "They were promised a lot of things when they got to Fort Hall. They were supposed to get a tent and some wagons and horses and some money every year. They got a wagon and a team. I don´t know about the tent. I don´t think they ever got the money."

"I was born in the wagon days and rode horses every day. My father taught me to hunt and to fish with a spear at Salmon. I like the Salmon country. I like the timber and the water and the fish and the game there. If I could, I'd go back. My kids want to go. Maybe someday we can all go"

Emory Tendoy
Photo: Emory Tendoy´s father is John Tendoy Jr., one of the sons of Toopompey who is, in turn, a son of Chief Tendoy. Emory remembers his family entertaining tourists in Yellowstone in the 1930s. From left in the photo: Jack Tendoy, whose father was Chief Tendoy´s war chief; Emory´s father and mother, Irene Lewis Tendoy; and Emory´s two sisters. "I don´t know where I was," laughs Emory, who would have been about 5 years old.

Tendoy´s son Toopompey led the march to Fort Hall. Lucy Diaz, his granddaughter, lived with him and his wife, Nena, when she was a girl.

"It was hard for them," Diaz said. "They loved that country back in Salmon. They often talked about how much they missed it. Salmon was their country. My grandfather was sad about having to lead the people away from it. He and the other old chiefs always went back to visit."

The tie to the Lemhi Valley was strong enough that virtually all of those who moved to Fort Hall returned whenever they could, a practice that continues with their descendants.

Six families never did go to Fort Hall, preferring economic hardship in the town of Salmon to the subsidized housing, medical care and other benefits of reservation life. The core of a small but determined Lemhi presence there, they lived in clusters of shacks locals referred to as the Indian Camp.

The camp was moved repeatedly as the white community grew. It typically had a population of 30 to 40 people, living in tents or makeshift huts of one or two rooms. They bathed and washed their clothes and dishes in a polluted creek. For drinking water, they filled containers at local businesses or at the homes of white neighbors. Medical care for most was a financial impossibility.

I've lived in Salmon, and I've gone back and forth. Now I live at Fort Hall. I'm one of two Lemhis ever to serve on the tribal council here. I live here because I inherited a lot of land here. But if I had a choice, I'd go back to Salmon."

Snookins Honena
Photo: Snookins Honena, brother to Lucy Honena Diaz, is the grandson of Toopompey. He is proud to be a descendant of Sacajawea. "She was a famous woman," he says. • In the shadow of Sacajawea Peaks, tepees are found once again in the Lemhi Valley at the Sacajawea Interpretive Cultural and Education Center, dedicated in August 2003.

Rod Ariwite´s mother died of pneumonia in the Indian Camp while still in her mid-20s. His father died at about the same time. Orphaned at six, Ariwite was raised by an aunt.

"When I look back now, I know we were poor," he said. "We lived in shacks. The only running water was a stream outside the camp. A lot of people were on welfare. We were guests in the valley of our people. "If you look at economic wealth as happiness, we didn´t have it. But if you look at it as being where you want to be, we were happy. We were where our people had always been."

The Lemhis at the camp lived with one foot in the Indian world and the other in what had become the dominant culture. Dan Arriwite, Rod´s cousin, "learned my language, to hunt and fish the old ways, to live the way our forefathers did. I learned to use a weir and a salmon spear. And I learned the white ways to see if they worked."

He also learned about prejudice. Some whites befriended the Lemhis in Salmon. Others had little respect for the tribe or its heritage. Graves at the cemetery where Tendoy and other Lemhis are buried were looted and remains disinterred and scattered. "My dad and my uncle tried to buy bullets to go hunting," Arriwite said. "The guy at the store wouldn´t sell them to them because they were Indians. There used to be a bar in Salmon with a sign that said ´no Indians or dogs allowed.´"

Members of Salmon´s white community today say they don´t remember such blatant instances of racism.

Photo: This photo, labeled "Lemhi camp west of Salmon," was taken by photographer William B. Fowler, whose work dates between 1901 and 1913. Although the Lemhi moved to Fort Hall in 1907, some never left and some returned. Photo courtesy of the Idaho State Historical Society. • When he was a boy, Dan Arriwite punched his name, the date and his birthdate into a piece of metal and nailed it to a branch of a tree outside his home at the Indian Camp. "It's still there," he says, "so I can prove that I was there."

"I lived in Salmon off and on for many years. I learned to sew and bead and make moccasins there. I went out and looked for things that we'd store up - winter berries and chokecherries and grouse. We looked for herbs that the old people used for medicines. It was the old ways of living. I still miss it."

Lois Navo

Photo: Lois Navo went away to boarding school through high school and then moved, in a wagon, with her parents to Salmon when she was 21 years old. Lois and her husband, Alfred, were the last Lemhi Shoshoni family to move to Fort Hall in the early 1990s.
I don´t think that´s because anyone is trying to paint a rosy memory," Lemhi County Historical Society President Hope Benedict said. "There have been comments that there was that kind of feeling from Caucasians toward the Lemhis, but I didn´t see it growing up here. That doesn´t mean it didn´t exist, but I didn´t see it. When I was in school, there was a Lemhi girl who was adopted by a white family.

"...The Lemhi culture has always been appreciated here. I know we´re accused of appreciating it only for its economic value, but I don´t think that´s accurate." James Caples, who is 86 and has lived in Salmon all his life, recalls the Lemhis as "living in poor circumstances we white people thought were squalid. They were second-class citizens. But the majority were good people who tried to get along and still live their own lifestyle. I think when there was friction, it wasn´t caused by the populous as a whole but by troublemakers, both whites and Indians."

By the ´70s, many of the whites who had helped the Salmon Lemhis by employing them or donating land, money or labor to improve their lives had died or moved away. Newcomers tended to view the camp as an eyesore.

Navo, whose husband´s family was one of the original six that never moved to Fort Hall, spent most of her life at the Indian Camp from age 21 until her mid-70s. In 1991, she and her husband, Alfred, returned from a visit to Fort Hall to an unexpected homecoming.

"When we got back, our house was gone," she said. "All gone. Maybe they thought nobody lived there anymore." Navo, who is now 86, said she thought they´d been gone a week or two. Sandy Sims, whose family owned the land where the camp had been built, remembers it as being much longer. He said transients were using the camp and that his family, concerned about liability, sold the land to the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. The Navos moved to Fort Hall, where Alfred died in August, 2003. The former Indian Camp is now a park for children.


"The Indians dry the salmon. They do the same thing with deer. They don't throw anything away. I've seen white folks throw deer away. They kill them for their big horns, and some of them don't even eat them. Do you know there used to be a lot of sockeye salmon up in Salmon? They're not there anymore."

Walter Nevada
Photo: At 97, Walter Nevada is the oldest living member of the Lemhi tribe. In 1992, a group of Lemhis gathered on a high hilltop in the Lemhi Valley to replace the cedar pole marking the gravesite of an esteemed ancestor - possibly Cameahwait - as tradition decreed the pole be replaced every third generation. Only select people had the honor of touching the pole. Nevada, the eldest, was one of them. "I think I wouldn't have made it this far without my grandfather," says Valerie Nevada, a granddaughter.

Today, Fort Hall is home to Shoshonis, Bannocks, Blackfeet, Crows, Crees, Sioux, Yakimas, Utes, Navajos and other tribes. Lemhis comprise less than 10 percent of its 4,500 residents. Nearly a century after their tribe was forced to move there, many still say they would rather be in Salmon. Lemhis of all ages, from teenagers born at Fort Hall to the oldest living Lemhi, 97-year-old Walter Nevada, respond to the siren´s song of their mountain homeland. They say they feel out of place on the reservation, where disputes with other tribes have long been a fact of life.

A dispute over the government´s pledge to reimburse the tribe for the reservation it lost lasted so long that many of those entitled to the payments were dead before it was settled. The full amount the government promised to pay the Lemhis in 1880 wasn´t paid until 1958. By then they were officially part of the reservation´s majority tribe, the Shoshoni-Bannocks, whose larger voting bloc often decided their affairs. Instead of going only to Lemhi Shoshonis, the money was divided among them and other tribes at Fort Hall.

Photo: The reservation at Fort Hall was created in 1867 under a treaty with the Shoshoni and Bannock tribes. In December 1906, the Idaho Recorder in Salmon editorialized: "Now the crowning sorrow is forced up on this good chief (Tendoy) and his long-suffering band. They are being forced from the land of their birth ... to a distant reservation to make homes among the people whom they fear and dislike..." Quoted in "The Lemhi: Sacajawea´s People." Once 1.5 million acres, Fort Hall is 544,000 acres today.

"There's no trace of the Indian Camp where I grew up in Salmon. I still have a little hostility about that. There's no trace of us ever being there. It's like we never existed. Were we an embarrassment?"

Marlene Quanda
Photo: Marlene Quanda is a grand-niece of Lois Navo. "In the Lemhi way, she's my grandmother," Quanda says. Both Quanda and Navo trace their Lemhi heritage through John Tyler, Quanda's great-grandfather. Quanda holds a photo of a Lemhi Indian Council in Salmon about 1900 at Island Park. From left, in the photo, is Joe Tendoy, John Tyler, Johnson Keni Botts, Frank Watame, and Chicken Nose (also called Quenna Moby).

A larger claim, for the loss of the Lemhis´ aboriginal lands, was settled in 1971. For 5 million acres of land, the government paid $4.5 million. Over Lemhi protests, the money again was shared with other tribes.

The lengthy battles over the land claims forced generations of Lemhis to unite against government and tribal bureaucracies, contributing to a separate sense of identity. Members of the tribe of Sacajawea saw themselves as a distinct culture. Some say that´s been a handicap, with Lemhis treated as second-class citizens at Fort Hall. Fort Hall Business Council Chairman Fred Auck says discrimination isn´t condoned at the reservation.

"We don´t foster that kind of attitude or practice it," he said. "We´re all equal. . My father was a Bannock and my mother was a Shoshoni. I have relatives who are Lemhis. The other tribes don´t see the Lemhis as being discriminated against or looked down on. When people intermarry in our tribes, we respect them as part of the tribe."

Some Lemhis don´t see it that way.
"I got a $2,000 allotment," Pohipe Eldridge said. "It was divided among all the different tribes instead of just

going to the Lemhis. The Lemhis got less than they should have. And that´s the way things are still operating today." Tim Ariwite, who was born in Salmon´s Indian Camp, says Lemhis "have to fight for status at Fort Hall. If you don´t have a prominent last name that´s been here for a long time, you have trouble getting a job or anything from the tribal council. Anyone from Salmon has trouble getting even minor things."

Auck says equal employment opportunities exist for all of Fort Hall´s tribes, but did not respond to a request for the number of Lemhis employed there.
Darrell Tendoy, a descendant of Chief Tendoy, considers himself "a fifth-class citizen at Fort Hall. Every time I´d put in an application for a job, I´d never hear anything. I finally just gave up. Our tribal inheritance was taken from us, and we live at Fort Hall in exile."

Rod Ariwite left Idaho and now lives in the Southwest after leading an unsuccessful attempt in the ´90s to return the tribe to the Lemhi Valley. He says he´d rather live in a shack in Salmon than at Fort Hall.

"If you´re going to put Indians on the hierarchy there," he said, "Lemhis are at the dead bottom." The Lemhis weren´t even contacted when a model was chosen to pose for the Sacajawea coin. The model,

Randy´L He-dow Teton is a Shoshoni-Bannock. Teton was a student at the University of New Mexico when Glenna Goodacre, the Santa Fe artist selected to do the portrait for the coin, was searching for a Shoshoni model. Santa Fe´s Institute of American Indian Arts put her in touch with Bonnie Wadsworth, Teton´s mother.

"When Bonnie showed me a picture of Randy at age 15, the age of Sacajawea during the expedition, I knew I had my model," Goodacre said. ". My designs were not portraits of Randy, or of anyone else for that matter, but an idea, a concept, an image of a young Native American mother."

Teton admits there was "big opposition" from the Lemhi people. "I tell them they should respect that as a nation we were chosen. We´re all Shoshonis."

The Lemhi Shoshonis aren´t convinced.

"They had ample opportunity to find a Lemhi," Rod Ariwite said. "There were some young Lemhi Shoshoni girls who were the right age and would have been wonderful candidates." He and others worry that the tribe´s younger members, most of whom are only part Lemhi, are losing their unique identity and heritage. Some are only dimly aware that they are Lemhis.

Diaz, who grew up with Lemhi heritage as Toopompey´s granddaughter, says a "lot of the young people don´t care about our history. They never go to any of the meetings we have. It doesn´t interest them one bit." Without a home of its own and a chance to govern its affairs, some fear that the tribe of Sacajawea will become a memory.

"We´ll be exterminated if we don´t go back to our valley," Ariwite said. "The Lemhi people will no longer exist."

A few are finding ways back to their valley by renting homes there and working at the recently dedicated Sacajawea Interpretive Cultural and Education Center. And the Ariwites are drafting a bill to recreate the original Lemhi reservation, now mostly federal land. They envision a community that would provide jobs through light industry, a gaming casino and the tourism they say would result from Sacajawea´s people returning to the valley of her birth.

They also are working for federal recognition of the Lemhi Shoshonis as a tribe. Recognition gives tribes sovereignty similar to that of nations. It allows their reservation land to be placed in trust and federally protected from being acquired by non-Indians. Recognition would give the Lemhis autonomy from other tribes at Fort Hall, the right to govern themselves and a better chance of reestablishing themselves in their homeland.

"Hundreds of tribes are trying to get recognized," Darrell Tendoy said. "We should move to the top of the list because of what our grandmother and grandfather did for this country - Sacajawea and Chief Tendoy." Spokesmen for Sens. Larry Craig and Mike Crapo said both would consider sponsoring the reservation bill and supporting federal recognition, but have not received proposals from the tribe. Ariwite says he hopes to submit them early in 2004.

Photo: "I want the government to see what our grandmother did for this nation," says Darrell Tendoy, speaking poetically of Sacajawea. "And look how they treat us."

One of the tribe´s fondest hopes - that the Lewis and Clark bicentennial would help its cause - is yet to be realized. No Lemhis spoke at its opening ceremonies in January at Monticello. Their representative´s attendance at meetings of the bicentennial´s Circle of Tribal Advisors was sporadic, and a co-chair of the advisors - a Mandan-Hidatsa - was asked to give the tribute to Sacajawea.

"They felt it wasn´t the right forum to support the Lemhis´ bid for recognition," Ariwite said. "...They want to paint a rosy picture. But look at Sacajawea´s people, still living as a minority at Fort Hall. "...I still believe in this country, though. You can take our land away, but you can´t take away our hopes and dreams. Someday in my lifetime, I hope our people can go home."

Photo: Raised by her grandparents in the traditional way and sent to boarding school to learn the white way,

Gladys George has seen a lot in her 80 years. Rose Ann Abrahamson clasps her hand as George, now confined to bed, speaks of the old days. At another time, Eloise Lopez recalls her regret at not paying more attention to her elders as she was growing up. "My mother said, 'You're living in this time and age. It's better for you than it was for us, but you can't see it.' I didn't understand then. I should have listened." http://sacajawea.idahostatesman.com/index.htm


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