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Authors: Anna Lee Waldo

Sacajawea

BOOK: Sacajawea
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ANNA LEE WALDO

 

 

In memory of my father,
Lee William Van Artsdale

 

The tropical emotion that has created a legendary Sacajawea awaits study by some connoisseur of American Sentiments. —More statues have been erected to her than to any other American woman. Few others have had so much sentimental fantasy expended on them. —And she has received what in the United States counts as canonization if not deification: she has become an object of state pride and interstate rivalry.

Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire.

New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1952, p. 618.

 

 
Contents
 

Book One
IN THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER
1
Old Grandmother

CHAPTER
2
Captured

CHAPTER
3
People of the Willows

CHAPTER
4
Bird Woman

CHAPTER
5
The Wild Dog

CHAPTER
6
The Trading Fair

CHAPTER
7
Toussaint Charbonneau

CHAPTER
8
The Mandans

CHAPTER
9
The Okeepa

CHAPTER
10
The Game of Hands

Book Two
RETURN TO THE PEOPLE

CHAPTER
11
Lewis and Clark

CHAPTER
12
Birth of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau

CHAPTER
13
Farewell

CHAPTER
14
A Sudden Squall

CHAPTER
15
Beaver Bite

CHAPTER
16
Sacajawea’s Illness

CHAPTER
17
Cloudburst

CHAPTER
18
Tab-ba-bone

CHAPTER
19
The People

CHAPTER
20
Big Moose

CHAPTER
21
Divided

Book Three
THE CONTINENT CONQUERED

CHAPTER
22
Over the Mountains

CHAPTER
23
Dog Meat

CHAPTER
24
The Columbia

CHAPTER
25
The Pacific

CHAPTER
26
The Blue Coat

CHAPTER
27
Weasel Tails

CHAPTER
28
The Whale

Book Four
HOMEWARD

CHAPTER
29
Ahn-cutty

CHAPTER
30
The Sick Papoose

CHAPTER
31
Retreat

CHAPTER
32
Pompeys Pillar

CHAPTER
33
Big White

CHAPTER
34
Good-Byes

CHAPTER
35
Saint Louis

CHAPTER
36
Judy Clark

CHAPTER
37
Lewis’s Death

CHAPTER
38
Otter Woman’s Sickness

CHAPTER
39
New Madrid Earthquake

Book Five
LIFE AND DEATH

CHAPTER
40
Lizette

CHAPTER
41
School

CHAPTER
42
Duke Paul

CHAPTER
43
Kitten

CHAPTER
44
Jerk Meat

CHAPTER
45
Comanche Marriage

CHAPTER
46
Joy and Sorrow

CHAPTER
47
Gray Bone

CHAPTER
48
Shooting Stars

CHAPTER
49
The Raid

Book Six
ON THE FINAL TRAIL

CHAPTER
50
Bent’s Fort to Lupton’s Fort

CHAPTER
51
St. Vrain’s Fort

CHAPTER
52
Bridger’s Fort

CHAPTER
53
The Mormons

CHAPTER
54
The Great Treaty Council

CHAPTER
55
The Jefferson Peace Medal

CHAPTER
56
I Could Cry All Night

CHAPTER
57
Nothing Is Lost

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

Book One
IN THE BEGINNING
 

A mysterious relic in the Big Horn Mountains west of Sheridan, Wyoming, in Shoshoni country, is an elaborate circular pattern traced out in stone on a flat shoulder near the top of a 10,000 foot remote peak. The Medicine Wheel has a circumference of two hundred forty-five feet, with twenty-eight spokes and six stone cairns spaced unevenly around its rim, and a seventh about fifteen feet from the wheel. These shelters are very low with a slab of rock across the top. Two of the cairns zero in on the rising sun of the first day of summer— summer solstice—when the sun reaches its northernmost rising point on the horizon. Two of the cairns zero in on the summer solstice sunset. Alignments of others point to the rising points of three bright stars, Alde-baran, Rigel, and Sirius. West of Armstead, Montana, now Hap Hawkins’ Lake, near U.S. 91, south of Dillon, Montana, is another wheel-shaped pattern of stones. These undoubtedly predate the Shoshoni nation as we know it.

Montana, A State Guide Book,
compiled and written by the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA for the State of Montana. New York: The Viking Press, 1939, pp. 32, 292.

JOHN A. EDDY
, “Probing the Mystery of the Medicine Wheels,”
National Geographic
, 151 (January, 1977), p. 140.

CHAPTER
1
Old Grandmother
 

The history of the Shoshoni, most northerly of the great Shoshonean tribes, which all belong to the extensive Uto-Aztecan linguistic stock, is full of paradox. They occupied western Wyoming, central and southern Idaho, southwestern Montana, northeastern Nevada, and northeastern Utah. The Snake River country in Idaho was their stronghold, but their expeditions sometimes reached the Columbia. Holding somewhat in contempt their less vigorous cousins to the south—Ute, Hopi, and Paiate—they themselves seem to have been almost equally despised by the Plains tribes. The northern and eastern Shoshoni were riding and buffalo-hunting Indians. Their traditions are full of references to a period when they had no horses, when small game took the place of the buffalo, and when they had no skin tepees in which to live. None of the Shoshoni were ever known to be agriculturists, but in the Wind River of central Wyoming, huge pestles have been discovered, about five feet in length, consisting of a ball eight or nine inches in diameter and a stem tapering to about four inches. They were found by Shoshoni Indians who suggest they were used for grinding grain, grass seeds, and dry berries, by some early tribe.

BOOK: Sacajawea
11.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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