Sacajawea
Authors: Anna Lee Waldo
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.
Book Three
THE CONTINENT CONQUERED
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.
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.