Sacajawea (112 page)

“But,
Umbea,
Mr. Welch says it is just as if there were a great strong man in the center of the earth that holds the ropes that you are hitched to, and the same with the water buckets, and—”

“Now stop that right away! That nonsense is like telling lies. You can hear Chief Red Hair laughing at you, and Tess is stomping his feet, and Miss Judy is making fun by dancing around you. Suppose there was ropes hitched onto things, wouldn’t the water get out anyway—you just can’t hitch water to anything, son. You just can’t. And I know there are no ropes tied to me.”

Rose rolled her dark eyes and nodded her head, agreeing with Sacajawea.

“I didn’t say there were ropes hitched to you.” Baptiste flung his arms out toward his mother. Then he said slowly, “I said it was only as if there were, and you are not really trying to learn, and I do not think I like you anymore, because you don’t believe what I’m trying to teach you. You’d rather be an ignorant squaw.”

Sacajawea stared at Baptiste. She felt as though a dirty trick had been played on her and she knew it but she wasn’t sure yet what the trick was.

“There, now, my son, don’t mind my ignorance. Youwon’t, will you? I’m as dull as that old meat ax over there. Certainly the earth is round. It is rounder than the roundest apple that was ever grown on Monsieur Chouteau’s apple trees. And it always was, and always will be. I’m the fool if I can’t see it. My eyesight hasn’t been good lately. Maybe I’m getting old. Can’t even stay on my feet. See?” She pushed out her tightly bandaged ankle. “One day you won’t have your old
umbea
hanging on to this earth sharp as a pin no more.”

“You aren’t old and sharp. You’re young and round just like the earth, and I’ll stick to you even if you don’t believe in geography.”

“Woof!” shouted Rose. “Look at that pancake just from the oven. Burned to a crisp! That what come of ignorant people like me listening to talk about people way on the other part of the earth that are all black like my old man, Old York, God rest his soul.”

Miss Judy’s face loosened. “Rose, make us another pancake, and we’ll all have tea with it.”

“Someone better get Tess some tea or he’ll choke,” laughed Clark, pointing to Tess, who had stuffed his mouth full of freshly baked bread.

“I certainly will, and I’ve a mind to swat his snitching hands,” sighed Rose. “Lordy, what they going teach in the school next?”

Henry Brackenridge, an author, statesman, and lawyer from Pittsburgh, wrote in his daily journal that Charbonneau and his wife, “who had accompanied Lewis and Clark to the Pacific,”
¹
were along on the same keelboat as he, going up to Fort Manuel in the spring of 1811.

There is no doubt that Charbonneau talked with Brackenridge as he did with Jussome, who was also on Lisa’s keelboat. If he told Brackenridge his wife accompanied Lewis and Clark, the assumption is that the woman was Sacajawea. Yet Charbonneau was known to be a braggart and not above a lie or two. If the woman was not Sacajawea, but Otter Woman, she may not have understood all the English words. If she did, she would not have contradicted her man in front of anyone. Jussome would not have bothered to straighten out Brackenridge if the woman was not Sacajawea, but in all probability would have added to Charbonneau’s story for his own amusement. However, there are many who believe that this woman was actually Sacajawea going to Fort Manuel with Charbonneau in 1811.

The Missouri Historical Society, Saint Louis, has an unsigned journal, found in 1912, telling about the life at Manuel Lisa’s fort on the Missouri River in northern South Dakota during the years 1812 and 1813. The writing in the journal has been established to be the work of a clerk, John C. Luttig, of the Missouri Fur Company.
²

There were about sixty-five persons living in the fort. Each day Indians brought news of tribal wars and threats of attack on the fort. In this journal, Luttig wrote that Toussaint Charbonneau made wild overstatements of dangers from Indians in order to excite fear among the
engagés.
Luttig could not understand why Lisa kept Charbonneau on his payroll as an interpreter.

On December 20, 1812, Luttig wrote:

This evening the wife of Charbonneau, a Snake squaw died of a putrid fever; she was good and the best woman in the fort, aged about 25 years; she left a fine infant girl.

In March 1813, the fort was attacked, and the Indians killed many of Lisa’s men. Charbonneau quickly escaped and left for Mandan country, leaving his small daughter in the care of an Indian woman belonging to another
engagé
at Fort Manuel. Some historians think the Indian woman may have been the squaw of Charbonneau’s old friend, René Jussome. Many historians believe that this entry in Luttig’s diary is about the death of Sacajawea.

Luttig thought that Charbonneau had been among the men killed in the Indian attack, so that when the remaining men and their families were sent downriver to Saint Louis, in June 1813, the baby, Lizette Charbonneau, was sent along. In August 1813, Luttig made an application at the Saint Louis Orphans’ Court for appointment of himself as guardian for the children of Toussaint Charbonneau, deceased:

The girl would be near her brother, Tess, whom Luttig recalled Charbonneau saying was attending a school for young boys in Saint Louis. No one knows why Luttig did not add the name of Jean Baptiste, the eight-year-old son of Charbonneau. Perhaps Luttig did not know that Charbonneau had another son, or Luttig knew that Charbonneau had left Sacajawea in Saint Louis, and she was the mother of Jean Baptiste. In this case Jean Baptiste would not be orphaned.

General Clark was not in Saint Louis in August 1813. When he returned, he heard of the Indian attack on Fort Manuel and some days later crossed Luttig’s name off the guardianship papers and wrote his own after Toussaint and Lizette Charbonneau. In this way he kept his promise to care for and educate Charbonneau’s children. But he did not make application at the Saint Louis Orphans’ Court for appointment as guardian of Jean Baptiste. Thus, some believe that he knew Sacajawea to be alive and living in Saint Louis at this time.

The baby, Lizette, was not heard of again — until perhaps April 23. 1843, in Westport, Missouri. Then a child, Victoire Verifluille, daughter of Joseph Verifluille and Elizabeth Charbonneau, was baptized. Elizabeth Charbonneau may have been the baby girl, Lizette.
³
However, some historians believe that the baby died shortly after coming to Saint Louis, as no further word is heard about her through General Clark.

In the South Dakota Historical Society publication
Wi-Yohi
for February 1957 there is a reference to a cash accounts book that William Clark kept from May 25, 1825, to June 14, 1826.
⁴
There are records on one hundred and thirty-two pages, plus both inner endpapers. Of prime importance is the record Clark inscribed on the front cover, telling what happened to the members of the expedition. Clark wrote:

Men on Lewis and Clarks Trip

Clark was wrong about listing Pat Gass as dead. He was in Virginia from 1825 to 1828. His listing of “Tons
^t
Chartono” as being with the Mandans is correct, for old Toussaint Charbonneau was not killed during the attack on Fort Manuel as Luttig believed, but went to the Mandan villages. Also, it was not Toussaint Charbonneau who went to Germany. It was Jean Baptise who visited Wiirttemberg. Therefore, Clark’s last entry is wrong.

Although Clark’s notations here are not conclusive, they cannot be dismissed lightly. It does not seem justifiable to say, “If Clark is wrong about Gass, and the misnaming of Jean Baptise, then perhaps he is also wrong about Sacajawea.” The cases are different. Gass had gone back to Virginia and severed his contacts with the west, but Sacajawea, Charbonneau, and their children were Clark’s concern for many years after the expedition. He cared about them and felt a responsibility for them. It is difficult to believe that he would have been wrong about Sacajawea’s death.

However, he was in error in his last entry, for it was Jean Baptiste who visited Germany. It is a mystery why he did not write out the name Pompy or Jean Baptiste here.

Dale Morgan, of the Bancroft Library, one of the most competent authorities on Western American history, suggests that Charbonneau only had two children, Jean Baptiste and Lizette, and that Jean Baptiste was sometimes referred to as Toussaint, his father’s name. Does this account for the use of both names in General Clark’s expenditures as superintendent of Indian affairs for school expenses?
⁵
Dale Morgan said to me in a discussion of the cash accounts book:

On the basis of this evidence, I submit that the

earlier date of 1812, is the correct date for the death of Sacajawea.

Dr. Merle W. Wells, well-known historian and archivist for the Idaho Historical Society, wrote to me in October 1967:

A list of the members of the expedition prepared by William Clark around 1825 indicates that the original Sacajawea had died before that time. Clark, of course, could have made a mistake, but that is terribly unlikely.

Therefore, instead of Charbonneau’s sickly squaw, Otter Woman, going to revisit her native country, it may have been Sacajawea who went on the keelboat with Manuel Lisa’s party up the Missouri. This is the present belief of many historians.
⁶

The diary of William Clark Kennerly, nephew of General Clark, dated 1843, is in the Missouri Historical Society, Saint Louis. In his diary. Kennerly states that Jefferson Clark, the general’s youngest son, and Baptiste Charbonneau, son of Sacajawea, went to school at Reverend J. E. Welch’s. Kennerly wrote that he remembered both of Baptiste’s parents very well and often saw them walking together along the streets of Saint Louis.
⁷

Kennerly told Eva Emery Dye, author of
The Conquest,
a work of historical fiction based on the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
⁸
that he knew the mother of Baptiste Charbonneau, the woman known as Sacajawea, and she lived in Saint Lewis while Baptiste went to school during the years 1815 to about 1820.
⁹
While making arrangements for the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1902 in Saint Louis, Eva Dye wrote this information in a letter to Grace Raymond Hebard at the University of Wyoming, December 18, 1906.
¹⁰

In 1932. Dr. Hebard, professor of political economy at the University of Wyoming, published her book, based on thirty-four years of research about Sacajawea. She claims to have found that Sacajawea left Charbonneauafter a family quarrel and wandered south to live for nearly twenty years among the Comanches in the Oklahoma Territory. Dr. Hebard was the first to rediscover that Duke Paul of Wiirttemberg took Jean Baptiste Charbonneau to Germany in 1823 and returned with him in 1829.
¹¹
However, some of the facts in Hebard’s book cannot be verified today. For instance, she has a reference in the book from the Salt Lake City Desert News of October 1, 1856, about a Snake Indian named Baziel and an Elder Isaac Bullock.
¹²
Nothing can be found in that newspaper about either man.

In December 1924, Dr. Charles A. Eastman, a Sioux Indian and a college graduate, was appointed by the U.S. Department of Indian Affairs to visit the Shoshoni, Hidatsa, and Comanche reservations where Indians might still remember Sacajawea, or know her by tribal tradition, and locate her actual burial place. Dr. Eastman made his report to Washington on March 2, 1925.
¹³

Dr. Eastman’s informants stated that Sacajawea left Charbonneau after a quarrel about 1822 and went south to a Comanche tribe, where she lived for a number of years. She left the Comanches to search for her firstborn, Jean Baptiste. She found her own people under the leadership of Chief Washakie, at Fort Bridger, Wyoming. Sacajawea lived the remainder of her life on the Wind River Reservation, Fort Washakie, Wyoming, until her death on April 9, 1884. She lived near
a son, who
called himself Baptiste, and near her sister’s son, Shoogan, or Baziel, the latter name given to him by the Mormons. The U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs at that time accepted this report and agreed with Dr. Eastman’s findings.