Sacajawea (181 page)
Authors: Anna Lee Waldo
One of Sacajawea’s neighbors, Mrs. Lane, wife of an Indian trader, told Dr. Hebard about Sacajawea’s death.
One morning word was received that Bazil’s mother was dead. Mr. Lane, the Indian trader, said, “I’ll go to the tepee.” At the door of the tent Bazil arrived with tears running down his face. Speaking to me, he said, “Mrs. Lane, my mother is dead.” I saw Bazil’s mother taken from the tepee wrapped in skins and sewed up for burial. The body was placed on her favorite horse, the horse being led by Bazil. Probably the body was to be taken to where the coffin was, for she was buried in a coffin according to the statement by Reverend Roberts and others.
5
The Reverend John Roberts had a remarkable memory to be able to state that the woman called “Bazil’s mother” was in fact Sacajawea after he had been on the reservation only a year before this old woman died. The old woman probably did not go far from her lodge; possibly she never went to services in the Episcopalian church, at least while he was there. She was very old and feeble. Dr. Hebard did not question Reverend Roberts overly in this matter.
In 1885, the man called Baptiste died on the reservation. His body was taken by a few Indians and carried into the mountains west of the agency and let down forty feet between two crags. After the body had been loweredby rope, a few rocks were thrown down upon the corpse, one of which struck the skull and crushed it. Later a rock slide completely buried his remains.
Edward N. Wentworth of Chesterton, Indiana, wrote to Clyde Porter, a collector of western relics, on December 2, 1955.
There used to be a big fellow from Lander [Wyoming], Ed Farlow, who was with Buffalo Bill for a while in charge of the Indians who went to Europe and I had many talks with him concerning the reservation and the Indians up there. He finally told me that he thought neither the Indians nor the whites had the slightest idea who was buried there. He was quite certain that the man who they claimed to be Sacajawea’s son was not a son of Sacajawea. However, he was a publicity man more than a student and I didn’t pay much attention to him then–I wish I had.
“One of the biggest hoaxes in history had its beginning in 1904 at Laramie, Wyoming,” according to Blanche Schroer, who lives in Lander, Wyoming, and was a resident of the Wind River Indian Reservation.
6
Schroer does not believe that the Wind River woman called Porivo was Sacajawea at all, but some other Shoshoni woman, who knew little of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and that the closest she ever came to a large body of water was the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
In 1886, Shoogan, or Bazil, a subchief under Washakie, died. He was wrapped in a sheet and blanket and taken by a few Indians up to a stream called Mill Creek, and placed in a new gulch that was dug into the bank and that caved down and covered the body.
In 1924, Andrew Bazil, son of old Bazil, gave his consent to Dr. Charles Eastman, inspector and investigator for the U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, to have his father’s grave site dug into. He recalled that his father was buried with the papers that had belonged to Sacajawea and many of them from members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Brig ham Young of the Mormon Church. The wallet was found lying underneath the skull “in good condition.” But thecontents were “ruined by moisture and the passage of time” so that they could not be read. The skeleton was found in poor condition. An old saddle lay across the feet, and beside the skeleton was a handsome pipe of peace. On January 12, 1925, the bones were reinterred beside the bones of Sacajawea in the Shoshoni cemetery. On account of freezing weather, it was impossible to hold a formal ceremony beyond the reading of the prayers for the dead.
7
This raises the question of why Dr. Eastman, who was college-educated, did not send the leather wallet with its “moisture-ruined” papers to a museum or some university’s anthropology department or the Smithsonian Institution, where people qualified to open and take the papers apart carefully would have been delighted at the chance to “prove” that this man buried in the Shoshoni cemetery was the nephew of Sacajawea and that the papers had, indeed, belonged to Sacajawea. And why was the grave of the old Shoshoni woman, said to be Sacajawea, not opened at the same time? There might have been some identifying thing buried with her.
Finn Burnett, the government farmer on the reservation, never went to school, but taught himself to read and write. He said that all he ever knew of the Lewis and Clark Expedition he learned from the squaw called Porivo, whom he believed to be Sacajawea. He said he had heard her speak English, French, and Shoshoni, and seen her good form of hand language.
8
James I. Patten, U.S. Government teacher, religious instructor, and Indian Agent to the Shoshonis from 1874 to 1880, said:
I believe most sincerely in the identity of this Shoshone woman. From the very first of my acquaintance with her in 1874, I was sure of this fact. She must have been Sacajawea for how could an old Shoshone squaw have known of Lewis and Clark if she had not seen them and had not been associated with them at least for some time?
9
Tom Rivington, a western pioneer who lived his last years in Gering, Nebraska, wrote to Dr. Hebard about being with Sacajawea in Virginia City, Montana, in theyears 1860 and 1861, when he was an orphaned boy.
10
At that time there was no Virginia City. Gold was not discovered in Alder Gulch until May 26,1863, and Virginia City came into existence in June of that year. It is known that Tom was a tall-story teller, and he probably wrote some of his tall ones to Dr. Hebard to please her and to have his name in her famous book.
Rivington told Dr. Hebard that all U.S. Army officers at Fort Washakie knew Sacajawea and gave her presents. She traveled constantly through the mountains, helped by the stage drivers, who never charged for her rides. Rivington went on to say that Henry Plummer, the sheriff and onetime road agent, gave her three sacks of flour to keep her from going on a certain stage. That night the stage was robbed and the passengers shot.
11
Rivington also wrote to Dr. Hebard the following, which shows he had a flair for writing as well as storytelling:
She never liked to stay or live where she could not see the mountains, for them she called home. For the unseen spirits dwelt in the hills, and a swift running creek could preach a better sermon for her than any mortal could have done. Every morning she thanked the spirits for a new day. She worshipped the white flowers that grew at the snow line on the sides of the tall mountains for, as she said, she sometimes believed that they were the spirits of little children that had gone away, but reappeared every spring to gladden the pathway of those now living.
I was just a boy then, but those words sunk down deep in my soul. I believed them, and I believe now, that if there is a hereafter, that the good Indian woman’s name will be on the right side of the ledger. Sa-ca-ja-we is gone.
12
Merrill J. Mattes of the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, wrote about Tom Rivington’s character:
It so happens I remember very vividly my conversations with Tom Rivington of Gering, Nebraska, way back in the 1930’s and I distinctly remember his telling me that he knew Sacajawea and rode in the stage coach with her, etc. At the time I believed him, because I didn’t have much background in western history. Now, however, I think this was a fabrication, or else the woman he claims he knew as Sacajawea was actually someone else with an assumed name.
It is a difficult thing to come right out and admit that the famous grave at Fort Washakie is not that of Sacajawea after all, but of some other historical nobody.
13
,
14
The people in the state of Wyoming freely admit the veracity of the journal entries of Judge Brackenridge and Clerk John Luttig stating that Charbonneau was on the keelboat going up the Missouri in 1811. But they believe that the woman with him, who later died at Fort Manuel, was a Shoshoni, but not Sacajawea. Charbonneau always had several young squaws; Otter Woman was also a Shoshoni.
Will Robinson, secretary of the South Dakota State Historical Society, wrote:
I have not the slightest doubt but that she died ai Fort Manuel [South Dakota]. The Wyoming myth was a good one before the Luttig Journals were unearthed in 1912, suggesting she died in 1812. Add the testimony of Brackenridge and others as to her being at Ft. Manuel and Clark’s final statement, and no one could possibly have known better of her death than he and you have the final rivet in the coffin of the Wyoming myth.
15
The people in Oklahoma like to quote Edith Connelley Clift, wife of the late William H. Clift, a Lawton businessman, cotton gin owner, and historian. Edith Clift was a researcher and writer of historical articles. She says:
She left a son among the Comanche and during recent years, a daughter of that son visited us here on this reservation. One time when she was on the reservation she explained to me that she was a granddaughter of Sacajawea. The tradition was very common among this tribe of Indians that Sacajawea had led a large body of white men to the west to a body of big waters.
The daughter of Sacajawea’s son, Ticannaf, above referred to was Ta-soon-da-hipe or Tah-cu-tine, which translated means Take Pity On. She resided within a few miles of Lawton, Oklahoma, on the Reservation there.
And so, Oklahoma may claim contact with the history of our earlier days as a nation; and an important link with the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition.
16
And so Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota claim to have the burial ground of Sacajawea. Oklahoma takes much pride in having her grandchildren grow up near Lawton. Even the city of Cloverport, Kentucky, population about 1,400, celebrates an annual Sacajawea festival in August. The city’s inhabitants believe, although they are incorrect, that Sacajawea was already with Captain Lewis when he was sent to Louisville to recruit nine Kentucky woodsmen in 1803 for the expedition.
17
The state of Idaho claims to have Sacajawea’s birthplace near Fort Lemhi. North Dakota, Washington, and Oregon have statues commemorating Sacajawea as the “guide for the Lewis and Clark Expedition.”
The cemetery at Wind River Reservation, Fort Washakie, Wyoming, where it is believed by many that Sacajawea lies buried, is a forty-acre tract of ground enclosed by a fence of cedar posts and barbed wire, with an irrigation ditch running along the left side, that once belonged to Andrew Bazil. Among the grave decorations, iron bedsteads, neatly painted white, hold the most prominent place. They are placed around the graves; the head-and footboard and two sides mark a small fence to protect the grave. Many wagons are likewise given an honored place, though the boxes and tongues have been removed from them.
When the woman called Porivo, believed to be Sacajawea, was buried, a small wooden slab was placed at the head of her grave.
18
The spring grass stood high, brushing the moccasins of the mourners. Groves of yellow-green cottonwood trees sheltered the splashing waters of the Wind River. Sage covered the ridges and mesas.
On the lower hills were stands of sycamore, of alder and aspen. Near the water, always, were the slender white trunks of graceful birch rising out of the bloodred soil. Above all loomed the distant high peaks of the Shining Mountains, the magnificent snowclad Wind River Range to the west and the Owl Creek Mountains to the northeast.
Today, however, a substantial gray-granite column placed on a raised concrete slab marks the grave. On the face of this rough stone is a large polished area containing the inscription:
19
SACAJAWEA
DIED APRIL 9, 1884
A GUIDE WITH THE
LEWIS AND CLARK
EXPEDITION
1805 1806
IDENTIFIED, 1907 by
REV. J. ROBERTS
WHO OFFICIATED AT
HER BURIAL
Under this inscription is a bronze plaque with the words:
DEDICATED BY
THE WYOMING STATE ORGANIZATION
OF THE WYOMING SOCIETY
OF THE DAUGHTERS
OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
1943
Annually, hundreds of people visit this commemoration of the final resting place of Sacajawea. She was the first woman to travel across half the continent with American soldiers to the Pacific Coast.
Many facts and stories from a variety of sources came to my attention during the writing of this novel that were interesting sidelights, but did not necessarily further the life story of Sacajawea. Collected here, they give authenticity and perspective to our Indian heroine. In most cases, the citations include: author’s name, year of publication if more than one work of the author appears in the Bibliography, and relevant page numbers. More complete information regarding these sources may be found in the Bibliography that follows these Notes. Notes that do not have source references are my own explications. In some cases copyright owners requested that the complete source be included here in the owners’ particular format.