This year’s theme for National American Indian Heritage Month, “Knowledge of the Past/Wisdom for the Future,” honors Sacagawea, the young Indian woman whose accomplishments and generosity of spirit and whose contributions to the Lewis and Clark expedition led to the opening of the American West.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson, with $2,500 appropriated by Congress, funded a small expedition whose mission was to explore the uncharted West acquired earlier that year with his Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson called this expeditionary group the Corps of Discovery, but it soon came to be known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition in honor of its two commanding officers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The expedition began that autumn from St. Louis, heading north along the Missouri River.

By November 1804, the Corps had reached the Mandan and Hidatsa tribal villages north of what is now Bismarck, N. Dak. There, they met Toussaint Charbonneau, a French Canadian fur trader, and his pregnant young wife, Sacagawea. Captains Lewis and Clark hired them as guides and interpreters, though Charbonneau was hired less for his skills and more for those of his wife. Sacagawea spoke several Indian languages and knew the region. She also happened to have been born into the Shoshone tribe. The Hidatsa tribe had captured her some five years earlier and sold her to Charbonneau.

Lewis and Clark had learned that the Shoshones lived at the headwaters of the Missouri River and that they had enough horses to trade. And they knew they’d need horses to cross the seemingly endless Rocky Mountains that led to the Pacific Ocean. The dreadful circumstances that had placed her in the Mandan village when Lewis and Clark arrived would also place her in the small pantheon of America’s founding mothers with the likes of Betsy Ross, Molly Pitcher and Pocahontas, because without her participation, the Corps of Discovery would undoubtedly have failed or its members been killed. But Indians angry at seeing strangers on their land, and white ones at that, were not willing to attack a traveling party that included an Indian woman and a baby.

Safe return
Along their journey to the Pacific, Sacagawea provided life-saving information about the topography and how to find and identify edible roots and plants. She negotiated with the Shoshones for supplies and horses—a task made easier when the Shoshone chief turned out to be her brother—and rescued the expedition’s only journals when their boats capsized in the Missouri River.

Lewis and Clark understood the importance of a predictable route home. And under Sacagawea’s guidance, they had one. The Corps of Discovery made the successful return journey to the Hidatsa-Mandan villages in North Dakota on August 14, 1806. By September 23, they were back in St. Louis. At the time, Sacagawea received nothing for her efforts, though the Corps gave her husband $500.33 and 320 acres of land. But her contributions to the Corps of Discovery’s success were recorded in the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

The true story of Sacagawea’s life is shrouded in mystery, myth and folktales. Most of what we know has been passed down through oral history by the Hidatsa, Shoshone and Comanche tribes. Apart from the watershed experience of her kidnapping, not much is known about her as a young girl, and even less is known about her life after the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Even her age and date of death are in dispute, because Charbonneau had two Indian wives in a time and place that didn’t put much emphasis on vital records.

But Sacagawea has never left the national consciousness. In 2000, the U.S. Mint issued its first Golden Dollar coin. By popular demand, it featured Sacagawea, with designs and insignia unique to the contributions she made to the expedition and to American history in her roles as interpreter, guide, negotiator, diplomat and peace symbol. The coin’s front shows her in a three-quarter profile looking straight at the coin holder with her infant son, Jean Baptiste, in a sling on her back. The reverse side has a soaring American bald eagle encircled by 17 stars—one for each state in the union at the time of the 1804 expedition. The bird expresses the same optimism and freedom seen in the depiction of the young Shoshone's face.

More statues have been constructed in her honor than of any other American woman.