A New York Times Magazine story on one of the most famous Native Americans in the history books raises a provocative question: "What if everything we know about Sacagawea was wrong?" reads the headline on the piece by Christopher Cox. For members of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes, the familiar tale—Shoshone girl, kidnapped by the Hidatsa, guide to Lewis and Clark, dead in her 20s—was a distortion. In their telling, Sacagawea was Hidatsa all along, lived well into her 80s, and was ultimately shot to death. To them, the epic journey to the Pacific was just a small part of her life.
This revisionist push, led by Dennis and Sandra Fox (whose family claims direct descent), culminates in a book, Our Story of Eagle Woman: Sacagawea: They Got It Wrong, aiming to set the record straight through oral history, family testimony, and even DNA analysis. Their evidence includes tribal memories of Sacagawea's later years, a detailed family tree, and genetic links between her reported descendants and Toussaint Charbonneau, her husband. But the story notes that challenging the standard Lewis and Clark narrative isn't easy. Historians remain wedded to expedition journals and fur traders' notes, which record Sacagawea's death at Fort Manuel Lisa in 1812.
The Hidatsa project's authors conclude it was Charbonneau's other wife who died at Fort Manuel Lisa while Sacagawea continued living with her husband for decades. They note the source for much of the information we have about Sacagawea, including on her kidnapping, comes from Charbonneau, whose command of the Hidatsa and English languages was poor. Most intriguing is a firsthand account of Sacagawea's apparent 1869 death by a man named Bulls Eye, who claimed to be her grandson. Speaking in 1923, he said she was among several people shot by a Sioux raiding party at a trader's post in Montana Territory when he was only 4. "I have never forgotten." (Read the full story.)
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